The only time this matters is during peak times - who cares how much space a vehicle takes up when you've got plenty of extra road capacity?

I suspect they do some, but either way you're still "the product". Or is it more about privacy (which is a totally different thing from being exploited)?

I bet it has something to do with the $5 billion they pull in every year in revenue.

An honest question: if you don't want to be "the product" then what are you doing here? How do you think Slashdot makes its money?

Yep, sellers charge Australians more literally "just because they can". They sometimes make up excuses like shipping or localization, and sometimes buyers even believe them! But the reality is that Australians are willing to pay more than Americans for the same thing, so sellers take advantage of this.

A similar situation of price discrimination exists for university textbooks. US edition textbooks can cost about double the price of the "international edition" of the exact same book. This is because Americans are willng to pay more than the rest of the world for the same book.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It's interesting that Ballmer would say this, given that Microsoft made a big effort to carbon copy AWS during his leadership.

I feel like smartphones have replaced TVs as the consumer electronics device to be smug about not owning. With apologies to the Onion:

1. UI innovations are still innovative, even if the underlying technology has been around for a while.

2. There are no existing email clients that bundle semantically similar emails and extract relevant highlights. Even if you're not impressed with the ui there is still a lot of interesting machine learning behind this.

I don't think this is like Windows 8. It's a safe bet that once technology improves and prices are low enough, everyone will have a hi-dpi screen, so it's easy to argue that retina displays are the future. Whereas this idea of desktop-tablet convergence thing that Windows 8 tried to push was controversial at best, and is an example of Microsoft designing for a future that probably won't happen.

The right font choice depends on the screen that the font is being displayed on. And during the period where we're transitioning away from low resolution screens to "retina" screens, there is no perfect choice for everyone - Lucida Grande is going to be better for low-resolution screens but Helvetica will look better on retina displays. They're not "ignoring good user interface design", they're just making a design tradeoff that favors new hardware over old, and optimizes for their highest-paying customers.

You're putting words in their mouth - no one is arguing that we should just coldly kill babies. This isn't about lowering babies, it's about improving the treatment of animals that are believed to have self-consciousness and the capacity to suffer from what we do to them.

So do dogs, cats and chimpanzees end up on the "OK to eat" side of that line?

No, we're not all one big organism, or at least it's not useful to think that way.

When it comes to the ethics of eating meat, the issue is not really the eating but the killing. If you could eat octopus meat without killing it or harming it or otherwise causing it to suffer, you'd be able to side-step this ethical problem easily. That's why even PETA is interested in lab-grown burger meat.

Maybe he wasn't talking about Mercalli, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about intensity and not magnitude.

As mentioned in the summary this has been discussed a few times on Slashdot, and the original discussion was kicked off by Paul Graham's assertion that the cool hacker kids were into Python and the only people using Java were boring corporate types who had no passion for their jobs and were often mediocre programmers. In this sense, "coolness" does matter a little bit - if you're starting a new project, you don't want to choose a language where the labor pool that you're recruiting from is full of crappy programmers.

And yes, I know good programmers can pick up new languages quickly. But it can take months or sometimes years to master all the libraries and frameworks around the language. Someone with relevant experience can hit the ground running and have a shorter ramp-up period than someone without. I'm not saying that this is more important than general coding ability - it's not - but this is valuable to a lot of smaller companies and startups who don't have lots of time to train up new hires.

What makes Java uncool isn't so much the language itself, but rather the community around it. I actually like Java as a language better than Python, but there's a real culture of overengineering in the Java community, and people there really value convoluted architectures that are (ostensibly) maintainable and extensible. In the Python community, people value simplicity and hackability, and you can see it when you do things like file I/O or compare popular frameworks from both languages.

Not directly related to Java, but a while ago the tech lead for OAuth 2.0 resigned citing cultural differences between the "web" and "enterprise" communities. The "cool" languages are definitely the ones that are favoured by the web community, and the uncool ones favoured by the enterprise community.

So as much as people might think that it's just language syntax, it's not - it's also about communities, culture and different ways of thinking.

The magnitude of a quake is the total energy released at the epicenter, and it's true that you can't estimate the magnitude from feel since you have no idea of the distance. But the intensity is the amount of shaking at a particular location, and is probably what bazmonkey was talking about.