lunchbox

Yes but overall, isn't it better to at least have the choice to go to the supermarket? (As you kind of acknowledge in your own example.)

Ah OK thanks!

Just curious, what risk are you referring to?

It can also be thought of as a pun -- when you want to "exit" an application, you "X it".

Clarification: this is about MS Word 1.1a, which was released in 1990.

Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly.

But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic writing system in the first place.

In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisation is different, especially when the language is used by loosely coulped communities. And then you have to adapt spelling to new pronunciations. But what do you do with old books? And how do you keep the language united?

English (or Spanish, etc) is a real-world example of a mostly phonetic writing system, and I don't think it is that bad. We can still read old texts, even though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said, but practically speaking I don't see this as a big problem. In contrast, I think it's very important to have a writing system that is easily learned, so that it is accessible to the entire population (not just those able to invest lots of time & effort).

"Germanic languages have special words for 11 and 12, such as eleven and twelve in English, which are often misinterpreted as vestiges of a duodecimal system. However, they are considered to come from Proto-Germanic ainlif and twalif (respectively one left and two left), both of which were decimal."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Origin

Dumb question: What does it mean that autocommit is now turned on? I no longer have to call mymodel.save()?

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.6/#improved...

Side comment: that's a nice website; how did you make it? I see it's hosted on GitHub pages and that you use Bootstrap. Did you write all the HTML/CSS yourself, or use Markdown, etc?

Another name for "begging the question" is simply "circular reasoning"

How do you know their issues are somatic, or that the relief they experience is a placebo effect?

  - 1-800-FLOWERS
  - 1-800-CONTACTS
  - hotels.com

> Two-finger slide from the right sometimes opens up a sidebar that apparently contains settings (not sure what the magic incantation is).

There's a grippie in the bottom right corner indicating the settings pull-out sidebar.

Yes, but keep in mind you can't make Google Maps the default mapping application, so links to addresses (e.g. in calendar, web browser, contacts) will open in Apple Maps.

OK, will log a bug if I can

I love PTVS, but I keep running into a problem when I debug my code. One time it'll properly highlight in my IDE where an exception (or breakpoint) occurred; the next time it won't, and I have to look in the black Python console window and inspect the stack trace . Using PTVS 1.1.50530.0 with VS2010 Ultimate.

On the right of each song page is a section dedicated to explaining the whole song. I don't see the problem.

It must depend on your definition of "abbreviation". For example, Hamas and Fatah (the main political parties in Palestine) are both acronyms. Fatah is actually a reverse acronym.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#Etymology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah#Etymology

How is this different from what happened in May?

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/21/business/la-fi-autos...

"California Senate passes bill for self-driving cars"

What does the "mixed nuts" example at the bottom have to do with this phenomenon?

Like Netflix

An issue with this puzzle is that the objective is not clearly stated upfront. The author should make it clear from the outset that the goal is to minimize the number of drops in the worst case, rather than to minimize the average case, especially since optimizing the average case is (in my experience) more common in optimization problems. He asks in parentheses what the worst case is, but that just sounds like a side question:

> The question is: What strategy should you adopt to minimize the number egg drops it takes to find the solution? (And what is the worst case for the number of drops it will take?)

Then in the solution he says:

> Problems where the solution lays lower down the building are taking less drops than when the solution lays higher up. We need to come up with a strategy that makes things more uniform.

It is not explained why it has to be more uniform.

A more minor issue with this puzzle is that for the sake of thoroughness, the author should say is that the number of floors required to break the egg follows a uniform distribution (i.e., every floor is an equally likely candidate).

Every movement has to start somewhere.

If you felt a company was behaving unethically and wanted to boycott it, what would you do? Would your strategy not involve spreading the word to your friends and followers via social media?

So you're opposed to boycotts? Or are you criticizing this boycott because it's not (yet) big enough to influence Apple?

Lots of boycotts have been successful throughout history, and most of them started small.

WalkScore has similar functionality (click on "My Commutes"):

http://www.walkscore.com/apartments/CA/San_Francisco

The numbers there are somewhat different.

You can also enter more than one commute location. So you can find all places that are within 20 minutes of your office AND 30 minutes of your girlfriend's house.

The other tabs have some pretty cool filters, such as proximity to public transit, grocery stores, etc.

They also have heatmaps showing how "walkable" a particular neighborhood is, i.e. how much you can get your daily errands done without needing a car:

http://www.walkscore.com/CA/San_Francisco

> Ok, your argument is that this stuff works for the other 95% but it won’t appeal to us hackers. My question to you is, how does Apple make ads that appeal to the rest of the world and something like 75% of the hackers?

Asking that question is like asking an Olympic sprinter why he can't be as fast as Usain Bolt, or scolding a successful musician for not selling as many records as Lady Gaga.

Compared to Apple, pretty much every company sucks at marketing. So what? Apple is an extreme outlier in its PR success, owing to a number of unique factors other companies cannot realistically replicate.

How would you answer your own question? Do you think there's a simple solution Microsoft hasn't figured out?

That's a misleading analogy. Microsoft's goal here is not to get you to visit a Microsoft store, since the device won't come out for months anyway. This is the first step in a months-long marketing campaign leading up to launch.

The goal is not to convey information, but rather to form an emotional bond, whether conscious or subconscious.

Successful companies have learned that a (shockingly) large proportion of consumers form impressions and make decisions on a primarily emotional, rather than rational or practical, basis. That's what this video is designed for. It inaugurates the brand, piques the viewer's interest, and plants the seeds of desire.

Trust me, there will be plenty of time in the coming months for in-depth product reviews, spec comparisons, etc. ad nauseam.

Off topic: the "headlinese" title of this article results in syntactic ambiguity.

I read it as: The coder who built Microsoft Answers (http://answers.microsoft.com/) cried because of a new development kit.

Related:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_blossom#In_headlines

Also see Pyvot, a similar tool that was created by Microsoft:

http://pytools.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Pyvot