mitcheme

I don't really see the point in making an explicit effort to avoid doing meaningful work. If your GPA is really the only reward you're getting in all of your classes, maybe you're going to the wrong school. Sure, I lazed off in Computing Ethics because it was a total joke (easy A, unqualified prof, poor course design). But I definitely got more than a letter grade out of my classes on algorithms, GUI design, best development practices, etc. For the courses with real value, I might as well get as close to 100% of that value as I can, even if I only get `credit` for the first 90%. Maybe it's just because I come from a working class family, but it seems so wasteful to throw that last 10% away on purpose. (University doesn't have a lot of money involved...?) Yeah you can learn it later in your own time, but why not just learn it right away and spend that time later diving deeper or exploring other areas?

For some reason I can't find it on Amazon right now, but it's this one:

http://www.thermos.com/product_details.aspx?ProdID=282&C...

I like to read 1-star reviews (for anything) just to get a rough idea for what a 'worst case scenario' might look like for that particular thing. If the 1-star reviews are all about entitled patrons, that's pretty encouraging, whereas a few reviews about rats or cockroaches would make me look elsewhere. To use another example, I was looking at books on Amazon yesterday, and the only one-star review for a particular jQuery book was from this guy who was mad because the book didn't explain how to put quotation marks inside another pair of quotation marks (it was NOT a Javascript book) or how to download Firebug. Whereas another book's 1-star reviews might be about how the examples don't work, core material was skipped over, etc. When I was looking for a travel mug I could throw in my purse, I nixed any option that had a 1-star review about leaks (including many which were advertised as leakproof), and ended up getting the best travel mug I've ever had. I can shake it upside down or toss it across the room and my coffee stays safely contained. I think the bad reviews of it were about how hard it was to clean and how the lid came apart too easily. (It's supposed to come apart, to make it easier to clean...)

I find this really ironic. Being easily annoyed isn't an innate difference you can't change, you know. It's hard to change, but not any harder than becoming less clumsy. Most of the people you're getting annoyed at probably have the same mindset about their flaws as you do yours.

One of my issues is that, although my grades on projects, exams, assignments, etc., are well above average, I tend to zoom in on the mistakes that I make and beat myself up for them. Weird kludges, or silly bugs, etc. So I don't brag about projects that have flaws, which is all of the nontrivial/interesting ones, because I feel like I'll get judged just based on those, and anything I did right won't count. I think this is partly a gender thing and partly a parenting thing. (HS Me: Look, I got 98% in Japanese! Dad: Where's the other 2%!? Me: sadface.)

Guys brag about their projects a lot, and what they say sounds really good, so I often assume their projects are better than mine and that they're better programmers. (Even though I probably got a better grade, and when I actually get a chance to dip down and see their source code it's usually not so hot either, at least by the standards I measure myself by.) End result, even though I might be 'exceptional' grades-wise, I have this mentality that I'm just good at school, not good at programming (compared to peers). Extremely stupid, but if you really really don't want to believe in yourself you can always rationalize it somehow. Your GF is above-average just for being there, since most female students (or potential female students) get scared off, and she's still getting it done.

"Victory belongs to the most persevering." - Napoleon Bonaparte

I've been pretty lucky with my uni, for the most part the profs and students are all very level-headed and don't care about gender much. There are maybe two somewhat-douchey but bearable guys and one prof who's always saying weird, stereotypical things about women during lectures, but mostly the guys just want to talk shop. Between 2nd and 3rd year I switched from wearing mostly jeans & sneakers to wearing mostly skirts & dresses & pretty flats and the way I was treated didn't change noticeably. The most atmospheric douchiness was during 1st year. For several months there was a man sexually assaulting dozens of women on and around campus, and I remember some idiots who kept talking about how it was sooo sexist that female students were being offered free rape whistles and self-defense classes as a result, and how the guy just had needs so you couldn't blame him, and how rape was just so much fun. It wasn't straight-up harassment, I guess, because they weren't talking to me, but being alone with them late at night in the computer labs made me feel very unsafe. It was a frequent and rather unavoidable occurrence and I can see how a woman considering CS as one of multiple possible majors would have been seriously put off. I was pretty put off and CS was the only major I'd even considered since I was 13; that year I worried a lot about what I would do if the guys in the working world were like that, too. (Never saw them in the second year labs, guess they spent too much time chatting and not enough time doing their homework, haha.)

Even with a decent school environment it's nice to have some female profs around as role models. I have male role models too, of course, but it's so awesome to get to see hard proof that hey, that awesome woman I want to grow up to be is not only attainable but standing RIGHT THERE in front of the classroom. Two in particular seem so fulfilled, well-rounded, and passionate about their fields that it makes me know that I made the right choice. I think if all my lecturers were male, or if the few female profs I had were the grudgingly-teach-from-the-textbook variety (of which I've had in both genders), I would feel a lot less secure. I could honestly see my alternate-universe self switching over to math or econ if the comp sci department at alternate-universe uni was as bad as the school you're talking about. Comp sci is great but it's not worth crushing your soul for, especially when there are so many other fields these days where good programming skills can give you an edge.

Ouch. My personal feeling now is that there's no intuitive connection between the logo and the thing it represents anymore. Firefox has a red panda curled around a globe, representing both the name and what it does (the globe being a common symbol for the WWW). Internet Explorer has a Windows-blue 'e' for "explorer" [of the internet]. Safari has a compass, which is related to both safaris and navigation. The old chrome logo wasn't great, but at least it was really shiny. When I think 'chrome', I think really shiny, so it made sense to me and I could easily make the association backwards, that the really shiny logo meant 'chrome'. The colors might represent Google, but honestly I didn't notice that until just now. When I see red, yellow, blue and green, I just think primary colors -- RGB for light and RBY for pigment. In my head, red, yellow, blue and green are just the "default" colors for anything where you want something to have four different "equal" colors without it getting clashy or garish. (As much as I love the secondary and tertiary colors, using them all together can sometimes make things look younger than intended.)

To me the new logo looks vaguely like someone went paint-by-numbers on the James Bond shutter. There's nothing there that I'd associate with the internet, the word "chrome", the concept of a navigation tool, or anything else like that. It might be more aesthetically-pleasing but that's not what logos are for.

For a minute there I read "super perogie moon" and was really curious as to what that would entail.

"Stores that sell cigarettes (grocery stores, corner stores, 7-11, etc) can't have them visible to the customers in any way, and can't advertise the fact that they sell them."

I was curious about this, because I live in BC and realized that I hadn't seen cigarettes in a store for a long time. I'm a non-smoker, but growing up gas stations and pharmacies always had the big glass case behind the counter full of cigarettes, and it recently its seemed odd that they weren't there anymore. So I looked it up, and they're only allowed a small, plain sign with no brands or graphics, just kinds of tobacco and prices. In hindsight, I remember seeing those in one or two places, but I'd assumed it was just store policy.

It does seem to work. I think I've run across a handful of smokers at my university in three years, and many of them I only knew were smokers because they stank so much. Definitely not cool to smoke around these parts. Right now the university has just restricted the allowed smoking areas even further, and unlike when the government smoking restrictions came in, nobody really cares. This is a student body that half consists of people who hold protests over every political concern, and half 'apolitical' people who complain at length about every new fee or university restriction, so when nobody cares about a change that really says something.

I think the headline is supposed to mean that the GPS device was on his car due to a Reddit comment.

It is a really awkward headline though.

As far as I'm aware, the hedonic treadmill is a culture-bound theory. Has anyone actually done serious research about it outside of the 'developed' world? Also, by my understanding, it doesn't state that long-term lifestyle changes won't make you happier, just that our happiness levels stabilize quickly after sudden changes.

Genetics may be one factor, but relative differences in wealth is another huge factor that I know has been observed extensively outside of dominant western culture. In HG societies, there are almost no differences in wealth. Everyone considers themselves pretty well-off because there are very few things (or experiences) in their world that they could want but not have.

And even by the objective standard, a HG is better off than someone in the industrial world who has no job, family, home, or love prospects. An average HG has meaningful work, a large and close family, a mate, and considers their entire territory to be their family's "home". It isn't a miserable or unfulfilling life at all. The only way you could come to the conclusion that you're still better off is if you held really stereotypical and inaccurate views of how HGs live. Which leads like things like groups of us deciding that we have a moral obligation to nose in on what few HG societies still exist and bestow the gifts of technology and capitalism on them, so that they can live in slums for the rest of their lives and the lives of most of their descendants. Which doesn't exactly make them happy, because they go from being the richest people in their society to the very bottom of the ladder in ours.

I'm not going to live my life maximizing my standard of living because money and wealth aren't the same thing. Call it fulfillment instead of happiness if it makes you feel better, but having the biggest pile of money isn't the way to get there.

It would be so much more useful to hold happiness or quality of life constant instead. I really don't think it's a meaningful improvement to have ten times as much material wealth if that goes along with a fifteenfold increase in the amount of material wealth you think you "need", especially if that goes along with increased workload, stress, responsibility, etc., and decreased leisure time, time with family, health, etc. To most westerners it seems obvious that a nice house and your pick of hundreds of mates will make you happier, but that's just because it's how we grew up. If we packed it up and tried to go hunter-gatherer tomorrow, we would fail miserably and be miserable doing it -- but that's what exactly happens when hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural societies suddenly go western. Either way it takes several generations to adjust, so the fact that you wouldn't feel comfortable living as a hunter-gatherer, now that you've already been raised in this culture, doesn't have anything at all to do with which lifestyle is better. Even your "objective" measurement made a value judgment that meshes with industrial, not hunter-gatherer, societies. Of course an industrial society will do better by industrial standards.

Being a hunter-gatherer born in a stable hunter-gatherer society is not at all the same as being a homeless person in the industrialized world. For the most part hunter-gatherers in a hunter-gatherer society aren't ostracized or looked down on by everyone they know, criminalized/shamed for living (finding "acceptable" opportunities to sleep, eat, piss, etc, are much more difficult for a homeless person), or surrounded by messages that a person's worth is measured by whether they own the right things. Being able to comfortably meet biological needs, having meaningful social connections, retaining dignity and self-respect -- these things mean a lot.'N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman' is an interesting documentary about a woman whose life took a dramatic turn for the worse after the introduction of western culture, even though she probably ended up being the richest person in her tribe.

AFAICT more technology has nearly always led to us taking up different kinds of work to fill up that time, not more leisure. When modern household appliances were introduced, the result was higher standards for housekeeping. Women in the 70's spent slightly more time doing housework than women in the 20's did despite all the new "conveniences". Were houses in the 20's disgustingly filthy? No. Did the increase in cleanliness make society as a whole happier or better off? I doubt it. If anything, I suspect the obsession with cleanliness has just contributed to increased rates in allergies, weaker immune systems, etc. Technically, access to these appliances are considered a standard of living increase, but all it really did was make us pickier about what an "acceptable" living is. Now people who can't afford those conveniences have to work harder to keep up or be shamed by others for having a "dirty" house.

People comparing themselves to others is very relevant, because those comparisons have a huge impact on happiness and quality of life, and it is generally assumed that a higher standard of living correlates with those things. (If you disagree, can you explain why having a higher standard of living is a good thing? Why is it rising? Why do we even care about it?) If that's a wrong assumption it needs to be challenged because from what I can tell it's basically a cornerstone of western civilization right now.

I assume it's a reference to Facebook's "poke". If so it gives a frequent FB user a pretty good idea of how the site works at a basic level.

I didn't even consider the "dirty" meaning until you brought it up and I hardly use FB.

'One major problem is what I'll call "balls." Do women really want a guy who's too fucking timid to just come right out and say they like them? No.'

I've had lots of crushes on shy guys. Problem is, I'm shy too, so I don't say anything -- and end up with the not-shy guys I crush on, because they ask first. Most of my female friends have had crushes on shy guys too, but the same thing usually happens. In younger crowds (I'm guessing the main demographic for these sites) girls who ask out guys can be rejected pretty harshly so its usually not worth the bother even if you aren't shy. In HS, one of my friends had her crush throw food at her from a car window after she wrote him an anonymous (but fairly obvious) note admitting she liked him. This even though they had hung out lots and she considered him at least a friend. It was more than a little discouraging for all of us, especially since his aim was so bad we ALL got covered in it. Ugh.

IF7's "natural language" syntax is not a pro IME. It often doesn't accept simple sentences, and sometimes rejects previously-valid sentences after a simple change is made. But because it's "natural language", there's very little help in the documentation for figuring out the syntax to do anything beyond the basics. AFAICT most of the good Inform games are made by people who have already made several terrible games. I'll definitely check out Curveship next time because I'm so done with IF7. (There's apparently a way to get IF7 to work with IF6 (code-style) syntax, but there wasn't much on that either, last time I checked.)

I agree with the general idea but the specific criteria sounds very good from a consumer POV and not very realistic for a company to offer.

"Rent should not exceed 1/3 of the cinema price. Purchase should not exceed the cinema price."

Rent/purchase and cinema are completely different businesses, with different expenses. Going to the cinema doesn't give you a permanent copy. I'm pretty sure movie ticket prices are subsidized by sales of overpriced popcorn, drinks, and snacks. Online sales/rentals might be better compared to brick-and-mortar sales/rentals rather than cinema. Either that or offer a breakdown of how it might be viable for a company to charge those prices.

"I have access to pretty much every movie ever made."

This isn't possible using any other legitimate method that I know of; the only reason pirates can do it is because they don't have to worry about the legal issues, pay for licensing, etc. They just need access to a physical or digital copy which is far easier to do. This will probably be even harder when combined with the pricing demands since it limits how much companies can pay for licensing. If you mean major films/TV shows only, "most" might be a better word, otherwise it sounds like you want them to chase down every indie filmmaker who's put out a movie that a dozen people might be interested in watching.

"Pricing of TV shows is about 1/3 of movies. I pay for the content, not for bandwidth."

These seem almost contradictory to me. I'm guessing the pricing of TV shows should be 1/3 that of movies because they're 1/3 as long, but if "content" means "length" then the second point doesn't mean very much in most cases. If content is some measure of quality/popularity then there's no reason why TV shows would cost less than movies. (Especially since, from my POV, there are far more good TV shows right now than good movies.)

(edited for formatting and grammar.)

It leaves that "it isn't several hundreds of dollars, since many people who are downloading from PirateBay would not buy the songs even if the free option wouldn't be available." The average person who casually downloads a huge torrent with hundreds of songs would not realistically download all of those songs if they paid $1 each for them. That's not a matter of personality but basic economics -- there's far more demand for a song when the "price" is $0 than when it's $1. For $0, many people will download a given song even if they have no real intention of listening to it, simply because the interface to delete lots of files from your computer is easier than the one to exclude lots of individual items from a torrent download. And hey, you can listen to one or two of them for 15 seconds each, maybe you'll find a new song that you like. The first benefit goes away when you're sticking individual songs in your cart, and the second is not worth very much money at all. Take the option of torrenting away and those people would download only a few of those songs for a much more reasonable amount of money.

Oh, I thought I should also mention that the class started at 0% and you could only reach the top grade if you got 100% on all quizzes and assignments, so it wasn't quite the hippie "everyone's a winner" deal some people might be thinking. Your current displayed grade was simply whatever you would get if you didn't do any more work until the end of the term. Also, there were many exams instead of just one big one at the end. I did do quite well in the course, so I wasn't just motivated to rush through the material, just motivated not to laze around instead of doing work.

Calculating the grades in that way just seems to make the interim grades seem more meaningful. When you have 35%, that means you have mastered 35% of the course material. Traditionally, if you have 73% at some point in the term... what does that mean in concrete terms? It doesn't mean you've mastered 73% of the course material, not even "so far", because chances are good that you've only received dinky assignments, labs, quizzes, etc., for a large portion of the material you're supposed to have learned so far. You won't be truly tested for mastery on chapter 1 until the midterm or sometimes even the final.

I took a course in high school that used that grading model before (minus the gaming terms ofc). It was an online, at-your-own-pace class in one of those subjects I find interesting but would absolutely hate to learn about in a traditional classroom environment. The grading scheme was indeed awesome and motivating. Completing the next exam/assignment ALWAYS meant your grade went UP, so let's do it now and see what grade I have then! IIRC I finished the course far before the end of the term, which was an additional reward as it allowed me lots of goof-off time in the computer labs.

Of course, it can be a bit awkward to explain the F on your first interim report card, but if this kind of grading became standard that wouldn't be a problem. :)

Lifestyle inflation is very sneaky. I grew up fairly poor (and felt it), like trailer trash in a back-woods area known for potsmoking hicks poor, and now that I'm a "starving college student" with a decent PT job I feel pretty rich most of the time. I don't have the nicest apartment and I've parked my car for the year because the bus is cheaper and (usually) good enough. But even though I'm still not even middle class, I've noticed lifestyle inflation so I'm actively working to combat it. (Especially since I predict my income probably going up as I graduate and go FT year-round, I want the good habits now.)

Firstly I try to be frugal. Some people think this means cutting coupons for everything and not spending any money on fun things, but really it just means not spending money on things you don't care about, so that you can spend money on things you do care about instead. The exact categories there are different for everyone and will change over time and as your situation/environment changes. For me, I chose to give up the car so I could have more wiggle room wrt general spending money (eating out, coffee), and could afford a new laptop and glasses. Other people will bring their own lunches and coffee so they can afford a vacation, or cut down on buying electronics so they can live in a nicer place. Sometimes I fail at frugality -- recently I've spent a lot of money on videogames that I don't really enjoy and won't play much, when I already have unplayed ones and games with lots of leftover replay value. So for the next month, I'm not spending any money on videogames, and after that I'll try to think more carefully about whether I'll enjoy a game and whether I actually have a small enough pile of games to get around to it soon, rather than whether I can afford the game. Because for any individual game, the answer to that question is always YES, so it's not a helpful question to ask myself. You mentioned you drive nice carS -- does this mean you own/lease more than one at once? You can only drive one at a time, so unless you have a family with seriously incompatible schedules or are a hardcore car aficionado, that might be something you could "afford" rather than something you truly need/want.

Secondly I try not to own too much stuff, especially stuff I don't use. Owning stuff costs time and money, but we don't always see that because the costs are hidden and sprinkled around all over the place. If you're using your big house mostly to store a big bunch of stuff you've accumulated, you are paying your hard-earned money to heat your own personal junkyard. When you move house, you pay to move the junk. When the junk breaks you pay to fix it or to replace it -- because by keeping it you've already convinced yourself you "need" it, even if it's something you never/rarely use or whose function could easily be replaced by some other tool you have. So I try to purge the things I own regularly, keeping only the things I use and want. I did a big purge last summer and I'll probably do another one this spring. It can be hard, especially if you've been raised to believe that owning stuff is a good thing, or that "you'll never know when you need it", but it feels really good when you're done. This doesn't mean I live in a minimalist apartment with no stuff, of course. It just means I have a somewhat-smaller, carefully-curated collection of stuff -- stuff I'm consciously willing to actually heat and move and repair and replace.

Sorry if getting money advice from a poor college student seems insulting/silly. It probably is at least a bit silly, but it seems like you and I (and lots of others) have the same problem on different scales, so the things that help me might help you, if you want.

That works OK until you hit a site that has a weird method of processing payments, and now you can't pay for your order from email+weirdsite@mail.com because your paypal address is email+paypal@mail.com and they have to "match" (and ofc you had no way of knowing this before signing up). Or the sites that don't think "+" is a valid email address character. Or the sites that strip out the "+blabla" because they've decided they're too special for filtering.

Hmm, sorry. I thought you were referring to the book being difficult to find because it would be mixed in with an infinite number of other books, not specifically that there would be an infinite number of fake versions of that book.

And it would also contain an infinite number of books which claim to list which books contain real information, but actually contain some titles that contain nonsense & lies and/or are missing some titles that contain real information. So the chance of you finding a fake information-listings book is far greater than you finding the real one.

How do they make them available only to teachers? I don't know about the databases, but I know you can buy teacher's editions of textbooks online legitimately, like through Amazon. I also know that last time one of my (student edition) textbooks came with online material, access was restricted by requiring you to enter a code printed in the book.

Even if the teachers' resources are secured better than that, it must be nearly impossible to prevent all of their customers from posting those questions online -- most of my profs post assignments online rather than giving out hard copies because it is just more convenient for both them and us this way. Some of those questions come from the textbook; I don't know how many come from some other teachers' resource. I know I've stumbled upon other profs using some of the same questions, and sometimes even answer keys, because I Googled some terminology I didn't understand which was apparently unique to that publisher.

You're assuming that the student doesn't own a laptop (or at least doesn't bring it to lectures) and that TPTB know the student's work schedule.

But they care enough to complain on the behalf of their female friends and relatives? Possible but unlikely, I think.

No sympathy from me. Anyone who works as a magazine editor should realize that these things are copyrighted (NOT "copy written"; seriously, editor?) by default. The FIRST thing you do is check the article's license, and if there isn't one, get permission (NOT "contact the author" to let them know you've decided to use it; she never had that right). Monica had every right to be rude -- Cooks Source had unapologetically violated her rights. This article just makes them seem whiny and reluctant to take responsibility for their own choices. I bet if they had owned up right away and published a real apology plus a mention of paying the author for her work, things would have gone much more smoothly.

If you had to guess, is it just that second-time founders have more experience, or is it that a lot of the first-time founders who aren't 'cut out' for startups try once and then give up? (Honest question!)

I'm no lawyer, so I'll take your word on the legal aspects. But from an ethical perspective, I think the temperature of the coffee is important. They intentionally sold a dangerous product. The woman's only faults were being kind of clumsy and assuming that the "hot" coffee was ouch-hot, not ER-hot. 140 degree coffee is ouch-hot, and serving coffee so hot it would injure you if you tried to drink it right away is absurd.

Juries are just people, and people blame victims of things all the time.

I'm a woman and I'm pretty sure I was like this when I was in kindergarten, as were most of my friends. I would be kind of concerned to meet a 6 year old girl who never acted this way.