shutupalready

> but customers don't for the most part. It's a lot easier than trying to explain to them that there are two kinds of ounces

It's that kind of stuff that makes people think that jewelers and gold buyers are crooked. Some customers--perhaps only a minority--do know the difference, and they will become suspicious and tell others.

Whenever a professional of any kind (car mechanic, doctor, tax preparer, vet) tells me something that is contrary to a known basic fact, then alarm bells go off in my head. I start thinking that this guy is either incompetent or trying to cheat or trick me in some way, and I will tell friends to watch out. Fortunately it doesn't happen all the time. I generally trust doctors for example.

In one of your other comments, you said, There are a staggering number of honest jewelers and gold buyers out there. But stories about obviously crooked people are what makes everyone say "see, these guys are ALL crooks".

Maybe the jewelers and gold buyers--like used car salesmen--have gotten the reputation they deserve.

> but I suspect that's the kind of project shutupalready was referring to

Yes, those are precisely the kinds of projects I was thinking of. (I was worried that if I gave examples, the conversation would derail into the viability of fusions reactors, ion drives, human level AI, or whatever.)

The topic was what people leave their money to (after death). All of the people you mention are alive.

> It's not always about the "big picture".

No, it's never about the "big picture".

High net-worth people almost never leave their money to a "space shot" type of endeavor.

An observation on what the super-rich never do for their legacy:

There's something that super-rich individuals can do that vastly richer governments, organizations, and companies can't do. They can make long shot bets. That is, they can invest in something that needs a large concentration of capital (an idea, research, enterprise, discovery) that carries very long odds but could have massive world-changing effects if it succeeds. Those are things that neither governments (too many people need to agree) or companies (no short- or medium-term profit) can normally do.

I'm avoid giving examples here because it'd detract from the point. Besides, there's an infinite number of such long shot bets.

It's sad and ironic that people are more risk averse with what happens to the money after they pass away than when they're alive.

> Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap."

Why wouldn't they put this video in the BBC article?

> When conveying nuanced ideas, I believe they will be much closer in length, with perhaps a small advantage for French.

I've looked in bookstores at expert translations of French novels to English, and English novels to French, and in either case, the English is shorter. This seems contrary to your claim.

Not to detract from your observation, but just as an aside, I wanted to mention that less than an hour after your comment, googling for "cow thiophenol romanesque establishment" (with or without quotes) lists this very page as the first result. Google must be indexing certain sites (like HN) very frequently.

> The tiny tab allows gravity to cause all the pullers to hang in the same direction as they fall into a rail toward the left.

The explanation above makes it sound like the pulls are getting re-oriented (flipped around) which is not what I see in the video.

I think a clearer explanation is this:

The pulls are aligned 50% tab-right (good) and 50% tab-left (bad) as they approach the feeder chain (or rail at the left as the OP calls it).

The tab-rights fit into slots in the feeder chain and proceed to the next assembly step.

The tab-lefts don't fit into the slots and simply drop away into the rotating pan below (from which they presumably return to the pot and make another attempt at the feeder later on).

> 1. The comment you're talking about is from, essentially, someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

Yes, of course, the person who made that comment is clueless about technology -- just like 90% of the population. The comment shows that most people think it's really cool that the diagnostic device uses a smartphone and don't realize that the smartphone wasn't needed at all.

> 2. ... than to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller.

Nobody needs to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller. You use a tiny cheap off-the-shelf microcontroller (like the PIC) and program it. Based on the information available in the original article, the program might be as simple as light the red LED (positive) if the color sensor indicates it's above a certain threshold and light the green LED (negative) if below a certain threshold. But even very complex algorithms can be ported to microcontrollers.

> 3. Imagine it as one person and a smart phone testing 4 villages

I did say databases and uploading were a possible reason for the smartphone, and do I agree that a smart phone does make sense for the use case of testing a whole village. This doesn't change my original point that a smartphone wasn't really necessary, not even to reduce costs, and might in fact be more expensive than a standalone device. The original article makes a big deal of the smartphone connection without explaining the real reason why the smartphone is there.

Was it really necessary to involve a smartphone at all?

> color change [is] picked up by a set of photocells in the dongle, and the results are then sent to an app

The logic to discriminate a color change could have been handled by a 75-cent microcontroller. Add a cheap display or a couple LEDs to show the test result, plus a cheap AA battery, and you have a self-contained gadget for less cost than creating the smartphone interface.

Pregnancy tests and all sorts of sophisticated chemical test strips don't involve a smartphone.

I'm thinking that the smartphone hookup is either:

(1) a way to add future functionality like maintaining a database of the tests or uploading test results to somewhere (with all the privacy implications and risks of those), or

(2) a marketing ruse since we all know that a smartphone app that does X is way cooler than a old-fashioned self-contained gadget that does X.

An an example of how easily people fall for coolness of having a smartphone do something that doesn't actually need a smartphone, check out this comment to the original article:

"I have been resisting the smartphone trend for years because they are expensive and there was no unique use for them: everything a smartphone did I ALREADY own a gadget for. This changes the game. Now I want a smartphone."

> ought to be prima facie evidence of ineffective/incompetent counsel

A much more likely explanation is that the writer and her lawyer know perfectly well the difference between gross and net, but this was the best deal they could get, and it was better than nothing.

Writer and her lawyer: "We demand 3% of the gross."

Studio head: "I'm not offering any percentage of the gross."

Writer and her lawyer: "OK, we'll settle for 2.5% of the gross."

Studio head: "I told you: nothing on the gross. Zero. If you don't like that, get lost. I'll hire another writer."

Writer and her lawyer: "Well, OK, how about 3% of the net."

Studio head: "I think we can agree to that."