I agree, this talked about none of the things I was hoping it would talk about.
I've always assumed that breakfast was said to be important because it improves various facets of functional performance, not because of weight loss. Maybe general body health from spreading out digestive load.
I've always wondered whether breakfast has an impact on performance throughout the day, or just the morning. It seems fairly obvious that you'll be more tired if you don't eat breakfast though.
I have to say, splitting things up makes me think of the whole Netflix-Qwikster thing - pointless brand splitting that does little more than confuse and frustrate consumers.
The intention was to branch off Qwikster and have it slowly die. I actually think it wasn't an awful idea, but that they did it too early. With a terrible name.
I suspect Foursquare want to slowly kill off checkins in a similar way.
4% is an average anyway. There are absolutely people in the US that must spend a notable portion of their income on food. I'm not in the best of situations, and I generally end up spending 20-30% on food, and I don't even eat enough.
Food is already hard enough to get for many Americans.
Another non-obvious change would be the elimination of minimum wage, which would improve corporate profits, which should (theoretically, at least) increase the taxes they pay.
As someone who's worked retail in america, this is entirely unsurprising. I didn't sell furniture for the most part, but it's probably consistent with my experiences.
This has little to do with defective products. People just expect to be able to return any product they don't like, or if they got the wrong one, or for whatever arbitrary reason. I would always be asked by customers if they could return it if they didn't like it, and they were always dismayed to learn that we generally only took returns if the product was defective. I lost more than a few sales that way.
My guess is that this comes from two things. First, most people are wholly uninterested on doing any product research. They want to just buy something that seems right, and then just take it back if they don't like it. Second, some stores will accept returns so readily (sometimes even of merchandise not actually sold by that chain!) that customers now expect it from everyone. Khol's is particularly notorious for this - we joke that their return policy is "yes."
I hope we see an increase in real software parallelism, since that's the only real way out of this for the foreseeable future. Tacking on more cores is still an option we have, we're just having trouble using them right now in many contexts.
In the longer term, we'll hopefully see advancements that let us fundamentally change how logic processors are constructed, such as possibly photonic logic chips. Only a major shift will let us break through the current single-thread performance wall.
New architectures like the Mill (http://millcomputing.com/) could provide alternative ways to a breakthrough increase in performance.
On the software side, I've always understood browsers are pretty good at parallelism, which is a pretty major platform that gets performance benefits. That could also extend even further with projects like Mozilla's Servo (https://github.com/mozilla/servo), a browser engine built from the ground up with parallelism in mind.
I don't think that's actually true. The way it use asynchronous callbacks allows for lots of parallelism. For example creating a new image will cause it to download the image off the network and decompress it in parallel to executing Javascript, and then when done it fires the 'onload' handler. That's much more parallel-by-design than something like C++.
Take a look at Chromium as an example. Every tab gets it's own process. The GPU gets it's own process. Every plugin object gets its own process. Page loading is done in a separate process. Web workers run in a separate process. Chromium will happily eat up every core your CPU has to offer.
If you're running multiple tabs at the same time and actually interacting with both. But most of the time you're only laying out and rendering one page at a time; your browser actually only displays one tab at a time, after all.
I don't feel like finding the source, but iirc one of the articles covering this mentioned that they actually managed to grow a penis before they did vaginas, so that is indeed very good news for transmen. Whether it's been actually attached to someone successfully is a different question of course..
A tangential, but this complexity is one reason I think that sales tax should largely be abolished in favor of rolling it into income taxes. The only context it makes much sense in is taxing various luxuries. Beyond that, it's confusing, adds administrative overhead, and discriminates towards those with lower incomes.
At least to me, the issue is more that Facebook is not who I want developing these technologies.
I think facebook is going to eventually use this to create a modern connected virtual world. Which is something I dearly want. I just don't want it controlled by facebook.
In the short term I don't think facebook will screw Oculus up, however.
I've always assumed that breakfast was said to be important because it improves various facets of functional performance, not because of weight loss. Maybe general body health from spreading out digestive load.
I've always wondered whether breakfast has an impact on performance throughout the day, or just the morning. It seems fairly obvious that you'll be more tired if you don't eat breakfast though.