Grinnmarr

I had mine done here http://www.elliseye.com/ in 2001 or 2002. At first my vision was 20/15 in one eye and 20/10 in the other and I felt like the bionic man. This over correction lasted about a year before it started to degrade and I am now worse than 20/20 I imagine. I can still pass a driver's test, spend hours everyday in front of a monitor, see well at night etc. My only complaint is the slight starburst effect around bright glowing objects at night but I consider that a small price to pay. To this day I consider it the best money I have ever spent.

Agreed. I don't like the politics of this "scandal" like many in this community, but this IS a serious fight AND I believe the stakes are even higher than many here on my side seem to think. It is how the battle is to be fought that concerns me as victory is my goal. This editorial, with all due respect to the EFF which I mostly support, is ultimately trite, pendantic, and shallow despite casual appearance to the contrary. This isn't just about freedom of speech. It is about putting a roof over our children's heads and food in their bellies. "You've got to get mad. You've gotta say 'I'm a human being God damn it, my life has value!'

Bah. Amazon didn't cave to political pressure, it made a sound business decision. While it may offend your politics this was about the bottom-line. It isn't Jeff Bezos' job to make polical statements with other peoples money, he has enough of his own for that. This isn't a privately held firm we are talking about folks. I doubt Amazon's PR team had to give this more than 5 minutes thought before calling the board. Whining about Amazon not fighting the fight is to either sorely misunderstand the nature of business OR a veiled attempt to promote anti-capitalism rhetoric. Liberal Capitalism (or however closely we approximated that during the last century) is in its death throes. The revolution is upon us and the bastards are winning. But to whine about Amazon acting in their own self interest? Wake up! As much as I love the Amazonians (as they refer to themselves) and have had the pleasure of gracing their halls on several occasions you need to realize that in the true scheme of things Amazon and the Federal elite are on the same side in this war. And it isn't the side many of you think you are on. But the power structure keeps selling the dream and enough of the poor and down trodden keep buying it up.

If you want to attack Amazon's decision, then you must attack the forces and structure behind it. If this was a game, Amazon made the right move. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Please.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much. If she has as big a problem with this as she claims then she has greater challenges facing her then learning how to set (or correct) a boundary. Seriously. I was recently fired by a client after rejecting her sexual advances. Maybe I'll make a blog post bragging about my animal magnetism to assuage my disappointment over my professional failure.

No matter how brilliant one is, its ridiculously hard to know what you don't know.

This cannot be overstated. And when ego is the cause...oy vey! I believe that one of the greatest intellectual challenges to overcome when one over identifies as being "brilliant" is the, oft youthful, focus on pedantry. How embarrassingly ironic to display one's ignorance as a result of flaunting one's intellect. As a recovering pendant well in to those years that separate true youth from "decidedly middle-aged" let me sincerely recommend to some of our (mostly) younger members that they put down the Bertrand Russell long enough to pick up some William Blake.

  When used properly, I have found that one of the most powerful phrases I can use to build confidence, trust, and credibility with a client is "I don't know."

I think your perception that the entertainment industry is in anyway a meritocracy is naive. There are always exceptions to the rule but for the most part it is still a "it's not what you know it's who you know" industry. This discussion reminds me of one of my favorite all time bumper stickers: "Real Musicians Have Day Jobs."

I agree with many of the other respondents that you are grossly overstating the role the names played. Additionally, while I agree wholeheartedly that "Mint" is the better name, when considering the role the company names played (however large or small) in the eventual outcome, I think one needs to weigh Wesabe's poor choice of name at least as equally significant as Mint's good choice if not much more.

It's their job to try and collect as much as they can. Even if your contact is friendly and sympathetic, if they think you can pay on better terms than you offer they will hammer you. On the flip side it is your job to be honest about your situation and get them to accept terms that you can actually meet. Other people have given better and more specific advice but the bottom line is they will take what they can get. No hard feelings. Business is business.

LASER eye surgery. Best money I ever spent.

I can't really comment on the viability/marketability of your product concept, but I will offer this very important, if not somewhat trite, piece of advice. If you are going to try to sell something to designers and use words like aesthetics in your sales copy, you will most likely fail if your own presentation is not aesthetically pleasing. Others have given some great suggestions below. I just want to emphasize that before you work to send any traffic to your site you should greatly enhance the look.

This is a lot of fun but the great variety of results I received left me without any sense of who I may actually write like. I analyzed a series of correspondence, all written within several weeks, and similar in tone, and I was told that I write like: Dan Brown, James Joyce, Isaac Asimov, Stephen King and Douglas Adams. Anyway, I love the concept. Please add Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case) to your collection. Thank you for the narcissistic pleasure :D

In the UK "punting" is an oft used slang term for frequenting prostitutes. A "punter" is akin to a "john" here in the states.

I can totally relate. I spend way too much time helping my Mom which aggravates the hell out of me because she has been using a PC since Win 3.1 and she still can't remember the easiest of tasks. Thankfully she has friends to help her with her financial reporting (she is treasurer for 2 non-profits) and her desktop publishing, but no matter how many times I tell her to stop installing free cursors and such it seems I need to clean her system out regularly. She is like the lady who calls tech support only to discover that her PC isn't even turned on lol But I could never charge her. She is my Mom. Now my sister on the other hand pays too many consultants too much but only wants free advice from me which I give casually. The few times she has asked me to do serious work she has balked even when I low balled her on the price. So she continues to spend too much for too little because she won't hire her little brother.

Friends ask for help all the time and I just dispense advice. I am not creating anything for free unless I have an emotional investment in the project and honestly I have always been uncomfortable charging friends. The friendship is what matters and a formal biz relationship can really stress it out at times. If I were you I would make it a policy to not work for family and friends and then make exceptions on a case by case basis if you feel inclined.

I'm not sure if you are being snarky or just ignorant, but the "The Artist..." is the commonly accepted usage and descriptor http://www.citypages.com/1999-06-23/news/the-people-formerly...

If I was at my wits end, I would start calling in to Google corporate until I got someone who could actually help. Don't get irate, be pleasant. If you must talk lawsuit, do so without threatening. Also, re-read the fine print of the Google checkout contract before calling.

According to Dave Itzkoff, an employee and frequent contributor to the NYT, this is a hoax. http://twitter.com/ditzkoff/status/15847765293

I have a couple of friends that managed large software development projects with global teams, one while at Microsoft and the other while at Autodesk. They both told me that outsourcing work to India was not seen as a way to cut costs but to instead acquire talent. That being said, as a small business person with limited development skills I do save money by outsourcing to India. But I take the time to thoroughly qualify my contractors, develop proper specs, and establish realistic expectations. I may spend significantly more time managing an overseas project than if I was working with a local or even American developer, but I currently have more time to invest than money. So there are the opposite ends of the spectrum...I imagine the middle ground can get pretty convoluted ;)

Is there anywhere in the country where AT&T's network is actually better than Verizon? As much as I love my smartphone (incredible) its best feature is a reliable network with great coverage. Forgive me if I sound like an ad but I live in the heart of the city of San Diego and my friends on AT&T have spotty coverage right here in the heart of a metropolis.

I just wish I had enough rep to down vote your comment :P His posts and complete transparency about growing his business epitomize the type of community contribution that brings me back to this site time and time again.

"...All those moments will be lost in time; like tears in rain. Time to die."

FYI Rutger Hauer actually wrote that last line in to the script. Most memorable scene in the movie if you ask me.

I think your contention better supports an argument for the decriminalization of drugs than it does regarding the social ills of porn. As far as "voluntariness" goes I have known a number of high billing IT contractors over the years that work to support an expensive cocaine habit.

Excellent point. I was in charge of much of the SEO of a large internet retailer and our organic traffic was stunning. Unfortunately no matter how hard I lobbied to start work on conversion, split testing etc, they insisted I do nothing but drive traffic to our poorly converting sites. When sales started flattening out despite the continuing month over month increase in organic traffic I was let go as a cost saving measure. And while still an Internet Retailer 500 company their position has slipped significantly down the ranks. At the time I left we had top ten positions for hundreds of our most important key words including #1 position for many of our first tier words. When doing SEO remember that traffic is only as good as it converts.

It's not just your opinion ;) This argument is about the nature of consciousness more than anything. It fights for a "subjective ontology" of the mental and is not easily dismissed as the earlier commentator would like to believe. The rapidity of upvotes and apparent sympathy to that claim by members of this community is certainly understandable given that the stance is anti-verificationist and presents problems for a purely scientific explanation of consciousness, but imho at our current level of intelligence/intellectual evolution a purely scientific explanation is horribly dehumanizing and insufficient.

To all you sys admins out there: Is rush2112 really as common as some of these? I am a bit chagrined by its presence on this list as I have used that as a low security password for 10 years. In fact it is currently my password to HN!! (of course by the time you read this I will have changed it :P )

"I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,"

Klingon is a human language! Who does he think created Klingon. And he has a Phd? Nice logic.

Well, yes and no. Many factors affect visual acuity including the shape of the eyeball (affects focal point of lens on retina), cornea (defects cause astigmatism), retinal damage like macular degeneration which leads to functional blindness, and the function of the muscles which adjust our focus within our visual range. Eye strain can take a significant toll on those muscles and eventually lead to a sometimes significant loss of visual acuity (myopia.) Fortunately the muscles can often be retrained. Search Amazon for books on vision correction and you will find a ton of books that essentially help you retrain your eye muscles to improve your visual acuity.

sample book on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Relearning-See-Improve-Eyesight-Natura...

The worst of these offers, notably the SMS ones, are scams by any definition and are only defended by people making money off of them or the typical forum "devil's advocate" that in his/her ignorance find these practices to somehow be defensible. The author gives very good examples in the article e.g. the IQ test. It is an affront to all that is ethical and fair in market practices that these kinds of businesses (the scam offers themselves) are even allowed to exist at all.

Metaphysics is more akin to "world view" although one's epistemological opinions/beliefs are certainly informative of their prevailing ontological stance.

Alpaca's can qualify you for certain tax breaks making them a worthwhile investment if you qualify.

Dude...Amazon has been the leading e-tailer for around a decade or so. Wal-Mart is not even in the top 10. Where did you get the idea Wal-Mart did anywhere near Amazon volume online? http://www.internetretailer.com/Top500/list.asp