darshan

If so, then I think it is ethical, because all you're doing is challenging an incorrect stereotype that was unfairly giving men a slight boost and women a significant handicap.

Is your Android device not quite top of the line? I read recently that Rovio felt that they'd aimed a bit high with their required specs, and that they would focus on increasing performance on mid-range devices in the near future.

Back to the point: while I'm pretty comfortable with translating Canadian dollars, British Pounds, or Euros to US dollars, that's about as much as I can do in my head. I'm much happier seeing ~US$1.17 than ¥99, and I'm much more likely to buy the app.

So while I can see your point, I think it was definitely a change for the better, and it probably resulted in increased sales.

2) Carrier billing was enabled for T-Mobile several months ago. My understanding is that it will be coming to other carriers as well.

Personally, I've always been drawn to practices that emphasize simplicity, ease, gentleness, and acceptance in the cultivation of awareness. If I need to pee, I get up and pee; if I need to adjust my position, I adjust my position. I don't force my mind, I do the opposite: I let go of my mind and instead watch it. Thoughts come and thoughts go, and a surprising number of them are pretty funny when I'm not caught up in them.

It's truly easy because you can't do it wrong: the goal isn't to have no thoughts, be perfectly present, or have super-concentration. You will have thoughts (lots of them at first), you will have moments when you're present and moments when you're not, you will have pretty crappy concentration at first. Over time, you develop a very easy, effortless form of concentration that doesn't involve forcing anything. Concentration isn't the goal, just a pleasant byproduct.

The benefits? I feel much more centered and present, more relaxed, my mind is sharper. My mood tends to be better. To be sure, there are times when I'm cranky when I start and cranky when I finish -- we don't get to use it to force our experience to change. But by practicing being gently present, practicing accepting "this is what my experience is right now," I seem to have more pleasant moods and fewer, briefer unpleasant moods.

2) Roast it in a Hearthware i-Roast 2* .

3) Pull a ristretto [1] shot from a Rancilio Silvia* .

4) Enjoy!

I highly recommend home-roasting. It's fun to geek out about it and completely control the process, experiment with different roast levels and curves, etc. You get the freshest coffee in the world. If you drink coffee with any regularity, the roaster pays for itself quickly and then you're saving money on coffee [2].

* Of course other equipment can be used; I mention what I use because after a lot of research, I found these items to be the best bang-for-your-buck for beginners, and I'm quite happy with them after several years.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ristretto

[2] Assuming you like roasting, or at least don't mind it much. I think it's really fun, so it's a double win.

Other than that, I like the App Engine architecture much better than Heroku's, although there's a lot to like at Heroku as well.

The good news for app engine is that Google has announced planned support for this (1) feature in their roadmap (2). Allowing us to pay to reserve an extra JVM at all times would eliminate the issue.

(1) http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=24... (2) http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html

In November, I was feeling annoyed that there was no easy way to see exactly what charge my phone's battery was at (at least none that were acceptable to me). I'd been curious about Android development, so I decided to "scratch my own itch". I spent 4 or 5 hours building a little app that would display my exact percentage in the tray at the top. Most of the time was spent tweaking the icon -- I'm not a graphic designer, but I eventually came up with something that looked good enough.

I decided it would be worth the $25 fee to get a developer account and share it with the world. Programming is just a little hobby of mine, so while I've been using and loving open-source software for over a decade, I've contributed very little back to the community. So I figured if one or two people a day downloaded this little utility, I could feel good about myself. I put it online and went to bed. Eight hours later, over 700 people had downloaded it.

Over the next couple of weeks, I got a lot of feature requests that I personally had no use for, and I'm a busy student, so I didn't think I had much time or energy to add a bunch of features I didn't need myself. But then my friend suggested I make a paid version of the app with the extra features. I thought that was a neat idea -- I figured that if I averaged one purchase a day, I could make $20 a month (Google takes 30%), which to me is a lot of money at this point in my life.

It didn't take long before I was averaging 15 downloads a day. It stayed there for a while, until about month and a half ago, with no explanation I'm aware of, it jumped to averaging 50/day.

I carefully and courteously respond to an average of 2-3 emails a day, and I release updates when I can find the time. But that's still not very much time put into this, and I'm making almost as much money as when I used to work full time. (I don't have a college degree and worked in retail.) The free version averages 1000 downloads a day.

I'm willing to overlook that every dictionary I've checked includes sleep as an essential part of what defines napping, since they all suck at defining meditation. To my mind, if we take successfully falling asleep out of the definition, a nap would still mean lying down, closing your eyes, and not engaging in a specific mental practice, but rather letting the sense of sleepiness overcome you. You might fall asleep, or you might just lie there, consumed in sleepiness for 20 minutes.

As soon as you start an exercise to control what your mind/attention does or does not do, however, you're getting into meditation territory: directing your attention to specific parts of your body and willing them to relax, directing your mind to relaxing thoughts, directing your mind away from distressing thoughts, and trying to culture a state where your mind drifts freely all qualify as meditation techniques to me.

I think intentions also matter. If you goal is to fall asleep for a while, then you probably napped, even if you didn't manage to fall asleep. If your goal is to let your mind and body relax and refresh, without preference to whether sleep happens or not, then that's meditation to me.

Specifically, paragraphs like this can be found in hundreds of books on meditation:

The best way I can describe the feeling of napping is that you lie down or sit somewhere, and first focus on relaxing. Relax your muscle groups one by one, from your neck all the way down to your toes. Take a good minute or two to do this properly. Then finally you relax your thoughts. Let them drift off. It’s important to gently nudge those thoughts towards more relaxing topics – you won’t nap very well if you’re rehearsing a conversation with the boss – but at the same time, they need to largely drift on their own. Keep your eyes closed, your body relaxed, and let your thoughts meander from subject to subject without much order.

The post (not exactly an "article") comes off as a silly complaint that Google Maps isn't completely perfect, without seeming to understand that something as complex as this can't be perfect. There are always going to be trade-offs, and the label locations Google Map's algorithm chose seem perfectly reasonable to me for the zoom-levels displayed.

In other words, the albatross fly over the water, and when they see small, colored things floating near the surface, they assume they're small fish or other edible things. Up until quite recently (on the scale of albatross evolution), this was a pretty safe assumption.

So, no, low intelligence and/or desperation aren't implicated; rather, it's a matter of habitat and how prey are identified.

When he uploaded a very early version to an FTP server at Helsinki, his friend, who administered the server, changed the directory name from "freax" to "linux", thinking the latter was a much better name. Linus at first thought it would be too egotistical to name it that, but he let the name stick. I'm glad he did.

Blacks do look seriously underrepresented based on the response rates to the two questions. (Suggesting that blacks account for around 4% of OkCupid's users.) That's hardly proof of anything, but it does offer some credence to Coates' argument.

In the real world, it's often very hard to find compelling data, so we sometimes have to rely on compelling argument.

(I apologize if this was just a typo -- I'm not trying to nitpick, but to inform.)

So this is a way of ensuring that the most popular apps work beautifully on the flagship phones, as well as creating some positive publicity and developer goodwill.

And of course, I'm delighted. I thought I had another 18 months to wait before I would get a better phone.

This is a really big error, and I don't see how it could be a typo. Agonist ("doer") and antagonist (opposing) muscles contract simultaneously when stabilizing a joint, but when lifting weights, the antagonists of the primary action (triceps and to some extent anconeus for curls) are relaxed both during concentric and eccentric contraction of the agonists (biceps, brachialis, and to some extent brachioradialis and a few other muscles of the forearm for curls). That is to say, the author's claim is absolutely wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_contraction#Eccentric_co...

My guess is that the fact that the organic bananas you have access to are small and mealy has nothing to do with them being organic. Your store must just get their organic and non-organic bananas from totally different places, and the organic ones just happen to suck.

From the second video here: http://androidandme.com/2010/02/news/adobe-teases-us-with-fl...

"From a developer perspective, there's nothing that I needed to do to ensure that my game is functioning on this [touchscreen] tablet device. It operates the same as it does on the desktop or on this tablet device. Obviously the inputs are mapped, and that's taken care of automatically by Flash player. So Flash Player is able to bring hundreds and thousands of casual games that [are] online from day one." (Emphasis mine.)

What the hell? He absolutely did win a Nobel Prize (technically, the "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences").

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2008/

Yes, that's the point. DHH isn't recommending removing all rules; he's recommending eliminating the approval process to get apps/updates into the Store. Apple would still, of course, have the ability to remove apps that violated the TOS.

The Android Market is run in just this manner, and it isn't overrun with pornography. So having rules and enforcing them but not having to pre-approve every release seems to work.

Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android.

While there do appear to be some developers pushing fake updates, I'm not sure that exactly constitutes a problem. If it ever gets out of hand, there are a lot of ways this could be managed that don't involve pre-approval.

(Yes, it's quite a bit smaller than Apple's App Store, but it's still plenty big enough that if you were on track, we'd see evidence there.)

The one thing I had to do (besides launching it as 'chromium-bin --no-sandbox --enable-webgl', as you mentioned) was to create a symbolic link from /usr/lib/libGL.so to /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 .