muhfuhkuh

>I imagine a world where you can get anything on demand in minutes, and in that scenario Uber is the taxi, UPS, FedEx, etc. at the same time.

And, with that, the feeling that Amazon.com will snap this company up for cash and stock is almost palpable. Forget drones, that's PR stuff for now. Uber is the real PTTH (product to the home) service.

This is really cool stuff. Reminds me of a stripped down version of notch's live coding sessions for Ludum Dare.

Any reason you chose LaTeX as your content dev language and publishing over something a little "easier" like DocBook XML and Publican (which uses LaTeX as an intermediate build language to create PDFs)? Is it required, what you're used to, or purity of notation?

... while taking a Samsung-sponsored selfie with the man.

I bought my wife the CV-DSC40 kettle. She drinks green and Jasmine and uses the water for her Bodum coffee press. The scaling is only for really hard water areas.

It is overkill if you don't use it all that much (we use and refill at least once a day). But if you're a hardcore hot beverage drinker, it's truly the Cadillac of kettles.

I guess since TN is a stone's throw away from NC, it stands to reason that the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) sees its fair share of Leafs on the road as well (as I sit smiling and equally as smug behind the wheel of my Prius).

I thought the jaws of life usually does the trick in a rollover whether its conventional, suicide, butterfly, or gullwing doors.

I thought that little SIM chip in my Visa Debit card from my Credit Union here in the States was just for show until I was forced to use it everywhere I went in Vancouver, Canada.

I guess they've either been stung enough by fraud up there that they switched over from stripes, or they're just a bit more forward thinking than we are.

Congratulations, you are not their primary consumer: Impulse buyers who even if they have a set list of things they are going to buy end up going off-list nearly every time. They need that DVD from the bargain bin, they need that extra box of 22lr ammunition, they need that BPA-free water bottle because the one at work (also impulse bought from Walmart) is starting to crack after 3 months of use.

Water is both a matter of public trust and run by the town, at least here in Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), North Carolina USA. It never gets shut down (unless you don't pay for 2 whole months, and even then only if you're under 65 years old), they send out water tests every quarter, and about 5 years ago they switched over to smart water metrics using Aquasense modules.

We as taxpayers subsidized fiber in this country, we should (as they have in England with BT) force incumbents to share those subsidized lines to competition. Let the competition worry about the last 200 feet leading to my house. Because Buddha knows the incumbents aren't too worried about running it.

For better or worse, we actually are trying to do something about universal care. It's just that there is a particular generation of voters and lawmakers that are truly afraid of losing their level of care to cover who they view as younger and less deserving generations/cultures/people.

One sticking point in my mind is that people always seem to conflate our pharmaceutical and medical technology industry with our healthcare and health insurance system, which are different areas completely.

They think that if we don't have the expensive, privately-held bureaucratic system we do, then GE can't charge what it does for its MRI and CT scanner machines and exit the market, and then Grandma will die a horrible, painful death in a ditch outside Waukegan. Or, if pharmaceuticals don't charge insured patients $10000 a dose of some new drug, that our system will collapse because no one will make medicine in America ever again (never mind that 5 of the top 10 largest drug makers are outside of the US in countries that have abundantly socialist healthcare systems).

Just to compare apples to insurance here, the largest pure auto insurer (progressive) maintains ~5-6% profit margins according to filings, whereas Wellpoint one of the largest insurers in healthcare maintains a 7% margin.

So, you're Friendster one year, Facebook the other? Don't most industries work in the same "it-girl" cycles?

"the consumer has to see the reduced overhead filtered down into their prices."

I think lack of competition (as described in the article) causes these hyper-inflated prices. If these gourmet organic locavore so-and-so food trucks had to compete in, say, Portland[1], they would have to contend with 30-40 other single-dish trucks in the same pod/lot that provide a heaping, often exotic lunch for 5 bucks.

"If it's not faster, cheaper or more convenient than the to-go menu at a traditional restaurant"

But often it is more convenient. Hypothetically (since I work from home), I would find the food truck at the end of the block of my building to be way more convenient than getting in my car and schlepping to a restaurant (as I would do when I worked at an office).

Or, if you get it delivered, you gotta know what you want in advance, phone them up, make sure you get a drink, wait awhile, tip the driver, etc.

It's a mess. Food truck? Pop down, walk to the corner, buy Korean taco and sugar water. Lunch done.

[1] http://www.foodcartsportland.com/

The devil's advocate in me will tell you the truth as only I see it, not as the up/down votes in this board of mostly libertarian social darwinist and would-be technocrats will indicate:

The reason Denmark's system (or Australia's, or Canada's or S. Korea's, etc.) works is simply this: They have mostly one type of people there, and sometimes have a little bitty number of other types of people there, and mostly that little bitty number of people keep to themselves and open up exotic restaurants and try really, really hard to assimilate to the dominant culture and pay their taxes; and if they can't completely be as successful as the dominant culture, they will leave well enough alone.

In contrast, Americans will look at the person sitting next to them, see them as lazy, and refuse to pay taxes to support who they think is taking all of it. That person next to them may be poor, black, old, sick, hispanic, have down syndrome, is a teacher or a cop or a union steel worker or liberal or English major or hippie... ad nauseum. Whatever the reason, that person looking over at that "other" person flat-out refuses to allow "my hard earned money" to go to whoever the hell that is sitting next to them. It just won't happen.

Another thing, our poor and elderly are heavily, and I mean absolutely, unmistakeably, and incorrigibly self-effacing, self-hating, and in flat out denial over their station in life. They are told through attack ads during elections, through cable news, and through the water cooler, that blood-thirsty communists are alive and well and have a donkey replacing their hammer/sickle emblem. They're gonna take your guns, your religion, your money, your children and your property, give it to white trash and Mexicans and Godless welfare queens who drive better cars than you on the way to the food stamp office, and you'll be left with nothing but their hospital bills that you now have to pay because they bought a flat screen and new spinning rims for their car.

No one will ever admit that the heterogeneous society that is America collectively feels this way, because we didn't have a raw sore like the Economic downturn in 2008 for us to really see how much hate we have for one another. No one cares about each other when the bill comes.

Maybe capital growth is decoupled from job growth, but why is it that Apple and Google and Walmart and Target and Whole Foods and Starbucks and GE and your local busy restaurant and market and machine shop are still hiring like bananas?

Demand causes job growth. No amount of automation is going to prevent an Apple Store from needing a genius or a Gap from needing shirt folders. We still need plumbers and nurses and CNC machinists and spot welders and longshoremen.

Why is Kia still hiring in West Point, Georgia? And, where are those robotic unbuttoned-shirt baseball-cap-cocked-to-the-side douchebag bots that greet my nephew at Abercrombie? Oh, right, they're still human.

A lot of industries and companies are still trying to climb out of the 5 year funk we're arguably still in. A lot more companies realized that they could simply work their remaining people into the ground, create an atmosphere of uncertainty and abject fealty, and pocket the difference rather than increase headcount.

My theory? We're in a whole new ballgame full of the following people:

* Those who are willing to get their hands dirty

* Temporary workers and those who like part-time work for the flexible hours and variety of gigs

* Those smart enough to get degrees and certification past their high school diploma or GED, and get those in-demand technical jobs in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and services

* A bunch of people who are either unwilling or unable to accept any of the above and/or are still looking for Dilbertesque nothing jobs in cubicles in office parks overlooking other office parks in positions at whatever companies and having longer titles than responsibilities (e.g., Assistant to the Regional Inside Sales Manager, Northeast US [except NY]).

She doesn't need a correlation when there is direct relation between those who work from home and those who didn't even bother logging in to the damn VPN. It's easier to make everyone come in than try to suss out who is and isn't getting their work done when their positions keep no tabs on it (actually, she should just cut that dead weight outright, saving her the trouble of her Friday FYIs).

You can easily check if you have a 4g (LTE, HSPA+, WiMax, etc.) and checking the same youtube video in HD. It's truly night and day and really got me so mad at Roadrunner once I discovered that.

Actually, UC Santa Cruz and the NHGRI/NIH embarrassed Celera by publishing the human genome and setting the whole thing public domain several days before Celera could publish then patent their mappings. And, anyway, the only reason Venter went private was to draw a line in the sand about shotgun sequencing, for which he was having trouble finding public funding/support.

Besides, no one got into space faster than governments, no one has managed to develop cures and vaccines for large-scale and deadly diseases than labs directly funded by the NIH and other governmental agencies, and no one has had the infrastructure to build large-scale networks like the Internet like governments.

I won't even mention interstate/intercontinental highways, sewer systems, healthcare outside of the US, etc. There are simply some things that cannot be done by anyone but the uppercase-P People.

Eminent Domain is a very real and oft-used legal power that is given, especially by individual states in the US to seize property for whatever "public use" those governments deem worthy, including (but not limited to) road widening, infrastructure (sewer, electric, telecom fibre) improvements, and even private enterprise that trumps individual rights "for the greater good".

Please don't think that China holds exclusive dominion over such a concept.

This actually supports my theory that the 90s were the greatest decade in popular culture history. It jibes so well with the (arguable) Golden Age of Rap/Hip-Hop music as well as the Seattle Grunge and Hard Rock renaissance.

Rap in the 90s had Biggie, Tupac, Wu-Tang, NWA, Nas, Outkast, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z and a Tribe Called Quest.

Rock in the 90s had Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Weezer, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine.

It also had some of the greatest movies of all time in the 90s as well: Goodfellas, Terminator 2, Trainspotting, Fight Club, the Matrix, Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, the Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Schindler's List, Rushmore, and Pulp Fiction.

Now, I may be looking through with rose-tinted glasses (and having my adolescence back then, how could I not?), but let's just make it official, and not only with just cartoons. It's almost empirical that the 90s were the greatest decade of American Popular Culture.

But, he didn't ask for that; he just put it out there and let the art world have at it. The fact that most of his preferred canvas is illegal (and by that nature, ephemeral) makes him firmly anti-establishment.

That was such a fascinating movie. Hopefully not spoiling much of it, but the way the subject of the documentary seesaws from Banksy to "the director" and back was really interesting.

I'm not sure what to believe by the end of that documentary, but it sure was a wild ride.

Odd, I bought the dual-link adapter from monoprice and I thought I got gypped when my wife's Yamakasi Catleap would wake from sleep that way. I guess mini-displayport is just flaky in general.

This echoes my usage patterns as well, and I'm 37; the only difference is I had a reasonable CD collection (~250 discs) before I met Napster and AudioGalaxy back in the late 90s.

I only ever rented VHS/DVDs and I buy blu-ray used and only if I want to own a re-watchable experience (Dark Knight, The 300, Pulp Fiction, etc.) First-run blu-ray movies are RedBoxed or downloaded in 720p x264 from usenet (RIP NZBmatrix) and deleted after viewing.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Pandora/Spotify round out content. I watch more stuff now that I don't have cable (around 2hrs/day) than when I did (30min. or less/day).

No. It would be an iPod 5 that would work on your commute to and from work, quite a few places in between for groceries and errands, then pick up dinner, then back home where you would naturally charge things.

You don't have to charge your Tesla at the Tesla dealership. And, seriously, if you make dozens of unpredictable stops in your day, I'll grant you, an electric car might not be for you. But, I don't think I've ever made impromptu out-of-city trips with my gas combustion car. That's more a planning thing.

"700,000 apps isn't consistent with the way Apple's other stores operate."

I thought Apple quite liked touting their 25+ million tracks in their iTunes music store catalog.

Could it be? Does this mean my wife and I can use our unlocked iPhones with voice-only (t-mobile, maybe?) sim cards and use this Karma thing as our data plan? We're paying US$15/mo each for 200MB data. It's ridiculous. And, we're on HSPA+, not even LTE (AT&T, don't even ask; I can have full bars and it still takes forever to load up text-heavy pages).

Wasn't it Steve Jobs himself who said to President Obama at a dinner that "those jobs aren't coming back" when talking about high-tech manufacturing?

I've been reading about other technology companies besides Apple doing this as well. Element and Vizio, two value-tier (think Wal-Mart and Target) flat-screen TV manufacturers have major assembly plants here in the states. They cited a combo of labor, shipping and duty being cost-ineffective at their price levels to make and ship from China.

I would daresay more important than, for example, another social networking mobile app. Not that there's anything wrong with another app, but I'd rather eat.

Here[1] is a good summary of why Montreal has one of the highest concentrations of tech jobs in N. America. And, while Quebec citizens might have to bear a larger tax burden than other provinces, there are heaps of tax incentives for businesses (especially technology) to startup or relocate there. There are massive SR&ED (Scientific Research and Experimental Development) tax credits and other incentives that can halve or more employee compensation expenditures.

Vancouver needs to play tax catchup (while boosting technology sector wages to level out the cost of living playing field).

[1]http://www.startuprev.com/archives/2012/10/the-montreal-tech...