Perhaps he thinks that in his field hallucinations don't matter. Perhaps he's right. I remember a famous elephant that beat the stock market. (I think it was also done with other animals.) Also see "A Random Walk through Wall Street"

I'm all in favor of space travel, but that's not going to solve the social problems on earth, and we don't yet have the ability to run a small self-sufficient stable society in an off-earth environment.

I do support space habitats, but I tend to think of that as a "next century" (or after the singularity) kind of thing.

What a large war does is kill of a large proportion of the most aggressive young males. It's one of the traditional ways the current crop of alpha-male primates keep control.

Nope. They apply everywhere, everywhen. If something is unstable in an environment, it tends to disappear from that environment. If it's stable (by definition) it tends to persist. And the environment is all those things it's interacting with.

The entire point of the AIM alliance was to make sure Apple wasn't dependent upon any one supplier. Yes, things weren't ideal with Motorola at the time either, but it's not clear to me that throwing PowerPC out the window was the only option.

(Also "IBM refused" to make a "low power" design is rather different from what actually happened, IBM had difficultly fulfilling their original promise to make a 3GHz part and Jobs threw a wobbly about it. Nothing about refusal or low power in there. I'm sure it'd have been easier for IBM to make a lower speed, low power, mobile part if that's what Jobs had been hyper-focused on. The 32 bit CPUs in the last generation of PPC Powerbooks weren't exactly rockets, with 1.67 GHz being the fastest 32-bit G4 released in a PowerBook. A 2GHz G5, or even a 1.5GHz G5, would have been a substantial step up.)

I'm always in two minds about the CPU change. On the one hand for 15 years Apple made PC clones with only the fact it ran a better OS to distinguish itself from cheaper, higher quality, PCs. On the other, it at least meant there were ways to build a Mac OS X running computer that wasn't limited by Apple's hardware offerings straitjacket. The switch to ARM seems like a move for the worse - behind the superficial performance improvements is one hardware change - a better integration of RAM with the CPU - that'll ultimately make its way to the commodity platform anyway. And then where does that leave Apple?

Why? Competition for limited spots is good. Even the losers will have worked hard to attempt the exam, and they will benefit from going through that experience immeasurably. They will learn resilience in the face of adversity, humility, the value of pivoting, they will learn to appreciate the skill required to succeed, and they will learn much about their own character and habits.

It's not unlike the Olympics. Even if you fail to win, you still win.

What about breaking it up into two companies like this::

1. The part of the company that has all the WB and Discovery stuff.
2. The remainder of the company, to be run by David Zaslav.

Zaslav can do what he does best, find ways to defraud the taxpayer by claiming bogus deductions, which should net his division, which will create, buy, and sell nothing, billions of dollars, while the first part of the company could make movies and nature documentaries. Win-win for everyone!

Don't worry, Ohio University I'm sure will back anyone who graduates with a legal degree from them, providing them with compensation and a free alternative degree program in something useful (with living costs included) when they're inevitably disbarred.

And that'll go for any other profession where their students have followed their University's advice and decided they don't need to understand a topic, just plug in questions into the spicy autocorrect machine.

Urgh, no.

I'd rather the other OSes follow Apple (and Digital Research and Commodore's, etc) lead on this and at least provide the option of a menu that follows Fitt's law.

Having to aim a mouse at a line of text should be made as simple as possible, especially when it's a critical part of the user interface.

> Sure it's great to have all this freedom, but do I want the complexity that comes with it?

I have multiple problems with this argument. The first is that you're implying what you term "complexity" is automatically bad.

I swear and get frustrated at my PC far, far, less than I do my tablet. The touch-only UI is just painful, it's like someone "simplifying" a house by making the doors smaller and roof lower so you have to crawl around. Setting up barriers around what you can do does not make it more convenient, it merely boxes you in and makes you do more work to get less done.

And when I say I don't "get frustrated at my PC", I'm using MATE on Debian, not even a Mac. It's not as if the user interface was designed by UI experts. I'm constantly dropping to the shell to get trivial things done. And yet... it's more friendly, because if I need to do something, there's a clear path, or even multiple clear paths, towards solving that problem.

And it's not like I have to go down those paths all the time. If I want to do the kinds of things that are easy to do on a tablet, I can still do them, in a way that's usually easier than the tablet's method. I want to browse the web? I press the little Firefox icon and up comes a web browser. I can then enter a URL if I want using a keyboard. I can enter search parameters using a keyboard. I can switch tabs just by tapping them with the mouse, where they appear instantly, rather than loading a special tab screen and scrolling to the one I want, which will then load anew, as I would on a tablet.

The compromises and hacks necessary to make a touch interface on a 7-10" screen viable make simple things, that we do all the time, harder for an end user.

The second is that by-and-large mobile interfaces are pitted against their users rather than for them. They're not designed to solve general purpose problems, they're designed for numerous predatory reasons by multiple predatory organizations. Mobile interfaces are changed constantly, and those making the changes will cripple or ignore the deprecated "method" in order to force you to make it work even if you want it to. Mobile apps bombard you with apps that frequently change contexts, often kicking you out of whatever you were doing to load an unwanted app store despite never consenting to that. Mobile apps are designed to track you, designed to channel you into doing things you don't want to do or watching things you don't want to watch. Mobile apps are like the worst parts of the web, amplified.

The advantage of a tablet is not its simplicity. Far from it, that's its weakness. The advantage is purely that they're portable.

It looks clean, clear, professional, and non-distracting. Exactly what a UI should look like, and exactly the opposite of what we've seen since they started to deprecate the translucent UIs over the last decade and a half.

It was never a problem in practice because foreground glass was usually heavily shaded, especially if it was more important to see what was on top than what was underneath - which was usually always.

Usually a button was translucent and sat on a relatively sold background (say the requester.) So there was never any risk of messing anything up.

So what you're saying is the success of Alpha-Beta pruning depends on the evaluation function. Yeah, that's correct. Getting the evaluation function, though, can be a real problem

But then it did in the early 2000s. Never did understand why we moved away from the translucency stuff, it always looked spectacular to me.

> Adenosine molecules gradually build up in the brain during the day, leading to a greater feeling of fatigue as bedtime approaches. Caffeine works by blocking the receptors that adenosine interacts with, giving us a temporary jolt of energy

I swear that my brain doesn't work the way everyone else's does because this is definitely not what happens to me.

Caffeine just increases my heart rate and optionally makes me more anxious. I'm still drowsy as fuck after I've drunk coffee to try to get through the day without falling asleep, I just can't because my heart's pounding.

If the above is what it does to everyone else, then maybe that explains why everyone else claims it's great and helps them.

No, no one get security right, and they never will. Security is hard and even actual experts make mistakes.

The best you can do is to expect companies to make a good effort to avoid vulnerabilities and to run vulnerability reward programs to incentivize researchers to look for and report bugs, then promptly reward the researchers and fix the vulns.

And that's exactly what Google does, and what Google did. Google does hire lots of actual security experts and has lots of review processes intended to check that vulnerabilities are not created... but 100% success will never be achieved, which is why VRPs are crucial. If you read the details of this exploit, it's a fairly sophisticated attack against an obscure legacy API. Should the vulnerability have been proactively prevented? Sure. Is it reasonable that it escaped the engineers' notice? Absolutely. But the VRP program incentivized brutecat to find, verify and report the problem, and Google promptly fixed it, first by implementing preventive mitigations and then by shutting down the legacy API.

This is good, actually. Not that there was a problem, but problems are inevitable. It was good that a researcher was motivated to find and report the problem, and Google responded by fixing it and compensating him for his trouble.

As for your proposal of large penalties, that would be counterproductive. It would encourage companies to obfuscate, deny and attempt to shift blame, rather than being friendly and encouraging toward researchers and fixing problems fast.