enko

Since you asked for feedback... get a native speaker to review your copy. "leverage on" - you don't need the "on" (this is in 2 places). "Notes are information that aimed at becoming knowledge" - doesn't make sense, perhaps say "aims" instead? hierarchizations - just say hierarchies.

Well, you asked : P

I know people your age or older who have successfully transitioned careers to software development, from a standing start. I wouldn't let it put you off at all!

I think there are more similarities than the author supposes between these "networks" and the traditional asian enterprise groups. For example, it's a classic feature of the keiretsu to have interlocking shareholdings, directors, and financial foundations, ensuring cross-pollination of resources and broadly aligned interests. I think that has more than a few parallels with emerging "business networks" such as ycombinator.

Obviously the scale is a little different, but hey, give it a century...

Got the email as well. I would be looking at a new price of $456/yr, up from my current $39/yr. Needless to say that is totally unacceptable.

Thing is I wouldn't even mind paying a little bit more, I know $39/yr is pretty cheap. $60/yr would be fine, or even more maybe. But $456/yr is not fine at all and it baffles me why they would even attempt this. Did it occur to no-one to ask, hm, do you think our customers will mind us jacking the price 10-fold or higher?

Looking into a switch to dnsmadeeasy. Even if they reverse course, I'll probably change now, since Zerigo management has obviously gone mad and I no longer trust them to run a service I rely on.

Hilariously, when I tried to google that exact rapgenius article, 'twas not a direct link to be found. I imagine 2013 has suddenly turned into a "Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year" for them, too.

That article is textbook character assassination based on an unimportant nit-pick the washington post itself couldn't even "fact-check". Instead, Booz Hamilton provided Snowden's base salary - not how much he actually earned, which could have included overtime, bonuses, any other kind of allowance. It seems entirely likely to me that Snowden's actual take home could have been well above the base rate. Certainly no-one has tabled any evidence otherwise.

So you're basing your skepticism on what? That he used the word salary instead of income? That's why he has lost all credibility? Not to mention this personal detail has nothing to do with the actual allegations.

Congratulations, you swallowed this textbook hit piece hook, line and sinker. Its entire purpose was to make people "skeptical", of course, and it obviously worked.

> Chinese people being offended by the colonial label of Peking instead of using Beijing

I think the only Chinese people who would be "outraged" by calling their capital Peking (the old southern way of pronouncing it) vs Beijing (the new northern way of pronouncing it) are the same types getting "outraged" over this ridiculous event - they were looking for something to get angry about anyway. For most I believe it is simply a historical name. Do New Yorkers get outraged if you sidle up to them and whisper "New Amsterdam"?

Anyway, it's still generally called Peking in plenty of languages, including Spanish, French, German and Japanese, and I don't see any great international incidents over that.

> 1.25 TB of Touhou music

I am going to have nightmares tonight...

> Winklevoss twin hopes Bitcoin valuation will top $40k

FTFY

Well, kudos to them for doing that, at least. Of course it's awful that you could be out ~$3k, but imagine how bad it could have been if they hadn't been so proactive.

> you don't want your investment to get hit by a bus

So take out life insurance on the founder.

And if two founders are essential for a successful startup, then there is actually twice as much chance of it failing by one of them being hit by a bus.

For my money I'd rather a proper integrated system like the Panasonic range: http://cycle.panasonic.jp/products/electric/

I've ridden a number of electric-assist bicycles and the panasonic system worked brilliantly - seamless and intuitive boosting exactly when needed, so hills just seem to disappear. They seem a lot more convenient, too, with the battery integrated into the lights system.

Yamaha's pedelec system is also worth a look, though I didn't find it quite as intuitive as the panasonic: http://www.yamaha-motor.co.jp/pas/lineup/

> Since the iPhone, we've added some pixels to its screen and a fingerprint scanner to the button

Did you forget about the 40x speed increase? Sheesh. I bet you're not still using an iPhone 1.

And no, I don't believe everyone will be being chauffeured around in their self-driving cars by 2025, but it will be an option at some price point. In fact, I expect that by 2020, if not earlier.

Yeah, was about to comment that that is a very nice bit of CGI. Something about the matte colour of the metals trips my detector. And the lighting on the workers, the too-perfect luminosity of the light sources, that "composited" feel. If you look at the first picture, it's probably the weakest - look at the 3 transverse beams.

Amazing work, though - right on the edge of genuine photorealism.

update: "foto oficial nº14" is also a weak one. Look at the workers up the top, the lighting on them is strange. And that guy observing from what seems to be an impossible position, missing the bottom half of his body.

Geeze it's good though - just that subtle uncanny valley in the lighting, and even so, I wouldn't bet my life on it!

update 2: actually, I don't know what to believe. It looks composited, but it's just so damn detailed, maybe I'm trying too hard. Would love to know the truth.

Holograms and personal flying machines required huge technological breakthroughs to make them possible. Those breakthroughs still haven't occurred. Teleporting - questionable it's even possible.

Self-driving cars are already on the streets in certain cities. Did you see the recent S-class test in Germany?[1] They're here right now, maybe not quite production-ready, but certainly in beta. There's no comparison at all.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKqJccK_EkM

That's an interesting video. I'd quite like to know if it's being coordinated "from above", or whether the cars are making their own decisions - the latter would be rather more impressive, since I think a fully managed road system is much further off, if not an impossibility.

I think a lot of people are hoping for a "remaster" of FFVII, including me. I'd buy a PS4 solely for FFVII in an instant, assuming they did a good job of course.

FFX would be great, but I'm annoyed it's only on PS3, which I skipped.

> it's not because they're stupid or ignorant

They may not be stupid, but that's pretty much the definition of ignorance.

Congratulations, you've discovered unicode composition!

  2.0.0p247 :045 > Unicode::compose("e\u0308").unpack('U').first.to_s(16)
   => "eb" 
  2.0.0p247 :046 > Unicode::compose("\u00eb").unpack('U').first.to_s(16)
   => "eb" 
  2.0.0p247 :047 > Unicode::decompose("e\u0308").unpack('U').first.to_s(16)
   => "65" 
  2.0.0p247 :048 > Unicode::decompose("\u00eb").unpack('U').first.to_s(16)
   => "65"

I presume the ones you pasted in were changed by the browser. His examples are not wrong at all, indeed how can a string be "wrong"?

Perhaps that's true, but you can be sure they're not getting their fix in the Mail, which regularly takes ferocious swipes at that element of society.

Which is another reason I have a kind of grudging respect for them. You'll never read a word against the 1-percenters in the Murdoch press.

Yeah, I shouldn't have really worded it like that. It's difficult making characterisations and I went a bit too far. I do believe, however, that there's a segment of the middle classes who have a lot of dissatisfaction with their general lot, and the Mail is a way for them to vicariously lash out at "the system", johnny foreigner, the rich, the paedophiles, and all of those other easy targets.

I'm going to leave what I wrote as is and reap what I sow, but regret putting it in such a nasty tone now. Sorry!

I agree with everything you wrote. But the problem is, what can anyone do to fix it?

I mean it's easy to come up with a plan to "fix" Murdoch. Simply tighten media ownership rules, so that one family or organisation can't own more than a certain small percentage of media. And I take your point that the Sun is pretty clownish in the UK, but in Australia they're far more insidious. (¶)

But how do you fix the Mail? They're like this perfect endgame of free press. There's no big conspiracy; they're simply the answer to the question: "what does the angry disenfranchised demographic want to read about?". And while I lament the means by which said class seeks to assuage its anger, I do sympathise that they have a lot to be angry about.

All this is why I find it hard to wrestle with the question of the Mail. I want to hate them, but some part of me holds back, because I feel that's too close to simple class discrimination, and because I can't shake the feeling that they're the symptom, not the cause, of society's ills.

(¶) Check out the Murdoch press's outrageous bias in the recent Australian election: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/05/daily-t...

> The Daily Mail has to be one of the most repugnant media organizations

Hm, I don't know. I sort of respect them, in a way. In some ways I think of them as the authentic voice of the impotent lower middle classes, lashing out at everything around them, greedy, cynical, childish and shallow, blaming others, ever seeking some outraged scandal to distract them from their otherwise mundane lives. Hate the Mail if you will, but you're basically hating their audience too.

I don't like the Mail, but at least they're independent, seemingly serving no-one's agenda but their own. Murdoch is much worse, in my opinion.

Well, I'd certainly never pretend to have the first-hand experience you have! I was only reporting my impressions from a TV documentary, 2 years ago. I don't even remember which area it was, or the program's name. You obviously seem to know what you're doing; maybe my impressions were incorrect, or the program spun it that way.

As for the kids - don't get me wrong, plenty were healthy; but they did not conform to normal asian notions of physical attractiveness. The unavoidable conclusion was that the chinese adoptive parents, who had first choice, cared greatly about this factor, whereas the americans either couldn't tell or didn't care.

This is a fascinating, well-written account, a decade after the events: http://www.laweekly.com/2007-03-22/news/heaven-s-gate-the-se...

> China and Russia would often give severely challenged children to US adoptive parents

About 2 years ago I was watching a documentary about china-to-america adoptions on japanese television. While the point was never explicitly raised, the viewer could not help but notice that most or all of the children up for adoption - no interested chinese parents having being found - were, and there's no nice way to say this, quite physically unattractive, developmentally challenged, or both.

The program showed American couples arriving to claim their new family member and I was struck by how unwitting they seemed. I got the impression they simply did not have enough experience with asian children to realise that their adoptive child had, to put it brutally, a pretty poor genotype, with a host of physical and behavioural ramifications.

If this is a joke, it's a pretty serious one https://twitter.com/CyborgUSA/status/403664555944865792

Well, you learn something new every day..

It is hard to disagree with you about the third-time DUI. I guess I am against "automatic" laws in general; it reeks of populism and "tough on crime" rhetoric, ignoring the human variables - see above article for examples. Trying to legislate judicial discretion out of the equation is, to me, a foolish idea.

Couldn't agree more on the drug use issue. They should not even be in the same category of crime.

update: thanks for the link, it led me down an interesting path of "attempted manslaughter" reading. eg, from http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=645716

> in Virginia a few traffic offenses can be classified as attempted manslaughter. Such as, speeding well above what classifies as reckless driving or driving sufficiently intoxicated. I think the reasoning is that if one were to kill someone under those circumstances it would be manslaughter, and any reasonable person would know that excessive speeding or driving drunk carries a high risk of killing someone even though that person isn't exactly trying to kill anyone, therefore, even though they didn't kill someone, they still basically attempted to in being so careless. IOW, you really should be charged with manslaughter, you just were lucky enough to have no actually killed anyway

> I think different jurisdictions probably punish those actions similarly, they just may call it something other than attempted manslaughter, like maybe reckless endangerment or whatever.

Reckless endangerment - I admit that strikes me as a better term, although I now understand the reasoning behind "attempted manslaughter".

I am not so sure it is such a good analogy. The "business model" of these hawkers in third world countries like Cambodia or Laos is to explicitly present themselves as impoverished, and then pressure or guilt-trip you into buying something from them as a gesture of charity. The OP seemed to encourage such behaviour, even admitted it was "crap" they were selling (it is).

I'd suggest that any startup worth its salt is actually offering something of real value, not explicitly a charity case, so the analogy completely breaks down. I fully support encouraging the startup ecosystem.

And I'm not even sure about using a term like "top down". Hotels really do employ locals, as do restaurants, and by patronising them you send a strong signal of support to the local tourism industry. With that assurance they can make plans, invest, advertise, expand. It's not about making the rich richer, not at all. Giving a small regional tourism industry the confidence to plan for the future is a wonderful thing.

I see what you're driving at (ha!), but "attempted manslaughter" is a contradiction in terms. Attempt implies intent; manslaughter is by definition without intent.

Look, I can see your point of view. There needs to be a deterrent, yes. Locking someone up and throwing away the key, though, should be reserved for only the most heinous offences. In my opinion, you should not be able to achieve that using only a six-pack, a car, and zero dead bodies.

There has got to be some other solution that doesn't utterly ruin the person's life, and the state's finances.