scw

Mint prominently provides privacy and security information, and background on how they secure the system. You should similarly provide something on the front page, providing some of the details you've mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

s/ll/le/

I've used beamer on occasion and think its great, albeit because I use LaTeX elsewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)

If you want to go the HTML5 route, I'm guessing pulling the relevant code out of the Google presentation highlighting HTML5 features would be a good exercise; source at: http://code.google.com/p/html5-slides/

For pure wiki syntax, I'd go with Pandoc which allows conversion to both S5 and PDF from a variety of markup languages: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Firefox has also had this feature for a while, right click > 'Add a Keyword for this Search' which is indispensable.

I'd recommend starting by reading this article about how Google approached educating its employees on investing: http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/best-investment-advice-youll...

And this talk by Charlie Munger on stockpicking and the art of worldly wisdom: http://ycombinator.com/munger.html

The two major mental models which I've found helpful in understanding the market are the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_market_hypothesis) which explains how the market acts under idealized conditions of rationality. Temper this with learning about Behavioral Economics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics) which covers issues of human perception and how us semi-rational beings actually act, such as perceiving a loss of $100 as twice as painful as a gain of $100.

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is a wonderful book, but reads densely. In more recent editions contains thoughtful side commentary by Jason Zweig which help break up the text and give a more modern perspective. A key idea is the separation between investing and speculation: set aside some percentage of your portfolio for speculating, and experiment with it, but investing for the long-term is the way to go in the absence of something which allows you to escape the financial gravity of the efficient market.

A Random Walk on Wall Street by Burton Malkiel covers efficient market theory thoroughly. The Intelligent Asset Allocator by William Bernstein for approaches to constructing long-term portfolios.

Lots more to say on this issue, but hopefully some of these starting points will get you thinking.

Paypal's operating rules may have changed, but I've similarly been bitten by money lost due to Paypal.

Here's how the scam works: someone buys something from you on eBay, pays you via Paypal. You diligently send off the good, and delivery confirmation shows it was received. The buyer waits till the last day possible to report the item as not received, Paypal puts your account in the red and you're stuck with the bill.

I agree, it reminds me of Netscape's decision to spin off their code base into open-source Mozilla. Arguably the web benefited greatly from this decision, but at the time it produced a four year delay in a new version at a time Microsoft was rapidly releasing new versions of IE: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

The original piece is "The Aquarium", by Camille Saint-Saëns, a part of the Le Carnaval des Animaux suite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Carnaval_des_Animaux

There's no non-developer release yet, and the browser isn't feature-complete on non-Windows platforms. For example, on Ubuntu I can't open links from other programs with Chrome, and asking it to restore tabs when opening the browser doesn't work.

I'm sure once they make official versions the situation will change, I've been happy having it as my secondary browser on all three platforms despite the hiccups.

The components in a 16GB 3GS are estimated to cost $178.96: http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2009/06/24/apple-ip...

It seems that the more practical answer to this problem which bypasses the problem is to make friends with people in fields you think may have lasting impact: if they do come across something marketable and you have capital, they'll turn to you first.

Electricity has only been widely available in the last eighty years or so, and the internet the last fifteen, but neither of those obstacles prevented great accomplishments or happiness to flourish. I'm guessing that the limited social interactions, movement, and separation from loved ones are all worse on the inhabitants.

Check out Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race": http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/

Thanks for the excellent article. This parallels nicely with Nassim Taleb's work on black swans, how statistical knowledge fails us when unpredictable extreme events are present.

I recently attended a talk by an economist who advised Greenspan during the housing run-up, and I was disappointed that he didn't cover the limits of knowledge: he stated things got worse due to declining housing prices, which is a symptomatic treatment of the problem. Hopefully this kind of deeper analysis will gain traction.

They mention a company doing just that: http://www.stickK.com/

The idea of using people's innate biases to help them is compelling, I especially enjoyed that the 'anti-charities' of causes you dislike had the highest success rate.

If we want a community of intelligent, civil posters, asking its citizens to look beyond titles and examine the articles themselves seems like a reasonable expectation.

Until we can remove the leverage that intellectual property holders currently have, they will fight ruthlessly to retain 'their' property.

Compare the economically optimum copyright length (http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/research-optimal-...) with the actual changes in length within the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copyright_term.svg). This increase in terms coupled with the ease of patent filing surely is purely marginal decision making.

Primarily for two reasons: difficulty in comparison between charts, and because comparing area is more difficult than comparing length. The Wikipedia article has good background information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart

They embed their movies using the Flash Video format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video) which is a container format for multiple audio and video codecs. These are licensed by Adobe, and indirectly to purchasers of their software. Because these codecs are bundled with Flash, to get iPhone support, all the videos had to be transcoded into Quicktime-friendly formats.

Generally, there are licensing fees for each codec (e.g. H.264) which are licensed by software companies for use within their products. The open source implementations of such codecs are in a legal grey area, as technically compiling them means you should pay for their licensing.

The source post, including a PDF version: http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/choosing...

One failing of this diagram is its reliance on 'what Excel provides', including chart techniques that are difficult to interpret or misleading, such as pie charts and 3D area charts. Please, for the love of quantitative visualization, don't use 3D charts unless you understand the implications.

Iqbal Quadir on Grameen bank and microfinance: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/iqbal_quadir_says_mobiles...

The talk covers the scaling of capitalism to the "other 80%" and the profound social change that takes place with small capital outlays.

If you found her talk fascinating (as did I), definitely check out her book (http://drjilltaylor.com/book.html), which covers the entire process in great detail. At times its a bit slow, but it successfully elucidates the challenges she faced, and the eight years of recovery which followed the stroke.

I think the spiritual aspect of the story shouldn't be ignored: our perception of reality is also 'plastic', and we can, to a large extent, retrain ourselves to respond differently to sensory input.

The crazy thing about this machine is the screen, which at 1600x768 in a 8" gives a 220 ppi... The iPhone looks crisp at 163 ppi, and we're on our way to the approximately 300 ppi limit of the human eye.

The journal article referenced: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec04_2/a2338

If you buy free range organic eggs at double the cost of mass produced commercial ones, you've still got a cheap protein source.

Just anecdotal, but I had a Thinkpad 600 which lasted from 1998 till 2006. While all machines will fail eventually, it is nice to find the ones which last 8 years instead of 2. Similar to the decision making process for cars: getting one that lasts till 250k miles is generally preferred to one that'll last 50k miles. It would be nice to have a reliability database for laptops similar to that available for cars (http://autos.msn.com/home/reliability_ratings.aspx).

Flatly claiming that Rails can't scale is overstating the case, but their is some truth to it: relative to other frameworks / languages, the effort required to scale Rails is greater than other popular languages.

This has improved with mongrel_cluster and (more recently) Passenger, but the memory footprint for a Rails application continues to be an issue, even relative to other dynamic languages.

As much as I prefer discrete graphics, the X3100 is actually quite good. Good enough to be the only video option for the Macbook Air, Macbook, Thinkpad X300 and Thinkpad 61s all well received laptops.

If you're in California, definitely take a hard look at the UCs: in-state tuition is very reasonable, and the schools are among the best on the country for CS. Generally, the highest ranking UCs are: Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB. All four of those schools tend to be in the top 30 for CS.

Also don't forget PG's thoughts on elite institutions: http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

No, it won't with the trailing '.' -- try it yourself, visit site.com/news and then search for 'news.'