Since we already know it's an area for rich people, it's likely that the land costs drive the price of the project up. Besides, if they're meant as rental properties, the idea won't be to get the money back immediately; the rental income and the theoretical dividends that it will pay back to the community will cover the costs in the long haul. Normally, the city would front some of that cost because there's value in that sort of diversity, but perhaps Lucas is shouldering a bunch of the costs that the city/developer normally would.

Boycott ResearchGate: they're spammers. If you enter your papers into ResearchGate they will spam all your co-authors and FORGE YOUR NAME as the sender of the spam. Every time I've informed a colleague that "they" have spammed me, they've been horrified and unsubscribed from ResearchGate. It's no surprise that such an unethical company brags about Bill Gates being one of their investors.

So say I'm searching for something with really common words in it. I can't think of anything specifically right now, but this is my most common search failure.

I get back a bunch of results. They have all the words I'm looking for, but they're all about two or three more popular topics. I'd like to be able to select a search result and tell the engine that results like this are incorrect for some semantic reason. Maybe it's a band name and I'm looking for a book titleâI should be able to say I don't want anything related to music. No bands, albums or songs. I'd be willing to tag results with some context to provide hints to the algorithm.

Things like 'windows' tend to mess up results; Google assumes that I either mean the Microsoft kind or the house kind, but sometimes I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with a particular application window. I run into this sort of thing surprisingly often.

Yeah, and Microsoft and Blackberry had phones YEARS before Apple did. Just because you've been doing it for a long time doesn't mean it's better than what Apple's done. Just because Apple's been working on it for a couple years doesn't mean it'll be perfect out of the box. This is a first generation product, and it suffers from everything a first gen does. Nobody escapes that.

Apple nailed a couple things with the watch, from all accounts. The watch looks good--which is critical if you want to sell it to non-nerds, the HR monitoring is good, you can use it with Apple Pay. Give it a couple years. All sorts of tech needs to advance and have something like this watch driving it to be good at exactly what they need.

Saying "Hey guys, these are the works that I've produced recently that are currently eligible for awards. Vote for me, please!" is not the same as saying, "Hey guys, here is a slate of works by various authors (most of whom are not me) that I think you should vote for."

You think he'd have a soapbox in prison? I rather think not. He'd be in solitary and that would be that.

Oliver is a master of taking a terrible, boring and critically important subject and making it palatable. Net Neutrality, predatory lending--we've seen people cover these topics for years and get no traction. But John Oliver keeps us watching for the whole thing.

I find it sad that nobody knew who he was to begin with. I do, and I live in Canada. I think it's a really important piece of news. But then again, I'm a nerd, and I'm bombarded with this information, relatively speaking. I guarantee my non-geek friends only have the most meagre understanding of who he is.

Snowden's information is important, and he has the right idea of what should be done with it. But John Oliver is one of the best ways to communicate the information. He managed to get Snowden to summarise things into really relatable chunks of data--it was brilliant.

Oops... I replied upthread before reading this. Apologies.

Yes, I read that too. I think that you are reading way too much into what is written there. It seems pretty clear to me that he is planning on casting his own ballot on the merits of the works nominated, but that he understands those that would vote against the sad puppy slate on the theory that intentionally disruptive behaviour should not be encouraged. Moreover, even if I granted your interpretation, that would be Scalzi pushing against a given slate, rather than pushing his own slate of nominees, which is what was claimed by ageoffri in the first post to which I replied.

I asked for a slate of candidates posted or endorsed by Scalzi. You replied with a the sad puppy slate, which was posted by Larry Correia. Thanks for the attempt, but that doesn't answer my question. The condescension is a nice touch, though.

Citation, please? I've noticed that Scalzi leaves a thread open on his website where people can push their own recommendations or slates, but I don't think that I have ever seen him endorse any particular slate of candidates. Again, my recollection may be flawed and my quick look at the Google may not have turned up whatever you have in mind, so I am more than willing to be shown that I am wrong---but for that to happen, I would need you to point out where Scalzi has posted such a slate (as I seem to be unable to find it myself).

Until I started using nintype, I couldn't find a single swiping keyboard that was faster or more accurate than tapping each letter. I used at least 4 different keyboards and they were all terrible. (Nintype lets me swipe and tap in the same word; it's a far better implementation of a swiping keyboard. And as far as I know, it's still only officially on iOS.)

I think the iPhone 6 is too bigâI think all 5-ish inch phones are too big. I have a 20cm handspan (8") and long fingers. The ergonomics are terrible. Even with the reachability feature, I find it incredibly irritating to reach the top far corner. Apple had the ergonomics of small devices entirely right, the problem is that most people prefer seeing more over better ergonomics.

Anyway, you don't find value in Apple products and that's fine. But many of us appreciate the design decisions they make. Don't try to pass of their work as merely being about marketing and high margins. I like their products better for HCI and quality reasons. I've used a nexus 4 and 5 and Samsung S5 and found them all sorely lacking. Just because you have some beef with Apple doesn't mean they don't actually make good stuff.

The reality is that those things are actually becoming less important for the consumer market. I hate to be of the '8GB should be enough for anybody' ilk, but for the kind of things that people are actually doing, that's probably true.

Think of it this way: the Macbook is the laptop you should be recommending to MOST people that ask you for advice. You only deviate from that advice if they have some sort of restriction or requirement. There are times where you might want to recommend the air, and for nerds you should recommend the pro. But the stock Macbook is going to be my recommendation every time without any extra info.

Similarly, if you need something with upgradable RAM, you're simply not the market for a Mac Mini anymore. I had my Mom buy a new Mini last year when her old one kicked it. She will never need to upgrade the RAM. For the things she does (playing MP3s, watching YouTube, email) the machine is vastly overpowered for her needs. That they make it in very few configurations is less of an issue because it's reached appliance status. You may as well complain that your fridge doesn't come with an upgradable cooling unit and spare bays for future extensions. It's just not that sort of tool when you're talking to most people.

For my part, I'm still on an early 2009 iMac with a 2013 Mac Mini that runs headless. 8GB of RAM really IS enough for 100% of what we do at home. I'd only want more RAM because it's one of those things that it's always nice to have more of just so you don't have to care about what's running, but it's not really necessary. I'm already running a lot more things than I need to.

Ugh, one of the things that I hate about BMR calculations is that they always seem to think that you're going to have an active job AND be an athlete when you get to high activity levels. I've got a sedentary job, but I'm an active competitive swimmer.

And then not all exercise is created equal. I burn more calories training 6 hours a week as a swimmer than I did training 10-12 hours a week as a cyclist. Part of it is just biomechanical efficiency--bikes make everything easier--but there's actually an effect of being in cold water 6 hours a week that's not insignificant. Not to mention I have more muscles being active while swimming than when I'm cycling.

But I guess at this point, I'm actually beyond using these estimators. I've got good direct estimates of power and calories while I'm on the bike, and my swimming is just more than that. Now I just eat to keep up and stop feeling hungry.

I think they're nice looking watches, but I'm not enthralled by them, certainly. I'm more actively looking at the Withings Activite Pop and Garmin VivoActive because I'd like to have swim tracking, and I'm willing to put up with an ugly (or at least not-pretty) device to get it.

But I'm almost 40 and I'm having trouble figuring out what's actually cool any more. ;)