JohnLBevan

Instead of putting "samanthastage dot com", put http://www.samanthastage.com/. This should improve your page rank, and makes the link stand out / easier to use, so people are more likely to visit, generating more traffic for her site.

Please can this post be hidden from any managers? It may give them ideas. ;)

When choosing to work with anyone you should look for skills which complement your own / your current teams. Generally when looking to recruit a designer, it would be their design skills your after; not their legal advice or ability to write in marketing jargon. Look for people whose designs you like, preferably who have produced something similar to the look you're after before. Find someone you can build a relationship with, where they can talk you through their subject in your language. If you're a small business with no technical skills, your "web designer" should be someone who describes the whole process of getting a site on-line up front, and who offers ways for you to maintain that site yourself, without having to pay them each time you want a few lines of text added. If you're a larger business, or a developer who lacks graphics skills, you'll probably be focussed on just the design side, and will want someone who uses technologies compatible with what's in your toolkit, people who have experience working alongside programmers, and perhaps those who understand how to optimise their designs for performance. Everyone's requirements are different, so the designer they're after will also be different. Look at what these designers have done before, and look at their customers' feedback, and pay particular attention to those customers who seem to be the most similar to yourself.

Nice demo - I like it.

I had the same comment - adding a key with this info would be really useful (especially if you could also use it as a filter). It would also be great if you could draw a line across the graph (optionally applying a curve) to allow the results to be filtered and the section beneath the curve zoomed in on (potentially two curves if you want to cut out anything suspiciously low priced also). You could also allow this selected section to then be displayed on different axes; i.e. these are the cars with a mileage and price I'm happy with, now plot my selection as price against age. Further user customisation would also be good - e.g. allowing users to change the meaning of the colours (colors) / dot size.

Nice work though - much better way to represent & search this data than the standard fixed range filters. I'd love to see something like this done for computers; when custom building & selecting processors for example, rather than getting a load of codes, plot serial task performance against price, filter it down, plot parallel task against price & further reduce the data set until you find the ones which meet your requirement.

Alternate Title: Apple have finally seen sense & started buying Windows PCs. ;)

If you go with the deposit only card option, you could adjust your feed to display the aggregate of the two cards; but you're effectively capping an individual transaction to $20. The donor therefore sees their changes reflected in real time, but any cheats are limited (hopefully a cashier would get suspicious / frustrated if someone tried to work around the $20 limit by going multiple times in succession).

as a result of SB getting a lot more coffee sales.

I read in a recent Wired UK article that some banks have opted to pay a sum of money to a charity of their employee's choice, rather than paying the employee a full bonus - the idea being they've found this to be a better motivator for employees. Though admittedly it's also good publicity for the banks running such schemes.

$100 spent on coffee for the homeless maybe? Just to take an optimistic view on the data.

Good shout - and Starbucks know good press so they're likely to keep it open when they see how much attention this project's getting. It seems strange that they don't just give you the free ones direct to your card - I guess it's down to the psychology of receiving a free actual physical thing, rather than there just being a slightly longer delay between needing to top up your card.

You should always endeavour to make your code easy to read. Since most people aren't aware semi colons are optional, omitting them can cause unexpected behaviour in certain cases, and having them there does no harm, it's surely best to stick to the standards (i.e. using semi colons). The only time to debate whether to omit them is when there's a good reason to leave them out. Also, I suspect (untested theory) that it puts more strain on the parser, though makes negligible difference to the download speed, so will be a hit on performance.

There's no need to close off an old account when you move to a new service, so you can leave your gmail as an archive - that makes for an easy spring clean too. My guess is that as cloud platforms evolve though, more and more will offer ways out - since people/companies will begin demand it before signing up as competition mounts. Those "ways out" will initially be bulk downloads (like Facebook's "download your info" feature), but over time will become more useful, offering filters on what's downloaded, pagination on downloading data, and migration APIs such that new services can pull data from the old ones without you needing to middle man the data. This isn't of benefit to providers though, which is why it relies on competition / user adoption based on ways out, and also why it will take time to become the norm.

Fundamentalists working in care homes perhaps? Jeanne was spared for 2 years due to factions forming over whether Man referred to species or gender.

With regards to the retirement problem, that's only an issue because people are still thinking like mortals. Were we immortal I'd expect gap years to replace retirement. Many people would choose to live their lives in cycles, retraining every 50 years for a new job / change of scene, getting to a proficient level, then taking a break for a few years until ready (or out of funds) to retrain & start anew. Once they'd done a few cycles people would likely begin to specialise, picking up stuff they'd touched on in the past & taking it to the next level / mixing it with their other skills. The issues then arising are the capacity of the mind (mind rather than human brain since who knows what form it will have taken by this point). I've assumed that with immortality we maintain physical (if still relevant) and mental fitness, as without those, extending life becomes torturous and pointless, causing people not only to not enjoy their lives, but also to become long suffering burdens on their families, just for the sake of a larger number of sun circuits.

Agreed - in fact, in the UK the Data Protection Act makes this a legal requirement (not that Google have to abide by UK law). You could change it such that users can only see the individual pics they're tagged in, and not all pics in the parent album. That may be preferable, but makes the situation more complex and means you can't see the picture you were tagged in in context. As you say, communicating how the security works is likely a better approach than changing the security model.

They should give it a more dot netty name, by picking a letter (maybe F, as it's a functional language) and putting a sharp on the end.

Another thought. . . could you take advantage of the thermoelectric effect to cool a system and make it more efficient in the process?

This gives me a thought. . . could Dyson Air Multiplier technology be scaled down to be used in computers?

http://www.dyson.co.uk/technology/airmultiplier.asp#HowItWor...

Perhaps Google Venn's required?

Thanks esrauch - agreed, they're just there for security at present, but have a lot of potential to be a lot more with just a few tweaks to existing functionality. One of the big differences of having circles which could be used as tags is these posts could also be shown to public and not to those in your circles other than those who've subscribed to the tag. I believe one reason Twitter's so popular is it allows you to post whatever you like and people choose to be interested - if someone tried to make the facebook status public and put the same stuff in there that they put on twitter lots of their friends would end up blocking them.

Good point, perhaps the naming of this functionality would need to be changed to avoid confusing users. . . Personally I'd prefer it all to be under circles, since to me it's all a way of organising collections of contacts, but I admit I think about these things differently to a user, and I'd still be happy if the terminology were different so long as the functionality was there.

Hey Alec,

Thanks for your thoughts - I see your point, though think the functionality could be made available without increasing complexity. Circles would work in exactly the same way as they do now; there would just be an extra button available to those who wanted to use it to bring up a security panel (similar to google docs sharing functionality). If the default for a circle is for it to be a private group (i.e. as it is now), users only need to ignore the "share this group button" to avoid any complexity.

It looks like a few other people are having similar thoughts, so opinion on this area's certainly split: http://garry.posterous.com/google-circles-is-high-work-and-l...

Thanks again,

JB

One other thought around circles. It would be cool if some kind of backwards circle functionality could be created. For example, I post a few links to my feed about tech stuff which only a handful of my friends are interested in, so I have two options: 1) post to just my "techies" circle so as not to spam my other friends 2) post to public so that anyone who's interested can see (including people who follow me but whom I haven't circled as I don't know them). The first option excludes my followers, the second spams my friends. I could create another circle of followers and message them and the techies, but that doesn't sit comfortably, especially as I don't know which of my posts caused those people to follow me (perhaps a music video I favourites on youtube caught their eye and now they're getting spammed with HN links). Having some way where I could create circles to publish stories to, but have others subscribe to those would be handy - I then publish to my "tech stuff" circle, and anyone who cares to subscribe to "JohnLBevan.TechStuff" sees it, whilst it's hidden from others (to prevent annoying them - not for security). Again, I'd welcome your thoughts. Cheers, JB

A suggested improvement to circles. . . Have 3 types - personal, group and owned group - defined by a simple editable property.

* Personal work as circles do currently - i.e. its your way of organising your own contacts; no one else knows what personal circles you have or who's in them (including the members).

* Group is a shared contact list - any member of that group has a copy of it, and has permissions to maintain it as if they'd created it. This would be useful if I wanted a group of people in my sport team / band, since when one of the band already in the group adds someone to this group, everyone in the band can then talk to them; and it's not up to me as the creator to do all the admin.

* Owned Group - essentially the same as Group, but with additional security / more like FB's groups. I specify who's in the group and what access they have - i.e. if they're just a member, or if they can also administrate the group. This is more useful for application fan pages, where you want a mailing list of people to contact, but only want a few of the people in the group to be able to add / approve new members. With this model, it would be OK to have an option for non members to request access; then be added once approved.

What do you guys think?

JB

Looks like an awesome book (along with the others recommended on this site). Unusual for scientificly minded cookbooks to be affordable - the only other ones I know of are way out of my price range: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Fat-Duck-Cookbook/dp/0747583692 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science-Cookin... (I notice the author of this book, Nathan Myhrvold's also mentioned in cooking for geeks)

Hmm, looks like a gap in the market. . . though I guess banks wouldn't be too willing to provide an API to third parties who'd offer this service, so it would require a bank to fill this gap, rather than an independent.

Those are great links - thanks for the info :) I'm thinking of looking into accountants after I start to make money; up 'til then I'll just keep records, since I'm assuming that I won't be making enough to cover the costs of accountants for a long time during my experimental phase. Thanks again, JB

Spending more than you earn? Idiots in charge. Cut back on essentials, keep the things that make you happy, still get re-elected. Hmm, anyone else see a minor flaw?

I think the point of the argument is less about getting into fights, than it is about harassment; on the internet it doesn't really matter how big each person is (except where spam is concerned); so long as address info is private, even the most dedicated stalker's got his work cut out. The issue is this attribute is searchable; so a guy can list all of them women on G+, checking out their profile pictures, and possibly contacting them. A woman with an attractive profile picture could get a lot of unwanted messages / friend invites in this way, which would lead to feelings of harassment. Even the knowledge that people may be checking out their profile pics will be upsetting to some, despite there being no direct affect on the "victim". Admittedly, all this is also true the other way around, but typically in most human societies, men are more likely to stalk and women are more likely to be upset by the idea of being stalked.

However, all of that is beside the point. The simple fact is that if this information is not required for G+ to function, it should be optional. You could argue that you have the option of not signing up, which is fair, but not very constructive. As G+ is competing against FB, and their stance is that they have better privacy, this is something which is in their interest to put right.

One advantage of publicly disclosing information about gender is that you know it's public. It's possible to glean someone's gender from the language they use (see http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php), meaning people who kept their gender private may be lulled into a false sense of security. Admittedly I still agree that you should always have to option to select which of your details to make public (or to limit which groups/circles this information is available to), but thought I'd chuck in a counter argument to keep things interesting.