pachydermic

I think a lot of people our age are just happy to have a job in the first place. Young people are flocking to big cities (especially the Bay area, NYNY and DC) just to get anything. I feel really lucky to have the nice "real" job I have now, and given a lot of what's going on right now I don't think it's realistic or responsible to expect that even your job will be balls to the wall awesome. I mean... presumably they're paying you for a reason, right?

Of course, I agree with the sentiment as you do. Just pointing out that there are difficulties in trying to make this happen in addition to the three problems you mentioned.

Right... in theory, a smartwatch type device sounds great.

Battery life, screen brightness/visibility (can I read the screen on a clear summer day at noon?), size, and ease of use are all really important. Price matters for business purposes, but I wonder what could be done if that were not considered as a factor.

But since they'll have to compromise on those parameters (or just physically can't push them too far) it makes you wonder if this thing will actually be worth it. It's definitely cool, but is it really that much better than just having a smart phone? Is it $600-$1,000 better? I have a hard time imagining it would be... hopefully I'm wrong!

And her actual speech here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/transc...

I don't really have any training in this area (I didn't study anthropology, history, biology or nutrition in school), but while the implementation of paleo might be flawed the principle makes sense to me - eat what we evolved to eat, exercise like we evolved to exercise. At least that's how I see it. I'm not all to familiar with what it's actually like.

I think that we could probably all go for eating less meat and a lot more fruits and vegetables. The flesh of other animals tastes so good though!

Whenever I've been in shape I haven't stuck to any diet or strict regiment. It's pretty easy to loose weight (in principle, not in practice) if you do some moderate exercise (like take a run a few times a week, take the stairs, etc) and avoid restaurants and processed foods. I think when you start cooking for yourself, you'll end up eating a lot more raw "real" food and will find it hard to cook the really unhealthy stuff you might feel totally fine about ordering. It just kind of works itself out.

Right. The insurance problem is the reason why I am hesitant to use these kinds of services (airbnb, peer-to-peer car rental, car-pooling apps). When something goes wrong, what happens? It just freaks me out - not that companies conforming to existing norms and regulations won't try to screw you over either.

I don't know if it's fair to say he's copying - there's always the chance that they came up with it on their own. Are you really saying that you're the first person to come up with this idea?

Anyways, I think your site is much better... thanks for sharing. This is cool.

Yeah I'd say being smart doesn't necessarily help you play good chess - being dumb hurts, though.

I wonder when the last time Gates even played chess? And even though he had way more time than Magnus did, 2 minutes is not a lot of time... Most blitz games are 3 or 5 minutes and if you're not an avid player (or at least used to it) then it's really hard to play fast like that. Magnus probably didn't have to think at all since he already knew the opening, whereas Gates was probably on his own from the third move on.

Kudos to Gates for being a good sport.

Obviously the DEA doesn't support legalization.

But I think that the DOJ has established that they're going to legitimately and honestly let the experiments in Colorado and Washington play out by themselves. Despite what they've done in the past and what they've done in other areas, I think they deserve credit for that at least.

At the end of the day, the people who work at these places are real human beings just like you and me. I think your caricature of these organizations is silly and slightly (and only slightly) offensive or off-putting.

What we're seeing now is that public opinion has changed and official policies are quickly changing to match - for as many problems as US democracy has faced lately, I think this is a pretty good example of it working. Simply put, I don't think it's fair to say that people in DC are trying to keep pot illegal or keep people down more than anyone else in this country.

Dude. rms founded the freaking FSF. If he doesn't support free software, then what the hell is he doing? I think what he wrote here makes total sense, even if I use tons of nonfree software myself. I value convenience and performance more than rms does - to him, freedom is much more important.

I think his argument is just that the whole point of GNU and the FSF is to make free software - if they compromised on that, then what would they stand for? And I think that argument makes perfect sense.

Dude what are you talking about? Honestly, are you trolling?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/in-major-shi...

Turns out that old white dudes - which I think would most clearly fit your label of "squares" (please) - are actually not the ones who strongly oppose legalization. True, this is just DC proper and not Virginia/Maryland, but given that Maryland has had votes to decriminalize it and such I don't think it's absurd to apply some general lessons from this to other parts of the area. Really, the only people who reliably oppose legalization seem to be older black women and republicans - which is kinda funny if you ask me.

My brain really wants this to happen, but my wallet doesn't. That would be really effective! If they really could get the costs right maybe it could happen - of course, the math just might not work out.

Man, some people really don't like Path. I saw people making similar comments when they raised some cash a while back. A high school friend of mine works there, so I'm curious... why all the hate? Seems like an okay idea to want to have all of your social media type stuff in one place, right? I don't use it, though. And I don't see what their business plan could be. Seems weird to actively hate it, though.

I think the argument (and I don't really believe it, so excuse me if I don't present it convincingly) is that certain materials are just harmful to children (and possibly adults). You have a daughter, but I think that with boys/young men you can point to porn and say that it's addictive and has a lot of negative side effects. In that case, it's not about protecting them from knowing about sex, but instead trying to keep things the way they were before internet porn existed (and the porn on the internet certainly seems different than a playboy or something). I think that's a natural tendency in a lot of areas and it may or may not have any substance to it.

As far as your little girl goes, would you really be okay her stumbling onto a site like liveleak and watched dudes' heads be cut off or whatever messed up thing is on there right now? I'm not even sure of how to answer that question, but I don't think it's absurd to think "no".

So I can at least understand why people would want to block this kind of content from kids. Did they go about it in the right way? Doesn't it seem like it would be easy to abuse? It's an understatement to say that governments haven't exactly earned our trust when it comes to technological issues.

Thank you, fsf.

Hard to ignore the irony when Google, Facebook and even freakin' Linked In (ugh) are calling to increase protections for peoples' privacy. I don't know what the answer to all of this is - I like free products as much as the next guy - but it seems like a messed up situation. If the NSA were stopped from collecting our data, that would only prevent one party from doing so. Even if you don't use Facebook or gmail these companies still track you so it's pretty hard to actually keep your privacy unless you hardly use the internet (and from public computers) and don't have a cellphone. I don't think it should be that hard.

I'm not going to doubt that... I'm just saying there must be some underlying economic reason why that's true. Seems that things are in an equilibrium, but maybe not the optimal one (blasphemy, I know).

Also, because the US has an increasingly unequal income distribution, that makes a college degree relatively more valuable. In addition to the social-status factor it certainly still seems to pay off despite the increased tuition (http://priceonomics.com/is-college-worth-it/).

My point is simply that maybe college costs so much more now because it's just worth it. It used to be that you could still do alright without a college degree, but a ton of manufacturing jobs have moved overseas and there's a ton of downward pressure on peoples' wages who don't have engineering and computer jobs.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that this is the reason why college is so expensive these days, but I think that it's a point which isn't brought up enough.

I think there's a tendency to say: "oh well not everyone can have these high-paying jobs", "college isn't right for everyone", etc. which Rowe also says. Maybe that's true, but we certainly seem to have a shortage of qualified people in this country. Seems to me to be a failure of the educational system and while it makes sense not to saddle yourself with tons of debt for a degree if that degree won't help you pay off the debt, I don't think encouraging people not to get a higher education is a good idea either. Now I'm just rambling - I just wanted to point out that that attitude is a sign that something is wrong.

perlmonks is definitely the thing which most impressed me about perl. Very helpful, kind, patient and incredibly knowledgeable people there. I don't really have anything useful to say, I just want to thank anyone that's been a part of that community - they've certainly helped me out immensely.

How many of those sources have a "Buy for $x" button under them? And I don't necessarily want to send the context of searches for content on my own computer over the wire to Canonical's servers (especially these days).

I'm not saying the lens search is an awful thing for everyone. What I'm saying is that they should have the button set to "off" by default, let people know what is available to them, tell them about how it works, and then ask if they want it or not. That's it. That's all it would take.

But even if they do that... isn't it still like the Java installer asking you to install an Ask.com plugin or something? I mean... that's kinda the lowest of the low for free (as in beer) software. Searching Wikipedia and for .git repos online is one thing. Ads are different.

I have been pretty pissed at Canonical lately for a number of missteps they have made but a few of them do seem like legitimate mistakes. Mark is not really a PR guy and you can tell - a lot of what he has done has just kind of fanned the flames. I don't think I need to remind you, but even in a sarcastic tone, "open source tea party" and "we have root" are inflammatory things to say. I think he addresses some of these problems pretty well in this post, and I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt here. Think about all that he has accomplished and the amount that Ubuntu has helped the Linux community grow.

So kudos to him for having the balls to apologize. I accept that apology, and I think that a lot of people (including myself) have had some venomous things to say about him as well as Canonical which probably weren't fair. So we could probably all back off here and focus on the real issues.

...but...

He's still not talking about the two elephants in the room.

The Unity lens is fundamentally fucked up. It should be opt-in. Period. It's clearly an infringement on users' privacy and totally not in the spirit of libre software or Linux. I can't really trust Canonical - even though they've given us all so much - because of this issue. So long as they don't back down from this I'm going to look at everything they do with a critical and possibly cynical eye... it just clearly looks like they're selling out their users. It is really just sad to see them selling out to Amazon like this, and I wish it didn't have to be this way. I can't really fathom the amount of money Mark has spent on Ubuntu. I don't really know how he can make it work as a business. But the Amazon search in the lens just seems like a morally wrong and short-sighted way to go.

The second issue which we all need to address is Mir. The technical arguments are completely over my head, but I feel like Canonical hasn't fully made the case for why they've decided to fragment the community and do their own thing. This could just be me not understanding what's going on, but pretty much everyone who's developing this stuff seems to be on Wayland's side... why is that (and is that)? It's worth considering, but I feel like Canonical should be engaging the community, although with all the flaming that goes on I can see why they don't. We all want the best free software we can get, but some serious thought needs to be devoted to the ramifications and rationale for having two display servers.

So that's the end of this long rant - let me know what you think.

Not sure if it's fair to call it "flagship". I have one now and it seems blazingly fast and it's nice to have stock android... but the device isn't without compromise. The battery life is 'meh' and the camera is pretty crappy (the speakers are also weak, but not what I'd consider to be a core feature of a 'flagship' device). So you can definitely tell they cut corners on those two (very important) aspects of the phone. Overall I still really like it, though.

If people make biased (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_of_an_estimator) guesses you will still have a problem. I think that's often what's meant by "rational": that people, in aggregate, make unbiased guesses.

The truth is not so - people get irrationally exuberant or are afraid to cut their losses, etc. These are problems of statistical bias of their estimations - and the opposite is assumed in many (most?) economic models.

Interesting - although it's worth pointing out that it's about half of private sector GDP, not half of US GDP. Also, I'm not sure I'd call a business with over 100 employees "small", but I guess that's the definition they're going with.

Here's the full PDF of that source: http://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf

Also, while they're a government agency and cite their sources, their job is to advocate for small businesses. Does anyone else have more sources to look at?

"Homo economicus" is still really important for macroeconomics. The reason for this is pretty simple: designing rich, large models is still hard to do and the practical limitations introduced by basing your assumptions on the idea that people act irrationally instead of rationally can make things too complicated to be of practical use.

So in microeconomics or small models, people can practically accept and implement these (pretty obviously true) ideas that people don't behave rationally. But in large scale macroeconomic models it's hard to do. It would certainly be a lot easier if people just acted like computers...

You get to turn pieces of paper which say "I own x% of TWTR" into pieces of paper which say "I own $y". A lot of people are happy to make that trade, especially if they don't think their ownership of the company is worth the amount of money that people are willing to pay for it.

As for the people who actually just work at Twitter, or who run Twitter? Well, you certainly get a lot more money to work with so long as your stock price doesn't collapse. You no longer have to go lobby certain individuals for money as much as you used to. Sure, you have to focus on making profits now, but that was always kind of the point, right? That doesn't mean you have to be short-sighted. Just look at a company like Amazon for an example of how a patient company can still command a high stock price and respect even when they're not pumping out huge profits.

Also, the vast majority of small businesses are abject failures. Most economic growth occurs through the activity of massive corporations (from the business side of things).

At least, that's my understanding. Feel free to point out if I'm full of shit, please.

Yeah that just seems crazy to me. Someone's going to make money, though...

EDIT: Wow! Who are the people buying this at $49 a share?!

I think you were kind of hand-wavy, but that's just how it has to be for this kind of article. If you're trying to explain this stuff to a general audience, you can't just jump right into talking about nyquist limits and stuff.

But maybe you could allude to the fact that there's more going on.

Anyways, I liked the article.

I was thinking more of my parents, girlfriend, and her family who have never heard of this website and are definitely not tech savvy. I think that it's hard to separate marketing/branding from software, though. Her family definitely just assumes that anything not Apple is cheap, while she decided to switch to an Android phone not too long ago - once she made that choice, she went with the phone that looked the coolest (HTC One).

It's hard to say who's average, though. At the end of the day, I think it's probably brand name recognition more than anything else which drives purchasing decisions. I'd like to see what the manufacturers know...

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it what I think drove my girlfriend to Android more than anything else is probably how poorly her macbook aged (although with any laptop you can only expect a couple of good years, so she might be being a bit unfair) - especially how awful iTunes is on that thing. Just opening iTunes completely grinds that thing to a halt.

What do you mean by that? I didn't buy a Samsung because of the hardware alone - first I decided that I wanted an Android phone and picked the one which I thought was the best at the time (based largely on hardware). But the OS came first for me... so Samsung won the competition with an iPhone with the software and other Android phones with the hardware.

Actually, I think that's how a lot of people make their decision. These people decide what OS/ecosystem they like, then whittle down their options from there. But a lot of people probably just walk into the store not knowing what they really want. I'm actually not sure which kind of person is more common.

That's awesome. It must have been a giant mushroom, because that's the coolest possible outcome. It's like I'm in Vvardenfell all over again...

Man, I don't know. That's not open source - they don't seem to intend for you to easily be able to see and understand the code. There's less peer review that way.

They're also an ad (analytics?) company. I just don't trust them.