BigZaphod

Twitterrific was retina-ready before the retina MBP even came out.

You never ever ever ever blindly trust the client to behave a certain way.

A patent is not a product.

This is stupid. 1994? Star Trek: TNG "invented" tablets, too - in the late 80s.

I'm no expert, but this doesn't seem to be any significantly better than a k-d tree, does it? I might be missing something. I find academic papers hard to parse.

I don't think there's any reason to believe they can't have their own rules in this regard - especially since senators in particular represent the state itself and the United States is (was?) a federation of the states, therefore the states technically have (had?) the power over the feds and not the other way around. Sending representatives from each state is (or should be) the state's privilege and should not elevate them to king-hood over the very state they are supposed to represent the interests of.

Of course.. it's never been tested because a recall attempt of a US Senator in any state that allows for it has never progressed to the point where it'd have to have been implemented and so it may ultimately be illegal if the supreme courts says it is. However states have a certain right to withdraw from the union as a whole because of disputes like this because the union itself exists at the request of the member states themselves. We at least know that has been tried, but it didn't go very well...

I'm unsure about the House, but there are a handful of states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin) that have state laws allowing for the recall of their US Senators. It's been attempted a few times, but it has never succeeded.

EDIT: I found that list of states here, but I actually don't know now how accurate it might be: http://www.ehow.com/how_2096900_recall-us-senator.html

No, the point is that even if you ban it in order to protect "everyone else", people who insist on being unsafe will find new ways to do so regardless of the law. Banning behaviors is only effective if the ban is actually observed by the people who are most likely to cause the behavior you're trying to ban in the first place.

Edit: And yes, I agree with your last point about a PR campaign. Personally, I'm not convinced we should go about banning every little behavior (especially in cases like this which are effectively unenforceable) but instead spend the resources on education about why a behavior is undesirable, uncool, dangerous, etc.

I love this idea and fully support it, but a possibly unintended side effect would be reporting of this event taking a turn towards: "Holy crap, we all rely a lot on Wikipedia! Who are these people who run this global resource, anyway? Can we trust them? Should this sort of information source be regulated for the sake of the public good? Should it even be possible for these unaccountable people to pull such an important site from the internet without any oversight?! We need more laws!"

Twitterrific has done this for a long time. It was hard to make it perform well, but not impossible.

Does anyone know why that pile was valued at $1.1M in the first place? I occationally stack junk in piles myself, so I'm kind of interested in the prospect of turning that habit into a business model...

I don't know. Perhaps the utter iPod domination was largely a US thing - especially since it went hand-in-hand with Apple coming back from the dead and them not initially having the resources to go global in a big way?

I think Apple has been largely US-centric up until the iPhone, so that could explain why there's a disconnect online when topics like this come up since obviously non-US people will have had a different Apple experience over the last decade or so than those of us here who have been seeing iPods everywhere for years.

"Do they expect Apple to continually innovate in a non-competitive market?"

Probably, yes, and I would argue there is some reason to believe they would do so. Look at what happened in the MP3 player market: Apple utterly dominated that market long ago, and yet they kept messing with the product lines, adding models, changing the feature balances, etc. There was and still is a lot of experimentation going on there and there's essentially no real competitors in that market anymore. "Portable music player" and "iPod" are practically synonyms.

Apple (with Steve Jobs at the helm, anyway) is different from many companies. They don't see themselves as competing with other companies. Instead I believe they consider Apple of the previous year to be the competitor to beat for the current year.

The median age in the US is 36.5 according to this: http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/STTable?_bm=y&-geo_...

I have a terrible grasp of things like statistics so I'll avoid making any kind of leap of logic here and suggest this means anything, but I just thought it was an interesting coincidence if anything.

I can relate to the <write line of code> and immediately switch to Twitter, email, etc. In fact, this is me right now!

However when I'm working on something truly interesting and challenging, all the distractions vanish. Tweets go unread, emails unanswered, RSS ignored. Unfortunately that state has become a lot more rare lately as I slug away on uninteresting parts of the project and my mind wanders to new ideas I don't have time or opportunity to play with.

I do think that when I was younger it was easier to be utterly immersed in a project because the whole thing was still new and challenging. Now some of the stuff I used to spend hours or days or weeks toiling away with intense concentration feel like.. busy work. It feels like I shouldn't have to program in assembly anymore and that it's tedious. It feels like I shouldn't have to implement yet another <insert data structure or process>. The act of implementing a lot of the small pieces are no longer interesting and instead I just want to get on to the large scale interesting bits, but it can seem that there's so much boilerplate and cruft in the way...

And so I check Hacker News...

Well I'm not sure who to believe, but leading off their rebuttal with, "I am not going to begin to decipher their convoluted logic" does not inspire confidence.

In regards to your second question, check out figure 2 way at the bottom of the article where they have a breakdown of made in us with us parts vs. made in us without us parts, etc.

I don't think that's what it means. I might be wrong, but I got the impression it meant that 75% of the total money spent on motor vehicles ultimately stays in the US in some fashion. Either because it was assembled here or because of dealer commissions or because it costs money to hire US companies to move the cars from the port to the lot, etc.

We did this over 2 years ago. Our 2.5yo son is (so far) growing up with very little exposure to television commercials (he almost never sees them unless we are watching something on Hulu), and we consider that a good thing. Not only that, since it's all on-demand, he can choose whatever fits his mood during the time he's allowed to watch stuff. And because the media is "always available", I think he's developing a kind of acceptance that it's okay to stop watching when he's bored because the content availability is not constrained to "now." In other words, it's far easier for him to leave a show midway when it's time for bed or something because he knows he can just pick it up later and continue some other day. This is a decidedly different experience than growing up with scheduled TV pre-DVR where every minute was precious and missing anything was a "big deal."

Greatest demo ever, IMO, was Future Crew's Second Reality. That utterly blew my mind in 1993. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G_aUxbbqWU

If you know the perfect solution, I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. All you're doing it tearing me down. You're not offering any suggestions to fix these apparently obvious glaring problems in my idea or the current system.

No one would be getting paid (by way of tax discount) for a patent unless they're already doing something the market values and therefore generating an income to tax in the first place. It doesn't matter if the income is from use of the idea in the patents or not. Any income generation is a sign the market is rewarding them for something. The government doesn't need to decide anything differently than they do now.

The patent system is already flooded with useless and novel things. The reason is that people are hoping that over the next 20 years (or whatever) that the idea might suddenly become valuable and they can profit off it. With my idea, at least, you cannot profit from a patent unless you're already profiting in the market.

There's probably problems with this, but...

Patents should not be an exclusive license. Instead they should be a limited time income tax benefit. In other words, when you are granted a patent then you get some small percentage break in your income taxes for some number of years. So the only way to benefit from granted patents is to have some actual income! Once an idea is patented, you cannot charge a license fee for the idea as the idea is now public. You can, however, still license implementations of the idea - just like you can with implementations of proprietary ideas covered by trade secret.

The granting of patents would work the same way they do now - first one to file wins. However since you do not get the benefit of owning an idea for the next 20 years and collecting licensing fees on it, the benefit of filing for a patent on new ideas immediately might be a lot lower than it would be to just keep it secret under trade secret and use it yourself as long as possible. The idea here would be to balance the value of an idea in trade with the value of it as an income tax benefit. If you have a bunch of good ideas you've been using for years but are no longer really "secret" you could attempt to patent those old ideas so that the rest of the world can share them and you can get some tax breaks on perhaps the down swing of a product's life cycle. If someone else has already patented the idea ahead of you, well, so be it. The idea is out there already so society hasn't lost anything.

My thinking is that this could be balanced so that the tax benefits are such that companies would want to keep things secret for awhile but then attempt to patent older ideas once products near end of life. It's a race and balance there between keeping something secret and trying to get the tax benefit out of old ideas that might not be very profitable on their own anymore. Any tax benefit would be better than none, so it would seem that old ideas that are no longer used but were being hoarded by the company would suddenly be "valuable" to them, so they'd get the idea out into the public and everybody wins in the long run.

This is only a patent. This is not a feature of a shipping product. Hopefully it never will be.

Apple patents anything and everything and a ton of them are never really used. Optimistically, perhaps they grabbed this idea solely to prevent anyone else from doing it. By having a patent, they can refuse to license the idea to anyone and go after anyone who tries it anyway. You never know.

Nobody would keep $500,000 in cash sitting around their house, but that's essentially what this guy did.

I have a 2003 WRX which I enjoy greatly. I haven't done any track days or anything with it because I'm too chicken and boring, but it's still great fun. :) Bought it brand new and it is 100% paid for, which is even better. :)

I think it's mostly because it's hard to do other things while video chatting. Things like driving or walking or looking something up or typing, etc.

If I have a video chat window open, I feel sorta weird when I cover it up and go look something up or cover it with a notepad window to take notes, or a code editor to write some relevant code, etc. I feel like I'm rudely ignoring someone who's right there. And they have no cue this is happening, either, so they might assume it isn't and say something like, "so like this shows..." while briefly holding something up. And I can't see it just then because the window was covered. They had no way to know that I wasn't looking and missed it. Then there's awkwardness, repeating stuff, etc. It just feels slightly... wrong. IMO.

Edit: It'd be interesting if, while on a video chat, any windows or apps covering the remote participant "showed through" to them. I wonder if that alone would give enough sense of context to make it work a bit better?

Believe it or not, in addition to the other tidbits people have posted here, Mike was also a professional opera singer in a former life! He's one of the most interesting and real guys on TV, IMO.

If the man really wants your location, he can just ask the phone company.

Does it matter?