vubuntu

That should be covered by 'fraud' related laws and he would have to be jailed and pay his dues to the society. Not by keeping him still labelled as 'dead'.

Recovery of the defrauded money (life insurance, social security benefits etc) from the family/beneficiaries is a tricky one. The law/judge would have to look into the knowledge/involvement of the family regarding the fake 'death' situation. Also any benefits they would have received from state (like child support obtained from state in lieu of a paying spouse, unemployment benefits that the spouse would have earned for the family had he been 'present' and unemployed rather than fakely dead etc) if the person were not fake dead but rather just "unemployed and/or unable-otherwise to pay child support" should not be recovered from the family.

Life insurance payments are to be considered 'windfall' and would have to be recovered from family to as much extent possible without making them any worse off than they were just before the person fake died.

He has a well balanced head on his shoulders. He should be in PR !

It's striking when you can tell whether an answer is honest/no-nonsense. And not even an overdone apology can beat an honest-to-goodness straight forward answer.

You mean sarcasm , not irony, right?

Irony would be that there is a news tomorrow to the effect " Half a dozen new web sites sprung up after Silk road bust and FBI is struggling this time to catch the perpetrators. They wised up from Silk Road's mistakes described in detail by FBI"

It's absolutely insider trading, even taking your far fetched example. You just have to see it in a slightly different angle. You are talking about not hurting the 'end customer' who bought the pumpkins at the same price, just a bit earlier. But what about the loss incurred by the 'share holders' of that pumpkin merchant who now might have incurred huge losses due to lost sales because some one used 'inside' info to beat him and rip him off his sales that would have happened if someone had not used the 'inside' info and 'acted' on it.

"It's almost debilitating, and caused me insomnia for quite a while."

That is the worst part of it. Insomnia causes more stress and anxiety which causes more episodes of sleep paralysis/night terrors etc. It is a vicious cycle.

All of these are strong triggers of sleep apnea, if your jawbone, throat, body structure etc, already make you susceptible to sleep apnea. All of these worsen my sleep apnea condition. I am starting to believe there is a strong connection between sleep apnea and these sleep paralysis episodes. Not that it cannot happen in other situations. But mainly here's my conclusion

1) Sleep paralysis is your brain waking up before your body and experiencing the 'unable to move' condition.

2) Lot of conditions can cause it. Mainly Insomnia, stress/sleeping-less due to work etc

3) Most folks who are saying that these episodes are not accompanied by irrationally terrifying 'presence' feelings probably have no other health conditions

4) Sleep apnea is your brain not getting enough oxygen. - Your brain goes into alarm/warning mode at some point and wants to force the body/mouth to change position so that you can start breathing normal again. - The way it does this is to try to wake you up, which results in most times you waking up short of breath, snoring very loud that it wakes you up. But in some cases, your body is very deep in sleep, so you first go through partially wake state...the sleep paralysis. - The brain is then further trying to wake you up fully, by recalling from memory things/experiences that have awaken you in the past - Someone bending over your face (your spouse giving you a good morning kiss) , some child running into your room (your kid running into your bedroom in the morning), sounds of walking steps (people walking in the morning close to you while you were partially awake, getting up), some frightening movie event/character that had made a strong impression on your brain in the past and which jolts you up (get adrenaline going, thus making your body recover from paralysis) etc. - These experiences that the brain induces, would feel more terrifying if you were in a state of paralysis and could not move. Thus the irrational terror. Especially if you are also living alone. - I think loneliness also is a trigger, as I have had sleep apnea induced breathless wakeup episodes (on some days when I neglect to use my CPAP machine), when my wife is next to me, but so far never the irrational 'presence' feeling when I am not alone. Even the sleep paralysis episodes are rare when my family is around. I just wake up straight short of breath when not using CPAP. But it is possible that my CPAP usage has improved my breathing. The last sleep paralysis episode I had was about 1.5 yrs ago when I was not yet using CPAP for my sleep apnea.

I have done this analysis so many times and very convinced that it is very likely to be accurate. But even then the fact that most people similar to me, have experienced 'the ghost bending close to your face and breathing over you, the demonic child standing in the room or walking/running towards you, the sound of steps' is still irrationally terrifying. That is why I do not watch horror/supernatural movies that much...to avoid giving more terror inducing fodder to my brain :)

If Sleep apnea were the cause (see my comment elsewhere above), then it would explain why rolling of tongue would lift it. Since tongue falling back on your throat is one of the causes of obstructive sleep apnea.

Also it is during such episodes, there are high chances that you will also experience what I call as 'recursive wakeups', several levels (mostly 1 or 2 levels deep) of indirection out of which you are unrolling to wake up like in the movie 'Inception'. I would feel very certain that I am awake, and have come out of my sleep paralysis by doing what ever tricks others have also pointed out (rolling sideways, wiggling toes, sitting up on bed etc), only to suddenly realize that the 'presence' is still there and panicking and eventually realizing I am still not fully awake ! Absolute terror until then :)

In fact, I would not be surprised if the writers who came up with the concept of 'Inception' and 'The adjustment Bureau' movies are probably themselves sufferers of these conditions (lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis) or at the least have heard accounts/experiences from some one in their circle (family, friends) and did further research.

But have you ever wondered why its always the feeling of a ghost or (some form of human/human-like presence)? Why not a snake or a lion, tiger etc.

I have sleep apnea and used to wake up short of breath some times. Before I got a CPAP machine, there was a period when I experienced sleep paralysis episodes. In some cases I experienced the sounds of fast running steps approaching my bed sometimes that of a child, sometimes adult, which used to terrify me (of ghost presences. These episodes also coincided with my wife and kids away on vacation and I was alone at home, which added to the fear) and wake me up after breif sleep paralysis experience. After lot of post-self-analysis I figured out that my brain must have been replaying events from past to try to wake me up so I could recover from my short breath/sleep apnea situation and get more oxygen to my brain. .... my son used to run into our bedroom early in mornings after waking up from his bed (early days of his sleeping in separate bedroom), and we used to wake up to his running and jumping into our bed. Some times my wife walks up to my bed on weekends when I sleep late, to wake me up.

I believe my brain was using, what were familiar ways of me waking up to, and trying that on me to wake me up to protect me from my low oxygen situation brought upon by sleep apnea short breaths. Nevertheless, this was kind of a vicious cycle for a while even with me fairly certain of my analysis. The terror of waking up from partial sleep paralysis to such ominous 'other presence in room' irrational feeling caused a bad case of insomnia...it was not easy to fall asleep. And the insomnia in turn worsens sleep apnea and sleep paralysis episodes.

The CPAP machine helped a lot. Nevertheless is absolutely dreadful and irrationally terrifying.

>"I felt like someone was standing in the room with me and was (irrationally) terrified."

This has happened to me couple of times as well.

Upon reflection I have noticed uncanny similarities to the below movies..

Lucid Dreams == Inception (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/)

Sleep Paralysis == The adjustment Bureau (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1385826/)

>"...kind of like swimming in the air" OMG. That's exactly what I dreamt more than couple of times. In my dreams I would be walking on water. Like if I pump my legs up and down fast enough, that keeps me afloat on the surface of water in a swimming pool, or a pond etc. Kind of like that lizard that walks on water (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhsxo7vY8ac) . It feels so realistic and so normal an ability to have. Alas I tried it quite a few times at our local swimming pool, and it never worked :)

Excellent answer.

In the case of mass merchants where the risk profile of their business model is low (i.e they are not crowd funding or pre sales receivers of funds from end users), the paypal model works well for everyone. Risk is equally distributed between paypal and the merchant (since their risk of going bankrupt is less and not binary) and the end consumer continues to enjoy 0% risk.

But in a crowd funding (or any VC) model, the end consumer is 'donating' / 'contributing' to a project because they a) they love the product/concept b) they trust the project team c) they are feeling generous d) willing to take a gamble e) all of the above. And inherently, the reason they are participating indicates that 'they are willing to take some or all of the risk' . The problem here is that the current paypal model is unable to take advantage of their 'willingness/promise of sharing the risk', and hence not having/needing to be so draconian towards such crowd funding to cover their own behind. Probably there is no such model currently anywhere.

It is quite possible that these end customers who were willing to bet/gamble, in the end when a crowd funded project fails, having realized that they don't have to take the risk after-all, are probably more than willing to take advantage of the system (bank chargebacks) to recover their contributions. But what if there were a model where we hold them to their willingness to "bet/gamble/take the risk" decision and only be a completely/mostly passive middlemen entity that only facilitates the transaction , like an eschrow account model (but where the funds go the intended beneficiary right away , if that is what the donaters want ).

Can paypal not build such a model where they can legally get confirmation/indemnification from end consumers/contributors to be willing to accept the risk completely/mostly upon themselves (or deal directly with merchant and indemnify paypal) if the project goes kaput? Or is the banking chargeback model so deeply ingrained, complex and inflexible that it cannot be molded in any way to achieve this purpose?

What if there were a banking/credit card concept of "funds that are not eligible for chargeback per customer's decision", and only such funds are used to pay to crowdfunding campaigns etc?

There is third category

* Cheapos. Won't pay for it unless it is the only way to get something that they like. (it's hard to find pirated copies, the risk (legal, malware etc) is high etc)

You are not quite understanding the graphs (and their proposed interpretation ) correctly. What the OP is saying is that the Rupee is being devalued (As seen by rising $ to Rupee curve) by the Govt in power, in the months preceding the next general elections in preparation for getting their stashed money (dollars) from outside (Swiss banks) into India and get a favorable exchange/conversion rate. As seen in the curve, the curve apparently goes up (dollar value goes up) right until just before the elections, and then the black money is brought in and converted in large amounts, which as you suggest appreciates the Rupee value immediately( as seen by the curve starting to go down).

> $12 device Not exactly. With shipping plus taxes , total came to ~ $41. So 41 - 3 x 7.99 = $17 device

Also note that he said "The truth is that I don’t cry because I miss them, I cry because I never fully appreciated ....." . He doesn't cry because he misses them. It is true with me as well and probably other folks who are claiming they don't cry. I too don't cry just because I miss them, but there are moments when the mind wanders into deeper thoughts , like what really matters in life, the silly little arguments you may have had with your wife in past, the times you ignored your kids needs (taking them to parks, play with them by putting aside your laptop etc) etc, and realize how silly those mistakes were, and how easily they could have been prevented when you think about the bigger context/meaning for your life is that time you spend happily with family and it is not going to come back. Time lost is lost forever. It is thoughts like these that make me cry, make me modify my future behavior for better.

Btw, I go thru this cycle of "self-realization/self-correction and then when the family returns back from vacation , then slowly getting back to the lazy original attitude of taking some of the things for granted about family and then back to summer and missing the family" :-).

I just hope that each of these cycles keeps making me a little better person than before!

Such people are hypocrites at best. Don't they use roads for their commute. Dont' their kids go to public schools. Don't they visit national parks etc. If they do all these things, aren't they ashamed of living off the money of the rest of the society that diligently pays taxes, and not contributing/pitching their share towards these common societal support structures?

You also give money to kill people (You do pay taxes, right?). How come you are not bothered about that also?

It's pointless to think about the impact of a micro action on a macro event. Especially macro things such as war. There are so many different factors that culminate in a war.

And about the good/evilness of war, that has a been a debate since ages. One can never win this argument.

The "risk takers" who "cross on their own terms" can be equally judged as "gamblers" who gamble with their life. I mean this whole analogy given by article poster is pointless first of all. And then comparing SFers with New Yorkers based on their road crossing habits is even more pointless. In developing countries (like India), where in most cities/towns there is no designated zebra stripe crossing (and definitely no push button pedestrian crossing signals), every one crosses at their own terms, some times dodging medium sized vehicles, giving respect to large vehicles and stopping smaller vehicles(bicycles, bikes etc) by waving their hand as they cross over. From the street hawkers to the bankers, from a school going teen to the old man with walking stick, every one does that. How does that give you any insight into the psyche of a person !! Or the psyche of a geographical region? New Yorkers cross on their terms more often possibly because there's just more people, lot of whom are in rush and "crowd learns soon from the behavior of few"

Trying to glean any meaning from such behavior is a futile exercise.

'Animated gif like snapshot' is certainly a more attractive option. But most of the funny animated gifs out there have some sort of 'continuation' or 'smooth transition' that for some reason is not coming thru from the Vine video snippets. May be the app (incorrectly) provides a feature that lets the users (jarringly) jump from scene to scene or may be more features/filters have to be added to coerce the users into creating a nice 'animated gif' like smoothly transitioning video. If its left to the talent of the normal day-to-day person, then a majority of the videos that will be uploaded will be jarring ones.

Just because 140 char limit worked for a text media does not guarantee that very short length works for every media. What next, 5 second podcasts? Or should we call them 'shoutouts' rather??

Even with 140 char twitter, unless a very strong opinion by an important person is being conveyed succinctly, most of the (useful) twits exist to give a short opinion on a larger piece linked to by a shortened url. The rest are your standard "I brushed my teeth, I just got of my car etc..." stuff that I leave the usefulness of for YOU to judge.

Thank god there is another sane person like me. I too find it difficult to make sense or enjoy just 6 second snippets. Conveying a sweet short targeted message for a specific someone with just a 6 second video itself is so hard, let alone be able to generate a 6 second content that is of meaning/relevance to a much broader audience. Just a novelty that will fade off. I cant see any useful purpose for 6 second clips in a social wide audience context.

Also, the kind of society, economy and marketplaces created by the existence of such a stable government (and society) that creates the demand and the need for the existence of web properties that would require a web designer to create them. I mean, come on at some point there was 'webvan' that delivered groceries to your doorstep. In somalia, you walk miles to get some or you grow your own ! And that is just one example. Even in developing countries like India, ecommerce is just picking up now a days. Few years back such 'conveniences' were non-existent, meaning no need for 'web-designers' in such a society.

He meant 'a mortgage payment' .. meaning one month's mortgage payment. If not, then yes $188.33 is highly unlikely to be a monthly mortgage payment even for the affordable Austin, TX area.

How much of your decision was influenced by the constraints of the H1B worker visa and the disillusionment with the whole green card process?

This might be oversimplifying a bit - How about keeping all OS files, app files etc on SSD. No auto-tiering of those. - Then some equivalent of a 'cron job + filter driver' combo that moves data files to and from SSD to the 1/3TB disk? When I say filter driver, I am thinking of Windows file system mini-filter driver. Linux equivalent would be VFS I guess.

How difficult is it to implement some thing like that in a pre known 2 tier configuration context? And what would be the effectiveness of such a solution?

In Windows filter drivers have been used effectively to implement file tombstoning for archive purposes and utilizing reparse points/extended attributes to store the remote URI (for recalling file contents from remote archive upon intercepting a read request). It's not too hard to write a mini filter driver in Windows and use it in conjunction with reparse points to implement tombstoning in filesystem.

StorSimple implements auto-tiering at block level and presents an iscsi target block device transparently to the OS/Filesystem layer. It is built on top of already available open source linux iscsi target software. If Fusion was done in similar manner, it absolutely does not require any modifications to the regular OS/file system layers at all. The intelligent auto-tiering capable iSCSI target portion would be at the driver level well isolated from the rest of the OS/filesystem components. It probably even has more simplistic rules for tiering . Keep OS files/dir always on SSD. Apply tiering logic to app data using a simplistic LRU scheme. And there is only two tiers to deal with. I am no expert in Linux/iSCSI or auto-tiering, but I bet you this is something that a HP/3PAR or Dell Compellent can spin up at a very short notice using their existing technologies. Apple is very good at identifying a complex ( and in most cases an existing but end-user un-friendly) technology that has been under-utilized in consumer space and bring it down to consumer level and deliver it in a consumer-friendly manner and put a wonderful marketing spin on it with cool terminology (Retina display, Fusion drive)and possibly even patent some arcane & obvious variations of the main theme.

It's the poor man's (or rather consumer's) 3PAR!

HP 3PAR, StorSimple etc all have done it long time back but at a bigger scale. Apple is just scaling it down, and bringing it in front of the regular Joe (as regular as Apple customers tend to be) in a non-complex manner.