d2vid

You're totally right, I thought about ordering a second set of phones and then initiating a chargeback if the first set didn't arrive/weren't resent.

If there had been absolutely no support from Google, that's what I would have done. But they claimed to be making progress in helping me. Fool me 32 times, shame on me.

This is exactly what happened - UPS said "We strongly suggest that you contact your shipper to initiate a package investigation. Shippers are encouraged to report lost packages because receivers may not have all the shipment information needed to perform a thorough investigation."

I conveyed that information to Google, and Google strung me along giving me the impression that they were doing something about it, albeit slowly.

I think we need a "not a microsoft employee" captcha. Uh, how about, "Bing sucks"?

I agree, I'm rooting for Google and would just like them to fix their customer support.

I get that they can't profitably provide any kind of support for, say, Google Groups. As we like to say around here, if you don't pay them, then you're the product and you can't expect good service. But once they start moving into markets where you pay them money, the bar is higher. In this case, I'm the customer and their support is by far the worst customer experience of my life. Worse than the time a US Airways stewardess took my carry-on bag off the plane before take-off without telling me.

Haha, I am most assuredly a real person, not a paid actor. My girlfriend got tired of me venting about it and actually being angry, so I turned my anger into humorous flourish.

My goal in this is to get some kind of human being at Google to respond. #googleplayed - what do you think? Could it catch on?

Econ 101 also distinguishes between elastic and inelastic supply. Engineering labor supply seems pretty inelastic - doubling engineering salaries might only raise supply 5% (some students switch majors, some engineers choose to work more hours or retire later). That is the definition of a shortage - there is not enough at any price.

I've been running into bad google experiences lately. I have a work email address that uses google for domains, and my account was completely disabled by google about a week ago with no response yet to my repeated contact attempts. Their error message was not exactly comforting, it included the following:

Google reserves the right to: Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.

I don't particularly care about that particular gmail account, but it's terrifying that they believe they have the right to do the exact same thing to my personal gmail account, which I definitely DO care about. That seems unethical, even if it's perhaps legal.

Agreed, and then any accusations of infringement that the patent holder makes must also be registered with the patent office, so that defendants can see who else is being extorted.

By grouping statistics into these things we call "countries" we are also "excluding" certain statistics. For instance, why are we ignoring cartel murders just south of the US/Mexican border even though the US drug market is the driving factor?

The parent comment is providing a better, more specific grouping that helps shed light on where murders are actually happening in the US and points us towards where we need to focus our efforts if we want to actually change the murder rate in the US. Inner city interventions will result in the greatest improvements to the murder rate, whereas focusing efforts elsewhere has literally zero chance of bringing the murder rate into line with the rest of the G8 because that's not where the murders are happening.

Getting annoyed by airport security has everything to do with class - you need to fly often enough to find it annoying.

We don't talk about stop and frisk over and over again on HN because most of us don't live in areas where we are subjected to that police behavior every time we go out for a walk.

How about an IP lawfirm offering insurance against patent trolls? Your company pays an annual fee. Once you get a shakedown notice, the law firm responds, letting the patent troll know that you have $0 marginal cost to making a stand. If the law firm had enough clients, their incentive would be to go to court to invalidate bad patents so they don't have to keep responding to the same shakedown notices.

But it confuses/scares the average user, which is a bad thing. Just have your site be SSL all the time and users won't get this warning.

I would argue TDD is a workaround which allows you to do meaningful work in a team context without holding a complete program in one's head.

It gets everyone to put their thoughts about what the program should do in one place. Every time you run the test suite, you are outsourcing to the test suite the task of running through your mental model of the program and thinking "what did I break".

The limitation of TDD is that it blocks rapid iteration in what the program should do. When you load the entire model of the program into your head, requirements change at the speed of thought. With TDD, they change at the speed of a lot of reading and typing.

Yes. Think about the word awful -it used to mean "inspiring awe" but it flipped and now always means bad.

I got curious so I looked up some examples that still can mean something or the exact opposite:

Bolt - run away or secure in place

Cleave - cut or join

Garnish - add (parsley) or remove (wages)

Weather - weather the storm or become weathered

That is what the author is espousing - judging people on a selected part of their bio, while disregarding any success they've had in the actual work they do.

I really like the clouds in front of the airship! The movement is very subtle, which gives the design a refined feeling. Totally the kind of detail that could be overdone and become distracting, but I think you guys nailed it.

Just bought 2 phones after 2 hours of trying (12:00-14:05) with two browser windows open (chrome and firefox). I was hitting the page about 20 times a minute, and finally got through. This phone had better be the best thing ever...

Good luck.

Exactly, and Stallman's proposal represents a viable path forward to effectively abolish software patents.

It avoids the messiness of invalidating existing patents or determining during patent examination which patents are for software and which patents are for hardware. Effectively, it shifts that determination to the implementer.

If I'm able to implement a patented idea in software, then it was a software patent. And I'm not infringing.

The way I understand his idea is that a phone is a general purpose computer. If Apple wants to patent slide-to-unlock, they can only patent a hardware implementation (i.e. a chip that only does slide-to-unlock, which is clearly a ridiculous idea).

Then I can come along and write software for Android that implements slide-to-unlock, and I am not infringing because my implementation is software only.

The end result of this means that Apple's slide-to-unlock patent would become worthless.

Exactly, this is how I understood his proposal. Simple to understand exactly what is and isn't allowed.

Many people here seem to be focusing on how patent lawyers would find new ways to write software patents, or focusing on whether hardware would still be patentable. That misses the point.

If I can implement a patented idea in software on commodity hardware, I'm safe. Simple!

I think you have this backwards. I can't be sued unless I implement the patented idea in hardware.

In that state of the world, if they patent the hardware solution, I don't care. I can still implement in software and I have a legal workaround to avoid infringing. I'm driving the truck through the hole.

You don't have a pre-existing condition if it only costs you $200/month.

I have a friend who had a serious back injury (near paralysis) in his 20s which requires constant physical therapy and visits to specialists. He can't buy health insurance on the open market at any price (literally), and so he must move carefully from group health plan to group health plan, rather than pursue his interest in startups.

The comparison with apartments is not fair - imagine that the only way to get a place to live was through your employer.

"History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired."

You mean like extracting billions of barrels of oil a day and burning them? We're already manipulating the environment.

This is what I wish we were discussing in the global warming debate in the U.S. - not whether global warming was happening, but conservation versus mitigation/adaptation.

Greenfinger

What are your expectations for what happens after the weekend?

Am I expected to make a commitment to pursue this new "startup"? If I take seed funding, what am I agreeing to do? What if 2 weeks later I discover that the market for the product doesn't exist? Can I instead build out the product and then sell the intellectual property to the pitch company? Who owns the intellectual property & code at the end of the weekend if no deal is agreed to? Are the funders and the pitchers one and the same or different companies?

You've piqued my interest, but there are a lot of details I'd like filled in. Thanks!

How about triggering a buffer overflow? Assuming the Turing Complete substrate doesn't have infinite memory, maybe we can break out ;)

It's not THAT easy. Gifts are taxable: http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Em...

So are trust fund transfers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation-skipping_transfer_ta...

I end up using underscore.js in every project I work on because JS doesn't have good functional programming built in, at least not that you can count on in all implementations.

I use date.js or moment.js whenever I have to deal with times/dates in JS because the built in date support is pretty bad.

That being said, I think libraries like this take Javascript from being "tolerable" to "lovable"

I agree, I got the book because it was recommended by someone here on HN, and I found it full of reference to studies that I think most interested readers would already be familiar with. Then it would take those study results and extrapolate, leaving me thinking "wait a second, that wasn't proved at all."

I just went on to AskPatents and tried my hand at it: http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/197/prior-art-for...

I'm not doing anything close to as good a job as a patent examiner would do, but with about an hour of work I (hopefully) was able to start pointing to some prior art that could get an examiner quickly up to speed on what the state of the art is.

I agree the amount of work involved to comprehensively invalidate a patent would be days - hopefully a group can do the same with shorter time contributions.