aprescott

I'm so used to this being the engine behind, and so unique to, dcurt.is that it actually threw me a little when it wasn't Dustin Curtis's site. I don't know who is/are the developer(s) but my feeling is that it would sit better with a low number of users. Or maybe not, maybe it'll just be like Octopress if it gets opened up.

Well, it seems I spoke too soon! When they first announced this on the official blog it wasn't available to me (an Apps user), but now it is.

Let's not talk about Google Apps users and this setting, shall we? :)

Off-topic: fun to see that someone else got emails about Wave being sunsetted from the "Google Wage" sender.

I genuinely thought that all Nexus devices were stock Android without carrier modifications. Is this not the case?

Astonishing blog post.

Imaging technology has been extremely effective in the field and has found things artfully concealed on passengers as large as a gun or nonmetallic weapons, on down to a tiny pill or tiny baggies of drugs.

This reminded me of part of the recent TSA Fail post by a former FBI agent.

Civil libertarians on both sides of the aisle should be appalled at an unauthorized use to which TSA is putting their screening: Identifying petty criminals--using one search method to achieve a secret goal. This is strictly forbidden in other government branches. In the FBI, if I had a warrant to wiretap an individual on a terrorism matter and picked-up evidence of a non-terrorism-related crime, I could not, without FBI Headquarters and a judge’s approval, use that as evidence in a criminal case. But TSA is using its screening devices to carve out a niche business. According to congress, TSA began to seek out petty criminals without congressional approval. TSA have arrested more than 1,000 people on drug charges and other non-airline security-related offenses to date.

http://gmancasefile.blogspot.in/2012/01/tsa-fail.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/ is available! https HN links come up in Google results (at least from memory).

> The last time I was brusquely asked if I was a natural born citizen or had been naturalized at some point.

If you're naturalised, my understanding is that you have all the rights of a person originally born in the country, with everything that implies. Is there even a point of asking this question other than aggressiveness?

Thanks. I relied on Google Translate to do almost all of the translation!

As the comments on the article point out, this seems to be about the enterprise maps service to businesses which ordinarily is at a cost.

From Le Monde[1]:

"As such, it considered that Google Maps distorted the rules of free competition by providing the same service to businesses while it undergoes costs to design the product."

["A ce titre, elle considérait que l'application Google Maps faussait les règles de la concurrence en offrant gratuitement aux entreprises le même service alors qu'elle-même subit des coûts pour concevoir son produit."]

The enterprise service FAQ[2] contains:

"Google Maps API for Business is extremely cost-effective, starting at just $10,000 per year. Pricing is based on the number of map page views for externally facing websites. For internal uses, it is based on page views or number of vehicles being tracked. Please contact us for more information."

Slightly changes the story.

[1]: http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2012/02/01/google...

[2]: http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps-faq.html

A related study into how long people spend reading words on a web page found that on average people only read 20-28% of the text. For 1000 words, the average visit duration was less than 70 seconds.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

I read quite a lot of text online, and I certainly have a different style of reading a web page versus reading a book. I'd be fascinated to know how efficient scanning is after years of practice online, in terms of information consumed that you're able to recall. 28% is surely too low for adequate comprehension, though.

On the water filtration front, one thing I'm curious to know is what happened to the LifeSaver bottle. Was that just the victim of TED hype?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeSaver_bottle

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pritchard_invents_a_water_f...

From the Wikipedia page: "In 2007, the LifeSaver bottle was tested by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the results found it to completely filter out all bacteria and viruses."

This may be a stupid question, but is that simply nothing remarkable?

Since graphene seems to be the best thing discovered for filtering evaporated water, not liquid water, is the LifeSaver not as great a solution as the TED video makes it out to be, for some reason?

Does this include so-called verbatim search? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-t...

I don't use it but I'm curious to know if the problems you're encountering also happen with this new feature.

An interesting take on the file sharing service that I've used occasionally is http://justbeamit.com/ which opens a direct connection between you and the recipient. If you close the window before the file is transferred, the transfer gets cut. It may not be great for large files because of upload speeds, but it can be quicker and easier than Dropbox for transient one-offs.

That's a disheartening story.

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." — Richard Feynman

I guess the effect you're describing could've been multiplied if SOPA had been a backronym too. "USA PATRIOT Act? How could that be bad! Just look at its name!"

I think it's worth also reading http://ospflor63.stanford.edu/upload/An-Introduction-to-Stoc... which is quite informative.

I think this was one of the most interesting parts of the article:

The other question that made sense was from Chief Justice Roberts:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So I have a great idea. You take wood, you put it on a grate, you light it, and you get heat. That recites a series of acts performed in the physical world that transforms the subject of the process, the wood, to achieve a useful result, which is heat. So I can get a patent for that?

Believe it or not, the answer was no, not because it's not patentable subject matter, but because it's not novel. So cavemen entrepreneurs could have patented it?

Just for anyone else: AMTTLOPW = add me to the list of people who. That was hard to find via Google, for some reason.

I completely and utterly loathe the security question-answer system. Has there been any study into how effective they are at improving security compared to, say, being forgotten and causing a complete annoyance? I've been unable to get access to fairly important accounts because I couldn't remember which answer I gave to a generic security question 4 years ago; I know full well that I gave a perfectly correct answer at the time, I just have no idea what it was.

I'm no software license lawyer (and admittedly I haven't read Apache in depth), but I understand that the Apache license has at least one requirement I'm personally not too keen on.

4.2 in the license: "You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files", I'm not sure how "legal" it is to follow the convention of sticking a LICENSE file in the project root and have that assume to cover all contents therein, but that seems reasonable enough, versus 4.2.

I'd love to know further opinions on MIT vs. Apache.

[edit: engaged brain.]

Until they graduate into adulthood when suddenly this knowledge is bestowed upon them!

What about the case where it isn't a long-form post, but something more casual like a retweet or a link to some website? I can see the blog solution working out there, too (cf. Daring Fireball), but you might not want to have that full setup for more ephemeral (yet interesting) stuff. There also might not be one specific topic. I'm not disagreeing with you, I just wonder if there is a way to use a social network like Google+ for Everyone, as they market it, which is sensible. Maybe not.

Reading your three situations, I have another one which I've been thinking about: a post which is informative and in some way beneficial to the public, but which a significant portion of the people you know simply do not care about.

For example, you may have an excellent piece of commentary about the history of Unix and the state of X, Y, Z in modern operating system design. Most of your non-technical friends, along with your family, in all likelihood do not care about this and will not find it interesting, so it's just noise to them. If you post it publicly, it's worthwhile to the Internet at large, but annoying to a select group. If you post it so that only the relevant individuals see it, and no one else, then the public potentially lose out.

Is there a simple solution here which I'm just not seeing? Is there a social network that deals with this appropriately? With Facebook, you can "unsubscribe", which means hiding a user's posts from your feed, but that seems like overkill. How do prominent developers deal with this? Do they just make their posts more generic and mainstream, and move the technical discussion elsewhere? Or do they just let their non-technical friends and family Deal With It?

Perhaps one solution is to mark a post with "Family don't need to see this", then skip the post for anyone in Family who views their stream/feed/timeline/whatever, probably with an unobtrusive notice which says "post skipped". But then there's added complexity, and — getting back to Zach's main point — it's more shit work.

I was somewhat surprised to learn: it's available immediately. 2 minutes after they posted on Twitter that it's now available to everyone, I followed their steps of closing Tasks and Chat windows, hit refresh, clicked the link. Done. (You may need to be on the Rapid Release track.)

You may need to switch to the Rapid Release track, so you get new features earlier.

The paid time off figures say something about the US compared to the UK, where the statutory minimum for a full-time worker is 28 days. http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/Timeoffandh...

While this is true, it's in the same class of work-around as just registering a @gmail.com account. It doesn't let an Apps user use their Apps account in a unified way, which is what I was getting at.

I know I need to just be patient and wait for Apps users to get Profiles/Plus, but I don't find it particularly sympathetic of Google when they keep saying that "everyone" can use Google+ now, even in their financial results announcements. From the CEO.

(Yes, technically anyone can use it by signing up with a free @gmail.com account, but I consider that a cop out.)

Or not! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SI_base_unit.svg

Huh?

"In fact, of the seven fundamental metric units — the kilogram, meter, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela — only the kilogram is still dependent on a physical artifact."

Followed by:

"And the luminosity of light, or candela, is measured in terms of power, designated in watts, or joules per second."

I'm not an SI expert, but Wikipedia suggests the candela is in fact an SI base unit with a definition based on physical phenomenon of the universe, so the second sentence seems erroneous.

[edit: clarity]