razzaj

Is raising money from the companies willing to buy you an option? Instead if taking the $12M, you could take the $2M you need and dilute accordingly.

"charged customers 19 yuan ($2.90 USD) per umbrella deposit and an additional half yuan ($0.07 USD) per 30 minutes"

So customers holding on to their umbrellas are bring charged 3.36$/day? I've paid that much to buy umbrellas in london on rainy days. How is that not an incentive to return it? Or are the umbrellas just being stollen from the rails?

You are right. It is difficult for me to remember and remove those when sharing.

The upside of irrationality. Ariely

Germs guns and steel. Jared Diamond

Influence, the psychology of persuasion. Cialdini

Justice: what's the right thing to do. Sandel

QED. Fyenman

All of Feynman lectures on physics

The hard thing about hard things. Horowitz

Al muqqadimah. Ibn khaldun

What is really worrying though is the normalization of privacy devaluation. Soon the uk will follow suite and then others. And sooner than later we ll be "back" to 1984

Isnt it weird that drasticly restrictive all encompassing rules are hastily pushed after attacks? Blanket Decryption of messages, and other privacy suppression rules will make intelligence agencies into super powers with too much control at a very reduced cost (less messy assassinations, or physical threats needed)

Makes sense. However, how is that going to protect the US? The moment such information is public, perpetrators will not transport any digital devices with incriminating data. What you re left with are people being harrassed over a digital copy of "how to make a potato launcher" on their laptops.

Frankly, it seems the US policing practices have been looking more and more USSR like. And i dont just mean since trump arrived to power.

I know that thesis. But i find that the middle class usually has a propensity to buying the more expensive items (even if it ends up being only marginally better than crap) because of a different dynamic. and it always puzzled me, i see it as an uninformed, irrationally positive, outlook generated by the mean fact of paying more for a "brand", because "surely it is better".

By the time this technology is out there, car keys would be obsolete. You would nt own a car.

Exactly. Not forgetting that radiation protection has nothing to do with the hardness of the casing. Lead is nowhere near hard and is one of the most used materials to shield from radiations.

Sure, kids complicate things. They also have the unique attibute of being non-undoable. And life is surely much simpler without them. But aren't all enriching things in life complicated? Like love, starting a company, friendship, learning. I have kids, and i dont think of people who decide not to have any as "wrong". This is clearly a personal choice, but i can definitely say they are missing out on a great source of richness, and tons of joy.

Looks like a nicer minitel, which was around at the time. Perhaps it was apple's attempt to bring the concept to the us? Or sell it in france.

failures are at least as important a dataset as successes. Most technical entrepreneurs i know are very pattern oriented people. And in a way Reducing the datasets to successes will invitably bias their patterns one way. If the goal of writing about startups is to encourage more entrepreneurs to take the plunge, writing about success is certainly a good way. However, if the goal is to help entrepreneurs make better decisions, and hopefully lead to a higher success rate, then sharing failure stories becomes necessary.

AS i look at the rendering on this plane, all i could think of is "gee, this eerily looks like the SX from black & mortimer"

http://images.gibertjoseph.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1...

A research on how to unwind grudges after long term conflicts. Specially for large scale conflicts (as opposed to personal conflicts). A notorious example would be the Arab, Iraeli conflict. That is a conflict that affects me personally, and i ve always been worried about how, even if official peace treaties are signed, will the people get over the hate, fear of the other, the feeling of not having been vidicated. And the effect of such feeling on the peace. A case that has always fascinated me is the german european relations post ww2, same for nippon-us relations, how did these pull it off?

Finding out the hows, and whys, can greatly help in improving global well being.

something that could benefit humanity on the long term is a wider "operating temperature" range. With the planet's weather getting more extreme, and the long term possibility of finding other habitable planets with an atmosphere that might be several degrees off, a human that feels comfortable in a wider temperature range will need spend far less external energy to accommodate. Consider how much electricity can be saved if people felt as confortable at 25deg C as they do at 22deg C.

In fact http://www.bowyers.com/bowyery_longbowOrigins.php says the contrary to what you are claiming, and in their account of the Cercy battle they clearly mention how the longbow outranged, and out-powered the crossbow (look for paragraph "Crecy 1346: the Longbow's Finest Day").

Excerpt 1: "The crossbowmen had a lethal range of up to about 80 yards, and took up an initial position 100 yards from the English, in line across the field. Unfortunately for them they quickly found out that the longbow now had a lethal range of well over 100 yards. "

Excerpt 2: "They were shocked to find that the longbows could now penetrate French armour, and could also down the horses."

In his book Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely described loss aversion by means of a set of experiments that go something like this:

A- take a person and promise her a substantial reward against completing a set of tasks. Measure stress level during tasks execution

B- take a person and give her the substantial reward up-front, but take back part of the reward for each task she fails. Measure stress level during tasks execution.

Ariely experiments showed stress was significantly higher with subjects that were in Experiment B. So much so that one of the subjects took the money and ran away by jumping out of a window. Ariely attributed the difference in stress levels to "Aversion to loss".

There is a difference between the scenario depicted by the experiments, and the cases in the OP's article. IN the article the author compares DMU as it changes from, say, 10K->2K vs 10K->18K, and argues that the latter has less impact than the former. Whereas in Ariely's experiments it is really comparing 2K-10K vs 10K-2K and showing that even if the Delta is the same, and both points are the same, subjects still experienced a different level of emotional distress due a visceral aversion to loss.

It is irrational to expect outstanding performance from an entity that does not have significant skin in your business. That's the rationale behind startups giving up shares to early employees. For contractors: more time= more profit. For Employees: better performance = more profit.

I think that before we can judge on the utility on such a presentation, we need the right visualization tool. My hunch is that viewing this with an Oculus would be an entirely different experience.

Wow, i am blown away by how dark internet commerce's gray zone can get. thanks for sharing this article.

"a possibility that was raised by some studies that found that in Arabic-speaking countries, where letters and numbers are read right to left, the mental number scale was reversed."

This is wrong, despite Arabic being an RTL language, in Arabic numbers are written, and read [1], in the same orientation as in Latin, Left to right. e.g. So 1,230 is written in the same orientation in arabic.

[1] this applies to all numbers with more than 3 digits. things are a little more complex for 2 digits numbers. As in English and French 12, or 11 are speller as "one word", however 35 in Arabic is spelled five and thirty instead of thirty five.

[2] the "latin" numerals are actually arabic numerals. The current numbers used in Arabic speaking countries are suspected to be of Roman origin according the wikipida article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals.

I agree. and car manufacturers should focus on making cars, that's a handful already. why not "outsource" the consoles to other more UX aware companies and just provide a universal connector. Imagine being able to plug in your favorite tablet in your car where the console is, and your car app will just popup. It makes sense especially for entertainment since you already have your music, and movies and games (for the rear seats).

I noticed other more annoying bugs in Audi console software.

And more generally, the automotive industry is weird with respect to software updates. To be clear, i only mean secondary systems such as entertainment console (so i am excluding core systems like engine, and other vital controls). In order to update your software, you need to ask your agent, who most of the time would just give you the default answer of "you have the latest update". Perhaps the agents are not lazy, but there is no place i know of on audi's website, where you can check for available updates. I would expect to be able and download a software update to my car using and SD card, or my phone data connection.

Car manufacturers should really just open up their in vehicle consoles to developers, somewhat a-la appStore.

Perhaps someone from the auto industry can explain this philosophy ?

Obviously Tesla is an exception by taking a more transparent approach to this issue.

whatsapp is owned by Facebook, so i doubt that would be the reason.

That is not what i said, nor what i implied. Read the comment again.

some imagination is expected from MS not the poor people without electricity, and without the luxury of imagination. This is a typical example of senseless marketing. If you are targeting the 20% mentioned, i would expect a Solar panel based charger that would charge a battery during the day, and then transfer the stored energy to the phone during the night. Now that's the imagination i would love to see.

"Plus, a built-in torchlight provides convenience, whether it’s late at night or after you’ve turned off the lights. Or, for those who have no access to electricity (in 2014, that’s still almost 20% of the world’s population), the torch is a necessity!"

So how exactly is the Nokia 215 supposed to be charged in the first place?

In my opinion the VAST majority of people never fact check, and most of the remaining people don't fact check unless the reporter's views strongly conflict with their own. In the current case being discussed, some embarrassment, and probably some figurative spanking are the aftermath.

In other more serious cases (crime, armed conflict, group terrorism, state terrorism) the aftermath of such a pattern is much more dramatic.

The hard truth is that media outlets need money to survive, to get that money they do two things: publish News/views that won't upset people paying for ads; and publish scoops that sell. No one is going to read a magazine or news "paper" that is broke.

But the hard question is: how do you effectively encourage properly done objective journalism? Is there a Reddit style karma scheme for news outlets? I imagine this will be effective if taken into account as an SEO signal.

There is no disagreement regarding blogging v/s not blogging. Your approach is sound. I made my point because i sensed that this issue will tend to eat at your time. And as an external, detached, party i said what i hope someone will say to me if i am ever in a similar situation as the one you described. It can be condensed to "don't mind the people being assholes, record your lessons, and move on".