delackner

This is hilarious. He is being downvoted for pointing out one of the biggest serious issues with digital content licensing: The problem isn't just the DRM, but also that the licensing agreements usually (always?) destroy the traditional right to resell your book/movie/album when you are sick of it, or just when you would rather that a friend have it (say, when you finish reading a book).

Paying say $15 for an ebook that is nontransferrable, when the physical book is ALSO $15, is an absurdity that I can't imagine will stand the test of time. Our entire human history is on the side of the feeling that when you buy something, you can then give that particular thing away to someone else.

Current legal and market norms don't serve this basic human instinct yet, and it remains to be seen which shifts first. My money is on humans insisting to keep giving things away to their friends.

You're splitting hairs. Louis CK's special raked in more than a million dollars. The website cost him about 30k to produce. iTunes would have sucked up TEN TIMES that.

Contribute is right. People might talk about how many people experienced (listened,read,saw) their work this year, which is already happening, only people worry endlessly about how they will get paid today, and tomorrow they might just worry about how they will get seen.

Happy to see they put some of the extra money to adding Mac support. I wish I saw that news before the window closed, since I ignored the project on first hearing about it because they were going windows-only.

Now I see that the Wasteland 2 project also says it is Windows only, but "Maybe" they will add mac compatibility if they get 1.5mil.

This suggests that Kickstarter needs a new feature: Pledges that are conditional not just on the project succeeding, but pledges that are conditional on the project exceeding successive tiers of ambition.

I'm all for positive messages about encouraging people to move to NYC, but "our public transit system is better than yours" is pretty flippant. On a recent visit with a japanese friend, it took only 2 rides on the new york subway during normal daytime NON-rush hour before she said "I hate this subway, I would never want to ride on it".

As for the smartest and most beautiful people, maybe, but also some of the most reptilian. Had a recent NYC window-seat dining experience spoiled by some guy on the street walking up and staring with a look that would make most women wish they had a taser.

As others have mentioned, no, the costs in Japan are far lower than this. You could get a place twice as big for the same money, at a very central location, in a brand new building.

Hell, you could get a bigger place for much LESS. My friend just rented a brand new place in Shibuya for 95000 a month, with beautiful interior, entryway, super-modern shower/bath, gas range, ample space for a proper washing machine, and the main living space is separated from everything else by a heavy door. The whole building is built from such heavy concrete that there is no worry about bothering/being bothered by the neighbors.

This is utterly standard. I hope some day soon the US figures out how to build similarly awesome but affordable buildings.

What? The unbalanced armistice was a big cause of world war 2. If anything it serves as a lesson that accepting the conditional cessation of hostilities would be, in the long run, a decent exit option.

While it would be lovely if we could find a way to get rid of harassing trolls on the internet, suppose someone on Facebook posts a comment disparaging [the founder of a certain faith known to try to assassinate people for disparaging said founder], then members of that faith might make formal complaints to the service demanding his account be deleted. So yeah, probably best to just try to make options to permanently block specific users/ip addresses from EVER posting to your feed.

This is why I feel so out of place in the vast majority of american suburbs today. Standing in any public space, if you look at roads and parking lots as dead space, it seems as if half the total space surrounding you is just nothing. It isn't beautiful, it isn't usable, it is just empty space that soaks up the landscape, carving it up all to make it cheap for someone to drive, but making it impossible for someone to walk.

As for the deep revulsion of being surrounded by tons of people, you're right, you have that right to feel that way. Personally, a crowd of 50,000 people is still easy to walk through, but even 1,000 people trying to leave a big sports event in their cars at the same time is a total nightmare taking an hour+ and during that whole time you are completely stuck in your car. I left a soccer game in Tokyo that was at a completely absolutely full stadium, and when it ended the huge mass of people slowly and orderly filed to the nearby train stations and we were on a train (packed) heading home within 20 minutes, at full speed.

It would be lovely if we could choose which lifestyle suits us, but most of the cities in the US do not provide ANY option for someone who wants proper high-density, so to exercise my "freedom" to live in a pedestrian friendly high-density city involved leaving the US entirely.

Old age is a funny thing. A lot of people seem to think that the incredible loss of strength and stamina they experience is totally inevitable and just shrug and think "well at least I have my car to get around".

That car is a big part of WHY you feel so lethargic and dread walking further than between the car and the edge of a parking lot.

Contrast with the most pedestrian friendly area I've ever seen: central Tokyo, with density so high that within a short walk of most homes there are all the services you need. I routinely see bent over grandmas that in the US would be considered incapable of traveling outside the home, calmly and slowly walking with a grocery / walker contraption holding some groceries.

What lead us to this point in history where people whine and go on tantrums about the injustice of being given powerful free tools produced at great expense?

I think the root cause is the anti-piracy war, going on ever since the dawn of the computer age. The endgame may be an angry backlash of anti-copyright extremism gaining mainstream support. We may see a day soon when the voters demand an end to all copyright. Who knows what the end result of that would be.

At a glance this seemed like an obvious move, but the deeper you look everything stops making sense.

The emails between company officers suggest that they themselves used their own service to upload copyrighted content and share it with others, knowingly breaking the law. Case closed!

But what gives US law enforcement the right to obtain those private emails between officers of a foreign company? Reasonable suspicion of infringement? What suspicion? Suspicion of failure to comply with DMCA takedown notices?

What is the basis for that suspicion? Their failure to delete ALL links to any file for which a single link is reported. But as many others have pointed out, each of those links represents a specific user who has uploaded the same file. Without a public searchable index, each of those keys is effectively a distinct privately uploaded file.

So we come down to whether a copyright holder has the authority to say "anyone anywhere who has uploaded a copy of this file, does not have the right to share it".

What next? If a service like Dropbox borrows a hint from git and stores not just single file hashes, but distinct unique data chunks, and a takedown request calls for the deletion of say, a feature film, will they claim Dropbox knowingly infringed for failing to remove a 10 second chunk of that film that some student put in their dissertation?

You cannot expect your body to adjust instantly to a barefoot gait after spending your entire life wearing heavy shoes that drastically alter your natural gait.

When I first tried running in VFF shoes I limited myself to 15 minute sessions, and even then my calves were so destroyed walking was stiff for 2-3 days. I slowly eased that limit up a few minutes at a time over the past year, and while I have a ways to go, I can run about 30-40 minutes now and my legs and feet look completely different.

It really helps to see the big picture to think, as you point out, about both mobile phone service AND broadband service. These are highly regulated services in the US that have terrible performance compared to the rest of the developed world, even only examining major cities.

Tokyo is one of the world's highest density places, with an average city block completely composed of an endless sea of highrise buildings that are made of very thick reinforced concrete. Radio waves cannot possibly travel very far in this place. Yet two of the main three carriers provide rock solid service. The third suffers from poor spectrum allocation (no spectrum in a range that penetrates thick material well). Recent regulatory changes have forced NTT (one of the two that has rock solid network everywhere) to resell access to its network to MVNOs at rates that are disclosed to the public, making an opening for tiny alternative carriers that are trying new service and pricing models.

Probably very difficult to dig up even a few feet of ground to lay new fiber, too, yet 100megabit ADSL and 100megabit fiber are available just about everywhere, in head to head competition. To improve competition the fiber pipe and network service provider are split (you pay NTT for the fiber, and one of about 10 different ISPs to push data down the pipe). AU is even pushing GIGABIT to select customers. Average 100megabit consumer pricing about $50 a month. Not to mention there is stiff competition for all this from wireless broadband from more providers than I can count (WiMax 40+ megabit, EMobile, Softbank, ...)

Japan's mobile phone pricing remains shockingly high, but the level of quality and competition in broadband service shows that the US could do much much better.

Actually if both sticks are actually linked, the person taking over will find his stick already full-left, and have to actually pull it over to the right as part of "taking over". Such simplicity and it would result in none of this insanity.

The linked article said that Boeing indeed to behave this way, and frankly I am not boarding ANY Airbus flights in the future.

Fascinating and crushingly disheartening. It is obvious that a coupled force feedback mechanism is the simplest human interface solution to showing what is happening between both sticks, and pilots prefer it. I would really LOVE to hear the thinking behind the fool that chose to produce an interface that allows for me to press "up" and you to press "down" and we each get fed the bogus result "up" or "down" while actually it has decided to process it as "asdfasdf".

And a piece in the Atlantic[1] says that actually, Obama's threat to Veto this bill is only, "... not because he is alarmed by its civil-liberties implications, but because the extraordinary powers it would hand him are in some cases less sweeping and more constraining than what he has asserted for himself via frustratingly secret Office of Legal Counsel memos. (For example, it would force him to keep some War on Terror detainees in military custody.)"

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/congress...

The main issue he was describing: news feed overflow; is solved by the list. I'm not so sure what the visibility is of people replying to things you said that were marked visible only to the list. Probably just the list as well, no?

Just an idea, but wouldn't simply making a Facebook List of real people fix this? I never actually visit facebook directly, I just have a link directly to a list of people I actually want to communicate with. Better still, recently if you are viewing a list, status updates default to being sent visible ONLY to the members of the list.

Thank you! After installing Stylish they had a style already prepared to fix reader:

http://userstyles.org/styles/55550/google-reader-g-edition-m...

Each time I see stories about this device I end up wanting to have access to one at my local climbing gym REALLY BADLY. I hope they manage to bring the price down enough that I might actually be able to pitch it to the gym.

From a developer standpoint, the Major version releases are far more important. All I have to choose is "am I going to support 3.1.x devices, or am I going to limit myself to 4.x devices". Even better, now that iOS5 has arrived with (very pleasantly smooth) support for the 3GS, the choice is "do I support 3.x or 5.x" since the last years of devices ALL support the APIs in the most recent OS. That is huge.

Just yesterday I realized that a long-standing bug is fixed by iOS5, and that since nearly all of our customers will be running 3GS or newer hardware, I can depend on that fix with confidence when we release our next version soon.

Then buy up the oldest Core 2 Duo mini you can find. Probably $200-$300. You can download Xcode for free. Used iPod touch 3rd gen maybe $100-$150 if you don't have an iPhone.

Back when OS 10.1 came out I took a look at Cocoa documentation and some sample code, read up on Interface Builder, and felt intensely that this was the clean, user AND developer-friendly well-packaged Unix platform I had been dreaming of. I had to learn it, despite having a pure Unix background (Vim was my editor for many years at this point). I paid more than $3000 for a mac desktop. That was more money than I had spent on anything in my life. It also opened the doors to my next job, and my job after that. Invest in your future.

I've spoken with several couples in Tokyo that were told by the US Embassy here that they should get married before trying to move to the US, since marrying afterwards would be a nightmare.

I'm not sure what you are saying. I think you are saying that altruism requires self-sacrifice, and that self-sacrifice is not self-serving. But this is silly.

Altruism doesn't have anything to do with self-sacrifice. It is about doing an act that benefits others. Saying, as the person I was responding to said, that someone is not altruistic if they do something "just because" that was their passion, and not because it would help others, is myopic.

Then there's the evolutionary biological sense of altruism, or the philosophical variant of "Pure Altruism", requiring that you suffer for a gift to be truly selfless. People who get really bogged down in this kind of nit-picking would do well to go outside and breath deeply. (points at self)

Please, altruism as defined your way does not exist. Altruism is at its core self-serving: We desire to feel better about ourselves, to feel we are good human beings. People admire different things, so their vision of how best to behave leads to different forms of self-satisfaction.

Rather than focus on whether Steve did great things because of his passion for excellence, or because he wanted to have legions of fans, or for whatever other supposedly saintlike or selfish reason, focus on what he accomplished: bringing computing to the masses. That is an amazing thing.

Oddly, with the conceit of an offline GPS app (map data in the phone) every item you listed would work without a mobile data connection.

The killer network-enabled app is still on the drawing-board. (I don't feel like being able to instagram a photo and have your friends "like" a black-n-white photo of your dinner WHILE YOU ARE STILL EATING IT! is it).

Very curious what the final output resolution will be. Sure it is fun to be able to not have to deal with focusing until you are back home "developing" the images, but if the final output is 3mp, after you develop you are still left with an image too low-resolution for anything but screen display. In the words of Brian Peterson (Understanding Exposure) for any particular scene there may be many "correct" exposures, but only one creatively interesting exposure. Likewise, in their image gallery there is generally a single focus point that makes the most creatively interesting image, so after you've chosen that point at home, you are still looking at a very low-res image.

Of course, for shooting in the wild, some of their shots would just never ever get taken correctly by an autofocus system and would disappear before even a pro managed to manually focus. And many of us never print a single photo today, so being stuck with a beautiful 3mp image may be enough. They have a stunning image in the gallery of a woman standing outside of a shop, taken through the shop glass. https://www.lytro.com/living-pictures/152 Imagine if she was walking by, not just posing. You would never have time to capture it if you were using a traditional camera.