tb

You do have a sliding scale, in the form of the hosting cost pass through. Your average restaurateur is entirely unqualified to estimate the AWS hosting costs of your software in relation to his/her restaurant, so these costs are completely opaque. (As patio11 puts it, "Metered pricing is none of predictable, transparent, or fair.") You, on the other hand, probably have a very good idea of the costs relative to e.g. size or popularity of establishment. In the interests of transparent pricing, you ought to consider factoring these costs into your price and charge your customer a fixed predictable amount, tiered according to the relevant parameter.

This suggestion comes up whenever the topic of self-driving cars arises, but I wonder if access to a fleet of self-driving cars would be more akin to a cheaper taxi service than a replacement for car ownership. I suspect that many people would still prefer to own their own (self-driving) car rather than rent one from a fleet only when required. However the privately owned self-driving car could still drive itself to the nearest charging station when not in use so I agree with your premise that self-driving and electric car technology has some synergies. Being a high-tech automaker, Tesla would be an obvious licensee for Google's self-driving technology once it matures.

Default risk. The price for a bitcoin that is currently held by Mt.Gox factors in the market's expectation that said bitcoin will be able to be redeemed from Mt.Gox. Analogous to why your bank charges you a higher interest rate on a loan if you have a poor credit score, to compensate them for the perceived risk that you fail to repay the loan.

For anyone who's interested in why this is the case, here is the classic article on this situation: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

OP uses a fresnel lens and gives instructions on how to focus the HUD at infinity to avoid this problem.

"However, although important for the local economy in Congo, the contribution of coltan mining in Congo to the world supply of tantalum is usually small. The United States Geological Survey reports in its yearbook that this region produced a little less than 1% of the world's tantalum output in 2002–2006, peaking at 10% in 2000 and 2008."

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

It's to keep all the railway clocks in sync. You could have one that's running up to 1.5s slow and it will still be able to keep up with all the rest, and they're all resynchronised with each other every minute. This is important when it could be the difference between catching a train or not.

See elsewhere in the thread [1] where I discussed this.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4738558

The camera is on the end of the arm at the bottom left in [1]. By comparing that to this picture you can see where part of the arm is in the self-portrait, above and to the left of the front-most wheel. The third-person perspective in the self-portrait comes about because the robot arm will always move out of the way of any photo that the camera is taking.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA15279_3rovers-stand_D20...

Very OT, but why in God's name do some people/countries feel it appropriate to use imperial units rather than metric units? The reasons are the same - historical usage and inertia against change.

> Some other particle may interact with nothing we are familiar with -- and thus we could never study it. Is it even "real" then?

Philosophically, this is equivalent to the question of whether other universes, which do not interact with ours and therefore we cannot study, exist or are "real". It is not a question that Science can answer.

Most modern cars will have lots of separate controllers. Many of the functions of the car are largely independent and having them on separate boards means they can be physically closer to the things they are controlling, and the number of functions that each is responsible for is reduced which simplifies design, coding and test.

You are referring, of course, to this excellent (and somewhat frightening) article: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

I absolutely agree. I now have an instinctive reaction to reach for my pocket whenever I'm feeling the slightest bit impatient, and I have caught myself on a couple of occasions reaching for my pocket when I already have my phone out, because I'm waiting for a page to load in the mobile browser.

It's an art piece, not a serious piece of espionage equipment, hence its form reflects its (symbolic) function.

Exactly. You might make 10 for your early prototypes but it's not unusual to make 100 or more for the final test run.

Aha, thank you. As most of my C code has been written for a single compiler and a single platform I was less aware of the pitfalls than I should have been. I will know now to be extra vigilant if I ever have to port that code.

I completely agree with everything you've said except for "any use of bitfields." The comma operator is ok in this circumstance, mixing unsigned and signed is a big no-no, but what have you got against bitfields? They're very useful when it comes to pulling sub-byte fields out of network packets.

"Selecting those with most artistic potential" were the exact words I used. The fundamental question is whether "found art" is copyrightable.

I love the small print at the bottom:

  Text copyright (c) 2004 Scott Nesin.
  Drawings copyright (c) 2004 Guy Nesin, used with permission.

The person who took the photos, since that would be the creative act. Sorting through the photos and selecting the good ones is also a creative act, but it is a derivative work because the original images are copyright protected. The difference comes about because monkeys are not capable of owning copyright, and hence are not capable of "creative acts" as far as copyright is concerned.

The monkeys took many photos, most of which were out of focus or poorly composed. Could not sorting through the essentially random photos that the monkeys took, and selecting those with most artistic potential, and perhaps cropping them to improve the composition, be considered a creative act?

It's not that simple, because you have to factor in all the negative externalities. That's what got us into this mess in the first place, people aren't paying the full cost of the planetary resources they are using.

It's an introductory post for a new blog. Obviously the author intends to go into much more detail in future posts.

What is a bee if not a miniature flying pollination machine? :)

It's called oversubscription and it's a very common practise. Statistically, not all of the ISP's customers are going to use all of their quota every month, so why should the ISP provide enough bandwidth to allow them to? That just means they're spending far more on infrastructure than is really necessary to service their customers' actual requirements.

Also, why should the quota be tied to the speed? When I want to download a movie, I want to download it as quickly as possible, but that doesn't mean I want to max out my bandwidth continually.

Looking at the gallery in the OP, most of the features enabled by CHDK are standard in DSLRs anyway - RAW shooting, longer shutter speeds, full manual control, etc. As a DSLR shooter, I was looking through that gallery thinking, "what does CHDK allow that I can't already do with my camera?" until I realised they were doing it with P&S cameras.

The way I read it, they were betting with free money, so they couldn't lose.

Why should I have to pause the comment auto-updater just so that I can finish reading the article?

I can understand Fermat's Last Theorem but I don't understand its proof.