Beyond that, most modern medicine requires pharmaceuticals and technology. Most doctors would be pretty bad off post-apocalypse.

Also, my career is irrelevant. I can build a house. But my career is in technology. So I would have to turn a hobby into a job.

If the people on /. don't see the worth of buying decent mobile apps - what's the point of them other than to advertise and hijack the masses?

Well, that's how I feel about a smart phone in general.

I'd love to get the advantages of a smartphone, but see these as insurmountable obstacles.

The spying by Apple/Google/Microsoft (not sure about what Blackberry does).

Taking something quite secure and adding the worry about spyware/adware/viruses.

The walled garden that keep me from being able to just, I dunno, run linux software.

Being stuck in the high cost/low quality distribution, ala would be the case for Hulu plus.

"You're so hot, I have to wear ANSI Z87.1 compliant eye protection"

I would sleep with any girl who used that line on me.

The famous line from the head of the US patent office in 1902:

In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold

Or the slightly less famous line from the head of the US patent office in 1843:

The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.

Google Now (recently added to the Chrome browser)

That's why it's always more secure to run software 6 or more versions out of date. No zero-day bugs for me!

Probably a win for them, actually. I imagine CBS will put more limitations on what Colbert can say than Viacom did.

Note to those who think Viacom owns CBS - Viacom spun CBS off in 2006.

I gather all deaf people do not think alike.

Granted - but immaterial in this instance.

This is a discussion about deaf culture. Pretty much by definition, it's a monolithic entity. You can, and should, when discussing a culture, talk about the incentives and attitudes it puts upon its members. Actually, going beyond that, you can and should critique those.

You're right that shouldn't go over into "deaf people all are evil/all think this". But the specific culture apparently does.

You seem to be laboring over a lot of misconceptions.

The point of overtime is not for the employee's benefit. It is for the employer's. It's cheaper to pay the additional per-hour overtime premium, then the fixed costs of having an entire additional staffer.

A second job is completely different from working overtime. It doesn't raise expectations for your coworkers, means that certain overhead is paid twice, and the list keeps going.

Eliminate the consultant and end the relationship with Pepsi then find a different sponsor. So clearly there's more to it collapsing than just the Pepsi guy.

They did get rid of him. The problem is a Game Jam is operating under a time constraint. And so much time and energy got sucked up by this dick that they didn't even see a point in trying to make the deadline. Which makes all the rented materials, salaries, etc. a lost cause, etc.

how dare you make a personal choice about something that does not align to the interests of the people who are paying you to do something totally unrelated to this personal choice.

Actually, yes.

I wouldn't expect a director making a horror movie to hire someone who disdained horror movies. Sure, maybe the camera work would be exactly the same, but you want people excited to be working on a project.

If you work at Pepsi, and you're really bought into the brand, then you care about it. And you think it's a core part of business. So someone drinking Coke would be a pariah.

but object to a dragnet search.

Sorry, stupidly explained. Object to a GPS device being attached to everyone's car. Same end result for one person, but totally different in aggregate.

So it's simply the efficiency of scale that you object to?

Well, it changes the entire situation. It's similar to how many people are okay with an officer tailing a suspect, but object to a dragnet search.

I do object to it on a small scale. But not enough to really care about.

Even knowing that before HFT, the market makers used to collude to keep the spreads at a quarter, and now (since HFTs compete) spreads are mostly a cent?

Mere correlation. HFT occurred at the same time (and as a result of) other efficiencies in the market. I have yet to find any evidence that HFT lowers costs to the retail investor.

Also, I find the spread to be a fairly meaningless comparison. HFT increases the number of trades. So, the spread isn't as unabigous a marker as it seems.

Although, I may be wrong. Please let me know if I seem off.

you still haven't mentioned any harm.

HFT's are making money, making billions. That money isn't from any value created. So it must be coming from somewhere else. That makes them a deadweight loss - siphoning cash from the market.

The issue isn't a HFT company making a fraction of a cent on a trade. It's a HFT making a fraction of a cent on every trade.

In your example, a better infrastructure allowed companies to make a profit proportional to the number (and, to some degree, skill) of their employees. In the current state, it depends solely on the infrastructure present.

Or, to put it a different way, the combination of a winner-take-all system with a solved-problem combined with a hardware-race yields an undesirable result; at least to me.

400 wpm is not high. Last speedreading test I took I hit 6-something. And I'm not that fast a reader.

But yes, that's English text, conveying possibly new ideas and/or facts. When I read a math text I don't achieve that speed.

I do wonder whether it's new paradigms that build on one another or the equations that make a difference. I have a few old Calc books around, maybe I should try speedreading them.

But in general, you can retain what is written if it's the kind of writing in a newspaper.

I can rip through a John Grisham novel in no time, but I'm currently reading "The Count of Monte Cristo". That is taking some time.

We just finally got pretty much everyone who matters to use a USB connector, now you want to go back to the Walled Garden of proprietary connectors, or even worse, try to get everyone to agree on a new standard?

Hell yes. I've wanted a standard for power for years. USB is pretty stupid way to standardize, because it's 5V @ 0.5A. But that's an issue because to charge you need 5V @ 1A (then 5V @2A) so instead of coming up with a new connector, now they negotiate rates, and suddenly you have to ask if it's a USB connection that supports 2A, etc, etc. etc. and you cannot tell by looking at it.

Also, USB has USB micro and USB mini and just regular USB A, so don't pretend it's totally unambigous. And only one of those is at all resilient to being flipped upside down when being inserted upside-down. Which is find if you need four pins, but we don't for power.

So, we should have a standard, which can propagate the same way USB did (the EU makes a law). Universal barrel plugs, if it fits, it works. (That is, each combination of inner/outer diameters is ties Also, step up the voltage/amperage into standard steps, so there's a finite number of possibilities. Maybe a couple of standard sizes for each combination.

But yes, I've often used proprietary power plugs as the example for where a stupid government regulation can make for great efficiencies.