parallax7d

Recently watched Gattaca. Found it interesting how in that world, DNA profiling for job placement was illegal, but because the technology was so widespread and available, it was easy to circumvent the regulations without getting caught. Just shake someone's hand or take a drug test, and they have your entire genome.

Yes, I like margarine too.

Govt will not take any action because Wall Street floods politician's election campaigns with dollars so they play ball. If they don't play ball, Wall Street funds a challenger to the seat.

The profit motive should drive the use, not the implementation of a trading system that effects the world economy so directly.

I've maintained that the standard increment for trades should be hours or days, not microseconds. This way liquidity is maintained on a macro scale, and parasitic orders based on micro manipulations of the system are eliminated.

I too rolled my eyes until I saw that it was about vim.

Well sure, but you seem to be scoping your statement down to recent events, in America, and only positive change. Before you were addressing any type of change in society as a whole, in the future. I was merely pointing out the vagaries of such over arching statements.

If we are to consider society as a whole, over time, i think things are moving in a positive direction for the liberties of children and the elderly. It's hard to predict what may or may not change in American legislation in the future, but I doubt it will be "nothing".

I doubt how we treat the young and the elderly will stop changing. Just look at child labor laws and social security, medicade/care in the US for one example of radical change.

I'm not sure you understood my comment.

I don't see anything wrong with these alleged agreements, per se, but it sets a terrible anti competitive precedent that is all manner of bad for employee marketability. It would be difficult to sus out the truth of what these types of agreements actually do behind the closed doors of these company's HR departments.

Well good luck to you. Don't worry about the haters that say you won't make it because there is no trust built up like the trust users have for Paypal. Who trusted Paypal when they first got started? And many people certainly don't trust them now.

I doubt he will actually cough up the money. It's not based on any assumptions about his character based on that movie, just my sense of how much of a paper tiger his and facebook's financials are.

The only reason I don't use Chrome is because of the Google info sharing. Chromium is unclear as to weather it actually shares data or not. I believe at one point there was a bug where it was definitely connecting to googles servers. I believe they fixed it, but it was enough to keep me on Firefox.

Yeah, the survival aspect is the most appealing to me as well. Hopefully some more survival elements will make it in before the beta.

The PR department exists to do PR. Irregardless of the motivations of the people who contact them, sending a few official comments should be well within their ability.

That someone expressed interest in their products is something to be encouraged by a PR department. It's unfortunately that Steve responded at all. Surely ignoring the request would garner much less negative PR than repeated denials.

no it's not, that's the first thing i checked. I'll remove the story though if no one else seems to be effected.

Creating available, consistent and learn-able interfaces is not that hard. Making them completely ignorance proof may be though.

Having to teach something is a reasonable part of any interface. Such as having a sign near elevator buttons that says "press the direction in which you want to travel". Or a cashier that says "no, use this pen." Or a website support person that guides an elderly man over the phone on the differences between a login box and a password recovery box.

Of course, it would be the ultimate aesthetic if interfaces would just do the magic, decide what the user really wanted, no thinking needed. I think this is the unreasonable ideal some designers dream of.

Even better, when we are born we could get a dialog box that says "Lead a Long, Fulfilling Life. OK, Cancel". But then we would have to learn to read to understand the dialog box. Maybe someone could press a button for us that makes us learn to read first. Or maybe an even more magical button could be designed, that when pressed, no one ever would have to read dialog boxes and press buttons ever again, or think or live. I think the Russians actually have a button like that.

The Mona Lisa looked a bit like Patrick Steward in a wig.

Hey a search insider, cool.

I want to thank your department for the advance search sort on the left hand side, totally non-distracting and much easier to drill through than clicking the tiny advanced search link.

But please stop adding more distracting stuff to search. Like backgrounds, animated interactive logos, menus that fade into view only when you move your mouse, instant results flashing and distracting you constantly. A design like google.com circa 5 years ago seems to have been quite popular for all it's simplicity.

I'm a Django fan, but in defense of this guy this is a pretty insignificant thing to post to HN.

It sounds like they screwed you too, and your defending them?

It sound suspiciously like they just want to keep the money for as long as possible. Collecting interest on your assets is a clear profit motive.

We are all miserable, as we tend to focus on what's wrong in our lives. The rich simply have a less desperate set issues to deal with. This has a desensitizing effect on how they relate to the reality of peoples real pain. The less you relate, and empathize with others, the more of a prick you seem.

So yeah, they would naturally give less to charity, and treat others more rudely to get what they want. There whole world is focused on experience and consumption, and not getting those concert tickets is as much of a psychological blow to them as me not being able to pay my rent.

People often fall into the self deceptive habit that thinking about doing something is doing something. Such truisms merit being in a self help article.

Do you really hate platitudes? Haters gonna hate.

I'm not sure vertical integration is something to be inspired by. In fact, it tends to create a variety of conflicts of interests, and anti competitive environments. Both effects are generally bad for competition and consumer choice.

From what I've read, Brits don't have the insane supermarkets we do here in the states.

I used to do this every once in a while. One thing to be aware of, are large trucks behind you at the top of hills. They tend to want to increase speed going down hills to use their velocity to climb the next. It's probably a good idea to accommodate this.

The information sharing agreement with the NSA?

It's still true for the top schools. The rest, meh.

Yeah, google could stand up to verizon if they wanted, they would just rather play ball now adays.

yanw, the article points out what they had previously said before this comprimise. I like the old position, not the new "only partially completely incorrect" model.

from a post on Google’s official blog in 2007: “The nation’s spectrum airwaves are not the birthright of any one company. They are a unique and valuable public resource that belong to all Americans. The FCC’s auction rules are designed to allow U.S. consumers — for the first time — to use their handsets with any network they desire, and and use the lawful software applications of their choice.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/why-google-became-a-c...

And, generally Pythonistas are drawn towards Mercurial/Bitbucket.