Let me fact check your statement - the major fact checking websites rank statements by degrees of truth, typically something like true, mostly true, ambiguous mostly untrue, and liar liar pants on fire. The statement you made would generally be rated mostly true, except that your absolute wording (including “all” in that manner) is something I have not seen, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time on fact checking sites. Alternative media likes to hate on fact checkers since they hate on anything that doesn’t fit their emotional narrative, so I imagine there is quite a bit of misinformation like this floating around.

Anecdotally, as someone who drives a Model 3 and uses Autopilot very, very frequently, Autopilot is excellent when an attentive human driver is in the car. It provides constant attention even when good human drivers disengage - changing stations on the radio, checking your blind spot, or assessing the safety of the bad driver in your rear view mirror. However, Autopilot screws up lots of things. Lane changing is mediocre at best. It misses debris in the road. It misses some truly massive potholes. There was a period of time for a couple of months when the algorithms would slam on the brakes every time I went under an overpass, causing unsafe situations in traffic. Autopilot still slams on the brakes when someone turns left across my lane, even if they are very far ahead. I watch for these situations and compensate for these shortfalls. I firmly believe that anyone not paying attention to the road while Autopilot is engaged is doing something flagrantly dangerous. That said, even though I have to pay attention, driving in general, and especially in traffic, is much more relaxing while using Autopilot. That improved mental state, as well as my belief that I'm a safer driver with it engaged, make me a big proponent of Autopilot.

I would have said that the partial lockdowns that have been effected most places aren't a strategy, but the relatively severe ones seem to have had substantial benefits. If their numbers are believable, China's harsh (but reasonably short) lockdown seems to have virtually eliminated the virus, and now they are able to manage with more basic measures and contact tracing (and re-open the economy with some sense of confidence). Thoughts? Per mutation, prior coronaviruses have shown lower mutation rates than the flu, so at least that's a small ray of hope. By the way, I'm not overall positive about China's handling of the pathogen since their suppression of early information on the virus was a massive, tragic error that exposes all sorts of issues, but it does seem that their lockdown strategy was effective.

There was definitely a bunch of FUD about this. The scary part was looking at places like northern Italy, which was really nightmarish. Also, the best scientific/logical arguments I've seen about reopening involve building population immunity at a measured pace while getting economic activity moving again. However, if we do this too soon or too quickly, then we are at risk of turning into northern Italy, and if a second shutdown is necessary, then the economic damage will be dramatically worse than if we just fixed it the first time.

To provide a little more concrete info, Dallas reopened recently without meeting CDC guidelines for 14 days of dropping cases, so we still hadn't shown evidence that we were over our peak (and we just showed a new high peak in daily deaths so it is a pretty sound argument that we are actually still getting worse rather than improving). Our ICU units were 65% full as of a few days ago. It won't take a huge spike to take that 65% to 120%, and then we will start to see all hell breaking loose (disease mortality rates skyrocketed to 9-12% in northern Italy when their health system was overwhelmed). If we had a measured opening, that eased that 65% number slightly higher, then we could legitimately get a lot of positive results (more herd immunity while maintaining a low mortality rate, better economy, etc). I support a measured reopening with a lot of messaging to the citizenry about good ways to slow disease spread, but we haven't been getting that information. Neither the state (Texas) nor federal government have provided strong, unified messages about good health practices and the need to support them. Governor Abbott never appears wearing a mask even though strong mask adherence would allow us to open greater amounts of the economy with the same amount of disease spread. I conjecture this is so he can appear more politically compelling to his voters, but from a societal standpoint, it's stupid. Basically, he's setting a bad example so that he can appear cooler. It's a shame that bad politicians are failing at implementing what could be a logical policy choice.

As a counterpoint, while China was morally reprehensible in squashing early information on the disease, their shutdown was much more efficient, logical, and effective. They shutdown for only slightly longer than Texas did, yet they virtually eliminated the virus and can now have a significantly more confident economic reopening.

Early estimates said that this virus could potentially infect 30-50% of our population if no social distancing was applied. While I'm not sure how those estimates have changed, if we apply the 10% mortality rate of an overwhelmed health care system to a 50% infection rate, then we could be seeing 15 million dead in the US. We are very unlikely to see those numbers with social distancing, and there is some evidence that the disease mortality rate may be lower than expected, but we should still treat the situation with gravity. What we really need is leaders that understand science (at least in Texas, maybe other states are doing better) and can gather data more effectively and act on this data more logically. Instead, we have poor testing programs, ineffective data processing (among other things, lack of good centralization of many data sources leading to data silos), and leaders that make decisions based off of what's popular rather than what will help us the most from an economic and health perspective.

I'm using a TiVo Roamio OTA which has been fantastic and has no monthly fees (high initial cost - $400). I also used professional installers for the antenna, and they were able to get a strong signal when I couldn't (they tried two different antennas and took off the reflector on one of them to get better positioning). Last weird note for soccer fans, Verizon Wireless's go90 tv service carries a bunch of soccer games because of a deal with beinTV.

Just refuting the claim that ARM and its related operating systems are a single window system. And if it's a watery thing to say - I quite like water, it's been integral to my survival up to this point.

I would think that porting non-web apps to Chrome OS would be a substantial amount of work - basically just as difficult as converting them to web apps. Google has added a tool which will allow you to remote to a desktop computer from a Chromebook and run desktop apps in that manner (using chrome extensions I think). Enabling developer mode and getting Xfce running isn't terribly difficult, but I'd be tempted to wait a few months and keep tabs on the Xfce distributions. They feel like Alpha technology to me right now, and I think that at least Beta quality would make the experience much better (and should be forthcoming as many Linux distribution developers are hacking on the samsung box right now - Fedora, Bodhi, openSUSE, Chrubuntu, Arch, and others). Regardless, I'm surprised at how nice the browsing experience is on the Chromebook and am looking forward to upcoming releases from the above linux distros.

Steps needed to get Xfce up would include flipping to dev mode on the Chromebook (easy), purchasing an appropriately sized SD card (also easy, just buy high performance as this will be a performance bottleneck), and then depending on the OS you attempt to install to the SD card, you may have steps as easy as putting an image onto the SD card (fairly easy) or manually copying numerous files from various different Chromebook directories and linux distributions onto the SD card (involved but well documented). This last step will be significantly easier if you already have a linux box to use - most of the documentation and tools are linux centric. The linux install probably voids the warranty, but I haven't actually checked.

I'm running multiple windows on ARM simultaneously on my ARM samsung chromebook this very moment, and it's very fast and very crisp. It feels like using chrome on a fresh windows install. I've also tried opensuse on this machine, and while its buggy, the processor runs XFCE very quickly. While ARM may not currently be the performance king, ARM is already viable on the desktop for users without high performance computing needs.

I'd have to dig out the paper, but I'm 95% sure that his initial quote was 600 dollars. Regardless, it's near that even if it isn't spot on. He's a fairly inexpensive carpenter though, so your mileage may vary. There are probably some commercial offerings in this range (although many are way more), but the benefits of the custom-design and getting solid wood made that a better alternative for me. He did say that depending on the complexity and quality of the wood, prices could change dramatically. For example, when I showed him a furniture piece made with antiqued wood of some sort, he said that it would cost significantly more just from raw materials.

My work over the past 6 months has varied between programming (small component of my work), extensive spreadsheet monkeying, writing quick reference training documentation, end user training, project management, and an embarrassing amount of emailing. I haven't noticed a drop in typing speed, and for any work that needs more dexterity, I just slow down the treadmill. If you get the treadmill moving slowly enough, there shouldn't be much degradation of your working capabilities at all. Also, somewhere else in these comments, someone recommended a trackball instead of a mouse, which actually makes a ton of sense to me after my experience.

As for eyesight/reading, I'm a tough person to speak on that as my eyesight is pretty good. I have not noticed an issue there; my eyes don't seem to have an issue locking onto words at a strolling pace. I think I might actually have to hit a full jog before noticing any difference on that front.

As I mentioned in my original post, mousing at faster walking paces was the most challenging thing for me.

Also, I would think that working at a standing desk for a few days would actually be a good trial run. It will allow you to get used to spending more time in an upright posture, which is a significant adjustment. I think it's helpful to start out only doing that for an hour or two a day and then increasing it as you like it. You can get a taste of it by putting a box on a counter top with a laptop on it and working for a couple of hours. If that feels like an improvement, then keep doing more. If it drives you nuts, then you've saved yourself some time and money. Lastly, I also tighten up some as I stand/walk, which makes me stretch every now and then. I didn't do this at a seated desk but probably should have.

I put together a treadmill desk about six months ago. Typing/mousing and walking is definitely a consideration. I had to reduce my mouse sensitivity slightly, and I also have to keep my walking speed at or below 2 mph in order to have any chance of typing accurately. I find I'm quite accurate at 1 mph. I reserve 2 mph for times when I'm mostly reading.

I also was unpleasantly surprised by the prices of the commercial offerings for these desks. I'm currently using a DIY cardboard desk and have a carpenter building a custom-made wooden desk, which will still be cheaper than the commercial offerings.

Regardless, I got into this because of 1. Ergonomics - sitting kills my back and 2. Health - this allows me to put in a decent amount of exercise with little to no joint impact while I work.

Plus, I'm slightly less stressed if I'm walking as I work.

Downsides: Until I get into the "zone" as I work, walking and managing a computer is annoying. Decent treadmills take up a ton of room. It's noisy enough that I have to stop it every time I get a phone call.

All in all, I'm glad I did it. And it provided me with a great excuse to wall mount a 60" HDTV as my computer monitor. :-D

As a quick followup, here are some quotes on 3G call quality from the iphone blog:

A few people post quotes to the effect "quality is so-so but it's good enough for me," but most responses seem pretty negative towards the call quality.

My 3G cell connection has nasty latency (200ish pings generally) and made for a poor skype experience when tethered to my computer. Delays in voice calls are pretty obnoxious when accustomed to cell and landline connections - I don't see this as a viable competitor to cell minute usage even if Verizon allowed skype over 3G to US landlines.

Has anyone else had any contrary experience?

The Palm WebOS multi-tasking UI is pretty rock-solid. I was reconciling numbers between an email and a text memo earlier with both windows open side by side "deck of cards" view. The phone has plenty of quirks - including some OS-level memory issues, but everybody should start copying their multi-tasking UI. It's very easy to switch between apps and close extra open apps.

WebOS from Palm has a very strong multi-tasking UI. I think Maemo from Nokia will as well. I use and love the Palm Pre, and I'm very interested in Maemo - it looks like it will be a fantastic new smartphone platform for Nokia.