fh's comments

That's a good point, however, might be solved by making the charger introduce itself as one of the well-known USB device classes.

Most cars here in Europe are stick shift though. A stick shift car can't go berserk on you, you simply press the clutch pedal, as you do anyway when braking, and the acceleration is gone.

Citations can be gamed as well unfortunately.

The conspiracy theorist part of me suggests that the reason for this proposal has something to do with the MiniMSFT blog.

This part of the article is most likely intended as a funny anecdote, not as an accurate description of a scientific experiment. Rest assured that Niels freaking Bohr would have thought of that.

This would be a much stronger finding if they had found any correlation between vowel sounds and the success/failure of actual brands, not just the perceived appeal of fantasy brand names. Does the fate of a brand really depend on what people think in the first five seconds after they hear the name without context? This is the same kind of thinking that makes Microsoft spend millions on compelling one-word domain names like Live or Bing, which haven't been hugely successful. In my opinion, brands are built through trust and reputation, and in comparison to that, any effect of vowel sounds is a rounding error.

(Maybe this was supposed to be a reply, instead of a top-level post?)

Anyways, as little as 20 years ago, you'd routinely need adapters when traveling from one European country to the next. That's hardly an issue anymore, and I consider this a vast improvement.

You say you have problems when traveling to "other continents", without saying which continent you start from. I'll assume you're from North America, because then you're indeed a bit out of luck, as this map shows: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/WorldMap_... However, that's a North American problem, not an international one.

As to your other point, I didn't cherry pick the examples, I addressed the examples from an article that argues the exact opposite.

From the article: "The fancy shmancy argument is that dominant design repels most attacks. There are lots of bad ideas that were adopted first, became dominant, and have been impossible to shake. The DVORAK vs. QWERTY keyboard debate is a canonical example. It doesn’t matter if DVORAK is actually 5x better that QWERTY, the cost of relearning is perceived to be prohibitive, so most people never have the motivation to try, and there are huge reinforcements of the status quo (e.g. people who teach typing classes). Metric system vs. English in the U.S. is another good example. A particularly retarded example of dominant design is electric plugs. Studying why the world has 50 different plugs and voltages explains much about resistance factors against innovation. Or world peace."

This is a actually a favorite nitpick of mine. I don't really buy the argument that established standards dominate even after they've been proven to be inferior. First of all, the Dvorak vs. Qwerty situation isn't as clear cut as it is commonly made out to be -- while there's lots of anecdotal evidence, the few independent studies (i.e. those not done by Dvorak himself) aren't very conclusive. At the very least they don't show a 5x improvement.

The cost of switching to the metric system likely isn't as great as commonly believed, and there's no harm in running both side-by-side for a while. There are many precedents for this from other countries. While as a European, I consider the imperial system to be clearly inferior, I think the real reason why the U.S. doesn't adopt it has more to do with emotional attachment and xenophobia than with cost. The point here is, if Americans genuinely consider the imperial system to be better, switching would not be an improvement.

The electric plug situation is rapidly improving, in part because of homogenization pressure, in part because electronic devices don't particularly care what kind of voltage you feed into them. (Be careful with adapter plugs and hairdryers though, you might start a fire if the voltage is too high.) Also, this is a case where none of the existing standards is inferior to any other, so it's not even an example of a bad design becoming dominant.

In short, my point is that if a new convention is clearly better, it's usually possible to switch gradually, and that this is usually done. The effect of "dominant design" is greatly exaggerated.

Google says that they will do the right thing (in their opinion) and stop collaborating with the Chinese regime, and your first comment to that is about the lost opportunity for profit. I'm shocked.

Now, I agree that Google probably does this for rather selfish reasons, abandoning a market that's not profitable to them anyway in a PR effective way. However, I wonder: Is there no room in American capitalism for consideration of the morality of helping evil governments oppress their people? Is this not a discussion we should have had years ago?

I can play first-person shooters all day long, but this makes me motion sick, and I had to stop after a few minutes. It's a shame, because I really like the concept.

In a way, Youtube is a bigger filter now than any of the suggestions in the article. There are so many videos on Youtube, so many upcoming artists performing there, that most of them hardly get any attention at all. If you're popular on Youtube, you're already ahead of a lot of competition.

Words are bad, pictures are good. Children's books have got it right.

nanijoe is still pretty much technically correct (the best kind of correct). It's just that when chess players talk about plotting "n moves ahead", they mean something different than a programmer talking about a program computing "n moves ahead". Top chess players evaluate a handful of possible lines of play very very deeply. But it's impossible for the human mind to evaluate every response and counter-response to any reasonable depth, which is why computer players dominate so much in tricky tactical positions.

Thanks for the link! The "comic timing" of Shannon's machine is much better (if that makes any sense).

> The definition of a plant is that they produce food.

This can't be true: Not all plants are autotrophic, and not all autotrophic organisms are plants.

Maybe plants evolved very late on this world, maybe from simple animals that became ever more stationary. Not having to move is an advantage: you can invest more in static defenses (like bark) if you don't have to carry them around. Sea shells are a real life example of something similar.

As for the link not being peer-to-peer, it might be as simple as the bigger/more complex nervous system dominating the other one.

I don't think so. Life on Earth is so diverse already. Your best examples are animals that are close relatives already (birds and bats aren't all that far apart in evolutionary terms, and their common reptilian ancestors already had by and large the same skeletal structure). Also, aerodynamics seem dictate most of the body shape. Butterflies on the other hand solve the problem of flight in a very different way. The movement of worms and snakes doesn't look very similar at all, and the same is true for fish and jellyfish.

Really, the Na'vi are more similar to humans than humans look to most other species on Earth. You can't make a convergent evolution argument here unless you believe that intelligence somehow requires upright walking and a human-like face, down to the specifics of what facial expressions mean. I consider this highly implausible, even if it makes for a good movie.

> That sounds hard to detect.

Well, obviously you need really precise spectrometers, but just because the effect is tiny, doesn't mean that you can't detect it.

> There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

Excuse me, but how exactly will releasing another Android phone reduce splintering of the platform? That doesn't make sense at all.

That's in some sense even more broken: Not all combined characters have a normalized form, so the result is even less predictable. (I don't have an example ready.)