Why are you adding the $33 to the $60? Normally, the rates that utilities charge include the costs of capital (loan/bond payback and interest) in addition to the cost of the service. IOW, the $60 rate should already include the $33 bond payback (+ interest). Is there evidence this is not the case here?

This is the argument Square made (that their policy "applies not to people, but to transactions"), but it's worth noting that their policy in fact does not say "bankruptcy services," it literally says "bankruptcy attorneys." (see the link in the summary)

Most of the rest of the list is about actual "goods and services." The wording for that one item would be easy to fix to be like the rest if they wanted to.

This is one area where Google's search algorithm falls down [...] I wish there was the option for a decay (or timeout) function into their page-rank algorithms to reward contemporary information.

Look to the left of the search results. See the "Search Options" thing? Open that and you can restrict results by date range (and a number of other things).

I never noticed those options until someone pointed them out to me recently. I guess if you've been using something simple for a decade, at some point you stop looking for new things about it. But now I'm amazed all over again. For example, do a timeline search on Google for "New Orleans" and see the peaks around the Civil War and War of 1812, then click and read historical articles from those periods in the NYT.

Tying this back to the original article, I personally think it's awesome that the Internet appears to "remember" stuff from before it was built. Getting articles from 1861 in your search results is just trippy, so hats off to Google and the Times.

I have personally seen truck drivers, park, get out of their vehicle, and verbally warn otherwise perfectly rational adults to move out of the way because they have gotten so acclimated to the reverse beep that they tune it out completely.

Hydrogen peroxide powered rocket packs fly for around 30 seconds, because they have a specific impulse of around 125, meaning that one pound of propellant can make 125 pound-seconds of thrust, meaning that it takes about two pounds of propellant for every second you are in the air. Mass ratios are low for anything strapped to a human, so the exponential nature of the rocket equation can be safely ignored.

A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.

However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.

John Carmack

I think what we really need to ask is: Will It Blend?

(Sadly, that's just a video of an iPhone -- couldn't find one of a hard drive.)

That said, Bujold's latest, The Sharing Knife, wasn't nearly as good as most of the rest of her stuff. I've not even read the second book, and I'm not sure I will.

I was in a similar situation when I got out of college. I had a lot of theoretical training in college and wanted to get my hands bloody. I was coding at work, but it was odd embedded stuff and I wanted some different experiences to "cleanse the palate". I ended up doing work for two projects: Vim and Mozilla. I chose these projects for two reasons: I liked what they did, and they had lots of room for additional coders.

Vim was sort of a dive-right-in situation. Bram maintains a vast TODO list that ships with every version of the product. I spent a while reading it, picked out a couple things that seemed like they ought to be easy, and got to work. I joined vim-dev and mailed out patches. I didn't do a ton for the app, but I got a few things in.

Mozilla was a different beast in many ways. It was a much more structured environment due to the review process and the presence of Netscape. Also, it was in C++ (which I barely even knew, thanks to some shoddy university training), and not just any C++, but XPCOM. At first I was intimidated by the size of the code and not knowing where to start, so I didn't even touch the code. I spent several months just sitting in #mozillazine and triaging bugs. I dup'd, I closed, I changed to NEW, all that good stuff. Through this, I achieved two important things: I got a much better sense of how the product worked, and I met some of the players involved through IRC contact. By this time I was sitting on #mozilla as well, but I never said a word.

Eventually, I downloaded the code and bought a copy of Don Box's "Understanding COM" for background reading (that book is amazing). From all the time spent triaging, I knew some of the areas where bugs were piling up and nobody was looking at them, so I started there. I submitted a few small patches, had them reviewed, had people check them in for me. The reviews were harsh sometimes, but I was learning a lot. Eventually I moved around a bit and took on larger fixes.

I did this for a year or so before I got too busy with work and dropped out of sight. To this day it was some of the most fun I've had as a coder. For all its flaws (in those days, Firefox was still "m/b", and Netscape ran the show), it was a great project, and some of the people who worked on it were the best programmers I've ever worked with.

So, my advice: start slow, start small. Figure out who you can ask for advice about something. Look for other (non-coding) ways you can help out that will help you get familiar with what's going on. It's worth it.

Thanks for the note. I do have e-mail notification turned on for replies to my comments, at a much lower threshold than +3. :)

My browsing at +3 is not an indication of my "faith in the moderation system" so much as it is an indication of my limited time. I can only afford to read these comments in so much depth. When I get really interested in a thread, I turn down the threshold to take a closer look.

I actually skimmed these comments at a threshold of 0. I did miss your posted corrections from John (sorry!), but that's only because there were >400 comments and I was moving pretty fast.

There is an eternal tradeoff between efficiency and fidelity. In medicine, we refer to the tradeoff between sensitivity (finding something important) and specificity (not finding something unimportant). It's kind of the same here, and I have chosen specificity over sensitivity.

I'll contact John.