Oops, I even checked before posting and didn't see it, though I was looking for it on the bottom right.
802 karma · joined December 10, 2008
This weekend's This American Life was an hour long feature on the software patent mess. It's a good intro to the situation, especially to the non-tech public. Share with your friends (and send donations as a thank-you!).
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...
However, I think even a few small changes to mental capacity or an extension of life expectancy beyond 2-3x will make the recipients something other than human. Our brains have many quirks that limit our ability to reason, understand, or act rationally, but those quirks are essential to our humanity and our ability to love. I think for this reason alone, few will elect to have very drastic changes made to their minds or their lives.
The initial motivation is that it reduces the stress on their energy (read: oil) supply chain, but they've found that adopting solar is also cutting down on the number of batteries each soldier has to carry to power the gadgets that have become part of modern warfare.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/06/06/military-solar-power (the meat of the story is actually in the audio, the text is just a brief summary)
After they're hired at a bigcorp, the devs get by through cargo-culting and leaning on the GUI, so they never learn to actually program. Visual Studio is a great IDE, but it's too helpful for the beginning programmer. 5-10 years later, they've got enough "programming experience" on their resumes to get hired as "senior" devs.
Are these guys on HN?
If visa paperwork lives up to its reputation, however, a rational company would only hire foreign workers if they are talented enough to be worth the hassle or have skills that cannot be found elsewhere. Presumably these people would be paid well. These numbers may be higher than the true average.
Here's the math: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049196
Another positive is that their site is entirely garbage-free, and they're not constantly trying to sell you something. I get the impression that they mostly do domain registration as a value-add for their DNS and other infrastructure-as-a-service customers.
Maybe doctors shouldn't be doing preventative care. Surely you don't need a Ph.D in medicine to perform and interpret blood tests, monitor blood pressure, take some measurements, and conduct an interview. If there are serious symptoms or something that doesn't respond properly to changes in diet, exercise, or simple medication, escalate to a doctor.
Specially trained nurses could be filling these roles much more cheaply, freeing up doctors' time for activities that require their training and experience.
Changing email addresses is a pain -- better to do it now, while you can slowly transition with email forwarding. Use filters to auto-label mail that is sent to the old address, ask senders to change your address, and switch over any mailing lists and accounts as automatic emails come in.
69.57.123.17 your-bank.com
Perhaps we should implement a more easily-searchable remote keywords, like REMOTEOK, H1BOK, etc.
And this isn't just about making it easier for job seekers -- we want to make this easy for employers to encourage them to come here when they're looking for talent.
I agree that Safari's usefulness is severely hampered by the copy-protection methods (I used to use it as a free service through my university library). Unfortunately, as a subscription service O'Reilly has stronger incentives to use DRM because if it was easy to copy content from books, you could sign up for one month, copy everything you wanted, and then cancel your subscription.
If you just need a compiler, install the development tools on the OS X install DVD that came with your computer. If you want to be doing software development for Mac or iOS, the developer fee is worth it for the documentation and prerelease software.