thank you

You notice it immediately if you know which is which. "Matter" is a different question. Ordinary writing has enough redundancy that you can introduce a lot of error and still have the meaning get through.

Yes. Go look at the Gardenweb appliance forum, especially contributions by Kaseki. But kitchen renovation is a whole world to itself.

What you're talking about is a program of minor repairs, not a renovation.

Another part of this was the effort to crush Netscape by integrating Internet Explorer 4.0 into the OS, no?

Game-changing papers may encounter more initial resistance, but I have to tell you as a reviewer that most rejected papers are rejected because they're poor and/or trivial. There's an awful lot of dross out there and, really, how many game-changing papers emerge in a given year? How often do games change? Moreover if I think about the fields I know well ... it may not be fair, but most of the game-changing is done by folks who are already prominent and know how to get their stuff published. The extra-effort hypothesis has a lot more going for it. It's also possible that as you take more time and resubmit to a new journal, you add more citations, increasing the density of connections to it which may in turn raise its chances of citation. Plus and more reviewers see it as it goes through more referee gauntlets, which may also raise its profile a tiny bit. The first hurdle with raising your profile in a field is just getting read in the first place. Publication in a journal does not guarantee that anyone else will ever read the article.

The original comment is right in pointing out that Enlightenment principles had a far more sweeping impact on France and the U.S. than on Britain. Germany too. Britain, by contrast, has a state church. Britain has a monarch who has little but not zero political power, and a House of Lords, for Christ's sake, with considerable power. And you can't be serious re HHS! No insurance mandate stops people from practicing their religion.

Me too: for a new PC build, an SSD big enough for OS and apps, even current files, is a cheap way to make noticeable performance gains. Those seconds add up. And it's the obvious storage device for a laptop. I'm surprised it's not the default option for most laptops. Part of laptop functionality is being able to open the thing up and be working quickly.

huh? U.S. inflation rates have been extremely low over the last couple of decades (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt) (lower than in China). If anything the problem is that the Fed has held inflation too low and permitted too much unemployment.

This is a big part of it. When you buy something you have to think about the probability distributions around (1) will you actually get the thing you paid for (2) if not, can you get your money back What Amazon is selling, in large part, is relatively good chances on both of these. When a purchase goes South it's costly in terms of money, time, hassle. And the problem on the other side is that Google is bottom-feeding and turning increasing numbers of bad vendors in its search results.

Um, Newegg is an actual vendor, and in my experience highly reliable. Nextag is a price-comparison site and I agree with you on its uselessness.

Besides price you need to know availability, and in my experience Amazon is pretty reliable for stuff they sell - if they take your money they have it and you'll get it. Newegg is even better. Amazon associated sellers a little less so, but still pretty good. Google product search, by contrast, fishes up a lot of con artists, corner-cutters, people who bill your card and then go looking for the product, and so forth. And of course this is partly because of vendors who game Google by spidering up millions of part numbers and descriptions of stuff they don't actually have.

Bingo. If you're just doing stenography, you're missing most of what pen and paper let you do. You can *draw*. What you should be doing in class is not just paying attention from one minute to the next but asking yourself, as the minutes go by, how it fits together. You can draw arrows from one thing to another, make up tables and diagrams of your own, start planning out your next assignment. Pen and paper are a thinking tool. Notes like this turn out to be useful even if you *don't* come back to them, just because they force you to process what you're hearing.

I moved to Chrome from Firefox a couple years ago. Firefox is not even on my laptop any more. For me, the greatest Firefox annoyance was that I'd open up the laptop in a meeting or someplace where I needed a browser window, fast, and instead some interminable update would launch.

Exactly. From the perspective of a pretty average user, Adobe has been my largest source of PC headaches for the last four years.