koeselitz

A friend of mine that had insurance cut off his thumb a few years ago; all told the bill to him ended up being around $80,000. It is unfortunate, but you can't really just save and hope that a tragic thing like that won't happen - it is possible.

I am no huge fan of the BPD, and I don't deny that their tactics here were silly. But there is real history behind this issue, and it's a legitimate safety concern. It was only a few years ago that the Station fire happened less than fifty miles away from Boston; a hundred people died that night, and people haven't forgotten it, nor should they. This is an area that has a ton of old buildings that aren't coded for large numbers of people. It's a very real risk to pack people in.

And - fires happen fast. Between the moment a fire starts and the moment when people start dying, there generally isn't time for a neighbor to call the police and complain.

This isn't a noise issue; it's a fire hazard issue.

We're talking about micro-transactions - less than five dollars. If failing to charge for and ship small items at very small prices were legally actionable or subject to regulation, I imagine a whole slew of companies would be out of business.

And - if we were talking about $500 speaker sets or something, we would be talking about bad PR. But if a false positive fails to receive a $2 item, well, I imagine that would have to be a lot of false positives to lead to a net effect of bad PR.

Unless these studies were controlled for gender - and it appears that they were not - height is just one more factor which both men and women have to contend with. And if that's the case, then attractiveness is still a lopsided standard which women deal with more.

Kayak, Hipmunk, Google Flights, Orbitz, and almost every other aggregator licenses ITA Software's system, actually. And most major airlines use it internally. It's good enough that it's pretty much the de facto standard and framework.

Well, I'm happy to respond, I guess.

A few years ago, I was given an iPad 1 by the company I work for as a x-mas bonus. It took me a little while, but over time I've found it taking up so very many functions in my life, and doing so with more ease than I thought possible.

To start with, I use a stylus (a Pogo Sketch Pro) constantly with my iPad. I journal daily - I now have about 300 pages of hand-written journaling done, two years worth, that I did in the Penultimate app. I also do a lot of reading on my iPad; I generally read PDFs inside Goodreader, which allows me to underline and take notes with my stylus; last month I read almost all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, and now I'm working on Moby-Dick (an old favorite of mine.) Being able to take notes, save those notes, print out or email a single page - these things are very useful.

In fact, I use my iPad to fill in every form I find myself having to fill in. These days, lots of places (the DMV, insurance companies, etc) will send you a link to a PDF and ask you to fill it in - which, of course, seems utterly ridiculous in this era. But that's no problem for me; in fact, I prefer it, because I can fill it in pretty easily on my iPad (by hand with my stylus, or typing the data in if I want it to look pretty) and then print it out. That way, I can keep a copy of every form that I am forced to fill in. I do this with leases, with insurance cards, with applications for things, etc. It's a great way to keep track of those things when I find I need them later, too (since that seems to happen often.)

Just in general, it's allowed me to simplify my life immensely. Huge stacks of paper and file folders filled with old receipts and crumpled-up forms have been replaced by a tiny device with a few Goodreader folders. And of course, I'm the type of (ADD) person who is benefited immensely just by having a calendar app handy all the time.

Another thing - I am a jazz pianist. My iPad has become pretty much indispensable for my music. Most jazz musicians lug around three phone books' worth of music books called "Real books;" I have all three of the standard volumes in PDFs on my iPad, and several other more obscure ones too. I have hundreds of pages of other sheet music that's instantly accessible, no filing necessary. I can take notes on anything I like - my iPad saves all of it.

Also - lots of musicians like me find it really useful to practice along to a prerecorded background at home; once upon a time people used pre-recorded tapes, and in the past few years there's been a desktop program called "Band In A Box." Last I checked, a Band In A Box license costs $300; that's how it often is with these niche pieces of software. But there's a fantastic little $8 iPad app called "iReal B" that does everything Band In A Box does, and more - it gives you simple chord sheets for 1200 songs, and easily plays backgrounds for you if you need it. And in addition, I have apps that help me format sheet music for people and transpose it for other instruments when I want other musicians to be able to play along with me.

My iPad is also a really good tool for actually creating music itself. There's a pretty fantastic sequencing / synthesizer app called Nano Studio that I use to create some electronic music (like this: http://soundcloud.com/koeselitz/the-end-of-the-beginning) just for fun. There are apps like Filtatron with filters and effects I can run sounds through if I want. And the iPad is good enough to work nicely for my own recordings of me playing my piano; the Soundcloud app lets me record directly and upload immediately if I want, or there's an app called Fourtrack that just acts as a simple four-track recorder if I want several parts in the recording.

The essential thing for me is that the iPad is miniscule when compared to all the things it's replaced. And at this point, I can pretty much do anything I need to on my iPad. I can download files and then open them in any app I want to; and I have players that work with any format under the sun no matter how obscure. There were days when having an iPad seemed to be limiting in that it was somewhat difficult to move files around and manipulate them, but as far as I can tell those days are mostly gone. It would be nice to have direct filesystem acccess - but I almost never miss it now.

Sorry this is so long, but you asked I guess. Really, there are things I never would have even thought to do if I hadn't had this device.

If you don't mind saying - in what way do you find it a breath of fresh air? I ask because I am very much a Linux guy, not a Microsoft and definitely not an Apple guy - but my iPad has completely revolutionized the way I use computers. I guess the main draw is filesystem access, right?

And he instantly regrets it:

"CNN was a huge mistake, which I will not repeat." http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/11pka1/violentacrez_on...

The study I linked to is absolutely not a "narrow experiment" - it's the largest and most thoroughgoing study of its kind ever done. The study you're linking to, by contrast, is a narrow experiment, is more than three years old, and has been superseded by new data. It'd probably be worth actually reading the link I gave.

Kathy was absolutely not trying to rank people by how much privilege they enjoy. And you're misunderstanding the "hard mode" metaphor; factors are not necessarily sole determinants. It has been demonstrated, for example, that in science being female is a hindrance and being male is an asset. [1] That doesn't mean that there are not some males who have it worse than some females; it means that, for a male and a female coming from exactly the same background with exactly the same experience, the male will be better off. Being male is a privilege, and being female is a drawback.

I can understand, however, that a lot of us white males (I am one too) find this threatening because it seems like it's intended to "wrack us with guilt," as you put it. I guess maybe there are times when that's the goal, but Kathy here clearly doesn't intend to shove that down our throats. She's trying to genuinely point out something that even people who've been in the industry for years (like she has) might not see. And that's jarring, and it's kind of shocking, but it is not supposed to be a guilt trip. It's just supposed to bring us to awareness of simple facts that many people these days aren't willing to acknowledge.

[1] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/201...

>> 2. It's more about the doxxing, which seems to be the one legal thing that isn't allowed on reddit. Either they have the policy that doxxing is horrible or they don't.

I guess the question is whether that is a sensible policy. It may make sense to protect anonymity - I can see that - but does it make sense to protect nothing else? Is anonymity really the only true community value?

There's an interesting question here, actually. Do people really have the right to screw themselves out of a fair trial? I guess so - if only because it would be very difficult to deprive people of this right. I would point out, however, that most constitutions I know of go to great lengths to try to deprive people of the right to screw themselves out of a fair trial. That's why people are given public defenders if they cannot afford a lawyer, for instance.

More to the point - this case isn't just about Samsung. Everybody is affected by the changing limitations and definitions involved in patent law. So while it's hard to say that Samsung doesn't have a right to screw up their own defense, it's also hard to say that justice isn't infringed when jury selection is botched here.

At the very least, if someone were a champion of Apple's cause here (and I am not saying I am one) then that person would justifiably be very upset to see that what could have been a clear and direct case setting precedent of the future can become a hazy decision which will be ardently appealed and at the very least questioned for years.

That isn't really phrased as a salary, is it? It sounds like a signing bonus. Which - well, I've never worked around Cupertino. Is $85k really a typical signing bonus?

>> "I have 3 people reporting to me. Designing product. I have them cause this is how you grow...."

>> "Essentially I could design myself and be 10 times quicker."

The first claim here makes no sense in light of the second. If you could do the work 10 times quicker, then do it and keep all three salaries to yourself and use less time than you do right now. There is no "growth" going on if the three people working under you are ten times slower than you could - unless the work they're doing isn't really important to the growth of the company, in which case why are they there?

And then you say this:

"if a candidate does not challenge you in your authority, he or she is crap."

... which makes me thing that either (a) you have not hired good candidates at all, since they are ten times slower than you; or (b) you're leaving out the part of the design review where they show you that you're an idiot and challenge you by producing something you never would have thought of.

In general, though, the feeling I get is that you approach these design reviews knowing that they will be painful, and that all designs presented will be wrong. In which case, again, this seems like an exercise in utter futility.

So - yeah. I don't really understand your point. Maybe you're saying you wish your CEO or whomever had done a better job hiring the people that report to you?

What you've said is true, but it should be noted that not only did Xerox never file a patent suit - nobody filed a software patent suit for at least a decade afterwards. Software patents were at that time unknown. If Xerox had wanted to file a software patent suit, a good lawyer would have disabused them of that notion instantly by pointing out that that wasn't how patents worked then.

So the fact that Xerox didn't file a patent suit doesn't say much, I don't think. That doesn't mean that Xerox wasn't in the wrong or that Apple wasn't in the right; it just means that patent lawsuits really weren't the way people went about these things then.

Hold on - that doesn't seem to say what people want to think it's saying, does it? That's a license to use Smalltalk-80 in products. It isn't a license to use the Xerox Parc system or look and feel at all. I think the point remains: if there had been software patents at the time of the original litigation, Xerox would have won. Am I missing something?

At this point, it seems as though journalism made an extraordinarily dire mistake in relying principally on revenue streams that are entirely distinct from their central business. Shouldn't journalism rather have sought to monetize the thing it does best - journalism? If it had, maybe it wouldn't be in this mess right now.

This seems like a fine point, and I wonder if it's actually true. Has there really been any case of a person being sued or threatened by Craigslist for cross-posting their ad - that is, posting their ad on Craigslist and also somewhere else? Keep in mind we're far afield here of what happened with PadMapper, which didn't have anything to do with anyone cross-posting their own ads.

This is flatly not true. The Affordable Care Act includes provisions to encourage - not compel - doctors to use electronic medical records; I really don't think this is such a ridiculous thing, and as someone who's work on medical data before I really think it's becoming more and more necessary to keep costs down. Here's a citation from someone who is concerned about security but who explains correctly that the Affordable Care Act in no way forces anyone to hand over medical records to "the government" :

http://claireshealthlawblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/electro...

The thing is that Apple has not so far allowed really and truly dynamic icons on the home screen. This bothers some of us, since we'd like to have some notifications or displays visible from that screen. This is neat because it allows that, although in a limited way.

Is this really true? How many "large online retailers" can you name that have been able to pinpoint an exact shipping date months in advance of the actual release of a product? Apple sure doesn't; they get around this by not even announcing a product until they can pretty much release it immediately.

In fact, as far as I can tell, Google is meeting the standards set by the electronics industry. Heck, in the gaming world, I have known people to put in their credit card details and preorder a game that's supposed to be out in six months, and then wait for a full year before seeing it ship.

Yes, for products that have been released already, it would make sense to demand a shipping date. This is not one of those products. They've given him a much better promise than many companies have in the history of not-yet-released electronic items. Once it's been more than three weeks, maybe we can start to wonder.

Wait, I don't understand quite what you mean. People standing up frequently turns an office into a "mess"? How so?

I guess you must mean that it would disturb the other four people in the office if one of them got up every few minutes. But it seems as though that is down to office design, not how often one person happens to stand up. I worked in a 100-person office for about a year and a half. The floor had nice-sized desk cubicles. The whole time, I strictly maintained a schedule, getting up exactly every half hour to go on a two-minute walk. It never disturbed anybody as far as I know; I didn't make any noise, I made sre my chair wasn't squeaky, and I walked carefully without stomping.

I really feel as though, if you're in a situation where on person getting up disturbs the workflow of multiple other people, then you have an office design problem. It wouldn't even matter if people got up fifteen times a day or three - if they're disturbing others unnecessarily, then you need your office fixed to remove this disturbance.

In particular, please note that the approach of blaming the disturbances on the people getting up seems like a path to terrible management. If my bosses came to me to suggest that they'd rather I tried to stand up less often, I'd be a bit taken aback, and I'd probably reconsider where I chose to work.

It's funny that they did a whole presentation like this without mentioning the price, aside from saying it'll be priced "like comparable tablets based on ARM," which doesn't mean much on the face of it. Just recently there was a lot of talk about how Windows 8 is too expensive for tablets running it to be priced in a range to compete with the iPad. One would think that, since Microsoft is making it in-house, it might be cheap enough to compete with the iPad; but of course we won't know until we know.

Will we get a price today, or are they holding that back?

I hadn't heard about that until this thread - nice! I am looking forward to that. Seems like a great thing.

You want them to add a pen? They added a pen:

http://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/632...

That's exactly what I do. Every night, I carefully set the settings on my iPhone so that I won't be disturbed by email notifications or other stuff. Every morning, I carefully set the settings on my iPhone so that I'll know when I get emails or texts or other messages. If I forget to do this, I miss a lot of stuff, but I really have no choice but to rely on myself.

Does it really make sense that it takes so much effort? These are otherwise such effortless machines; it just seems weird that I can't make this part of using them easier.

I got very excited, because I thought at first from the headline that this meant that Ubuntu's Unity interface now supports Linux. Kind of disappointed to realize that's not the case. I guess we'll have to wait a few more versions..

>> Do we imagine that such progress is achieved through the kind of Luddite thinking that leads people to value "hackability" over never-before-achieved levels of precision and portability?

I don't think that's precisely fair. I'm not exactly a fan of King Ludd - I like machines a lot, I like taking them apart and putting them back together and doing cool things with them. For this reason, though I think they're really neat, and I've even thought about it just because they're so cool, I don't think I'll ever buy a Macbook.

Even so, I am not foolish enough to believe everyone is just like me on this count. I've even recommended Macbooks to at least three friends, helping them purchase and set them up, not that anybody needs much help with such intuitive machines. They're just not for me, and I know why - because I'd like to be able to disassemble them, and at the very least I'd like to be able to add or replace my own RAM.

Does that really make me a Luddite?

Well, it might. I guess it depends on your profession. If your profession is hardware hacking, IT, or maybe RAM disk upgrading, it seems like that would be included. So I suppose the "Pro" in "Macbook Pro" implicitly excludes those professions.

That's the trouble, though - will Windows RT really offer file system access? I haven't seen guarantees that it will.