Well yes, seeing as they haven't charged for it for the last century, it's no surprise that people would be upset by this sudden change.

Sure, they've charged for printing and distribution, but the cost to find and report the news has always been covered by advertising. You only paid to have it put on paper and delivered to you, which is a very expensive process. Online distribution, however, is practically free, and so naturally people would expect access to be as well.

Apparently somebody has forgotten rather quickly that this is NOT the first time the New York Times has put up a paywall. The last time (a few years ago), they tried to limit sharing via twitter and other feeds. If I shared a link to a new york times article with my friends, or with readers of my blog, then they couldn't actually read it unless they paid for it. The result was exactly what you'd expect - people stopped linking to New York Times articles. People began to notice that virtually everything they wrote about had also been covered by somebody else who was happy to share it openly, and so the Times immediately became irrelevant as news source. They dropped that paywall very, very quickly.

At least this time around they're trying to fix that obvious error. But their business model is fundamentally flawed because they're still charging for news, and news is a commodity which is widely available for free elsewhere.

I found that my wrist pain got worse when I switched to a crappy keyboard that was marked "ergonomic" just because it was split, but healed for good when I switched to a nice "non-ergonomic" scissor-switch keyboard. These mechanical keyboards have a nice, solid clicky feel, but the keys take less effort to press, and don't travel as far, compared to the classic buckling spring switches.

I used the Kensington SlimType, and my wrists felt better quickly. It looks like they've recently stopped production, but you can still get a new one for ~$25 -- really cheap for the quality IMO.

It's well known that the founder of JetBlue has ADD. He's talked about it in interviews before. If you're right, that would mean that he accomplished everything he has in spite of his "mental disability." Which would be pretty impressive. But actually, he claims that ADD has been a benefit to him, that it has contributed to his success.

Now personally, I'd be hesitant to use the word "disorder" to describe any condition that can help someone to become, by any reasonable definition, highly successful. (A great business, happy family, millions of dollars, etc., etc.)

Just because some researcher decades ago named this unknown, poorly-understood pattern of thinking and behavior "attention deficit disorder" doesn't mean he was necessarily right.

(And yes, exactly the same argument can be made for Aspergers.)

Oh yeah -- to address your troll about how "a scant few of them may be very good at other things": it is my understanding that there is little or no negative correlation between ADD and IQ, so people with ADD are just as good at a great many things as people without, as well as often being good at some things that "normal" people are generally not.

Well, probably for the same reason that we had 1.5 TB drives in between 1TB and 2TB. The most popular sizes at NewEgg include 150GB, 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, 640GB, 750GB, 1TB, 1.5TB. So maybe you're counting in binary, but it looks like nobody else is.

Indeed. This is why I never use the Internet. Who can trust anything on it? I only stick to carefully fact-checked sites like Slashdot.

Actually, Google started providing answers to specific questions (flight info, math problems, UPS tracking numbers) several years ago, long before either Bing or Alpha existed, and I seem to recall experiments with more general queries like birthdays. Now I guess they're expanding these existing features by integrating with the Google Squared Database. And this is fundamentally different from a product like Alpha, and very much in keeping with what google has always done best: find the information you're looking for wherever it might be on the Internet and get you to it as quickly as possible. Alpha has hand-made databases designed specifically to answer a selected set of questions on closed categories of data -- google actually tries to parse the text and structure of web pages to figure out a likely answer, so its database is the entire internet. This has inherent weaknesses, but based on google's history I think we'll see continuous incremental improvements in this feature until in a few years we'll take it completely for granted.

Ha! I think I found where they got at least some of these numbers: confickerworkinggroup.org. To quote the source: "it is with a lot of trepidation that we even show any values for conficker knowing that they will most likely be taken out of context and quoted by many." Oh well. They show conficker traffic hitting their honeypots from about 6.2 million unique IPs in 225 geographic areas (presumably based on ccTLDs, which use a liberal definition of "country") -- interestingly close to the stats quoted.

There are a few apps that don't need much more than the very basic notification system that the iPhone already uses. Then, there are a few apps (like music players) that absolutely require full-fledged multitasking. (It'll be nice to finally be able to listen to pandora while checking my email.) But there are a lot of apps that could get by with something in between: a more robust notification system that lets the app register for notifications from the OS when certain conditions are met (example: notify when a phone call comes in, or when the phone enters a geographic area, or connects to a particular wifi network), and run arbitrary code when that happens. This can give the best of both worlds: an app that runs whenever it needs to, but can't waste battery power the rest of the time, even by accident. I wish there were an API that allowed developers to do this.