ShabbyDoo

I have a prosthetic leg and travel weekly. Apparently, the TSA's official policy is (or at least was) that, if asked my me if I am allowed to remove my leg and place it on the x-ray conveyor belt, they are to tell me doing so is forbidden. However, if I simply do so, they are not to stop me. I presume the theory to be that travelers might somehow mis-understand and create a PR disaster by claiming that an amputee was forced to remove his leg.

If I leave my leg on and walk through the metal detector, I must wait around until a male agent is available to swab me, check for explosive residue, and determine that I am not carrying a weapon. It's much more efficient to take the leg off and waddle on my knees through the metal detector.

Most of the TSA agents know me at this point, but occasionally a new person will be caught off guard. Usually, they are speechless in fear of breaking two seemingly conflicting rules: (1) don't offend, humiliate, etc. and (2) don't allow passengers to do stuff they aren't supposed to do. I see some panicked motioning to a supervisor and hear, "Oh, he comes through here all the time! ...Yes, it's allowed." Occasionally, a new agent will tell me, "You can't do that, sir!" When I reply that I've done so well over a hundred times in the past couple years, they defer to a supervisor who informs them of my "rights." [Quotes to convey the absurdity of the situation, of course.]

It is because of my experiences in hearing TSA agents make-up a rule out of thin air that I do not doubt the author of the blog posting. Interestingly, I suspect that my notoriety actually has lead to less scrutiny over time -- the frequency at which my carry-ons are hand inspected has decreased over time.

The number of times I've implemented something by convention due to the lack of this construct... One common use case is that I like "value objects" -- an AccountId class vs. just a String or an Integer. I usually implement them using some sort of internment internally -- WeakHashmap, Guava Interner, etc. When reading from a wire format and using value objects, one must presume the existence of a fromString(String key), fromInt, etc. method. I'd love to state explicitly that all ValueObjects have particular, generic-ified static constructors. Much cleaner. And, it avoids the cliche Java programmer shame of implementing AbstractValueObjectFactory, etc. Some static state, if isolated and properly managed, makes life easier.

A year or so ago, I wrote what was effectively a small subset of the JDK8 streams stuff. Incredibly useful, but hard to get right. It's good the core APIs will be part of the JDK so that, like the collections API, they may be adopted with some trust that others will do the same.

Does the cost of housing in the Bay Area coupled with older people's need to provide bedrooms for their children cause them to move to other parts of the country even if they've spent their 20's in The Valley?

Moviegoers are biased, and Hollywood wants to create products which sell. The people behind the cameras often are old even if the female stars on screen are barely out of high school. If I see ugly shirts in a store year after year, I don't blame the fashion house behind them, I blame the people who keep buying them.

I'm 37 and have not been concerned. If I compare my current work to that I did a decade ago, it's obvious to me how much better I am -- faster, better at design, fewer bugs, etc. AFAIK, no one has turned me down for work because I'm too old. Perhaps they've chosen someone younger and less expensive, but that's fine by me -- maybe not a rational choice, but not one based on discrimination.

Other than code quality, how was I different as a 25 year-old? Much more likely to adopt new technologies, libraries, etc. because they were shiny and hyped. Did this serve me well? Sometimes I got lucky, but I also wasted a lot of time figuring out the hard way that Technology X was way too bleeding edge for production. I was way too willing to go along with (or even suggest!), massive, all-things-to-all-people architectures which looked great as block diagrams but didn't match up with timelines, project risk, etc. Now, I push for incremental change over big bang projects.

One way I've regressed in the eyes of an employer: I'm no longer willing to put in long hours in exchange for vague promises of future pay-outs (bonus, promotion, whatever).

Because I fly Southwest so much, I get free WiFi when available. Of my ten or attempts at using it, I've had no connectivity at least three times. Of those, perhaps five attempts resulted in connectivity so slow that it was only useful for background email checking and painfully slow web browsing. The remaining two "successful" uses had a 128K-ish downstream at best. Ping times (to whatever www.google.com resolved to) were 500+ ms at best and multi-second at worst. Periods of flakiness lasting a few minutes at a time were common. So, unless I have some urgent usage requirement, I just stay offline to avoid the hassle and anger.

It would have been even more profound for each daughter to have been made a prodigy in a different specialization. I suppose the availability of instructors in three separate areas would have been a barrier though.

Why doesn't eBay provide better ways for buyers to increase the belief of sellers that they will follow-thru on their obligations? I'm thinking of something along the lines of "earnest money" requirements common for real estate transactions. Could eBay require buyers to put 10% of their maximum bid in escrow via Paypal? If a buyer flaked out, he would lose his 10% to the seller as compensation for the time wasted. To implement such a scheme, eBay could at first offer sellers the opportunity to discount items won by buyers who made escrow deposits. Those buyers who didn't want to play along could bid as they do today albeit at an economic disadvantage. Eventually, eBay could allow sellers to require escrow. Even as a buyer, I would be happier if escrow was required because I would be less worried about shill bidders and others who run-up prices with no intention of paying. Of course, this scheme requires that all parties trust eBay/Paypal to act responsibly -- something the comments in this thread suggest is far from a given.

They're verifying that I created a PayPal account which links to a bank account to which I have read-level transaction ledger access. It's a better-than-nothing proxy, but it doesn't prove that the person setting-up the PayPal account has the legal right to withdraw funds from that account.

I wish my bank/brokerage/etc all had the equivalent of "valet key" logins where I could set-up and manage accounts for others which only had a subset of my own rights. For example, I'd like to hire an assistant to reconcile/aggregate/classify my financial records, but I'd either have to take a lot of time to gather everything up or expose the ability for this person to steal from me. My brokerage account includes the right to buy/sell securities, but I only want my bookkeeper to be able to view my transaction history.

One problem I see is that access to one's financial records sometimes is used as a proxy for identity, much like the presumption that, if you can read an email sent to a particular address, you must "own" that email address. Didn't PayPal once (or even still does?) debit N cents from one's bank account and then ask what amount was charged as a way of verifying new users?

So, does anyone here know any Baltimore cops? Could someone who works downtown walk outside, find a cop, and ask? We're all speculating here.

Is there any evidence in regard to the nature of quota-esque incentives? Are the measurement periods monthly vs. say, every two weeks? One would assume that, if quotas exist, they would have some periodicity, but there certainly are other schemes.

Do union-required holiday pay rates cause the PD to only staff for minimum requirements? Perhaps the PD simply staffs at minimum levels because most officers want those days off? Do holidays cause so many "real" crimes that the police don't have time to write tickets?

It would be interesting to ask the Baltimore PD what incentives are given to officers to write speeding tickets. [I bet they claim none] Then, ask some cops on the street what the real incentive system is like. From there, use the data to see how cops respond to both the real and official incentives.

I wonder if ticket writing happens when there's nothing better to do. It would be interesting to see the correlation between arrests for "real" stuff and traffic tickets. Are there differences in pay rates based on days/times worked? Do more tickets get written when rates are low vs. 2.5x pay on a holiday? Does the PD only staff for necessities when rates are higher or when officers most desire time off?

I'm surprised I haven't read something yet about Stephen Levitt looking at this data. This provides such incredible insight into the impact of incentives and lets us compare the probability that the official incentive policy is perceived as accurate by the officers vs. the likely real but unwritten incentives.

Yeah. Tethering still is too mysterious. If it's not working, which device is at fault? For awhile (pre-ICS), my Droid RAZR had a bug where it required a reboot before the hotspot would work. Of course, it failed silently and claimed to be making itself available!

I know little about Bluetooth 4 except that it's supposed to be low power. Could it be used to "scan" for interested/allowed devices and then "step-up" to a higher power, higher bandwidth connection?

I don't mind this so much presuming it can do Bluetooth tethering with my phone [vs WiFi due to power usage issues]. If I'm the device's user, I'll likely have my phone with me, so having a redundant radio in the device doesn't add value. And, if I let someone else use the device while I'm not around, the likelihood is that there will be an available WiFi source.

I'd like it-just-works connectivity between my phone and any other devices I carry with me. Right now, I have to hit a couple buttons on both devices -- a pain for short-term usage scenarios.

A-List folks get auto-assigned a boarding order 36 hours before a flight starting with A-16. A1-15 are the "Business Select" seats for which a premium is charged. So, on flights with many frequent fliers, many of the "A" slots may be not be available even to those who check in early.

I bet she's a woman who is already too rich and powerful to go down without a fight. HP needed her much more than she needed HP. I can't imagine that she'd put up with nonsense given her power -- the ability to walk away and likely tank the stock. Someone without fuck-you money might stick around and compromise. However, she must either be doing this to cement her legacy as a successful CEO or for a massive increase in wealth. Accepting mediocrity doesn't allow her to achieve either.

I have a HP LaserJet 4100 series at home which I bought several years ago on eBay for < $200. It's amazingly reliable and cheap to print with due to an abundance of 3rd party toner cartridges -- not that it matters much when we average perhaps a couple hundred pages a month in usage. Perhaps this device is so old that it emerged from HP's old school engineering culture?

The author doesn't mention if he had called getLastError after inserting data:

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/getLastError+Command

The MongoDB "way" is that clients know the importance of their data and can choose write strategies which make the proper trade-off between insertion throughput/latency and durability/consistency.

Didn't LinkedIn originally offer HR recruiters some version of their system which didn't show photos so that they wouldn't be worried about the liability of violating US discrimination laws by using headshots to bypass minorities? This suggests that HR departments would fear the purchase of legally prohibited data types.

"It is getting increasingly difficult to just invest in companies you believe in."

So, let's say that Mark's right and the combination of HFT and emphasis on macro trends has caused some securities to be mis-priced compared to his analysis of their long-term prognoses. As a long-term investor, shouldn't he be delighted for the opportunity to bargain shop? If anyone can stay solvent longer than markets stay irrational, it's him.

Perhaps Mayer should have randomized distribution so that Yahoo's mobile offerings would be consumed by employees via all three platforms. Perhaps the downside is that loyalists to a particular platform would just use their personal phones instead if another platform was forced upon them.

Yes. The piece missing for me in most answers I've seen is eventing. Does one pump a series of events/state changes into the CowModel and see what actions pop-out? Does the model involve interactions with other cows where the actions of one cow cause actions of others? If so, one must have an event queue to handle chain reactions. How discrete are the events? Is there a "temp is 89F" event where, for every N minutes the cow is in that temperature in direct exposure, it becomes more likely to seek shade? If so, the "it is 89F" event must be triggered multiple times. And, such a rule requires that the past states of the cow be retained. I think the if/then/else logic is only part of the solution to a simulation problem of this sort.

"The Veteran - The first ten lines of any function, even an accessor, are all assert statements. All the error conditions for each function are dutifully checked and handled"

Even spent a couple hours tracing through a zillion code paths to reverse-engineer the implicit contract for a particular method? Do any clients explicitly check for the FooException which bubbles up the stack when Method A accepts null for an Integer value (fun with Java) and passes that null down into Method B which in turn, ....

I'll take overzealous assertion vs. the alternative of under-definition any day.

The article cites customer service interactions as the obvious (and obviously effective) remediation step once a player is identified as likely to quit in a few weeks. I'd like to know if this is really true. What if the game's fundamental problem is that players become bored over time? What can a CSR do to fix this? Probably not much. The analysis shows that changes in gameplay frequency are far from a random walk and do indeed predict future declines, but it doesn't offer much in the way of clues for how to keep customers engaged. What if it could be shown that a breakdown of a player's in-game social structure (I'm not a gamer, so I'm being vague) also predicts churn? Perhaps helping the player to find some new relationships would be effective. Is game play repetitive? Maybe decreasing frequency of novel experiences predicts churn? This would be good feedback for game designers. Predicting the future isn't of much valuable if it isn't actionable.

So, should BufferBox pay 7-Eleven, or should the money transfer in the other direction? On one hand, the BufferBox takes up valuable floorspace, especially in the urban markets most likely to be BufferBox's bread and butter. On the other hand, effectively guaranteeing 20+ people walking through the front doors of a store every day certainly has value. What percentage of people receiving packages will realize while walking past the refrigerator case that they have no beer in their fridge?

So is following around the UPS truck pretending to be doing door-to-door sales.