alsothings

First thought: Why are there no references anywhere? Second thought: Must be because it's so difficult to put links in a webpage.

this was my first thought and it's driving me nuts. It's just a bunch of floating assertions.

USB was defacto standard for data transfer, especially on PCs, but the /connector/ on the phone side was not at all standards compliant or uniform across makes and models, and up until the passage of that law, it wasn't uncommon for the power port to be separate. Now that is basically unheard of. I'm not saying the law is the only reason for this change, but it is clearly a big factor, yet it is omitted from this article.

CANBUS +1. Would love to nudge the ardunio-ish end of the IoT community in that direction.

I find it notable that this article entirely ignores the EU's Common Electrical Power Supply law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_External_Power_Supply), which effectively mandated that all smart phones sold in the EU use micro USB for power. This had a swift and noticeable effect in the diversity of connectors in phones (basically Apple is the only maker that doesn't use micro USB and this change happened at the exact time of the law). The emergence of USB as The Way Phones are Charged didn't happen as a magic emergent property, but via considered government regulation. Government: it can actually work.

possible, I'm much less sure about my use of passed versus past here then the use of which instead of that in the title. That said, I had thought 'get' did not indicate motion across the sentence here 'passed' did, so passed is correct. But I could totally believe I'm doing it wrong.

I thought you were right for a second, but I'm fairly certain that 'passed' is what I meant. It's the past tense of pass, and thus the correct word. see http://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/past_passed.h... for a good set of examples.

I appreciate that the which/that distinction is tricky, but one is a restrictive clause and the other is not, changing the meaning of the sentence.

I cannot get passed the title. Unless the only cold emails the author sent were the ones that got the meetings, s/which/that.

(Actually I did read the article, and in it she says "cold emails produced 7 meetings at Twitter, Klout, LinkedIn", so either she sent 7 cold emails or the title should use 'that' not 'which')

“The raw height data is stored in metres and must be scaled down to fit within the 256 block height limit in Minecraft. A maximum height of 2 500 metres was chosen, which means Ben Nevis, appears just over 128 blocks high.

“Although this exaggerates the real-world height, it preserves low-lying coastal features such as Bournemouth's cliffs, adding interest to the landscape.”

- http://www.pcgamesn.com/minecraft/ordnance-survey-recreate-g...

So they are keeping to the 256 block height, but being slightly creative with the vertical scale...

I mean, this http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/the-re... was not comedy and it happend all of a few days ago.

tl;dr - nothing on the web is private.

It's perhaps worth mentioning that there's a pro-cyclist campaign around this issue that's been going for a few years (full disclosure, I have one of their jerseys) http://ipayroadtax.com/

I believe this headline is a very clear example of Betteridge's law of headlines[1], since the answer is 'No'.

I'll also just add that road surface wear and tear is to a significant extent and function of vehicle weight. If car driver want to yell at people for using more than their fair share of the road, yell at HGVs.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headline...

A bit of context, these bins tracked wifi enabled devices as they passed by for various targeted marketing things. http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/londons-smart-bins-track-4m-...

duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933422

Is it meant to be an amalgam of 'solution' and '-ify'?

Can you differentiate between other similar already in use terms like 'yak shaving' http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving or 'bikeshedding' http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding ?