minor_nitwit

The Athenians would say that we do not have a democracy but an oligarchy. The only way that they saw to actually make the government the will of the people was to select representation by sortition, i.e. drawing by lot, like jury selections.

I don't think that they were wrong in this regard. If we look at the demographics of the house of representatives, they do not come close to making a parallel of the demographics of the country. If representatives were selected at random, we'd have 51% women in the house, we'd have people from all economic backgrounds according to the current wealth disparity instead of only the wealthy. We'd need to actually focus our resources on education if we agreed that really anybody can be selected for representation. If the pool of representatives was large enough (larger than we have now, which is a limitation put in place to make party control easier), then random selection should always result in a representative body that is actually representative.

Just really fresh I think. Backyard chicken eggs from my coworker are like this. I don't know what the big deal about the firmness of the yolk is, but I'm not a pro chef. Tastes like an egg to me. When she gives me eggs, they last a really long time. She says that the way to tell if their old is by how fragile the yolk is. If it breaks going into the pan, then it's bad.

Ok, these guys claim to have invented a great engine, really just the pre-cooler. Why are they trying to build a plane instead of licensing it to others? That seems to be several orders of magnitude more difficult and increases the likelihood of failure.

Firefox OS on the otherhand is HTML.

I use antennaepod, but I think it's far from perfect.

New Zealand, Australia, and to a lesser extent Sweden all have vast areas with very low, near zero population densities. Could that be impacting the deliverability?

Google is both dominating smart phones and search at the moment. The examples given were of particular products that superseded other products. Is there a product that going to supersede Google Search or Android? If not, I don't see Google at its peak. In fact, with their efforts to take over the last google free screen in your living room, it might be that they're due to break into an even bigger advertising market.

that's awesome. It's a one line REPL.

that seems overly complicated for ruby if a is a file.

   c = []; a.lines{c << a.pos}

As far as $, you may know it from Regex as the new line indicator.

The article also says that just 17% of walks are made for the pleasure of walking. That sounds like a good number to me, should I expect a third of the people I see to be going nowhere?

you still end up loading the gigantic image to go on a tiny screen, so you consume a lot of memory on a mobile device for no-gain.

I agree. I would actually prefer if the test subjects were considered new to all students, and they were expected to become experts in those subjects before taking the test. What you need to score for is the ability to learn and apply the knowledge that you already have to new subjects, not to repeat the basics. You're ready for college when you're able to learn new things and apply them quickly.

It's a good thing IMO that people have to learn 'SAT words', it filters out the ones that are able to put in the effort to expand their vocabulary, and also retain this new knowledge.

why not both?

I can't believe that they would pay $400M for a company without getting something more than just talent. They must have created something very impressive that will be able to plug into the Borg.

To me, simulations always seemed to fall into a nice place for concurrent programming with messaging. In that case, the abstractions are not as numerous as when forcing things into a single threaded world.

I think the popularity of url shorteners shows that people are willing to click on links where they have no idea what is lurking behind an unintelligible string.

As for the apple site, there are other (better) systems in place for supplying identity information than just the url.

Any idea why it would be $20?

In the future, psychologists will ask, "Why don't you point to the meme that matches your feelings about that?"

Seriously, in some of the most-heavily travelled corners of the internet, its endless image-macros filled with random animals and long irrelevant photos. What started as an internet version of the inside joke, has morphed into an impact-text filled super-emoticon. It's almost like cockney-rhyme slang for the internet, if you're not familiar with the original image, you have to climb into knowyourmeme in order to figure out what anybody is trying to say. If you head to somewhere like facebook, you'll find the same photos posted by women in their 50s, now completely decoupled from the original meaning. (We've all seen them abused in tech powerpoints, which is a separate story.) The strangest part about this is that I've now seen it leaking out into the real world, where people will use the catch-phrase as if we're all becoming our own meme-generators, with the pre-canned images burnt into our temporal lobes.

What makes you think that your brain may not be 'poorly written' for supporting 24 hr+ uptime? Think of the brain has having bad garbage collection or a memory leak, so at some point in time you have too much built up memory that needs to either be dumped or written to disk.

The article acts like there's a chance that Boeing is in serious trouble, but the US government has programs to prevent the loss of defense manufacturing capabilities.

The status quo is, if a product is not needed in the US, but the manufacturing base to produce it is, to cover a potential major conflict, then the US sends foreign aid to another nation, who in return agree to buy our defense products. In the end, the government just wrote a direct check to a defense contractor to build a weapon for someone else, who probably didn't need it, but it shakes out as being 'foreign aid.' For a good example of this, check out how many tanks the Egyptian government has.

It's about Ruby conditionals, but they didn't talk about my favorite part.

   eat_gruel unless has_parents?
   puts "Please sir, I want some more" if shortest_straw?

The rule for me is to give the least information required for the interaction to take place.

If someon is considering me for a job, it's reasonable to give my full name.

If someone just wants to chat with my on reddit, they don't need to know my full name.

If someone knows me outside of the internet, but we communicate through the internet, then I don't need to provide my real name.

I'm not sure that people will go through this app and pay another $6 on top of the original shipping fee, and enter an oddball shipping address. They may pay it if it's an option at checkout, as at that point they are weighing the shipping costs as a total and looking at things like overnighting a package, or two-day shipping etc. If it was a markup for nighttime delivery at checkout, and you just enter your home address one time, that would be the most painless implementation. To get there, that means they'll need to partner with Amazon, UPS, FedEx, etc, rather than acting as competitors. If these companies are not interested in night-time delivery or unable to do night-time delivery for labor reasons, they may be quite willing to earn a markup by partnering with Luna. They already have similar relationship with USPS which handles last mile deliveries, which is what it looks like Luna is going for.

The N9 and WebOS were the first that I remember with the swipe gesture based interface, but BB10 is a much better OS than people give it credit for.

I think the watching TV thing has to do with a TV connected to your WIFI network.

I've experienced what you're talking about though with the flight cards. I'm anxious so I want to know that my flight information is there and ready before I get to the airport, but Google only shows it to me 'when I need it.'

I'm surprised there's no shortcut for this.

I prefer the paradigm where you edit in something like markdown but the live preview is available on the right hand side or down below the text. All it needs is a catchy acronym.

The controls for the text should be immediate in the text, that makes sense and is the most powerful implementation. But you have to see what it all means and be able to identify problems along the way when you make a mistake & know what your markdown is creating. Otherwise you type it out and notice that you forgot to force 15 line breaks.

It's times like these that I wish Valve wasn't private.

Yes, context-switching is normal. People often take on different personalities that are dependent upon the person that they are dealing with.

I'll let George handle the rest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPG3YMcSvzo

Formula.js has most of the excel formulas in a library. http://stoic.com/formula/index.html