> 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.
No, it's 31.10g per ounce. The price of gold is always quoted as troy ounces[1]. You used the figure for the avoirdupois ounce which is used for anything that isn't a precious metal[2].
Though it doesn't really affect the argument you're making since 28.35g and 31.10g are pretty close, but how do you not know about troy ounces as a "former jeweler" (as it says in your profile)?
That's like a doctor saying body temperature is 105F or 40C.
> 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.)
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.
> had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results
That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand what problem you're pointing out:
"The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures ( hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions." -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
(That the experiment has not been replicated as you claim could be a bad sign, but that's a separate matter.)
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."
What joy it is to finally uninstall Flash. The last time I was this happy to uninstall crappy software was when I realized that I no longer needed RealPlayer.
For those that don't know it, RealPlayer was a very popular proprietary media player (with its own proprietary formats) circa 2000. The company's stock was worth $380 a share in 2000; it's now worth $6.
The only explanation for RealPlayer's popularity was its DRM I think; lots of commercial users wanted the DRM.
But it got more bloated with every release, and I had to go through its countless option settings every time I updated it to disable all the sneaky ways they came up with to violate user privacy. I'm relieved that we no longer need either Flash or RealPlayer.
I was expecting the Landsat images to be something like satellite view in Google maps. I realize that close-up views in Google maps are collected by airplanes, not satellites. I'm not expecting to see individual cars and houses in the Landsat images, but the images I looked at were very disappointing.
The ones I downloaded were TIFF files, 8k x 8k (or sometimes 16k x 16k), 16-bit grayscale, covering large areas (~100km square), and if I zoomed-in the image quickly became blurry.
With photos that I take with a digital camera that are only 2k x 2k, I can zoom in quite a lot and see a lot of detail. The Landsat images seem to be much larger than they need to be for the level of detail they provide.
EDIT: To give an example, here's San Francisco that I zoomed-in on and cropped:
He's obviously concerned about being sued by, for example, McDonald's because you made and used a logo having golden arches in the shape of an "M" with on a red background with text "McDonald's" at the bottom. There's no way he can detect or prevent every such possibility.
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.