mdm_

I switched to BlackBerry from Android last year and the browser is amazing (composing this reply with it on my Passport). Just wanted to say thanks!

>"hmm, maybe I'm not awesome enough for this position" - said nobody ever

I think you're underestimating the number of people who tell themselves things like that.

Add a feature where you can select what to wipe, e.g. you could choose to have it wipe only your SMS messages, so the phone still looks lived-in and not factory-fresh and make it impossible to tell whether the normal unlock code or wipe code was used.

My wife and I see ads for "Tim Horton's Cafe and Bake Shop" during NFL games on the US stations and it seems bizarre to us that they apparently felt Americans needed to have an explanation added to the name of the business.

I don't really understand why it is that on a PC/laptop we do our banking, news, and other tasks in the browser, but on phones and tablets we need apps for all these things. I recently upgraded from a Samsung Note 3 (which my wife now happily plays Hay Day on) to a Q10, and can do everything I need through the excellent built-in browser. As far as productivity apps, I use Blackberry Hub, Blackberry Remember, and Evernote, and can't think of what else I really need to do on my phone.

I've always struggled with lack of concentration, focus, etc and by the time I was on my third Android smartphone I realized that they're Big Glittering Distraction Machines. Personally, I find the lack of apps and games on BB10 a blessing, and the OS is unparalleled for my primary use, email and texting.

In the article they talk about making sections of a smartphone's screen feel different (permanently, I assume), but would it be possible to have a type of glass where the texture of the glass can be changed quickly and repeatedly by applying some sort of magnetic/electrical field and an app could, for example, make your phone's glass feel like it has buttons, then you could switch to another app and it would feel like a different set of buttons? I'm obviously not an electrical engineer, but I'd be interested to hear more informed opinions.

Could you provide any tips/advice/reading recommendations to a programmer who is interested in learning more dba stuff? It would be appreciated!

My wife and I are currently trying to decide between the Q10 and the HTC One (we're both renewing contracts and upgrading from Samsung Galaxy Infuse). We're really drawn to the Q10 for the physical keyboard and BB10 looks awesome (we've watched video reviews and played around with a demo model in-store). There's also a little bit of a "Buy Canadian" thing, at least on my part.

But we're leaning more and more towards the HTC One. Our Android apps are guaranteed to work, without any complicated conversion process, missing features, or stability/performance problems. The HTC hardware seems light years ahead of the Q10 (and is actually more powerful than my work laptop). The device seems more "futureproof", especially given Blackberry's uncertain future.

What if they get out of the consumer-level hardware business six months from now (I have memories of my old Sega Dreamcast here)? What if 10.2.1 is the last consumer OS upgrade they ever release and AppWorld collapses and support for Android APKs gets worse and worse as it goes unmaintained? These are devices we're committing to for the next two years, and we can't help feel apprehensive about choosing Blackberry at this point.

>45% of those surveyed don’t own a device that can read ebooks – this includes both e-readers and smartphones.

Completely anecdotal evidence here, but as someone who works at a university and sees a lot of people age 16-24, noses in their tablets/smartphones/laptops, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of this number.

First of all, "a device that can read ebooks" could be anything from a desktop PC to a smartphone. I find it highly unlikely that in 2013, 45% of people ages 16-24 don't own ANY devices like this. Even if that number is accurate, it's misleading, as many teenagers perhaps don't OWN a device, but have access to a shared PC or the like.

Second, I'm curious about how the survey was conducted. Did they just ask a random sample of people in this group if they have a device that reads ebooks? How many of those people own a capable device and are simply unaware of it, I wonder?

Any recommendations for learning more about PostgreSQL's features? I use Postgres for basic web app data store kind of applications, but haven't gone much beyond that. I've skimmed the manual and it doesn't look that dissimilar to MySQL's, but I see a lot of comments heaping praise on Postgres and/or criticizing MySQL. Is there a good book on Postgres?

And every time it shows up on here or reddit, I say "THIS time I'm going to read it..."

I always feel like I get stuck way more than I make progress. :(

>Affordable cars are in the pipeline, this is just the route we have to go through to get there.

Having recently bought a new Lancer, I find this very exciting. By the time I'm ready for a new car, it's quite possible there will be numerous EVs in my price range. This in contrast to when I was car shopping ~8 months ago and didn't even consider Mitsubishi's EV because it cost as much as a mid-range Lancer and looked like a glorified golf cart.

>Businesses are not going to put iPads on peoples’ desks any time soon, nor are they going to ditch Microsoft Office in favor of Google Docs.

That's interesting, because at MPoW we've been using Google Docs for several years and at most meetings I attend, you can look around the table and not see a single laptop; everyone is using a tablet or smartphone.

It's amazing how fast it's changed too. When I started here ~4.5 years ago, Office documents shared on network drives or emailed back and forth was the norm and if you had a meeting of n people, you can be sure there would be n laptops around the table.

I think the Chromebook looks interesting, but in Canada the major selling point (price) is moot. Right now on Amazon.ca the cheapest Chromebook is $399, while in the $349-379 range I can choose from several makes and models of fully-functional 15" laptops.

I'm currently doing a double major in Philosophy and Mathematics part-time while working a full-time job and caring for a house and 5-month old daughter with my wife. I think one of the things that initially drew me to those subjects and keeps me plugging away is that I find both of them confounding, infuriating, confusing, and hard as shit. I have a couple tech-related college diplomas that I really didn't have too work too hard to get, but in 8 to 10 years when I'm being presented with my degree, I'm going to really feel like I accomplished something.

Ah, great explanation. Thanks!

Any philosophy majors want to help me out here: is this what Sartre called "bad faith"?

The most shocking revelation to me in this article is that Sirius XM plays 13 minutes of commercials per hour! I could have sworn one of their big selling points was that they're commerical-free.

Your definition of a good English course sounds more or less identical to a Philosophy course.

>Of course then most students will insist that 0.999⋯≠1 which shows how ineffective this method is to understanding what the real numbers are.

Okay, you got me. Why is 0.999... != 1 incorrect?

I never understood this acquisition in the first place. I was surprised to learn that OMGPOP actually did produce more than one game[1], but I had previously only heard of Draw Something, which my wife and her facebook chums had already grown bored of by the time Zynga came knocking last year.

Forgive my naivety, but don't these things have to get past a board of shareholders with a public company like Zynga? This isn't just a hindsight-is-20/20 kind of thing; IIRC the general consensus at the time was that it was a risky, ill-advised acquisition for a potential one-hit-wonder company.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_on_Omgpop

I'm a part-time student in the Philosophy and Mathematics program at the university where I work, and the level 1 philosophy courses I've taken have had a significant number of 20th and 21st century selections in the course readers. We've read some Rawls, Dworkin, Singer, Sartre, Camus, a debate between Andrew Sullivan and William Bennett on gay marriage, a debate on hate speech on university campuses (can't remember the authors), etc, but also some Kant, Descartes, Plato, Hume, Mill...it's been a good mix IMHO.

I'm actually taking Intro to Logic in the second term of summer classes and looking forward to it!

>Many people want a-la-carte cable where they get to pick what they want - why not video services?

I think the difference is that with cable you're picking genres a la carte, as opposed to picking based on production/distribution companies.

For example, if I'm into sports and news, a la carte cable would let me subscribe to, say, CBC, CNN, TSN, RSN, CTV NewsNet, The Score, etc. A la carte video services like WB is doing here don't give me such options. If I like the Harry Potter movies, I have to subscribe to WB's service to watch them. This costs $9.99/month and includes a bunch of other stuff I might not want. Then say I want to watch House Of Cards on Netflix, that's $7.99/month and includes a bunch of other stuff I might not want. So it starts to look a lot like the current cable setup people complain about: you're buying bundles of stuff you mostly don't want to get at the stuff you do want.

> Versions of Minecraft are available for iOS and Android, indicating that its developers can see beyond Java.

Wouldn't the Android version be written in Java?

I think the main opposition is that some studies have shown that red light cameras are correlated with higher accident rates[1].

[1]http://blog.motorists.org/red-light-cameras-increase-acciden...

AFAIK only G+ related things are deleted. I don't use Picassa, but my Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Wallet, Play Store, etc accounts are all unaffected.

I suspect this as well, which is why I deleted my G+ account in protest the other day. It was remarkably easy to do, both practically (just click a couple buttons) and sentimentally (in ~2 years there has rarely been any activity from any of my contacts, and I follow most of them on Twitter anyway). I've heard people hem and haw over deleting their Facebook account; G+ offers no such difficulty.

Solving the problem was never Columbo's biggest challenge. It was "How can I spend several days or weeks sadistically tormenting the perpetrator before he/she makes some massive blunder?". The thrill for Columbo was in toying with the suspect, fostering FUD, provoking their conscience to eat away at them. In some ways, Columbo was a much sicker person than many of the criminals he brought to justice.

I started this course today (through Coursera) and so far it's great. Looks like they're using the Khan Academy software for the practice exercises and the videos are excellent. The instructor is high-energy and sort of eccentric and it's a real hoot watching at 1.25x speed. My only gripe is the textbook: it looks slick, but the weird Greek letters start on the first page and the prose is...laconic. The rest of the course materials seem geared specifically towards totally green beginners; the style of the textbook is a little divergent.