Posts by Don Jefe 5059 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Nov 2011
OK. The car needs some further development. That's normal, look at how many millions of 'normal' cars are recalled each year for potential fire hazards. My wife's CRV was recalled four times because of faulty wiring in the column that started a few fires.
At any rate, there seems to be a bit of tech sector financial analysis in most commentary regarding Tesla share price. Tech, specifically software, and financial services are about the only industries where stock price fluctuations, even periods of sustained reductions, aren't normal and expected.
The game isn't about the final value of the shares, its about whether or not you anticipate which direction they're going to move. There would be a lot less aggressive bullshit in the tech industry if this idea of sustained exponential increases in valuations hadn't become a thing.
Do you realize how many calls major airlines get about shitty service? All of them. They get all the phone calls. And emails and handwritten letters signed in the blood of their eldest children. What do they do? Nothing. Not a god damn thing. They might even cram some more seats in or show a Hallmark original movie next time so you're extra miserable.
I think airlines are huge dicks taking advantage of the situation, but they've got a pretty big leg up, seeing as how they can fly and you can't. As long as they're all shitty nobody has any reason to address or even listen to customer complaints.
Now, I'm no Forbes billionaire or head of State, but I oversee my little kingdom with a fair amount of oversight, I like to know what's going on. That being said, never in over a decade has a call been so important that it couldn't wait until I was on the ground: 'There's fuck all I can do about it anyway, I'm in the sky, literally, sailing through the sky. If I could fly on my own I'd swoop down and piss on you from on high for bothering me with something I can't do anything about. That's what I'm paying you for.'</internal_dialogue>
It's not like some creditor showed up with a $3M invoice demanding to be paid in cash, those people call first. If the office has exploded or the baby's fallen down a well then call the insurance company, or fire department or the baby extractors, anybody who isn't in the sky is a good place to start. Even if I was there I couldn't do anything about anything crazy serious, other than call the appropriate authorities. If it isn't crazy serious why are you calling?
That's the single positive thing about flying with a mass carrier, your troubles can't fly. For just a little while nothing on the ground matters. It's nice. We do have a plane at work with an Iridium system but the whole getup is mostly for emergency parts pickup/delivery and showing off. I usually fly commercial carriers because it's orders of magnitude cheaper and I can't be pestered. I really wonder who is tied up in such poorly managed businesses that their phone calls can't wait.
This is kind of long, be warned. 3D printing has a ways to go to reach parity with the accuracy of CNC machining and will likely never meet the precision levels of traditional hand machining.
Higher end Commercial 3D printers can reliably output to about .0005 but beyond that their output falls off exponentially. Even with optimized instructions they are also terribly slow compared to a CNC machine. 3D does seem to offer a lot in the way of new processes and design options but there are a few challenges be for you see them in the mainstream.
Product design as well as manufacturing is built around established 'subtractive' processes that have been proven at scale for 100+ years. Changing those mindset a won't happen within a single generation. From raw materials to a finished good is an incredibly complex and established system and is profitable only if every step and person in the chain is optimized for maximum output. The primary reason I employee software developers and a computer scientist is for optimizing small production runs through the CNC. Each step that can be eliminated and each minute saved on the machines translates to hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout the year and we're a small operation specializing in bespoke parts for extremely specialized uses. In a mass production facility changing 10 generations of proven best practices is going to take a while.
There's no infrastructure to support 3D manufacturing at scale. From trained machine service techs, to materials supply chains and billing systems, they all have to develop and it will take a while for that to happen. There's also no scale and quality provider of all the different tooling needed. Although we can make about anything it isn't cost effective to produce things like hold downs, vices, waste removal systems, etc... I've got to have a steady supply of lots of little things and those little things are completely different in a 3D environment. In an emergency I can send our plane to a supplier and get exactly what I need in just a few hours and that's normal in the industry. There are no 3D suppliers yet that are equipped to deal with that and a million other things.
There's no real standardization in raw materials yet. From the actual materials, their transport processes, waste disposal even materials handling: Will the containers of raw materials be compatible with the tine setups on my fork lifts and cranes? Who is responsible for empty containers? Will the containers be compatible with the rails and belaying systems in my railcars or do I have to buy new railcars? If so who is going to design the railcars?
There are a whole host of other issues as well. That isn't pouring rain on anyone's parade, it's the reality of inserting completely new things into large, well established processes, it will take a while. There's also lots of opportunity for enterprising individuals to set up all the infrastructure... People take for granted how incredibly complex manufacturing is. You can't just plop a machine down in a factory and expect anything to happen without thousands of other people doing specialized tasks before you even turn the machine on.
Within my industry there is pretty much agreement that 3D printing will eventually operate in parallel with CNC, but won't supplant it as there are advantages to both. But 3D is a very immature industry and it will take many years of solving operational logistics and standards issues to reach the mainstream.
And as far as extreme precision, that will remain in the hands of the traditional machinists and their traditional tools and machines. There's general agreement that an entirely new form of technology (think replicators) will be required to go beyond the levels of precision achievable now with hand work. We've got the finest CNC equipment money can buy and a starships worth of lasers (one big enough to put a car in) and none of those things can really approach the old school methods as far as tolerances go. Not many things really require or benefit from those levels of precision* which is why CNC has been a success and 3D defiantly has a future in the industry.
*We can work down to a few millionths of an inch if required and automated machines simply can't do that, there's just too much slop in them. The work runs into the many thousands of dollars per hour and individual components take days or even weeks to make but sometimes it's required. Among other things we design and manufacture laser positioning devices for high energy research experiments that have tolerances so high that the finished goods are hard to look at. Things that precise simply do not exist in nature and it's a little unsettling to see something like that. It simply looks unreal, like it shouldn't be in this universe. It also puts the general sloppiness of the natural world into perspective. It helps me to remember that most things aren't perfect and it's unrealistic to expect them to be.
** As a fun side note, I have a tungsten table I made for my office and on top of it sits a six pound tungsten weight, both finished to .00001". The surface tension from the moisture in the atmosphere and molecular entanglement between the two surfaces make it so that it requires a stronger than average person to lift the six pound weight from the table. People think they're magnetized, but no, they're just flat. Really, really flat.
You've obviously have no idea about modern (post WWII) powder. Most of those other ingredients are included so that the powder can hold the shape it is molded into. Grain shapes run the field from round cylinders, hexagonal and octagonal cylinders, spheres, buckyball and flat grains with differing numbers of sides.
The shape of the powder is critical to the performance of the round. Different powders and powder shapes are used to adjust the burn rate of the powder in order to impart the desired flight characteristics onto the bullet itself. In precision shooting the powder and primer are matched with the rifling of the barrel to best suit the target distance and in the case of military weapons those things are matched depending on what you're trying to kill. If you combine the powder and primer incorrectly (because you don't know what you're doing) the round can explode instead of burn and result in serious injury or death or best case, not fire at a.
Modern powder looks nothing like black powder and hasn't in nearly 70 years. If you saw a pile of it in the ground most people wouldn't know what it was. There's a lot of science in powder and primers and ignoring it is completely defeating the purpose of cased rounds. You'd be better off with a muzzle loader if you don't want to do powder the right way. It'll be safer and more reliable.
You're absolutely correct and it's true of securing everything from nations to email, you've got to trust several someones. Security is 50% technical and 50% Human, if you've got no faith in the Humans you'll never approach anything resembling security.
You're right about the Internet too. It's an inherently insecure thing simply by virtue of is being an two-way communications system. The the security products and practices surrounding it are attempts to mitigate those insecurities. You can never 'fix' Internet security, it is broken. It's that people want to do things with it that is wasn't designed for.
You do realize that Apple has sold a few hundred million iPads right? They experience very few fires, especially considering the quantities that are out there. You stand a better chance of being strafed by machine gun fire from a Zeppelin on a bombing run than you do of experiencing an iFire.
Even the best manufacturing facilities have some problem products that slip through QA. You simply can't expect perfection from a mass production line. The media makes a big deal out of Apple failures because Apple kind of sets themselves up as 'superior' and it's always fun to kick those kinds of companies in the shins.
Ok, fine, you've got to call the fire department in a retail shopping area, that's fair. But people ran away from an 'exploding' iPad? Lame.
How are people supposed to learn what happens when things go wrong if they're running away from it? Failure to observe not only the events, but how they were managed, indicates these people are incapable of rational thought, risk assessment and any sense of wonder. The big push in the West for more engineers may have come too late if this is what we can expect from the educated, middle and upper classes (Apple's core market).
Maybe next year at intern selection time I'll have something catch fire and see how they respond.
You're absolutely correct, the plugin requirements make encrypting messages from the mainstream clients simply too much of a hassle for most people/organizations to deal with. There's also the risk management component in all this. Most businesses simply don't deal with truly sensitive information. The costs of implementing complex encryption schemes isn't worth it.
The need for a new standard that eliminates the third party aspects and complex deployment issues is significant. Email 2.0. It'll happen one day, but right now tech standards bodies are too busy catering to their primary members.
Yep. IETF is about as neutral and immune to government and commercial pressure as ICANN. While they do some good things, their primary role is the streamlining of commercial practices online. Before you buy completely into their marketing efforts I suggest you skip the propaganda pages and really dig in to who steers the organization.
You mean the same standards committees that have their arms twisted by the governments of the home countries where their large/powerful members are? Those guys?
The only way to stop this sort of thing is with big changes to the current climate of governance through fear and/or big changes in risk management policy. No independent group has enough power to stop mass scale government surveillance in the first place. They certainly aren't going to affect change with a 1431 page revision of a standard. I'm sure kit makers will welcome the sales opportunities this exercise will provide though. <--- That sentence, unfortunately, is the reason why big change is unlikely. There's simply too much money in things staying the way they are. The only people losing out in this are the common folk and fuck them, they've done their duty as soon as they create new taxpayers to replace themselves.
Anytime companies are offering deep discounts (and in this case paying a 3rd party for the privilege) it is for one of two reasons: Either their model is cash flow based and as long any cash keeps coming in their expenses are manageable (hotels and brand name fast food for example), or they are desperate and have made fundamental errors in the operation of their business.
It is that second group where you're going to run into shady problems and tons of stack on fees and caveats. If all is going well with a business offering a sale or discount is dumb unless it's an inventory/tax management issue. If you only get the customer because of price they probably aren't worth having as they won't come back for regular priced goods and if you've broken even on the one deal you do land you're lucky.
Groupon survives on the hopes of the desperate. I'm really surprised they've lasted this long.
From a non-technical standpoint, anytime you have a safety feature (login in this case) that is a nuisance people will do phenomenally dumb things to streamline or circumvent that feature. In the login case, people will not use good password practices so they don't have to remember them or they'll make lists and stick them on everything.
The average user will never follow good security practices and anything that can be done to make it easier on them is good overall for the IT industry.
Large US contracts are never awarded on merit alone; tricks and smoke and mirrors is how the game is played. Well, that and confirming with policies. The govt lead will straight up to you how your bid needs to be positioned to get the deal. The price isn't the main factor and only comes into play if all the other bids are equal, but that rarely ever happens.
Sub-contracts are, strangely, usually a much cleaner and merit based thing. There it's a business decision for all parties, not a career step for a government bureaucrat and/or political capital. There's a lot less sketchy bullshit involved when it's just money.
North Korea has the institutionalized lunacy that comes with having an unenlightened hereditary dictatorship. That's always going to be 17 bushels of crazy. South Korea has specific lunacy regarding the North. Things not relating to the DPRK are on par with mainstream news coming out of any other country.
It is important to remember that South Korea has tabloid/paparazzi outlets just like the West. The problem is that it's hard for people who aren't familiar with the various publications to determine what is 'legitimate' news versus 'crazy' news.
Consider the Daily Mail, everyone in the UK knows it is satire, like The Onion, but more shouty. Lots of people outside the UK don't know that though and cite it as a legitimate source of news. News about the Norks that comes from South Korea (Sorks?) generally falls into the same category as the Daily Mail but it isn't satire. It's straight up, often slanderous, propaganda.
Tactical nuclear weapons were being developed by the US as late as the early 80's and they had 3.5" shells as far back as the 1940's. The major issue (other than the fact it was all really stupid) that put the brakes on their development was the risk of losing control of the weapons in a ground battle. The only viable options to mitigate those risks involved soldiers detonating the weapons themselves which was guaranteed to kill them, which is an unacceptable in 'civilized warfare': You can't create a situation that will result in a soldier losing his option to surrender or ask him to commit suicide.
Additionly, all the military types finally determined that anything smaller than a theatre scale nuclear weapon was pointless as the repercussions of their use would guarantee a theatre scale escalation. The only people who still see nuclear weapons as a viable option for warfare are politicians, lunatics and countries with tiny egos. They will eventually all go away and the entire period will be remembered as a time when people forgot how to make war.
Nothing that comes out of South Korea regarding North Korea can be taken at face value. Both the government and the press there have a loooong history of crazy anti-DPRK propoganda. It is a very odd thing too. South Korea has trundled on and become a significant supplier of consumer goods and has a nice little economy going but they hang on to the really outdated anti-DPRK propoganda stuff hard. Maybe it's just for the fun of it, it isn't like Lil' Kim is going to sue for libel.
That person has examined half a million fossils? That's a lot of fossil examining. That's a lot of anything examining... Even many years ago when I ran an eight year experiment on the effects of cannabis, mushrooms and bourbon I don't think I looked at my hands 500,000 times, and I did a lot of looking at my hands then :)
But I can point out that you seem to lack a basic understanding of the current Internet economy without having to log into a Google service and you can respond with a big fuck you without logging into a Google service. I couldn't even read the feed with Feedly if I didn't sign in through Google. See the difference?
It was the United Federation of Planets. Earth and its interests are represented by Starfleet. Jesus man.
But I don't know if a society with no money qualifies as socialism or communism. I don't believe it would as both of those things are based primarily around the distribution of wealth. All the other parts of those things are simply control mechanisms to maintain control of that distribution scheme.
YORP? Really? Naming something that terribly could only be the result of a women's health product focus group, or alien conspirators who have infiltrated the astronomy field in an attempt to cover up the imminent arrival of more landing craft if, as in this case, they were accidentally spotted. Even the lamest Human astrophysicist could come up with something better than "it's like, spinning man, really fast and parts are flying off". The fact this kind of stuff is printed in the media is just proof that they're in on it too.
One of the very few parts of our legal system that works really well is the part that prevents the government from taking your property without paying for it. Thanks to the British oppressors of the past who forced colonial rebellion, partially, by allowing their soldiers to stay in people's houses and seize their property we now have a really great way to bill out current oppressors.
But seriously, even with a court order the government has to pay if they take/demand your stuff. If it's a product they're taking they have to pay the replacement value of thing and any costs associated with putting the new thing back to work, those prices are generally established and there isn't much wiggle room. Service demands/subpoenas are another thing entirely.
If they're requesting you perform a custom service on their behalf, you've got pretty much a blank check to assign (arbitrary) numbers of staff to the project. You have to bill those staff out at their regular rate, but they can't say no if you say it takes 19 first class engineers to check email logs. They can cancel the project (even then you get to bill them for the quote) if it is too expensive but you basically name your own price and they can take it or leave it.
The US shot their wad in South America a long time ago. After their last few decades of US interference they assume by default that if you're a US company you're working with the CIA and you've got to prove you're not. They have more checks on business funds and transactions than the US does. Although it's a lot cheaper to work through the bureaucracy there it's much more through than it is here.
Try shipping in containers of finished machine goods. They're filled with glee when the boat arrives and they think they might get to uncover new US shenanigans. They're far nicer about it there than here in the US as well, just goes to show you don't have to be a dick to do a good job (Miami customs take note...)
Besides, it'll be the Japanese that handle all the tech and they aren't going to let their South American money machine be compromised by the US. While the West has been busy playing World Police Japan and South America, specifically Brazil south, have been having a grand time out educating and industrializing everybody else. I think it's hilarious. We're busy looking in baby diapers for bombs spending billions to censor the news and the Internet and they're busy building economies and staying out of all this stupid bullshit.
Yeah, too bad NEC, Hitachi, Matsushita, Mitsubishi and Fujitsu aren't in Japan, Brazil's BFF and largest point of origin for computer systems in Brazil.
The idea that all high level tech comes from China or a few US firms is a particularly Western thing and it is incredibly wrong.
It has been that way since Lincoln. He was the first one to ignore the law on a grand scale. He's also responsible for the 'ends justifying the means' in US policy.
Lincoln rides on one good act, that isn't as straightforward as people like to think, and freeing the slaves was a good thing, but he set in motion the machinery that's turning us all into slaves. He broke away from the very principals he was upholding to accomplish something else. That kind of thing never goes well.
You're kind of correct. They haven't been granted permission to lie, they've been ordered to lie. It's a fucked up thing when the great 'quest for truth' is shrouded, by law, in lies. Laws requiring you to implicate yourself and/or cooperate in the machinations of others has no place in "the land of the free".
Oddly enough, the US was designed with the majority of the Constitution being written as a way of legally restraining the 'big people'. Government overreach by the English is what started the whole mess and the idea was to prevent such a thing from occurring again. It's the little people in big people shoes that have fucked it all up.
'Too bad Googles legal team isn't mad'.
That's a stupid statement. Legal teams can't go off throwing sueballs at whoever pisses them off. They're employees (or contractors) just like anyone else. The filing of lawsuits against your home country's government without orders is most certainly exceeding your mandate and arguably your ethical boundaries as a lawyer (they have professional ethics standards, moral ethics are debatable). Filing lawsuits because you feel like it is the domain of tort lawyers.
The lack of legal response paints the true picture, that the execs aren't that upset by all this. If they were then we'd see an overwhelming legal response, but it would be ordered, not an emotional response from a lawyer.
With few exceptions, most related directly to money, there are no laws prohibiting companies in the US from lying. You can be sued if you lie, but, generally, no regulatory body has control over what you tell your customers.
You can redefine most words specifically in context of a marketing campaign or even a specific piece of marketing collateral. What means something in campaign (x) may not mean the same thing in campaign (y). Dealing with that is actually what most corporate lawyers do, they stay busy writing up the 'official' meaning of terms that will be used in marketing materials.
I guess civics classes were dropped along with math and science huh? It's a real shame too. Turns out having those classes provided more value than anyone knew.
The US is a democracy.
Democracy is a broad term that has many different implementations. The only commonality among them being that those who make the laws are granted the power to do so by the citizens. Think about it like Christianity. All the different breeds of Catholics, Protestants and Outright Crazies are still all Christian, they just go about their observances and beliefs differently.
The US has a representative democracy in the form of a constitutional republic. They are two distinctly separate things , and one does not preclude the existence of the other. One is the mechanism for action and the other is how citizens interact with that mechanism.
You're right about the Electoral College, that piece of law is really stupid. It was put in place solely to disenfranchise voters who chose a President that didn't fit with the houses of Congress.
I agree. The trashiest part of this whole thing was that she called the police after agreeing to the bargain. Honor has gone the way of the dodo it seems.
Anyway, they showed the 'electric weapon' on the news this morning, it's not a real Taser, it's one of those stupid novelty 'stun guns' that you can buy at any flea market or truck stop for ~$24.99. It hardly qualifies as a weapon.
The lesson in all this is that if you're going to Tase someone, do it with an actual Taser. Otherwise they'll either call the cops on you or beat the ever loving shit out of you.
Why does going into an Apple store seem to make people more likely to part with significant sums of money? The same could be asked about any retail presence really.
The truth is people want to acquire things, they want to give you their money. They've been subjected since birth to the most well developed science known to Human history: How to seperate people from their money.
In retail you've got to have a hook. It can be price, service or some gimmicky bullshit that looked at objectively adds no value to the purchase, but it activates those conditioned responses.
In the case of Google products, they aren't going to be competing on price, they obviously aren't going to be riding on service, gimmicky bullshit is all they've got. Besides, it's almost certainly cheaper to buildout a barge than rent prime retail space and you've got loads more options than in a managed retail area.
As far as webinars, the bulk of consumers aren't going to explore products solely online. They've got to see one and hold it before they buy it. People more comfortable online (like you, presumably, and I) are far more likely to do some research and be comfortable making a purchase based on what we've learned. The vast majority of people aren't like that though, hence the whole 'showrooming' thing. If Google wants to get into the mass market they've got to cater to that majority.
Christ, Google sucks at naming things: Google Glass, Google Mail, Google+, Google Earth... It's like Spaceballs marketing over there.
Retail Battlebarge or Ships of Uncertainty, Aquatic Dominance Platform, anything but barge, there all by itself.
El Reg should do a naming contest to help Google out, or at least make it more interesting.
Unlike in the movies, shooting someone in the leg is often fatal or at least results in amputations. Arm shots generally aren't fatal, but do often result in amputations. Shooting someone in the ankle, even with a smaller caliber sidearm, will often take their foot off, or at least leave it hanging by shreds of skin. Look at wounded vets, since land mines went out of fashion most of them lose a limb from small arms fire, not explosions.
I can understand why that wouldn't be much fun in movies or video games though. If the antagonist or the level boss (do games still have those?) was defeated when the hero shot him in the ankle with a $75 .38 it would be rather anticlimactic.
The point is you don't have to aim for the head, you stand a better chance of hitting someone else. Aiming for the ankle at least provides the possibility of a badass ricochet into the nuts if you miss. If you hit your target he's as good as dead anyway as you can continue shooting him while he looks for his foot.
Unless you're getting suits made from panda fur or Human skin spending much over $5k for one is rare. Once you cross that line it is very obvious you've paid for flash, and that completely defeats the purpose of the suit, especially with business folk: If you stand out you look like a clown. Granted, accessories will run the total outfit price up, but those aren't calculated as part of the price of the suit.
God, that is not a well fitting suit. It goes well with the guys haircut though.
It will be interesting to see how going 180• from traditional body armor works out. There's a really good reason that traditional body armor is equipped with a trauma plate, that's what stops the bullet from killing you even though it may not have put a hole in you. Bullets do not kill by holes alone. In a traditional body armor upper, the energy from a billet is dispersed across the 7"-10" rigid or semi-rigid trauma pack and greatly reduces the damage that would have occurred if the energy was concentrated in a small area.
Their choice of target market is also interesting. Rarely are executives targeted with sidearms, especially in high tension areas like the Middle Easy or parts of South America. The bad guys in those countries use high powered rifles that will pass through your $20,000 ugly suit like it wasn't there.
And since I'm in a negative mood, $20,000 is insanely expensive. A weeks worth of suits will set you back $120k? That's simply not a good spend. When we travel to rough places it costs us $4k/week per guard and they've got guns to shoot back with as well as crowd control equipment and evasion skills. These suits can't do any of that and are certain to be higher maintenance than a professional security agent. Plus you can't hang out and chat with your suit.
Is it really the best approach? I'm not in any way saying the NSA Compliant Certified algorithms are the best, but somewhere, several places actually, in the chain there must be implicit trust. Trust not only in the technical abilities of those implementing the algorithms, but trust in their ethical capacity as well.
Whether it's a nation, a building or code, security is only 50% technical, the other 50% is reliant on Humans. If you don't trust the Humans involved you don't have security, you have a resource intensive, micromanaged system that can be manipulated. Snowden is a great example of this. When everyone is constantly under scrutiny the guys watching are nearly always looking the wrong direction and you know what they're looking at; its an unavoidable side effect of any highly structured system, it can only do what you tell it and that's a significant weakness.
Anyway, at present we don't have an independent body that is both technically and ethically capable that is worthy of the public trust. The higher up the food chain you go, the more shadowy everything becomes. There are mystery parties involved in all of this and that's never going to be secure. Until/if such a body is extant, there's a strong argument to be made that using one of the 'government approved' algorithms is the best option. At least with those you can take appropriate measures to ensure data you might not want them to have doesn't travel online. With the mystery algorithms you don't know the enemy, or even if there is one. That isn't security either.
The free part is the biggest flaw in the perceived security superiority of OSS. Granted, the fact it can be independently analyzed is a positive thing, but if no one is doing the audits then having that option is meaningless.
The unaudited nature of a popular security product is stupefying. If nobody is doing line by line audits of security related code what makes anyone think that other, not security specific products, are being audited? Having 'more people looking at it' obviously isn't a valid point, nobody looks at the actual security parts... It's like storing all your valuables in a vault but not bothering to make sure the door locks: Why bother building the vault?
Expecting people to turn out extremely high quality work for free has always been a weakness in the system. Actually paying people is obviously going to be necessary as the community isn't going to do it for free. They just expect someone else to do it for them and they'll accept whatever you hand them. It will be very interesting to see if funding audits is sustainable, if it isn't then we're all back at IE6.
Yep. And more precisely, that your methodologies are solid and could have produced the results you state. Peer review does not mean that the jury upholds or falsifies your findings,or replicates your experiment or 'checks your work' that's for other scientists to do.
The poor understanding of the scientific process is directly responsible for so many stupid headlines and policy decisions. It's just awful really. Nobody in the scientific community views peer review as validation, that's not what it's for. More than anything it's so that other scientists don't have to waste their time double checking basic methodologies before building on (or refuting) the findings.
A ~decent analogy is that of a materials standard: If I'm buying 50 tons of T6 then the methods used to determine that the T6 is in fact T6 are valid, and if they are followed will result in the T6 acting like I expect. I don't have to go to Australia and do analysis of the ore itself.
Because a journal, any journal, publishes a study that absolutely does not end the science. That's only the beginning.
Potential financial savings from deploying any tech are always radically overestimated. If they were remotely accurate the tech manufacturers would be paying me for using their products, not the other way around. If all the promises actually added up my costs should have been reduced by ~9,000% over the last 10 years. That, unfortunately, isn't the case.
There are certainly efficiencies to be gained with tech, but it is rare that those translate directly into dollars. The increased staffing costs for skilled IT people to manage it all, licensing costs and general pain in the ass factor mean that you're lucky for a financial break even.
I'm not saying it's all worthless, far from it, but I am saying that financial savings is a terrible metric for judging a technology.
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