chwahoo

I find it shocking that "technical/instructive/informative" books are disallowed. I can't begin to fathom a reasonable explanation for that.

To be more helpful, a mathy algorithms text, like CLR (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H-Corme...) might slip through the censors and be a good option--depending on whether your friend is comfortably enough with thinking about code abstractly.

I think prevention of semantic extraction to diagrams would better pitched as "another unforeseen negative consequence of agreeing to Elsevier's terms", rather than as a significant part of the problem. If this story became a major part of the larger narrative, Elsevier could respond to this particular concern in a limited way (special access for researchers that apply for it), rather than dealing with the more central concerns.

> Whites boards are treated as RAM, not Storage. Your phones have cameras now, use them!

This sounds like whiteboard space/time is a scarcity you haven't shown to be artificial. (I'm not saying your approach is wrong, just that it doesn't fit with the theme.)

I love creative policy ideas like this. It's an fascinating attempt to engineer a carrot and stick motivate the rich to help make all Americans better off. I'm not necessarily saying that I like to see highly engineered policies put into practice (and there's an argument to be made that people shouldn't be forced to have their livelihoods engineered), but it's fun to think about them.

The question I have is: Under this tax policy, what could/would the 1% actually do to ensure that the income of the 99% would grow at the same rate? Would the economically rational thing be to ignore the law? (perhaps hoping others would take action) Would they insist that more tax dollars go to education? (or is that too forward thinking?) Would lots of workers find themselves with immediate raises? Would the market hone in on previously unknown ways to make workers valuable? Would the 1% only attempt to help the top 10% or 25%, or would it be more fruitful to help the bottom X%?

Does it? It looks like an utterly generic smartphone to me.

People/organizations have bought into telecommuting to varying degrees. Like you, I'm still pretty skeptical, but there are certainly teams/individuals that wouldn't work any other way and have found success.

This only scales so far. Once more books are priced at impulse levels, it will provide less of an advantage and ultimately hurt your bottom line compared to the current typical price level.

It's similar to web apps being "free" in order to attract eyes/users. I think competing on other fronts (quality, connection with users/readers, obsession with consumer satisfaction) are preferable to cutting price because it's "too easy" to compete on price

"One factual error that the article makes is that DRM'd content is harder to pirate. That is simply not the case; every piece of content ever released is easily pirate-able. The only thing that DRM does is hurt legitimate users."

That's hardly a "factual error". I can email an mp3 to my friend and have them play it. I can't do the same with a DRM'd song. Is that not harder? Instead I have to make extra efforts to strip the DRM or find a non-DRM'd version elsewhere. For non-technical users, it might actually be "hard" to pirate DRM'd content.

While the article could/should have taken care to make the subtle point that you allude to, I find it's phrasing less disingenuous than yours.

However, if iOS is able to evolve additional flexibility as it is needed without too much pain, then perhaps they made the right design choices at the start?

So an attempt at a brief summary of (the non-thread-priorities portion of) her post:

The Android model of providing rendering isolation between apps/windows has limited hw acceleration of window contents rendering, which is a cause of some of Android's lagginess. That iOS forgoes this isolation and achieves better responsiveness is a reflection of a different security philosophy.

If this is an accurate summary, it's an interesting example of how platform design is wicked problem with complex interactions between concerns that you might expect to be orthogonal.

He's not arguing against capitalism. He's saying that the market is currently overvaluing certain kinds of businesses, causing resources to be misallocated. That's it.

You may be right that he is either wrong or making his argument for self-serving reasons. Or he might be right.

I suspect he means that investors are overvaluing small startups (relative to their chances of becoming successful). The consequence he worries about is that having too much funding available makes the opportunity too appealing to the best engineers, making it harder for ventures that will succeed to keep/attract talent.

I think it's the dissonant claims that the employees in question are "non-performers" but those same employees would be deserving of their jobs if they were to relinquish their stock options. If they were truly "non-performers", Zynga should probably let them go. Since they don't want to do that, it seems that Zynga really just wants to claw back some money.

The connection between the "Peter Principle" and this article isn't obvious to me. Can you say what you mean?

Nice! Only with the help of a track of magnets. Still, this is pretty slick.

I wonder what the "least-GNU" distro is at this point. Are there any that use LLVM/clang and uclibc, for example?

Is this true? Has Amazon/AWS asked people to take down blogs/articles that benchmark their systems?

To redeem the coin, you have to peel back a sticker. The hologram for peeled coins takes on a honeycomb appearance according to the link.

That page does allow you hear the changes. See the toggle-switch next to the picture of the guitar.

3d is one of the claimed features of the Lytro: http://blog.lytro.com/news/it-gets-better-lytro-3d-demo/

Perhaps in length, but it looks much thicker. It seems like it would be awkward to carry in a pocket.

I've been pretty excited about the idea of light-field photography/Lytro, but this thing looks pretty awkward to carry/use :(. I look forward to seeing reviews when they start to trickle out. Hopefully Lytro can figure out how to make it more compact in the next iteration.

While I agree that those terms are unclear and might mean different things to different people, I think "banning" them is solving a non-problem. I don't know anyone who would ask a developer to "rewrite the code to not be ugly" (without providing specifics). I think it's a useful informal term for when specifics aren't needed: "making this change will require us to touch the X module, which is really ugly, so factor that into your time estimate" (if both developers know the X module, this needs no further explanation). In other words, I've not encountered any discussions where "ugly"'s ambiguity has caused problems.

Sometimes "ugly" really seems to hit the nail on the head, like when code fails to communicate what it does or why it works (e.g., due to an implementation that looks like it resulted from brownian-motion trial and error).

"Utterly retarded" is far too strong a statement. The indie games of tomorrow may be built on "hitech ultra-HD" engines. The exploration of the space of games is advancing along many dimensions (including technology) and I think technology improvements will be needed for many of the great games to come.

Spotify, MOG, Pandora, Farmville, are all popular users of the platform.

This isn't G+ "settling" for anything. This is a user's clever way of using the G+ API to present G+ posts on his outside blog.

I own a tablet (Motorola XOOM) and have used an iPad on a couple of occasions. Those tablets are pitched as substitutes for the PC, suggesting that you might produce content using them. (Apples early release of an office suite for iPad is further evidence of this focus.)

However, so far, I've really only found tablets useful for content consumption. The Kindle Fire makes the bold (and I think right) choice to optimize for consumption. I suspect its smaller form factor will appeal to how more people will actually use these things. Similarly, I don't think people really want high-quality cameras or video on their tablets.

The Kindle Fire is exactly the right product for Amazon to release (given their strengths), and I suspect it might be match the needs of a larger group of people than the iPad.

However, content production in tablets will surely improve over time and I don't think iPad/Windows 8/Android are misguided. I'm just betting that Amazon latched on to a real hole in the market that can be profitable right now.

I use it for shopping for my next book when I'm too lazy to get out of bed and go to the computer.

I'm having a hard time parsing your post. The passage you quoted concerns cases where advertisers might not like the material on sites that rank highly in search results.

> so let's make some more money. Let's not send visitors to sites anymore!

You seem to be accusing Google of something, but I can't tell what. (Google sends me to sites all the time. I'm also not aware of accusations that advertisers affect results.)

> there is no reason to not own your own collection

There are reasons. The-all-you-can-eat model certainly makes much more music available, which is better for discovering new music. Also, if you regularly listen to a lot of new/different music, Spotify/Rdio/etc would be cheaper than iTunes/Amazon mp3.

Personally, I'm in a kind of "stuck" position where I'm trying to decide whether I should continue to buy music from Amazon, or should switch to an all-you-can-eat streaming service.