Thanks for the link on Formalism. Perhaps I don't want to learn math at all. I personally feel that in its highest esteem, math is just a tool to help us understand the world, and the understanding is the thing I really want.

Here's where I'm coming from: as a music teacher, I'd much rather have a student who can improvise a simple melody over a simple chord progression than a student who could write a fantastically complex chord progression but have no idea what it actually sounds like.

I still don't understand math. I can manipulate the symbols but I don't understand what the symbols represent. I believe that as a student in any discipline, understanding the things that the symbols represent is far more essential than being able to decode the symbols without comprehension.

Sure I have basic concepts down such as whole numbers, but more complex functions are completely lost on me.

I would be ever grateful to a math educator who could teach understandable concepts first, followed distantly by symbolic notation.

Now that you understand what I'm taking about, I'll give this concept a name: "numbers vs numerals"

Wow, I just logged in and ... sure enough, it's awful!

Good thing I get all my recommendations from Berlineale instead of Netflix.

sorry didn't meant to post as AC before... anyway:

DD-WRT on your router + ntop running on another machine. Ntop gives you all sorts of pretty graphics and stuff. Very easy to use.

I know I have asked for features in the past (Pidgin!) and the development team has refused donations, while I would have been happy to "buy" a feature. A kickstarter-like site would be cool for feature requests. It could be carefully organized by the different the projects. It might be difficult though if the development team believes a requested feature to be outside the scope of their application, or against its philosophy. Forks and market segmentation could result.

Very interesting thought...

In the future, only spam bots will be able to register for websites!

I'd also like to point out that rather than fire everyone, my goal would be to transition all the existing employees to other tasks that improve the quality of our product (legal services).

I think I could run our entire office (13+ secretaries!) with a single secretary by automating the enormous amount of data entry that goes on. But I'm so busy doing data entry that I don't have time to automate my own job.

Durr.

Note that I do make time to post on Slashdot, but I'm not good at coding in small bursts.

The fact Apple has a highly evangelical user base says something about their products - they're meeting needs that customers didn't even know they had.

I'm a classic case where I saw the first iPod commercials and thought, "wow, that looks stupid! If I'm going to listen to music, I'm going to listen at home on my hi fi system."

Fast forward several years and I'm absolutely inseparable from my iPod.

As Henry Ford said, if I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

This assumes an "informed consumer" which is rarely the case. How much do you think investors and consumers know about the products they invest in and buy?

As a society we need to begin examining long term, sustainable, healthy ways to live. We can either educate people to the point where they can make these sort of informed decisions, or we can muck with the system so that the cost of products more accurately reflects their long term total utility, including their end-of-life reuse, re-manufacture, or disposal.

They also have an amazing fully automated electronic just-in-time shipment and stocking system and a powerful brand. They're a stalwart of sales process engineering.

That said, I'd be happy to pay more if I knew the floor employees and floor manufacturing workers were the ones getting the money.

Next thing you know you've accidentally signed yourself to a contract paying double the going rate, you can't get out of it and you can't sub-let it without losing money unless you can find someone equally stupid.

I work for an attorney specializing in real estate in the US. Sometimes I feel like our services are completely unnecessary, but when I read things like this I'm reminded that we can sometimes be useful.

Do attorneys get involved in real estate over there?

You all may be interested in a high school with no walls.

Williamsville East is unique for having open classrooms, being constructed without any interior walls on the upper two floors of the three-story building.

My coworker prefers all capital letters. He can read them more easily because capital letters are bigger.

We work at a small law firm and use a lot of old fixed resolution software.

I beg to differ!

Jonathan Coulton writes lyrics targeted to a technologically savvy audience, and distributes online, exactly where his target market is available. He has the perfect storm of content distribution and audience demographic.