thalur

It looks like the entire comment is the quote - the only closing " I can see is at the very end.

I don't know if it is the same thing that you are alluding to, but LIDAR can be used to measure distant wind speeds. I don't know if the output would be suitable for shooting, but it has been used in sailing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIDAR#Meteorology_and_atmosphe...

http://optics.org/article/34878

http://www.gizmag.com/catch-the-wind-racers-edge-laser-wind-...

To me, the obvious follow-up would be social anxiety because it is intrinsically hard to talk to other people about, yet discussing it with a computer doesn't pose any difficulty. (I'm currently reading a 'use CBT to cure social anxiety' book which has been rather eye-opening.)

Regardless, I like the site, though it sometimes gets a bit choppy on my old macbook pro. I think £50 might be a bit steep as an up-front cost - it almost put me off.

Also, have you considered doing an iphone app for the diary? I use some supposedly motion sensing app to wake me up with music. It doesn't work very well, but for your purposes I could easily see just thumping the phone when I notice I'm awake instead of having to look at a clock and remember a time.

The thing that jumps out at me is your first question: the majority of the actions I get from e-mail come in the text of the email and are external to the mail client (implement this feature, fix this bug) rather than part of it (reply with an answer, accept meeting request).

I think the reason why email works for this is that somehow email "comes to me" whereas everything else I have to consciously "go to it" to check it. I recognise that some of this is habit, some of it is how the email client is integrated into the computer (outlook at work, mail on my iphone) so that it presents new stuff to me directly, and some of it is that it presents a single place to check rather than having to hit refresh on a bunch of webpages to see if anything has changed on each.

It seems to me that you have introduced an unnecessary third party to the problem (the agent) that holds the same power and position as the current problem party in the copyright arena (the publisher/label). The interesting development in recent years has been the removal of this party from the equation (self-pub ebooks, kickstarter etc.) so it would be a shame to bring it back.

Alternatively, how much of the stats were the same machines failing repeatedly until they found stable settings?

[Anecdote] If my brief experience is anything to go by, overclocking involves lots of crashes until you get it right. Once it is working I would expect no more failures than a shop-bought PC, but by that point the statistics are already skewed by all those crashes that I don't care about.

I'm curious, does anyone know if this study counted all the computers that didn't have any of these failures at all during the time period? Or is it just those that reported a failure?

I would have guessed the opposite - I would expect the least significant bits to have a random distribution (if the image is a photo from a camera, that is) so if the least significant bits of the image have a non random distribution that might be a hint that there is something hidden there.

Of course, all of this is moot if the image is lossily compressed.

You would have to weight that against possibly increased use of artificial lighting, but it might work.

Finding drops for the AH isn't as powerful a reward loop (at least pre-inferno) because whether you get a reward or not is at the whim of other players, and because your reward (or failure) is delayed by up to 48 hours. This may be different in the end-game (I didn't get addicted enough to get there) but during levelling it is quite weak.

I think there's definitely something to your second point though. Are we less prone to addiction, or more likely to recognise it and choose to break the loop?

With any luck Ocado will step up for this one, it seems an ideal fit with their current business model.

Can your friend prove the Haskell and ML compilers he is using are 100% bug free as well? And the hardware it is running on? (both the compiler and the execution environment if they differ)

"The rebuttal of course is usually the same. Used games fuel new game sales; this is GameStop's response and some buy into it. Of course, in reality it's pure conjecture without any evidence."

...just like most of this article then. I doubt many dispute the outcome (decline in game quality, trend towards multiplayer or DLC), but the author hasn't even shown a correlation let alone cause.

FWIW I don't agree with the rebuttal quoted here. I would simply point to the same trend in Hollywood movies. Greed and risk aversion have done the damage, not piracy or second hand sales.

The last paragraph really bothered me, but I'm not entirely sure why; it felt authoritarian, thought police etc.

That aside, the idea of a gender neutral pronoun sounds good to me. I'd also like a specifically plural "you", for example when you're talking to a representative of a company and want to refer to the company rather than the representative.

She describes her planning method in a post linked from the submission [0] and it has quite a lot in common with the Snowflake method.

[0] http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/how-i-plot-nov...

At the furthest point in its orbit, the command module was probably about the diameter of the moon (plus a bit) away from the guys on the surface, so ~2000 miles.

Or use a random picture from a set which the user has set up with different "passwords".

Like one of these? http://www.campingsurvival.com/kahaemdewama.html

"Programmers are interchangeable" seems to come up quite a lot, but I don't think we have a monopoly on it: celebrities (where it is the individual's brand that sells) are the only example that aren't interchangeable that comes to mind.

One thing that may disadvantage us is that programmers are still one big blob: we don't define our specialities strongly enough to the outside world (or to ourselves). For example, teachers have their subjects: one might consider two maths teachers interchangeable but not a maths teacher and a French teacher, and that is obvious to a non-teacher. You and I might see the absurdity with swapping a web programmer for an embedded safety-critical systems programmer, but I don't think it is at all obvious to the outside world.

If you are using C++, you can make the units (dimensionality) compile-time checked using templates. See: http://learningcppisfun.blogspot.com/2007/01/units-and-dimen... (that isn't where I came across it, but the code looks basically the same.) It's easy to add more dimensions for any units you care about (pixels for example).

I don't think it works correctly though... it uses "Author" as the first link whereas the first link in the text of the article is "webcomic" ("Author" is in the summary pannel on the side)

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Xkcd

I can only speak for myself, but the arguments you list aren't things I would really consider at the time of purchase: I've never yet wanted to buy a book anonymously using cash, though I won't rule out wanting to do so in the future; the lack of/limited lending is a concern, but if the cost of the book is low (e.g. ~£1 like a lot of self-pub books are) then I would be happy to buy a copy instead of borrow one, and if I'm buying a book (of any sort) the lending potential of that book doesn't figure into my decision at all anyway.

There are a lot people who do open source stuff and make a big thing out of it ("I think a github link is more important than a CV" etc.) to the point where those of us who don't, the silent (majority?), may feel we are somehow lesser programmers as a result.

I was thinking of reviews along the lines of "I'm sure this will be great. 5*" I'm not sure if I've seen any like that on Amazon though, now that I think about it.

I have no probelem with people leaving 1* reviews without reading the book, just like I have no problem with Amazon removing those reviews (and only those reviews). Yes they are annoying, but they are also one of the few visible ways to protest. While "not buying the book" will probably be effective in the long term, an indivudial non-purchase isn't going to be noticed by anyone.

A similar situation to this frequently arises when big games are released on Steam. Amazon then gets flooded by 1* reviews from people who can't get Steam to work properly on release day or something.

I also find the opposite very annoying: when fans rate something as 5* before it's even released.

"When you buy a car, do you insist that it has manual windows and no power steering?"

But when you are learning how a car works and trying to build one, you would start off with one with manual windows and no power steering.

The outcome in Japan may have no impact on the statistics, but it will have a massive impact on the opinons and beliefs of the human decision makers. Waiting for it to resolve will allow calmer heads to prevail.

I may be wrong, but I thought the choice between DRM or not for books was up to the publisher and not Amazon?

I'm not sure your example works because one would not normally expect a person to be turned into a cake, so the "give you a cake" reading is going to seem much more plausible.

If the button said "Make myran a genius", what would you expect to happen?

Some GPS units can measure speed by doppler shift. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the receivers in smartphones can't.