colonel_panic

"Warning: Life is addictive but unremunerative."

That's how I feel about lowercase life so far.

I have to wonder how much benefit you're really getting from that coupon program if everybody is getting them. At grocery stores you basically have to use a club card to get the same prices you could have gotten if the store didn't have a club card. If you're an early adopter you can get good deals for a while, but as the number of customers in the program approaches critical mass, the benefit to each customer from having volunteered their information diminishes, and by then the Nash equilibrium is for everybody to be in the program. There's probably a name for this situation but I've forgotten it. It's like an inside-out race to the bottom.

And if stores can track you just as easily through credit cards, then I wonder how long it will be until Target offers discounts for using credit cards instead of cash, if that's legal.

(Also, you could be getting those coupons because you don't buy that laundry detergent as much as you could; if you bought it much more frequently they might guess that they couldn't get your purchase volume up much further by dropping the price.)

No mention of an OpenGL update. Still waiting out this stone age here...

A lot of introverts do care what others think and tell themselves they don't care in order rationalize their social failures and unwillingness to expose their vulnerabilities. Some might be able to fake it 'til they make it, but all too many just keep faking it and dying on the inside.

The fact that the previous article created a stir is precisely why the WSJ published this one.

It's always seemed to me that "hacker" is the only term that geeks can get defensive about without the anti-prescriptivist police coming in to ruin the party.

I've heard of transcranial magnetic stimulation, but not direct current stimulation. Can anyone give us a rundown of the difference in results?

It thinks I'm a 65+-year-old male into extreme sports and uh... anatomy?

He's there to make Bill sound more authentic by comparison.

This leaves out the fact that there are people whose only real choice is between taking a bus and not going anywhere.

And if you're studying at Cambridge University, the Computer Laboratory is waaaaay the hell out of town.

But let's face it, the reason we're having our attention drawn to this right now is that we've got a president running for reelection, so it gives us exactly what we want to know.

The thing about Colemak is that if you ever have to use somebody else's computer for a moment, you can be absolutely certain they don't have it installed. Dvorak, I think, strikes the most acceptable balance between efficiency and widespread availability. Sure, as a hacker, you should set up your own unique keyboard layout/.emacs file/guitar-pedal-to-USB modifier keys/saccadic eye motion detector/whatever to absolutely maximize your efficiency for how you spend most of your working hours, but if the day ever comes when I'm the only person who can override the Doomsday Machine, I could do without the hassle.

"Since programming isn't primarily normal English language text, Dvorak really doesn't help"

Here's a late Christmas present: http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/