tomw2005

We had a maths lecturer who got us to buy their text book. Turns out the text book was just copy pasted sections from other maths textbooks in one book. Cost 30 quid, had the old page numbers and was therefore a confusing mess throughout.

My tutor then pointed me to a better maths textbook which was actually worth the money, shame I didn't know about that before!

Information Commissioner's Office: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/

There's also Russell discussing it on the Material Podcast (https://www.relay.fm/material/149). That gives me hope (but it is a shame to hear he won't be on the podcast as often).

There's a very good book called E=mc^2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation written by David Bodanis. I think I read it at about 16 and it was very approachable.

To quote my Physics of Electrical Power Generation lecturer from a few years ago: "Fusion is 15 years away, I think it will always be 15 years away."

I agree. I was a longtime Nexus user and switched for the S8 as Pixels were in short supply (UK, not sure if that was the same in the US). We still don't have Oreo on EE over here and I am constantly trying to disable the annoying Samsung software. I will be going for a Pixel 3 next time I expect.

Are you referring to meta analyses? They are often used to find p-hacking:

[1] http://training.cochrane.org/resource/introduction-meta-anal...

[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

I think for most people it is portability. I can use my .md files in any Markdown editor and reasonably expect it to look the same.

If there isn't an editor to hand it is easy enough to read as plain text.

I recently analysed a load of my time tracking data.[1] I only managed to get up to 11h37m per day when I'm travelling for work. That includes flights as 'work'.

It does seem pretty unlikely unless he's counting Networking/social type events in the evenings and stuff.

[1] https://www.tinkertailorsoldiersponge.com/toggl

The backup planet strategy is one I approve of. Backup solar system would be better.

I was not meaning to equate ArXiv to Nature. I can see how I implied that though.

As I've said in another comment it was used much more frequently during my undergrad years than at postgrad. Within Maths and Physics it is generally trustworthy as they are pre-prints of papers to established journals.

Would I cite an arxiv reference in a paper for submission or thesis? 99% of the time, no. Useful for citing on the web though where your users may not have access to the final journal article behind a paywall.

1) I was trying to talk in general terms. I understand that the peers doing the peer review are usually not paid but that there are other editors involved. I probably should have made that more clear. One of my fellow PhD students is now an editor for a journal.

2) I was aware of this also. I have seen some weird stuff on arXiv but it is normally trustworthy within the realms of Physics. I must admit my use of it was higher as an undergrad than a postgrad. Again I was probably being imprecise in my terminology but it is an archive of pre-prints.

3) 'Slip of the tongue'. I'll edit that in my original comment. Turns out you can't edit a comment after that long. I didn't know that but I think that is probably a good idea overall. I meant Open Access not Open Source.

I would consider myself pretty well informed as I was in academia until a move to industry a few years back and still work fairly closely with academics. That being said I am always happy to be corrected, I know people's opinions on this subject are a moving target and it is probably different at different hierarchies within academia. Thanks.

> Publications should be judged on their content

They are but it takes time to build that reputation. Also publishing houses with big pockets can hire good reviewers etc and get established quicker. If Nature churned out rubbish papers all the time people would stop trusting it but their hit rate is pretty high and retractions are issued for poor papers.

There are some open source websites that are trusted (e.g. https://arxiv.org/ and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) but they are archiving content from already trusted journals. Then there is the 1 Open Source journal I would trust* : http://journals.plos.org/plosone/

I hope that we can accelerate this open sourcing in the years to come.

* I'm coming from a Medical Physics background. There may be others I'm not aware of that are also worthwhile.

I would argue that the species will be fine. If your definition of 'fine' is the species surviving. If 99% of the human race were wiped out by Global Warming we would still have 70 million humans on the planet (approx one UK). That should be more than enough to repopulate given a long long time.

Obviously that would be a terrible disaster the likes of which our race has never seen. 100 times the death toll of WW2 and would destroy pretty much all our infrastructure etc as supply chains fail etc. This is something we should strive to avoid at all costs but I do think the species would survive. We are quite a hardy bunch actually.

> Then it went to unlimited storage for Office users, but then they stopped that for no good reason.

That was brief and sadly disappeared. However OD is still cheaper than DropBox for 1TB of storage and comes with Office. I'd still mark that as a pretty good deal since most people are required to have Office around.

While that is all true Amazon Fresh has completely blown that out of the water for me. Though it is only available in Greater London atm.

They have Trusted Voice on Android[0]. Hopefully it is only a matter of time before it is on the Google Home.

[0] https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/6093922 - last entry.

Well in the UK they amended the law to exempt themselves: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...

It has recently become the ease-of-use choice for our RPG group. Being a mixed group not everyone is used to configuring clients etc. so the out of the box usability is definitely what works for us.

From the DM point of view he can still send us pictures, it is free and we don't really use maps so don't need Roll20 (or equivalent). Also direct messaging players secret messages is really easy and handy.

Connected from UK with Chrome, language DE. Celsisus was default.

> I fail to see a viable market or a satisfactory use case for such an oddly designed and artificially limited gaming device, and am confident that it will be yet another failure in a long line of Nintendo failures.

It is a portable console that I can take on business trips. That's a use-case :)

> I would jump on this if I had more time to game.

I'm getting it as I hope having a portable console will give me more time to game. It'll fit in my suitcase and plug into nearly all hotel TVs. That is pretty awesome.

-Price: Exactly the same as the basic Wii U at launch. Comparing it to the PS4 is disingenuous as it is a 4 year old console [1], it is £100 cheaper than the PS4 Pro deals currently on Amazon. Who are 'most people'? This article implies that it is the expected price point [2]: http://time.com/4632820/nintendo-switch-nx/.

-Battery life is 2.5-6 hours depending on the game. This is comparable to the 3DS line: http://kotaku.com/how-does-the-new-3ds-compare-to-the-older-.... We will have to see how well it does in practice though.

-Storage: The Wii U only had a basic 8GB which is enough for most use cases except downloading games. The switch can extend with SD cards too. As games will be shipped on cards like the DS I doubt this will be an issue for the average user.

-Online: I would consider the playing with others side of this more important than the free game. Though it is a shame that the games are only for the month. This is a fairly new thing for Nintendo so I hope it improves.

-Launch: it might have a few but I expect the fact that one of them is Zelda will help it a lot.

Personally I'm excited for it and it is perfect for my kind of gaming: mostly on the go. I'm rarely at home long enough to make the investment into systems that I can't take with me. Of course, YMMV.

[1] I'm not making a judgement call on specs here, just pointing out that, of course, an older console is cheaper.

[2] The accessories though, are not cheap.

> I encourage old Opera fans to check it out as well.

Did something happen to Opera to make it lose fans? I tried it a long time ago (pre-Chrome) and enjoyed it then but eventually ended up on Chrome. Are there any particular criticisms of the current version of Opera?

> Add on to this the customer support, marketing, warranties, legal expenses, returns and other typical overhead of production.

This is often why startups and SMEs can sell at lower cost too. The overheads are lower. I work for a medical devices company and our main competitor is more expensive than us and keeps having layoffs (or so it is rumoured). It's hard for them to cut prices for similar products when they have 10x the staff.

In our company we still us FORTH because the timing of each command is well known.

I'd also add that arriving after 5pm is basically useless at any business address. That and they don't seem to be able to deal with pressing the buzzer for our office if the receptionist isn't there.

My Physics of Electrical Power Generation lecturer told us pretty flatly that we should not expect or bank on fusion power in our lifetimes. He said we should concentrate on renewables (which seems to be the way most countries are going in Europe at least).

While it is about management I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in Pixar's history. The Audiobook is also very well done.

My first Anker product was some USB cables. They were faulty. The excellent customer service though completely won me around and the replacements they sent have not failed yet (unlike many other usb cables I have owned).