pstack

I've actually traveled a great deal (in my youth, including two years in Zambia and Kenya) and while it's not something I enjoy overall (for all the usual travel hassles, plus I'd rather spend my time earning money rather than spending it), I understand that your friend does. I don't know that there is anything particularly "perspective broadening" about it in a world that has grown so close together through technology and communication, but I'm sure she'll have plenty of memories and experiences from it. Memories and experiences don't necessarily have inherent value. They have personal value.

I enjoy working. I enjoy that every week, I get to do technically creative and very detailed and complex things with people who are all over the planet. China, Japan, India, Australia, all over the UK, France, the Vatican, Israel, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Singapore and many others. Granted, taking time away from work makes you look bad, so not doing that is a point in my favor -- but I truly enjoy my work. I also enjoy that it allows me to own a home, have plans to buy my childhood home so it can stay in the family some day, put my siblings through college, help with financial support and technical guidance of my friends' businesses and projects, contribute to worthy causes, and someday potentially retire.

Then again, if I have to die "young", I want to be one of those Karōshi deaths where they go out slumped over a pile of spreadsheets and whitepapers on their desk. So . . . take my preferences with a grain of salt, if you like.

Netflix is for archived content, while Hulu Plus is for current-season content. I'm happy with the Netflix model and it's all I use. The problem with Hulu Plus is that there is some non-Plus content that you can't view as a Plus member (because of licensing). Also, they don't have _every_ show. Also, they don't have _every_ network (no CBS, for example - or Sci-Fi either, if I recall). Missing plenty of others. Also, they only have the current season of shows - and sometimes not even the whole season. And you still have advertising. A LOT of advertising. I had a free week of Hulu Plus and the first 40 minute show I watched contained seven full commercials. For a service that I would presumably be paying money for (more money than Netflix costs). I canceled Hulu Plus after that first hour and never used it again.

Even at double the price, Netflix would be a ridiculously good deal. My only complaint with them is that they churn through their selection so damn fast. How about they just KEEP South Park and everything else? There's nothing worse than logging in on a lazy Sunday afternoon to find that 20% of your queued content has just vanished, because they only had licenses to stream the content until 5/20/2011.

After seven years with my company, I was finally earning the highest amount of vacation hours per pay check, up to 15 days per year. In my fifteen year career, as an adult, I've never taken a vacation and I don't really have any interest in doing so. I currently have about 300 hours of vacation banked. I'm at the limit, so unless I use some of that time, I won't earn any more. That's okay, because . . . I don't have any use for a vacation. I don't use sick days, either (I know a lot of people use their three or five allotted sick days from their company as personal time).

I guess if I was digging ditches for a living, I'd want all the paid vacations I could possibly have. However, I work with computers and technology for a living and I love computers and technology. So . . you know . . . why would I want to take time off from doing something I enjoy?

Not to mention, after I die, nobody is going to remember me fondly for the vacations I took, so I could sit in the sun and cook my skin next to a chlorinated pool in another country. They're going to remember me for any work ethic, personality, and accomplishments I had.

I can't even imagine how someone accused (especially falsely accused) could even begin to respond to such a thing with any fairness. If I accuse you of the most hideous crimes against little kids, you have a right to defend yourself. You just won't be taken seriously in doing so, because I'll have already played the nuclear card on you in the act of forming the initial accusation, itself. Nobody deserves to be harassed and nobody deserves to be slandered and unfortunately both happen so often that people will simply be sided with in the court of public (and eternal internet) opinion based solely on the prior experiences and views going-in of the "reader".

And, other than that, I'm staying the hell out of this entire conversation. No good can come of this, even though it would be nice to think that constructive conversations about such topics can be had. I'll move on to something a little less volatile and a little more rational, like peace in the middle east.

I have two cats and it would NEVER have occurred to me to search for an app that my cats can play with. I am not a crazy cat woman and don't buy $1,000 cat toys. I mean, good on them for the success -- but I think anyone who actually stops and thinks "I wonder if there's a toy my cats can play with on my expensive electronic device" must be mental.

I would slightly disagree. I'm a new contributor, here, but I simply look at the comments on my profile and see the scores which helps me determine when I have, perhaps, strayed. It helps me refine what I contribute and how, based on the community response. Of course, I then have to interpret what scores are the result of my contributing something of value versus people simply agreeing with the sentiment of my comment, but that isn't too hard. I don't know that enough people would see public scores and derive what is good or bad before contributing to be a reason for tagging every post with them.

I think the way the system is, now, isn't ideal but it is decent. It eliminates the temptation of a lot of people to post with the intention of getting lots of points so everyone sees how awesome they or their comment are, but still provides the input on those comments for the individual to see. So it helps shape your quality, without making the "ranking" a public competition.

As for curating the live contents of an actual discussion . . . I don't think exact point numbers is necessary for that. If I only want to read the best top half of the comments in a discussion, I don't need to know that a set of comments got 12, 32, 48, and 119 points. I just need them to be displayed in such a way that I can discern the top-most content. Physically weight the comments (in color, boldness, placement, or other possible options) so that the top 20% of comments appear in one way, the next 40% appear another, and the bottom 20-40% appear in yet another way. Easy to visually discern and pick through, but the top comments are then tied to the top comments in relation to that exact discussion and not a hardset number of "anything over 50 points is really great - period". (For all I know, this may be how HN does it - I tend to read most comments already, so I'm not sure).

They couldn't have published a more obvious story. Anyone with any sense doesn't log into either service and you don't need to be logged into either service for them to track you. It's amazing what freely available information (your IP, the sites you visit, etc) can do to help turn you from an aggregate anonymous identity into a fairly well "guessed" identity. And since webmasters carelessly litter their sites with this third party crap, they can build up a significant database of the places you've visisted and your habits, without knowing much else about you.

The first thing I did when Facebook rolled out all of that garbage was redirect everything facebook related to localhost and then created adblock/element rules to filter out all twitter and facebook buttons, tags, etc. I even filter out the whole "facebook discussions" crap that are attached to seemingly 80% of pages, these days.

Then again, I guess the public lags behind such things. I'm sure there are people out there just today learning what a cookie is, so . . . ~shrug~

I can't wait to see this all come to a head. Netflix's CEO isn't shy about calling the industry out on their bullshit, while the industry continues to lie about available bandwidth -- insisting that it is very limited, near maximum capacity, and very expensive (none of which is intrinsically true and only artificially so by their own machinations).

Netflix could end up doing a lot of good for the consumer beyond just providing entertainment at an affordable price, at the rate they're going.

I couldn't agree more. I can't keep up with all of the advertising local shops and eateries and services leave on my door (which inevitably end up blown all over my yard and in the bushes and the window wells) and it makes huge mess - especially if it rains before I get to them. The last thing I need on top of that is the damn phone book (and, of course, you usually have multiple phone books). The first thing I do when I get those on my door step is close the door behind me and walk them to the trash. I have not used a phone book in a decade, but have thrown away a minimum of thirty.

I'm reluctant to accept any violation of copyright as anything more than a civil issue.

I have a founders account from early contributions that I have never used. I logged in, setup the account, asked a few people if they wanted invites (nobody did) and haven't touched it, since. I don't care for other social networking sites (though I use LinkedIn), but supported Diaspora for principal.

I'm not expecting much, anymore. I hope otherwise, though.

I do have a schedule work-wise to keep, but it's not enough that it informs the rest of my life-style, I think. I work three days a week (nights, actually) for about twelve to fourteen hours. I telecommute, so it's not a huge deal and I could technically do my job at any time, but various persons have come to rely upon my availability during those odd hours to sort of bridge an informational gap across geographies if something comes up.

Part of the reason I spend more time in my own basement than any other room of the house is that it's dark down here (I've covered up the windows with blackout fabric) and it's very quiet. I don't hear the neighbor cleaning his RV or someone mowing their yard or loud cars going past.

I know it's unhealthy, but I don't really know of another solution (and from what I understand, it isn't enough to have a schedule - but you need to have a schedule where you're awake during the day and getting sunlight).

Doesn't seem much different than that Rip Off Report guy. Except, unlike him, they don't seem to be trying to extort money out of people to change the comments about them.

It apparently won't ever happen. I'm surprised the author of the article took it so seriously. I've gotten spam like this for years and it just goes directly into /dev/null when I see something like "so and so sent you a..." or "so and so left a comment about you at...". If I saw that Honestly spam, it would have only held my attention long enough to delete it.

That we're still putting so much attention into an email like that all these years later suggests that we're never really going to learn or become fatigued. We'll just accept it as "part of life".

I believe they've had other minor outages, but overall, the lifetime of the service seems to have somewhere around 98.4% uptime. That's counting since November of 2006, when I believe the PSN launched alongside the PS3.

Being a free service isn't exactly a reasonable justification for "you get what you get", though. You can pay for PSN+, but either way, it's still using the same network service and it's the only option. It's not like there's a pay-for option that you can say "well, if you care about uptime, you should have subscribed to the pay-for PSN service". Additionally, it's the service that is essentially part of and supplemental to the entire PS3 purchase. It's great that it's free, in that you're not losing anything with the downtime, but it's not even remotely the same thing as providing some sort of a free/beta community service website that goes down and being able to say "hey, it's a free website, what do you want from us?".

That said, I've been eager for PSN to get back so I can register my PS3 copy of Portal 2 to use on the PC and so that I could play Killzone. It's amusing that the only two titles I will probably buy on that platform in the entire year came out near the same time and were hindered by the outage.

That may explain why renting is the norm in a lot of other countries and owning a home isn't considered a big deal (while, in America, it's almost an obligation before you can feel like you've made it). Shifting terms is unsettling. I don't know the history of loans in the states, but I wonder how much of the 30yr fixed was established in response to everyone returning from service after WWII and starting families and buying property?

A compelling answer to why we can't let ourselves waver from a scientific and exploration driven society, why real heroes are not Bret Favre, but guys you'll never hear of, and why every attack by certain groups on science should be taken seriously.

My money is always behind the species that makes its own "miracles".

I'd settle for even being able to sleep at regular intervals. I have a habit of staying up until I'm tired and waking up when I can't sleep anymore. As a result, I may stay up all day for several days and then stay up all night for several days. Or for several days, I may sleep twice during 24hrs, in completely random periods. I just don't do well with the concept of "well, it's 10pm, so that means it's time to get into bed".

I don't think you understand my point.

Housing should cost whatever supply and demand value it at. That means that when everything goes belly up because of stupid lending and stupid borrowing, those people should have to sell their homes at a loss and people should be able to come in and buy those now cheap (because of a new ratio of supply and demand) homes on the cheap.

In other words, I want the natural value (free market) of things -- not some artificially inflated value, because government and committees felt obligated to bow to home-owners in saving their asses and maintaining the value of their assets. If I buy a car and then my financial situation changes, I may need to get rid of that car on the quick and someone can get a good deal out of it. Why should the government come in and rescue me by ensuring that I get a solid high value for my car, at the expense of another person who could have benefited from circumstances that otherwise would have made the car affordable to them?

I know we don't tend to have a truly free market much of anywhere, but it seems particularly shitty to artificially maintain a high value in housing at the expense of a huge chunk of society that can't afford ridiculous (artificially so) housing prices.

Unless I moved out of my home, I'd actually be more likely to just rent out rooms. I think there's far less risk and legal complication if you're essentially renting out a room to a "roommate" versus giving over your entire home to another person or family.

True. That's a big risk and that's one major reason to hold off on buying a home. However, at some point, you have to either decide that you're going to live somewhere or you have to decide you're going to spend your entire life as a nomad. I've been with the same company my entire adult life and my feeling of uncertainty made me delay buying a home by almost fifteen years. I eventually decided I can't just keep living my life (relationships, purchases, etc) based on a fear that I may or may not be in one spot long term.

In the US, you have fixed-rate mortgages and adjustable-rate (ARMs). Fixed rates are usually 15 and 30 years. The longer the term, the lower your monthly commitment, of course. I believe a 30yr fixed rate is probably the most common type of mortgage. I don't know the details of the ARMs, but a lot of people were suckered into those which is why a lot of people are having huge problems, these last few years. If you get as much or more house than you can afford so that you're just getting by every month and a few years down the road, your rates jump, you're screwed.

My fixed mortgage is fixed for the life of the loan (until 2040), so over time, the percentage of my income dedicated to paying my mortgage will continue dropping.

When I rented last, my lease switched to month-to-month if you didn't sign up for a new term, too. It went from (at the last number) $1,200/mo under lease to something like $1,900/mo without a lease.

In my experience, leases are exactly the opposite. You sign a lease for up to a year and are locked in at a certain price over that year and they do whatever the hell they want to when it comes time to renew your lease for the following year. Your option would be to switch from annual lease to monthly, but you're often looking at paying double the monthly rent, then.

My thoughts, also. It used to be that you could reasonably argue the money you'd spend "investing" in a home would be better spent in the market, but that would not seem to be the case, these days. Not to mention, there is now a distinct value to having a roof over your head that is your own that is, perhaps, more emphasized than five years ago.

Close. I think you counted an extra year in there. It increased 5% at the end of the first year, 7% the second, then 10% the third and fourth. I moved out at the end of my lease after the fifth year, so I don't know what the fifth increase going into the sixth year would have been. It started at $900 and five years later, it was $1,215. That's a 35% increase.

I lived in a more expensive apartment than is typical, but there is no housing anywhere near where I am (only apartments). I don't know if proportional increases are typical all over Denver, though. By the end of the fifth year, I was tired of seeing my rent increase at triple the rate of my raises.

I don't see small pox as being unique. If we get rid of it, we need to get rid of everything else. I think we still keep ebola, for example. Frankly, there is simply no way of knowing the future (though I agree, there's no way of ensuring security of samples into the future, either). We worry about destruction of rainforests, because we have no idea what cures and solutions we might find in the undiscovered life within that could be lost forever. Likewise, we simply don't know what today's "horror of horrors" could find beneficial use, some day.

In the event that we are invaded by aliens, I would count the success of unleashing small pox on them as being much greater than Jeff Goldblum infecting them with a virus from his macbook. :P

When it comes down to it, though, I don't think there's a right answer. We just have to make an educated judgement call. Maybe the kind of judgement call where we respond to things like "but if we torture people, we can find terrorists!" with "but that's not the kind of people we are". Maybe we really do need to be the kind of people who say we're not willing to risk exposing innocent people to this for some future that we are only guessing about. Or maybe it's enough to simply map the genome and keep the data on it archived, while dumping the actual real deal.

I think the Economist might be one of the exceptions, where they are prone to less hit and run activity and have a more participatory readership of regulars. Compare that with any news or magazine site that you might click on right this very moment that is linked via Drudgereport, which I think is far more common.

A very valid point. As others have stated, buying a home should be more about quality of life and living than making a buck and that has to be on your time schedule; not someone else's. The worst thing you can ever do is buy a home when you're not ready for a home -- and you know better than anyone else if you're ready.

When you start waking up in the morning and thinking "god damn, I wish I had a home, so I could . . ." then it might be time to start giving it consideration. For me, I had dealt with a home invasion. I'd lived in my apartment for five years and someone walked in while I was asleep and stole everything (the layout of the apartment was such that I wasn't disturbed by the intruder - if you were in the back bedroom, you couldn't even hear someone banging on the front door). I lived alone. Nobody else had keys . . . except the leasing and maintenance offices. Took $30k worth of stuff.

So, I started waking up in the mornings feeling a bit unsafe, wishing I had a sweet surveillance/alarm system, and also thinking about how great it would be to have room for my entertainment system (and get to blast it as loud as I wanted). Also, I kind of still want to get a dog and that wouldn't have worked in the apartment. Enough things started to bug me that I just sat up one day and said "let's go look at houses".

Until you are home shopping for those reasons (or similar reasons of your own), then you may be doing it for all the wrong reasons. Maybe because friends are all buying homes. Maybe because you feel like you're still a "kid" as long as you keep renting. Who knows?

In the mean time, definitely don't buy into the idea that you have to go for it because people around you are talking about it and you feel like you're missing out. You might be the sanest of them all. I didn't buy a home until I was starting into my 30s. I could have done it a decade before and went so far as to check out homes and even get approved for loans. It just never felt quite right, until last year. And I have been happy that I finally did so, when I did.

Well-being accounts for a lot, too. Whatever you may be losing "on paper" with renting, you may be compensated for in peace of mind, right now. You can focus on work and savings and family rather than finding a trustworthy and affordable lawn service, worrying if your boiler is going to make it another year, wondering why in the hell that sink is draining slowly, when it isn't clogged up, wondering how much it would cost to turn that spare room into a sex dungeon. . .