Nekojoe

On a similar note George Orwell got shot once in the Spanish Civil war. This article documents his thoughts on it - http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.h...

I agree. The BBC have more analysis here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010...

The figure also includes Apple iTunes Store App purchases and Kindle subscriptions. But they're not broken down. For all we know 3 people could have bought direct access to the website and the other 99,997 people could have bought the App to read something on their iPhone while taking the train to work.

It's interesting to see that the Guardian are now earning around £40 million from on-line ad revenues. While the back of a napkin calculation by the BBC blogger puts The Times paywall at £7 million.

The difference is that the Times and Sunday Times are aimed at the public. There's plenty of competition and free on-line quality alternatives in the UK from the BBC News Website and the Guardian. What I'm interested to see is how other sites traffic went up as people left the Times site as the pay wall was put up.

I'll bet the type of news you're willing to pay for isn't aimed at the general public. I reckon sites that will do well behind a paywall are either specialist sites or industry specific sites or even sites that offer time sensitive information first. The kind of sites that either offer quality information or hold a monopoly on this information. They also won't price this for the general public they'll price it for the corporations.

From what I've heard it's because the buttons and the case are made by different companies and they can't get the colours to match. http://www.reghardware.com/2010/10/15/white_iphone_spied/

I love this quote - "We talked a lot about how perception leads reality and how if you are going to create a reality, you have to be able to create the perception."

It sounds like the concept of the reality distortion field.

This way of memorising things is called Chunking - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_%28psychology%29

Chess champions use this technique too. I remember seeing a TV documentary where they got a chess champion to look at a board layout for a few seconds and reproduce it in front of them. They could do this easily for a valid board layout. But when they got people with no knowledge of chess to design the board layout in an invalid manner the chess champion could not reconstruct the board as accurately or as quickly.

I guess a common programming equivalent would be a design pattern.

If this was in the EU it would be a case for Protected Geographical Status - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Geographical_Status

I like it. It would be nice if the buy button was more prominent. I found a book I was interested in buying, or at least finding more about. I tried clicking on the book cover and nothing happened. I did notice the Buy button in the top right at the end, but it's not prominent as it's the same colour as the shelf.

Don't forget to mention Ben Goldacre's own website too which has more of the same stuff - http://www.badscience.net/

TweetDeck on iPhone is the same. The multi account feature was what won me over in the first place. I liked it as I could use it for managing both my personal and websites twitter account. Unfortunately that's broken right now. The issue is mentioned on their support forums, but no one at TweetDeck seem to have picked up.

The only other issue I have is a minor UI gripe. When you click on the run in background button, the progress bar and cancel button for the background tweet covers the back button on the main part of the app. It’s odd that they did that.

I remember seeing a documentary about these foxes last year. IIRC they were part of a science experiment to see if it was nature or nurture that was the key factor in the domestication of dogs.

Basically with each litter of foxes they selected the most friendly, and allowed them to breed, creating more friendly / domesticated foxes. They also selected the most vicious and bred them separately as a control. Later when the behaviours became more pronounced they artificially inseminated the vicious foxes with the domesticated foxes embryos to find out if they would be aggressive or domestic. They turned out to be domestic.

Interestingly because foxes are solitary animals they behave more like cats than dogs.

Borrow money on the internet?

Isn't that what start-ups like http://www.zopa.com/ are all about? Disclaimer - I'm not affiliated with them in anyway.

Baker Tweet uses the Arduino - http://www.bakertweet.com/

The official Arduino blog always has lots of interesting examples too - http://arduino.cc/blog/

According to this [1] it costs £2.15 a hit. Which isn't that bad spending wise if you consider the worst website in the UK government cost £11.78 per visit.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/gov_websites/

It all depends on where you are. One guy tried to get 4 weeks off at a place I used to work. He needed sign off from a high up manager to do this. The manager retorted if we can get by without this guy for 4 weeks, why do we really need him at all? Suffice to say, he didn't take his 4 weeks holiday.

If you're interested in this blog post I suggest reading Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science - http://www.badscience.net/

It covers the problems with homoeopathy in great depth and includes other similar alternative medicines, along with flaws in scientific studies promoting them and quackery in general. I highly recommend reading it. Not just to learn about the problems with these kind of treatments, but also the difficulties in creating unbiased scientific tests.

El Reg has a better write up including safety fears - http://www.reghardware.com/2010/06/16/arctic_laser/

A question mark can be part of your name -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8206280.stm

Certain characters like the defunct yogh have had issues in Unicode -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4595228.stm

Some names can be changed if they're cruel or too unconventional -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7522952.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6939112.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6937327.stm

Everytime someone mentions the a Sinclair and accounts, I always think of Hey Hey 16k - http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

You can generally get cheap buckets of Lego at people's yard sales, eBay, etc... The good thing about Lego is that it ages well, The bricks don't become obsolete. For more specific parts you could try BrickLink - http://www.bricklink.com/

I agree, it's a sensible guideline, but he would be critical of websites that don't follow this guideline.

It's good to be consistent. But lots of sites now have an colour scheme that makes it clear which links are visited and which ones are unvisted. Generally the visited ones are a duller / subdued.

I used to read a lot of Jakob Nielsen's writing, on his website and books. I don't read his work so much now because I find what he says tends to be too conservative. He tends to be too strict with guidelines. For years he insisted that all unvisited hyperlinks should be blue and all visited ones should be purple.

One of the tricks with usability I've found is knowing which rules to stick to, which ones to bend and which ones to break.

For something like that, it's best to read PPK's excellent Quirks Mode site - http://www.quirksmode.org/compatibility.html

This is a dupe of yesterday's story - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1342748

I agree with this. Each platform can be completely different. Banks often have their own internal platforms too. Some are even set to trade in millions by default. So when you enter an order for 15 shares, you're really buy 15 million shares and so on.

Stuff like this does happen now and again. One example is putting the wrong value in the wrong fields -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4512962.stm

In the above case the trader got the price and number of share fields confused.

Yes, but rather than him just randomly select an address for a location he has taken the time to visit it and describe it accurately in his books. If he's gone to this level of detail already, it would make sense that the layout of the furniture, fittings and items in the building also map to an accurate model.

Some authors can't always go to this level of detail. For example J. K. Rowling was in Scotland when writing the first Harry Potter book, as a result she describes Kings Cross from memory, confusing it with another London Station, so her description of it does match the real world location.

Sherlock Holmes is a work of fiction, but 221b Baker Street is a real address. You can go there today and visit it in London. It's a popular tourist destination. Conan Doyle did visit the house and I've been told that details match up with the building that's in the books (such as number of stairs). They've decorated the rooms there to match the details from the books too.

I agree, normally there is an opt out for this. With the nappy company it's sneakier though. If you don't agree to being contacted about special deals etc.., you won't receive the bag full of goodies, which is the only reason you'd agree to give your data to them in the first place.

The part of the nappy company getting your details could be emphasised more. Some people are against supermarket loyalty cards, but the "nappy company" can be even worse.

They'll ask you all sorts of questions, and since the parents are all happy about their new baby they'll comply without a second thought. They'll then sell all this data to a data trading company. It's valuable because the nappy company has verified the data, and also having a baby is a major lifestyle change that other companies are keen to use. For example you might need a new car that's family friendly with more space in the back for the kids.