umarmung

This is a fantastic talk, thank you for the link!

It covers much more than even the Lockdown article and the questions from the audience at the end are both interesting and lead to even more interesting responses.

Ordinary users only care about cost, choice and being limited - in that order.

Not only are Android phones cheaper than Apple, including pricing plans, but there are a lot more Android than Windows phones.

Finally, even the most casual smartphone buyer understands apps are key to not being limited. The perception is that Apple and (then?) Android are the leaders.

"Openness" as a concept is simply not on the radar for most users, but the consequences very much are.

Fake IP poisoning from the tracker? Unless "YouHaveDownloaded.com" actually connected to this IP as part of that torrent, this seems highly unlikely to be real.

Informative, but strange circular arguments in that article, especially from a scientific process perspective.

There are a ton of questions that Higgs cannot answer already and yet if we find Higgs precisely, research comes to a stop?

It almost feels like there's a split between theoretical physcists and everyone else, with theoreticians saying if you take away our broken toy, you better replace it with something we can play with!

Given Nature already trumped Einstein, his contemporaries, and all since, I think we can be fairly secure that we will ALWAYS having find something new to learn or discover from practical science.

After all, that's how we used to almost exclusively learn before scientists went a bit crazy with maths. These days there seem to be many more models out there than there is good science behind it - at least to a layperson like me. :)

Yes, he's trying to wean China off molten salt reactor development, specifically reactors like the LFTR.

China is basically the only market for fission reactors left. They are the only ones purchasing new external nuclear reactor technology as well as aggressively pursuing their own.

Bill Gates realises if China produces anything successfully independent from the West, then even if TWR functioned and functioned well, it would be a dead investment from a market (and personal legacy) perspective.

"China gets to be first (and Thorium reactor products cannot be easily weaponized)"

You do realise that Bill Gates owns and backs an opposing technology?

Hint: it is not thorium based.

The first MMO TLC (Massively Multiplayer Online Translating Language Collaboration)?

That link is worth the giggle. Thanks :)

America makes all other rich nation's provincials look like Einsteins!

You are generalising and taking too much at face value.

I went to Oxbridge (not going to say which) for my first uni and also interviewed at several colleges, as well as many of my friends also going to Oxford or Cambridge.

1. Neither Oxford or Cambridge university have an open policy to discriminate against privately educated students. This is just a public perception due to political pressure. In fact, in the 1960s, 30% of domestic intake was from private schools, it is now holding at roughly 45%.

2. You are largely correct that you need better exam results if you're from a private school compared to maintained schools. But within that large group, you are actually differentiated mainly by your entrance exam (70% of all admissions), application and interview.

3. Oxbridge has no inate preference for diversity. Academic excellence in general matters far more:

i. Your first critical generalisation is that preferences are expressed from a university level. This is not the case. Every college has its own admissions office and select based on their own college preferences which vary significantly from college to college and can be surprisingly strong and consistent across time.

ii. Therefore, your resume matters far less than you think, depending on which college you apply to and even what subject. For example, for the most competitive subjects, the academic bar is extremely high and in the interview they will be looking for additional indications of the nature of this intelligence such as quick or lateral thinking as well as confidence of expression. For the least competitive subjects, the academic requirement is far more flexible and you can get in largely based on how well you fit in with that specific college's ethos or how much they value diversity.

4. Oxbridge DOES effectively discriminate, not on any illegal basis, but on your "class". Almost all Oxbridge students have a background from upper or upper middle/professional classes, even those from state maintained schools. It is rare to find lower middle or working class kids who go to Oxford. This is likely due to the heavy emphasis on education from an early age as well as the Oxbridge staff, culture and traditions all being from the same cut.

Since this tends to cover a large proportion of immigrant groups, this means you will rarely find such pupils at Oxbridge. For example, there was a notorious article that exactly ONE Black-Carribean student had been admitted to Oxford in 2009. Even the British Prime Minister got involved. Oxford vociferously denied this and said there had been 26 "Black" students out of 3,202.

5. As for Europe, I dare not generalise. This is especially the case since many European countries have lower proportion and diversity of immigrants as well as strongly integrationist rather than the multicultural policies of the UK and US. Also, difficulty of access to tertiary education tends to be much lower in Continental Europe because it is heavily subsidised publically. For example, many courses in many German universities are effectively free, even for foreigners. When things are that different, there's little point trying to compare directly on one specific issue.

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So, Britain does not do "tick box" discrimination even for the most competitive universities. Quite the contrary, at least for Oxbridge, they will take academic quality even if that means sourcing from a monoculture. Only political pressure has stemmed the further reduction in state school access.

In short, you could say that Oxbridge is almost a perfect example of the minimum you could expect without legalised "positive" discrimination in a university system of a multicultural anglo-capitalist society.

Based on Leynos's well-written post, I initially thought the exact same thing.

Then, I realised that Google runs Youtube, remembered all the recent changes in particular, my face turned green and I puked up a little inside...

If they can mess up such good service when it was handed to them on a plate, I have zero confidence in them in any new endeavours online, especially when the cost is my privacy for perpetuity.

So, thanks but I'll continue to stay well away from social networking sites.

The only thing correct in that article is that the guy is a "first-year analyst".

It's as if he's only read a book or gone through some terribad training and has no idea the size, time horizons and liquidity preferences over which different market participants operate.

He equates short term trading with investments for pensions and makes ad-hoc incorrect claims about market efficiency.

He has no idea about the current market. "2/20" for anything but the very best hedge funds is long gone. It is not even close to being the industry standard.

He completely fails to grasp that hedge funds, unlike most other market participants, have no recourse to systemic help or support. If they make mistakes, if they underperform or if investors just feel like it (flight to quality) and remove liquidity, then can fail. Since 2007, thousands of hedge funds have failed and closed. They represent one of very few places in the financial industry where classical capitalism (ability to fail) is allowed and still works!

The post is basically FUD trying to overwhelm the uninformed or naive with jargon.