stoney

> The time spent learning the course would still have been spent, had one not used this special method of revision

Not necessarily true. He specifically lists learning and understanding concepts as they were taught as a part of his strategy (his principle #1). I adopted pretty much the opposite principle - not putting in too much effort during the term and learning it all at the end. So I would presumably have put in far fewer hours during the course than he did. So comparing my total revision time to his would not be a fair comparison.

Incidentally, this wasn't a deliberate strategy of mine, it's just how I liked to do things, but I think maybe having the full content of the course before I started serious learning may have been a benefit.

I also spent a lot less time on revision than many of my peers, so I don't think learning during the course is necessarily a prerequisite for minimising time spend revising.

Well then you have the basis of a perfect system: configure your email client to only alert you of emails not marked urgent.

> How about instead... industries that create easily copied content get with the 21st century and stop bitching.

I like the ideal of what you're saying, but I worry about the practicality of it. I don't see how you could finance a huge blockbuster movie without having some guarantee that you would have exclusive rights to exploit that content for some limited period (which is effectively what copyright is about).

Sure, the harm to the producer isn't measurable if you download a movie from the internet. But I don't think that would scale to the wider population - if downloading for free became the standard way of getting movies, how would they recoup the production costs (I guess if you can answer that question then you could become very wealthy!).

Maybe there's some painful expectation realignment due from those whose salaries are paid by making movies (I don't think we'd be short of good actors if they were paid thousands instead of millions per movie). Could they produce the same quality of movie at a massively lower cost? Another question that if you could answer you could make yourself a lot of money.

I guess you could approach this kind of question from a risk/probability point of view. Not everyone who practices guitar becomes great at it, but some do, so if you practice guitar you expose yourself to a potentially big upside (assuming you actually want to be a great guitar player).

I can't think of a potential upside that you expose yourself to by watching TV (other than the immediate gratification), but maybe there is something.

But if you go down the road of leaving it up to suppliers to secure against copying, you end up with ridiculous DRM systems.

Would you rather receive an un-DRM'ed mp3 in exchange for the promise that you won't make copies of it for everyone else, or receive a DRM'ed file that you are free to try and circumvent? Particularly for less tech-savvy people I think the unDRMed option is better.

(the third option is an unDRMed mp3 that we can legally copy and give to our friends, which you can have already as long as you stay away from the major record labels, but I don't see why the big industry players shouldn't be allowed to continue to use IP laws - no-one is forcing you to listen to their music/play their games/watch their movies).

Maybe highway robbery, but pretty standard in Australia - mobile phones are expensive here. As someone pointed out in another comment, Telstra's standard price for off plan data is $2/Mb (for a consumer mobile, not a b2b contract which is presumably what the power company had). For 90Gb of data that works out at $180,000, so pretty consistent with the reported cost.

The article did say at the end that they've put in measures to stop it happening again. Presumably something along the lines of monitoring usage per SIM. I would guess that it just didn't occur to the power company or Telstra that someone might steal the SIM and put it in their phone.

If I stole a SIM card and used it to download movies, I would fully expect to be liable for the cost of the data at whatever rate the SIM owner had agreed with the telco.

In this case the thief (or really the recipient of the stolen SIM) was unlucky that the data plan was a B2B contract designed for small quantities of data.

I find that scheduling activities with other people that start at around the time that you want to finish work is very effective at enforcing sane working hours.

I meet a friend to go climbing two nights a week, which pretty much forces me to stop working at a certain time two days a week. Having those two days anchored seems to help stop the other days drifting into other time zones.

The problem with switching to electricity is that the electricity distribution network has a limited capacity. Increasing the capacity of the connection to every single dwelling would be enormously expensive (and energy consuming!), so there are limits to how much demand can easily be switched to the electrical network.

I've seen enough instances of this kind of thing now that I've got two facebook accounts - my real account and my spam account (just like I have two email addresses).

I was just thinking the same thing - why doesa Firefox insisted on installing updates just when I open it to use it (which really is exactly when I don't want it to be doing it). Why not do the updates when I close it down?

I think the dispute here isn't so much whether or not Montessori education has or doesn't have advantages, rather it's the confirmation bias inherent in finding famous people who had a Montessori education and then using them to hint that their success is primarily due to their education.

See for example statements from the article like "perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Montessori alumni lead two of the world’s most innovative companies...". To which I would say, yes, it almost certainly is coincidence. Look at the (non-Montessori educated) leaders of pretty much every other company in the world as counterexamples.

The description of Jeff Bezos's behaviour makes it sound like he was an exceptional example of children in that system (unless Montessori teachers routinely have to pick kids out of their chairs), so probably not a good example of typical results from that system.

Assuming that societal advantage results in more offspring. Do the rich have more kids than the poor? I'm not sure that they do.

Do people with blue eyes reproduce more? I've not heard that before. I thought the ratio of blue to not blue eyes was due to the whole dominant/recessive gene thing (do I mean gene, or maybe allele? a long time since I learned this stuff at school).

Another tactic for getting yourself out of a rut is to just try something new. The more different to your current activities the better. Something physical that involves other people is a good bet, but anything that strikes you as interesting is good. As a student you probably have access to loads of clubs/societies that do all kinds of odd activities, take advantage of this.

Also, +1 to all the comments suggesting you see a doctor/counselor.

Uploading your music to Dropbox would be a good example. As far as I know nothing stops me doing that, and it achieves a fairly similar functionality to the proposed Amazon service. Dropbox even use Amazon's servers to store their data (I believe).

I agree, it's an interesting problem.

Thinking about it maybe there's a kind of bathtub curve of photos that I'm interested in

- I'm highly interested in photos around me and of close friends

- I don't really care about photos of acquaintances and people I went to school with but haven't seen in years, etc,

-I'm highly interested in photos of people I am close to but that live far away.

But the reality is that 99% of the time, companies don't need a chapel roof painted, they just need a quick watercolour to put in reception (abandoning the painting analogy now).

It's a business decision - is it cheaper to hire one genius to produce something amazing or to hire a few mediocre programmers and manage the heck out of them to produce something that just about works?

Given the frequent privacy-related news stories that appear here, I thought that this anti-privacy essay was an interesting alternative view point. And actually a fairly persuasive argument against privacy.

If I'm after a UK or Australian company I'm as likely to try .co.uk or .com.au first - but only because I've lived in both of those places so I'm familiar with the extensions.

Basically I do this too. But I'd add: Moved to country in vastly different time zone? Put pictures on facebook and send newsletter style email every now and then.

But possibly bad for the community in that it pretty much removes the possibility of getting bought by a company that wants your talent/customer base more than they want your product.

I don't know about these particular reactors, but I've worked at nuclear power plants in the past and the final cooling backup plan was generally a variation of "fill the building with sea water".

The reactors I knew (I assume it's similar in Japan) each had a LOT of options for cooling them. Some options would allow regular operation (which requires very fine control of cooling), some options would harmlessly shut a reactor down (where "harmlessly" means without causing any damage to the reactor). The filling-with-sea-water option was "standard operating procedure" in the sense that it was in the manual as a standard procedure, but it's the kind of thing you only get to do once because after you've done it your reactor is permanently broken and won't be restarted.

I'm not sure how meaningful "profit" is in the context of a privately owned company. Ok, so they only had $2,127 left over at the end of the year after costs, which sounds pretty small compared to the revenue number, but that's after paying the salaries of 45 employees, which presumably includes the owner. It seems slightly arbitrary where you draw the line between "profit" and "owners salary".

The title is different on the two submissions. Could have been a factor?

I think it depends on what you mean by "leading". As I understand it, Bin Laden is a kind of "thought leader" to the AQ movement - sort of how you could say Mick Jagger leads the rock n roll movement (terrible example!). No doubt BL has a lot of influence over AQ and used to be very active, but I very much doubt that he's still involved in deciding who gets hit and how. I suspect he could be removed with no noticeable impact on the movement.

CommanderX may or may not be in a similar position.

Who says it really was CommanderX behind the facebook profile?

But that's assuming that you're hiring more programmers to do the same task. Programming is partitionable at a larger scale - if I hire more programmers I can start more projects/create more products.

So I guess what I'm saying is that for a one product company, yes, there is a point where the productivity loss from adding another employee gets very big. But for multi-product companies (think Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple), more employees just means more parallel projects.

Walmart could open a new store. That would need more employees and, presumably, the store would generate a profit for the group. So looking at the marginal employee doesn't tell the whole story either - hiring one more employee isn't enough to open the next store, you'd need to hire another 30 more (or whatever the figure is) to see an increase in profit.

I think the uses of "sloth" and "lazy" here are quite importantly different. The idea of working smart by being lazy, really means (at least to me) coming up with a better solution than the obvious hard work, time consuming approach, then going off and doing something better with the time that you have saved. Sloth implies to me sitting around doing nothing.

So: general sloth=bad;lazy approach to some tasks=good when it frees your time to do more important stuff.