Kuiper

I worry less about water damage to my Kindle than I worry about water damage to physical books, even without any sort of protective covering. If I spill coffee on my Kindle, I simply wipe it off. If I spill coffee on a bound volume of paper, I consider it to be "ruined." My Kindle has demonstrated far greater fortitude than paper in weathering spills.

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20&%20WIL... (page 6 for remarks on insurance)

Obviously, certain kinds of disaster pose a greater threat to happiness than others. For example, health insurance may be a worthwhile investment for some, while property insurance may not.

This sounds like the kind of feature that some users would embrace, and could even become a selling point. Remember justin.tv?

On top of this, sometimes hardcore fans will buy multiple copies of their favorites to inflate sales numbers. For an extreme example, see this man who bought 5500 copies of a single AKB48 CD: http://blog.esuteru.com/archives/3347822.html

To put things into perspective, the Bakemonogatari blu-rays sold around 50,000 copies per volume during the release window, which catapulted it to the status of "most commercially-successful anime since Evangelion." Based on this, it's not hard to see how a base of several thousand really dedicated fans could be enough to justify an anime production.

Another thing that may seem obvious, but you can input multiple strings and get a nice visual comparison. For example, try "cleveland, detroit, flint".

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

"Amorality, the absence of morality; for example, a stone, a chair, or the sky may be considered amoral",

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/amoral

"not involving questions of right or wrong; without moral quality; neither moral nor immoral."

The goal isn't to judge people based on whether they are "overweight" or such, but rather to institute a system that charges customers proportionally to the cost of transporting them.

As someone who hops around the country a fair bit, I can definitely think of one place where this would be an appealing option: airports. I am sometimes able to find a random stranger to engage in conversation, but it's often a crapshoot trying to find someone who's both willing to engage in conversation and interested in the same subjects; I usually settle for just the former. This actually doesn't work too poorly (I've found that on the whole, people who fly tend to be more interesting than a typical cross-section of the population), but I'd be more than willing to spend my hour-long layover with an algorithmically-selected stranger. If I'm also able to find activity partners, all the better; I'd be happy to start packing my portable chess set and Magic the Gathering deck in my carry-on luggage.

I presume that the same is also true of eBay in some fashion.

A good example is this post from several weeks ago on the subject of denying blood donations from donors with a history of male-to-male sexual contact: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3237895 It's very fact-centric, to the exclusion of any sort of pandering or apology. When I read this post several weeks ago, I immediately thought, "this would never fly on reddit; people would quickly downvote it for being 'insensitive' or similar."

This also reminded me of PG's essay "Persuade xor Discover." http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html HN users seem to care less about "persuasion," which can lead to perceptions of "unfriendliness" because things aren't written to please people. However, it does lead to a lot of interesting discussion that couldn't take place on a site more concerned with being "nice."

There are two ways that one typically goes about improving on the existing record. The first is to look at the video posted by the current record holder, dissect the run, and find all of the small mistakes that the current record-holder made. Shave off a few seconds here, a few seconds there, and by the end of your run you've beaten a game in 4 hours and 57 minutes instead of 5 hours. That's playing harder.

The other way to break existing records is to start completely from scratch, map out the game and figure out if there's a different route to take that the previous runner didn't. Maybe it's doing the levels in a different order so you spend less time walking across the world map. Maybe you spend an extra 10 minutes picking up a stronger sword that allows you to save 20 minutes over the course of the game because you're killing enemies faster. These are the kinds of improvements that lead to people turning a 5 hour game into a 4 hour game. That's playing better, not harder.

I think a lot of it also has to do with expectations from parents. For a lot of students, graduating with an engineering degree and a 2.5 GPA will leave mom and dad less happy than an English degree with a 3.5 GPA, even though the former is more likely to be useful in the job hunt.

I've never lived out of a city with a population of less than 100,000 so I suspect that the social dynamic might be somewhat different there.

Here's a link to the video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...

Plus, there's all kinds of other neat things that you can have the tech do with regards to scoring, like having a system to scale/normalize scores so that a team of 10 adults can compete against a team of 10 children and come out with roughly a 50/50 win ratio.

The main thing that people like about the Steam client now, as you mentioned, are the client's community support features. People also like the Steam store's frequent discounts. Steam community integration didn't exist until late 2007, and 2007 was also the first year that they did a major holiday sale. Before that point, most people were either neutral on the system, or disliked it because the client was a waste of resources. Its memory footprint was big enough to make a significant performance impact on older machines, which is significant when you consider that Counter-Strike, the most popular game on Steam at that point, was a game from 1999.

People eventually came to like Steam, but that wasn't until Steam began functioning as a service that added value to a product, rather than an impediment that devalued a product. The Battle.net 2.0 is plagued with many of the problems of the original Steam client, and it confers very few of the benefits that the present-day Steam does. People don't just hate the idea of it, they hate the very client itself and will continue hating it until Blizzard does something to fix it. Forcing it on the playerbase when it is still in its current unpolished state is making a lot of people very upset, and reasonably so.