ryusage

Very strange to me as an American. So would you actually get in legal trouble if you took a picture at a public event?

> And train yourself to rely less on your smartphone, while you’re at it.

This pretty much sums up this "review" for me. It's not a hands-on article so much as a reaction to her husband's device usage habits. May as well be about cell phones.

Interesting. Is there some objective way of determining if the words are cognates or not? In particular, in the audio section, the Inuit-Yupik example for "thou" sounds very out of place.

I don't think the author was saying not to put effort into anything, and certainly wasn't saying not to take advantage of opportunities. I think it just has more to do with your mindset. Are you doing things simply because you want to be "great", or is it because you actually enjoy what you do? If you're never going to be content until you become the next Steve Jobs, and that lucky break just never comes along, then what kind of life is that? You could spend a whole lifetime as a solid, successful person, and still be miserable. What a waste.

I would also argue that, yes, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates just did things they were obsessively passionate about, and the fact that their passions turned out to line up well with what was marketable and under-exploited at the time was accidental luck. And working hard was their choice, but what about the many others who were inevitably working just as hard? They might've had a similar passion, but they weren't lucky enough to have the skills, timing, and luck that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had. I would hope they don't spend their lives feeling inadequate because of that.

C.S. Lewis said, "Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." Replace originality with greatness, and telling the truth with following your passion.

You sure? I could swear a friend of mine had something at least a year ago that allowed him to play just about anything he wanted on it. Maybe that was the older DS?

That is a great example. Some code just absolutely needs extra documentation around it. IMO, this is mostly true with more complicated or non-obvious algorithms like your example. There aren't really much more intelligible names you can give those variables; the algorithm just needs them.

Still, I find that with 90% of the code I write for work, it's not so difficult to come up with variable and method names that make it pretty clear what's going on. I take the approach that I'll add comments anywhere I think that naming might not be enough, but that very rarely happens.

Granted, I'm not writing low-level, math heavy code. I think it really just depends.

Those are minute details. If he accepted money from a studio, there would be people telling him he needed to add whole scenes, even if they made no sense with what he was trying to do.

This case is really pretty interesting, whether the movies were actually plagiarized or not, but man, this article is so bad. I can't get over how bad it really is. Why would you want to post this here?

Over-the-top tone, broken links and misspellings aside, it just doesn't have any real sources. It claims Snopes as one source, but as msg linked here, Snopes actually completely contradicts this article. The main source for it appears to really just be Sophia Stewart herself, if you believe the article's author at all.

I looked for another site that would have a more objective analysis of the whole thing, and this[1] is the best I found in short order. Even that one's not great.

The most interesting point, I think, is that the Wachowskis were only 21 and 23 in 1986 [2], and they were apparently just working as carpenters while making comic books on the side. I can't imagine they had a lot of money to solicit scripts through magazines at that point.

[1] http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/sophia-stewart-the-m...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wachowskis

No, you would think that, but actually if you read the comment referenced above, what they actually found is that outages seem to have little effect on revenues. That's why it's so surprising, really. The implication seems to be that their customers don't actually spend a whole lot on impulse buys.

> It doesn’t matter where the income I receive comes from, whatever the after tax sum is for each year, the investor will see 10 percent of it.

They would still get a piece of that pie.

Edit: added quote from the article

Okay, so you're suggesting this seems to set a dangerous legal precedent with slippery slope potential? I still say it's just a loan. To your argument here, can her parents legally take out loans in her name? I don't actually know the law there, but I don't think a lawyer would have a hard time answering that.

To your earlier question about 51% or 100% of her salary, if an investor loans me $500,000 at 0% interest to pay back in 10 years, and I only make $50,000/yr, that would suck, but I'm not becoming a slave to that investor. I can't afford to pay that back, so I'm going to default on my loan. There's a huge difference between that and literally being owned by someone.

If all you want are backups, then no, I don't imagine this is very compelling.

The idea is to actually access these files regularly from more than one computer. Hence the web interface and the emphasis on mobile devices. It could also serve as a media library for various devices, not just in your home, but presumably anywhere.

Dropbox and plenty of others basically do this already, but $10/mo at Dropbox only gets you 100GB. And I don't think it does streaming, though I could be wrong.

Personally, I'm curious how they access the files externally. The device must act as a server, I suppose, but it seems like firewalls would present an issue to less technical people. Maybe they just assume those people would never buy this?

Maybe they like gambling?

That seems a little over dramatic...

If anything, this is a decent-sized loan, with a very safe, variable repayment amount that is defined to always be a small amount of her income, and the collateral is a company that may or may not succeed. More than that, the investor only even takes the company if she's dishonest. There's almost no downside for her here.

If you want to be concerned for someone, I'd be concerned about the investor.

One thing that I haven't really seen addressed in these discussions is how we're actually measuring the value of bitcoins. The focus is entirely on the USD/BTC exchange rate, but is that really the proper measure of value to use when discussing inflation or deflation? I'm not an economist by any means, so I honestly don't know, but that seems a little wrong somehow.

In particular, when we say the USD is worth 10% of what it was 60 years ago, we're not comparing that to any other currency. We're just saying that things that were $1 USD back in the day tend to be $10 USD now. Then when we talk about BTC being deflationary, we talk about 1 BTC a year ago being traded for $200 USD now (or whatever it is). It seems a bit apples to oranges to me.

So here's a question: when BTC value in terms of USD spikes, does the price of goods in BTC spike proportionally? If so, maybe that's a reasonable metric of value for now. I haven't bought in to BTC yet, so I don't actually know the answer. But in all these discussions about inflation or deflation and instability in a hypothetical BTC economy, does it really make sense to still talk about the USD/BTC rate?

Nah, that should be a non-issue. US Dollars are anonymous, after all.

Not completely, no, but it could certainly be stunted. The first question anyone asks about bitcoin is "What can you actually buy with it?" If it becomes illegal for American or European companies to accept bitcoin payments, that would certainly certainly do a lot to prevent it from taking over.

> how are you meant to do business in a place where an item costing one unit of currency is worth $10 one day and $20 the next

I think this is only really a problem if you need to convert between the two very frequently, no? If bitcoin grows enough, it seems like this may not be such an issue.

IIRC, when I got a bank account at 15 or so, my parents had to go with me to the bank and they had to also have their names on the account.

Where about do you think it ought to be valued? Personally, as a completely casual observer, the current valuation seems incredibly high and unsustainable, but I'll admit that's an uninformed gut reaction.

...I can't imagine a financial company would ever actually take down their main site and claim to have been compromised just as a joke. For one thing, it's not even funny, so where's the joke? And second, it's obviously really bad for business. I think it's safe to assume this is real.

As a note, at first glance, this comment seems to be saying that they could not have been upper class because they weren't horribly condescending and close-minded, and that this is the entire definition of upper class.

Looking at the book description, I take it that these are meant to be heuristics for guessing a random person's position in the class system? That seems more useful. I'm still not convinced it makes sense to apply that here, though, as the OP was working in these people's homes, and certainly has a very good idea what sort of people they were.

I agree. Someone already in that situation will not be less depressed or more satisfied just by getting married. If anything, that's likely to make it worse in most cases.

I don't know, there's a huge difference between self-service, in which I do something for myself instead of relying on an employee, and the idea presented here: doing something for someone else which normally would be performed by a paid employee. I care about getting gas into my car or getting myself groceries, and as a not-very-social person, I see some value in just doing it myself (edit: or at the very least, I don't mind). But what do I care about joe schmo down the street and the jazzercise DVD he ordered from Walmart? I am not remotely interested in dropping that off to him.

Maybe if Walmart wants to pay customers to do it? Just lump that in to their shipping fees? But then they're kindof employees at that point. Or at least something like a contractor.

As far as I know, the US has not publicly admitted it created Stuxnet. But at this point both security researchers and journalists have concluded that it was created by the US and Israel, so it's essentially a well known non-secret.

The culture thing to me has never meant doing things outside work. Is that a startup thing I'm not aware of? Even in the OP, I don't think that's quite what was meant. It's more a matter of shared interests and compatible personalities.

Maybe you're not the type to hang out outside work, you don't have time, whatever. But how well are we going to get along for the 8 hours a day we spend together?

Unfortunately, once the thing can be made, it will be, somewhere. If it's not legal, but people want it, then it will be made in secret.

I'd say the studios "need" Netflix largely because people want all of their content accessible in one place, and Netflix has established itself as one of the major places people like to get it.

You're right, though, it's a very competitive space, and if the studios could get their crap together, they could certainly destroy Netflix. Unfortunately, I'm not convinced they're flexible enough to do it.

As another data point: I just clicked that link in Chrome, and I get the robots.txt with * Disallow like others are saying. Weird that some people are getting a 404.

Ah, thank you. That makes infinitely more sense.