But I just learned the hard way that, even the console version of games from Ubisoft will endlessly bug you for your UPlay account when you start the game. Every. Single. Time.

Child of Light is a great game, but getting a prompt for me to setup a UPlay account every time I play is ensuring that I won't buy another Ubisoft game for a LONG LONG time.

Does that come from authors already having a publisher publishing for them? Or does that include authors still looking for a publisher willing to publish their first book?

While I do very much agree a publisher currently brings quite a lot to the table, but why can't an author buy similar services from editors/proof-readers directly, and then self-publish?

If authors are concerned about the cost, isn't that amounted to saying the authors are unwilling to take the risk to invest in their own creation? Don't they think the sales from the resulting book can cover the cost?

Unless publishers have a monopoly on all the editors and proof-readers, this doesn't add up. Eventually some editor is going to start a new company that only provides editing and proof-reading service, and then let authors self-publish electronically, then what do publishers bring to the table?

In most other civilized countries, it IS.

Agreed. This difference is almost like the difference between people who read, and those who don't.

People who don't read will tell you how much more effective a movie can tell a story, blah, blah, compared to books. Books are boring. They can't stay focused on boring text. etc. etc.

People who read find books interesting and enjoy good reading.

If you do a study on the "effectiveness", by whatever measure, of books vs movie, the result will be skewed by those who don't read.

I will offer this quote from Particle Fever by Kaplan: "When radio waves were discovered, they weren't called radio waves, because there was no radio at that time."

When the electron was discovered, it was called "the most useless particle".

Quantum Mechanics give the basis of building up semiconductors.

Yeah, right, no useful application.

You are showing your ignorance here. Of course Japan also have online stores, but that's another thing entirely.

What the GP said was to be able to *physically* go to a store, *hand pick* what you want to pick (i.e. you can pick and choose, e.g., the fruits, one by one), and the pay at the counter THEN have the store deliver what you picked to your home.

Living in the US you might think that is stupid, why would you take the trouble to go (drive) to the mall and then not carry the stuff back home? The difference is, in Japan (and also applies to many Asian metropolis), as the GP mentioned, there are malls *everywhere*. Next to metro stations, around the corner, right beneath your home, etc.

So during the normal course of a work day, you would probably pass malls/shops on your way to work, during lunch break, and on your way home. Then it became natural for you to scan the shops and probably, once in a while, notice something you want to buy, but you are on your way to work/lunch break/dine with friends/etc and obviously *not driving*, so you don't want to carry the stuff with you around. THAT's where the delivery comes in to play. You pick, you pay, and they deliver while you go on your merry way, just 3 minutes spent.

That convenience of practically going through shopping malls along the way of everywhere you go is what GP meant. You are literally 10 minutes away from everything you need/want to buy, almost all the time, and you never need to "take time" to buy anything at all.

And no, Americans living in suburbs where they have to drive 10 minutes to buy toilet paper, and do a "shopping trip" to Walmart once a week just to stock up on groceries won't be able to imagine what it is like, the convenience of being able to buy a fresh apple (just one), on the way home, every day, by just stopping for 30 seconds at the grocery that you pass by daily anyway.

Exactly. Fools in HR like to parrot the idea that raises have little impact on morale, and use that as justification for not giving raises.

Guess what? Giving raises IS one of the most clear signal that the company VALUES a staff, regardless of whether that person need the extra money or not. And the opposite is also true - NOT giving a raise is a sure fire signal to the staff that the company DID NOT VALUE his contribution, regardless of what management said.

And if there really is a point where more money doesn't matter, why aren't there a maximum compensation for the CxOs?

I take it you don't play console games, else you would have known that people fled gaming-PC because of the constantly escalating system requirements (what? my 2 year old PC is too slow for this new game already?!), headaches about driver compatibilities ("My game crashes a lot" -> "which video card are you using?"), blatant and widespread cheating, and of course, buggy games that are partly due to wide variety of hardware/OS combinations that are impossible to test for.

Console, for better or worse, have uniform/very limited number of configurations (both hardware and OS level), and DRM-locked harder than a chastity belt, which naturally result in fewer bugs (fewer, not none), uniform performance for all players (no need to worry about minimum or optimal system requirements), and no hacks (at least not those within the machine).

When I buy a console game, say, for my PS3, I just need to check the "PS3" logo to be almost 100% sure it will "just work" on my PS3, even though it was years old. Can't say that if I wanted to buy a game for my years old PC.

True, but are you willing to bet your life or limb that the thug is (1) has a brain smart enough to figure that out, and (2) not on some drugs impairing his thinking at that time?

Yup, it hurts to lose something worth $500-$1000, but is it worth getting serious injury or killed over?

Even if you just got into a fight and won with, say, a couple broken fingers (due to a missed punch), the thug fled and you managed to get back your phone. Would you think it worth it 20 years later when your fingers still hurts whenever it rained? What if you won but lost an eye instead, is that worth it even though the thug were eventually caught and rotting in jail?

If you care that much about losing your phone due to its price, is it wise for you to buy such an expensive phone (which you pretty much expected to carry around everywhere on your person, all the time) to begin with?

But obviously civilians have one thing the police officers don't - the WILL to take action.

If the police have been taking these thefts seriously and had sent officers to thief's home instead, then no one would be foolish enough to do it himself.

Yes, it is foolish to confront the thief at his home. What do you think would happen? "Ha ha, you got me, here's your phone."? More likely is the thief would know giving you the phone just proved he stolen your stuff, and now you know where to lead the police to him, thief would be thinking how is he going to silence you?

Maybe after the first few fools got killed, the police will finally take a visit to the locations of stolen phones?

Agree, but it seems like the whole world is filled with idiots...

So, even before the technology is available, you have already concluded it won't give real improvement to the world, so you think there is no point to this technology, so you would rather have one less change in the world, to kept things familiar to you.

Oh, what irony. Clearly, you just demonstrated that people don't need to grow exceptionally old before they start to prevent the world from changing in order to keep things familiar.

And how many bugs and vulnerabilities will they put in with such high volume of commits in such short time?

- If a change is only "house cleaning" which is unrelated to security, why do it in such a rush?

- If a change is security related, and obviously needed, then why wasn't it made earlier? Didn't that make a mockery of all the "many eyes" arguments oft touted in favor of Open Source?

- If a change is security related and non-obvious, then won't doing it in such a rush probably introduce new bugs/vulnerability into the code?

No matter how you look at it, making so many changes in a rush is not a good idea.

THIS. Students that have problem learning from lectures most likely are treating the lecture as a movie (as the article alluded to), they expected to be passively entertained (a.k.a. spoon fed), instead of making an effort to learn actively. Then they wonder why they didn't learn anything and complained the lectures are too boring (i.e. not entertaining).

There, corrected it for you. 20 years ago, most people in college have had no problem paying attention to lectures. YMMV.

That's your prejudice showing. All the great teachers in college in the past century had no problem doing their great teaching with lectures (among other means).

If you have trouble paying attention to lectures and learning from it, have you considered that, perhaps, you shouldn't be in college to begin with?