bonsaitree

Remember the interview show HotSeat with John McChesney? Ah, the early days of Real Player.

Amazon is fabulous, but that sort of real-time return policy workflow is for relatively low-mass & low-expense items from high-volume retailers.

Try returning custom car parts or, really, anything close to $1k USD which essentially mandates shipping insurance.

That said, I love-love the instant UPS-label "pick-up at your office or home" return workflow for the majority of stuff I buy from them.

The item is here in two days (Primed) and if I need the rare return, it's, at most, about 5 minutes worth of my time & attention. It's such a total win over the typical retail process for non-bespoke items.

A case isn't there primarily to protect the screen. It's there to absorb shock, protect against nicks and scuffs on the non-glass regions, and provide a non smooth-as-glass grip surface for your fingers and palm.

A good case will also have a raised bezel on the front so any potential screen impacts from a drop on a flat surface will hit the bezel and not the screen.

A 1% efficiency won't be a net-energy-gain for any sort of large-scale commercial production.

Three key questions:

1. What is the relative scarcity, if any, of the materials used to manufacture the "inks".

2. What is the durability/degradation under "field conditions" of the cell's active photovoltaic substrate?

3. Do the "inks" degrade in an environmentally friendly fashion?

Nice book plug. I'm reminded of the old CSS Box Model hack for earlier versions of IE.

For those not already familiar, Paul is the maintainer of HTML5 Boilerplate: http://html5boilerplate.com/

I suspect this is more about isolating the phone from the radio energy sinks of the human body (surface moisture on the skin & saline blood plasma) than anything to do with the glass itself.

Any suitably insulating (capacitive) enclosure (such as a "napkin swan", teacup, etc.) which preserves a largely vertical orientation (perpendicular to the local ground plane) should work just as well. We're still comfortably within the far-field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-field performance envelope for transmission, but well within transmission-line power transfer regimes at these frequencies with a cell-phone-sized antenna.

If the glass were lead crystal (extremely unlikely in the bog-standard bar tumbler pictured), there's more potential for interference and a spatial locus of signal above the noise floor is possible. Typical window and utensil glassware is essentially transparent to these frequencies.

It's not about education or productivity.

Top colleges, military training, and most early stage start-up environments all have either explicit or implicit cultures where part of the values indoctrination is to "achieve under fatigue".

It isn't about what's optimal for long-term productivity or health. It's about gauging mental toughness and weeding out those individuals without an adequate level of committment to that particular community's values.

If the individual can perform adequately under an extreme depravity of conditions, then they can be expected to excel, or at the very least, fall back to an acceptable baseline of trained performance when provided the surfeit of resources available under day-to-day tasking.

I can't help but be reminded of "hacking" casino comp systems. Please.

In truth, this trip cost well in excess of $418 due to the other purchases and time tie-ins involved.

I'm all for leveraging advantages, but there's leveraging, and then there's outright "gaming". The former can yield value when you factor in your time & attention, reasonable workflow safety margins, and compliance with spirit of a policy. The latter is merely a mental exercise to optimize a series of transactions around a single parameter, in this case the present dollar cost, to the complete exclusion of externalities.

At least he got some follow-on web traffic for his efforts.

Indeed. After I finished it, I was sad for weeks. I just missed being in that world with those people.

None of Clavell's other endeavors even comes close (though Tai-Pan was, relatively speaking, a fun modern romp).

Um. Wow. He's THAT desperate for press these days?

The author of the article (Jill Fehrenbacher) is married to Peter Rohas--formerly of Engadget/Weblogs Inc.

Mr. Rohas is a co-founder of GDGT. Calacanis was an early investor and presently a director at GDGT.

Without a link describing the methods used to garner this information and the raw data itself, these conclusions are, at best, suspect.

As a fellow bullied child, I can empathize with the treatment, but I could not disagree more with the proposed solutions.

You simply can not treat children as adults nor can all family situations be adapted to yield the necessary love & care required to raise a non-bully. Biologically, children also don't have the same ability to morally reason and weigh present actions against future consequences. There's also a good deal of evidence which suggests some personalities and brains have a preternatural inclination towards aggressive actions and violence.

Children also learn, nearly from birth, how to please their parents and will often, as the author did, shield their "shame" at being bullied.

I was taught by my father, quite simply, to "always stand up for your rights" and that "dignity itself is worth fighting for".

As a kid, I never started a fight, but I ALWAYS responded to violence with violence. For many bullies, violence is really is the only social interchange they understand and the attention they receive from the public physical domination of others is their main source of self-esteem.

I got into my fair share of physical altercations (which I lost more than I won) and subsequent interactions with school disciplinary actions.

Nevertheless, win or lose, I never regretted any fight as they were 100% effective at preventing future bullying.

If a bully "gets bullied back", they back down. If a bully "wins a fight", they know you're always ready to throw-down and take the full measure of consequences so they move on to easier "prey".

School systems are different, but at least in my case, it always helped out with the school authorities to have the higher GPA and be recognized socially as the "good kid that got in trouble".

Finally, one learns at a visceral level, the numerous costs and few benefits of violence. Violence becomes a viable option, internalized very concretely, as the option of absolute last resort.

I wouldn't use the term "interesting" so much as "foolish".

Much like Best Buy's recent firing/non-firing of that employee, the act itself only serves to add more fuel to the negative-PR fire.

Summary: Imperfect system is imperfect.

'Ya gotta love a tautology adorned as journalism.

Are there any reasonable alternatives for privately funded research? No. There will always be the urge to game data to fit the hypothesis and honest people will still make mistakes. This forever shall remain a challenge for science.

I'm struggling with the urge to flag, but recognize the applicability to HN.

For those that wish to learn more about the Korean pro Starcraft scene, I urge you to watch the English YouTube commentaries at SC2GG ( http://starcraft.homelinux.org/VODTracker/#v ).

"Spam" is done as part of warming-up during pre-game chat and during approximately the first 10s of most builds.

These players aren't spamming. They're selecting individual unit abilities within multiple control groups and switching off the membership of said groups in real-time.

That documentary clip is somewhat misleading. Some very strategic top-level Starcraft players with excellent micro-control can have as low as 200-250 APM. Some macro-oriented players such as Bisu ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Taek-Yong ) have ~420 APM.

Though APM is a datum which has grown during the evolution of the game, Flash ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Young-Ho ) ,the current highest ranked Starcraft player in the world, only has "average" APM for a pro gamer.

At the pro level, success is less about "action volume" and more about which actions one chooses to take.

Is this content really within HN's bailiwick?

The aforementioned to be read in the voice of Bender.

All we're missing is violet, indigo, and orange. Then we'd have a full Green Lantern Corps ;).

I can understand the philosophical underpinnings, but honestly, it smells of 7-Habits-esque management "science" , and worse, a pure sales ploy for consulting.

At least 5-Whys ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys ) and Six Sigma ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma ) have show actual quantifiable improvements in industry.

While this does do away with one more modal interface in side-by-side battery arrangements, judging only by the pictures, it looks extremely shock-sensitive. It would seem suitable for office/home use as long as it's not in a small child's toy or something like an RC car.

Additionally, "idiot-proof" mechanical contacts like this are commonplace, going as far back as '80s, in high-amp "industrial" battery chargers.

This article reminds me vividly why, at my Alma mater, EVERY engineer (even EEs and CEs) were REQUIRED to take a class in their freshmen or sophomore year called "Manufacturing Process & Materials Design".

It was basically a fancy academic term for "shop class".

We made gears, arc welded (still have a scar from that), cut screw threads, riveted sheet metal, worked milling machines & saws, turned fixtures on lathes, and glued/bagged/baked carbon fiber.

At a very visceral hands-on level were introduced to the materials, workflows, and structural fastening tech that makes up the shells and supporting frameworks of physical goods.

At the time, it was a royal pain in the ass (I'm not a natural kinesthetic learner) and I didn't "get it", but looking back it was an extremely valuable experience.

Aside from the welding scar on my left thumb, I think the biggest takeaway was gaining an appreciation for the EXTREME ROI gained in designing processes which have "loose" tolerances where it's acceptable and "tight" tollerances where it's required.

Two words: Sarbanes–Oxley

Um...Wow.

Aside from Mr. Garrison's gyro-thingie ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entity_%28South_Park%29 ), that's the most emasculating mode of travel I've ever seen.

As a D.C. metro resident (living in NoVA), I share your pain. When I moved, I made sure to live close to at least 1 airport (ended up being IAD) for that verysame reason.

It will NEVER happen due to the lack of a sustainable economic model for passenger service.

The U.S. lacks both the population density and the dearth of a legacy bulk airline/airport network to make large-scale roll-out of high-speed rail service viable.

That said, I'd still be the first one to vote FOR a referendum on a build-out. Journeying by train is real, civilized travel. Outside of private charter service and PLSes, travel by air is mere transport.

For the shop owner(s), making the economic case for having a card merchant account comes down to several factors:

- Size of typical transactions - Volume of transactions per billing cycle - % of charge-backs per billing cycle - Charge-back volume compared to revenue - Anticipated volume & revenue gains with the additional card buying channel - Comfort level with dependency on 3rd-party accounting - Comfort level with 3rd party data mining - Comfort level with necessary technologies - Additional management overhead due to accounting and card accouterments

Offhand, there are a variety of scenarios, esp. for boutique businesses in urban environments with ready access to ATMs, where a cash-only policy makes good business sense.

Yes. An suitable analogy can be made to a hybrid car. Local servers (electric motor & batteries) for constant/idle-demand and EC2 (internal combustion engine) for high bandwidth & storage overflow during version deployments and peak loads.

We actually recommend this solution our clients who already have significant sunk costs and long-term SLA contracts in hardware and datacenter services.

NS. Emacs shouldn't be anyone's first text editor, but if experience is any guide, it will be many's last text editor.

I think that's more a reflection of CNN's lax journalism.

No. They're both "reserved" loop-back addresses, but 127.0.0.1 has more cultural/conventional weight for this explicit purpose and also avoids any possible semantic overloads with dotted-quad zero and/or null values.