lavamantis

Another solid purchase by the company that bought broadcast.com in April 1999 for... drumroll... $5.7 billion! Yes, I'm actually not making that up. It's why you know who Mark Cuban is.

It never ceases to amaze me how positive that guy can be after what happened. He has accomplished so much since that fateful day. (shakes fist) "Damn you Italians and your lust for life!!!"

There's no question in my mind that we'll figure out the aging thing, and probably sooner rather than later.

Then the ethical questions will arise - e.g. "will only the wealthy be able to afford it?", "what happens to the world population if the birth rate doesn't go to zero?", etc.

Update: the Mars Trilogy novels deal with this issue nicely, including what could happen to your mind as you live longer. They're very good too. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

Nice:

'Obree himself said: "My biggest regret of my career is mentioning to a journalist that there was a bit from a washing machine in my bike.

"Now forever I will be remembered as the washing machine guy."'

Right at the beginning of my obsession with cycling, I read about this record and it's most fascinating challenger: Graeme Obree.

Nicknamed "The Flying Scotsman", he made his own bicycles out of washing machine parts and invented a few new riding positions before being banned by the UCI.

Pretty interesting cat. http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/sportscotland/asportingnation/...

Because of your #3, that means they had some time. Rather than torpedo something that was still a bit of a success, if no longer a moon shot, they could have innovated something new alongside the existing product. Either a compelling new feature or a separate product that was able to leverage their huge data set. Their users were delighted by the existing product, but they ignored their users in order to go with the torpedo route. Clearly they had never read anything by Paul Graham?

I went back and forth on the Facebook thing. I think my generation cares a lot more about it than the younger generations - on the whole they just don't seem to care at all. FB is the absolute easiest - just one click and it's done. At the end of the day, that was the most compelling reason. It's open source, so if you want to help add other options... :)

Thanks for trying it! I'll fix that asap.

[Edit]: Oops, can't duplicate on my Firefox/Mac. By chance do you see a console error (before I can add Sentry to the site)?

There may be a problem on Android/Chrome. I selected "play online" and it's unresponsive at the splash screen.

Germany has a few other words going for it to promote worker productivity, such as Mitbestimmung ("Industrial Democracy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_democracy)

I just wish PgAdmin would respond to typical OSX keyboard shortcuts when editing SQL. Pretty much only control-shift-arrow for word selecting and fn-shift-arrow for sentences is supported. If it would just support a few other basic commands (and make them the same keys as standard OSX shortcuts, or user defined) it would be a huge improvement in usability.

The T-Mobile deal seems great at first blush. You get more stuff for free - yay! But, what if you're a startup streaming music service, and T-Mobile does NOT include you in their list of cap-free streaming? Good luck competing with the other providers.

Perhaps a solution would be to classify types of services, and then make ANY company in that service eligible for the cap-free streaming. So, if you're a startup in the music streaming space, you are automatically included along with all the others. Then the telcos could provide packages of free services without harming innovation and competition.

If the organizing method at Valve is so great, where the hell is the third episode of the Half-Life 2 trilogy? I've been waiting 7 years for god's sake.

Thanks for articulating this, although you may have just started a religious war.

My only addition is why cyclists don't completely stop at stop signs. It's a LOT of work to get up to speed from a dead stop, so it seems a bit pointless to do it when you can clearly see that no one is in the intersection. Also, as you are trying to accelerate from a dead stop, it takes a while to get through the intersection. If there does happen to be a motorist there, they have to sit and wait while you (slowly) go by. It isn't necessarily legal, but cyclists not completely stopping probably helps everyone.

Also keep in mind that when people come up to a road they expect traffic to be coming from a given direction. They may not expect traffic to be going the wrong way, so they aren't looking for it. For pedestrians, not necessarily a big issue, but for cyclists it kind of is. By going the wrong direction, when you suddenly appear out of nowhere, at speed, you will cause a lot of unnecessary confusion, surprise, and rapid decision making. It's not worth it. Luckily, I see very little of this (Santa Monica).

Agree 100%. Pretty much the only time I get honked at as a cyclist is when one of the drivers at an intersection wants me to go through but the other drivers there don't. Chaos and honking ensues, and I'm the only one who's life is actually in danger. So, drivers: just obey the rules as best you can and we'll take care of ourselves. (but please stop blowing through stop signs without looking - even if you don't hit me you may cause a heart attack)

Seems like the FB version of Microsoft's long running Bizspark program. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

I doubt change is going to come from external pressure or treaties (although those are good things). Change is going to come when a lot more people become aware of just how bad things have been going, and why. All of the atrocities you mentioned have been done to protect and expand the interests of the wealthy, and have been done in as much secrecy as possible.

I have reason to hope that things CAN change and in fact, ARE changing. Look how rapidly gay marriage has gone from an impossibility to soon being the law of the land in an incredibly short amount of time. Pot legalization is happening at the same speed. The next great wave will be atheism. These things are happening because of increased communication and awareness due to our newfound interconnectivity. That is only going to increase.

Soon it will be extremely hard to keep secrets at all, a condition that is essential to these atrocities continuing.

I'm not sure it's all that obvious. That's pretty much the entire foundation of the very popular practices of "stereotyping" and "racism".

What people '"believe" in their government'? Do a search for "poll americans believing in government". Most polls will show < 50% of people are willing to state that they believe government officials on various issues. So, trust really isn't the problem.

I agree with your last statement completely. The trick is to get people to get knowledgeable (or even care) about history and what is happening in the country. Right about now, it seems to be we're more tending towards "Brave New World" than "1984". If people could just turn off 30 minutes a day of their "Real Housewives" and focus on learning something new, about anything, we'd start fixing the problems.

We are Nodeists (not nudists - to the best of my knowledge) - we like to use the term "shrinkwrap."

If you're 65(ish), the answer needs to be "the rest of your life."

The Internet of Things is poised to take off in the next couple of years. I just got into electronics and there's a whole world that's opening up right now due to miniaturization and economy of scale.

As some have mentioned, being a go-to place to pick up your Raspberry Pi, Espruino, Arduino, etc. and have literally all the modules and parts in stock so you don't have to wait 9 days to get it from China would be a huge opportunity. Robotics is probably going to start taking off too.

There's still hope if they bring in the right CEO/management team.

That is a sobering article. These guys blink at a product, and their user base is instantly more than the entire population of the US. I wonder how much longer the US can afford to fiddle with ridiculous things like debt ceilings, immigration, birth control, needless foreign wars, etc., when a behemoth like Alibabi is poised to overrun the world in a decade. Once China gets over the whole fascism thing, the future appears to be theirs.

I was about to argue, then I realized my first computer was the Apple IIe. Reset button offset a bit to the right. http://images.cdn.fotopedia.com/flickr-144862832-hd.jpg

Oh crap. Now we've done it. This thing is going to encounter an alien race of machines, get smart, and come back and hold the earth hostage while looking for it's long lost creator!

Articles like this should have "expiration dates." Everything in there was true at the time, but past performance is not always an indicator of future performance.

In an ironic twist, this tool uses Node - which is based on JavaScript (the allegedly obsolete two-decade-old language).

As someone wise mentioned to me, Objective-c was 20% of the problem and Apple's silly rules and controls around app distribution are the other 80%. As someone who had their app available in the app store for nearly 8 months including 3 approved updates before being (seemingly) arbitrarily rejected, I feel the pain of that other 80%.

There's absolutely no right or wrong when it comes to sipping whiskey. Ice, dilution, neat, chilled; whatever YOU prefer is the right way to do it.

That said, on a snowboard trip one of our amateurs took some of my Macallan 12 year and mixed it with coke. That is definitely the WRONG way.