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I don't think we pile it so high, though I have never worked in whichever civil service branch handles snow so it is only based on life-experience.

I have never seen a pile so high, we have many smaller piles scattered throughout our cities: every parking lot has one, the parking lane of most roads becomes places for snow piles, just outside of town you can see fields of small piles. The snow that is actually removed from the roads, I assume they spread that out into smaller piles as well.

Those pictures of loaders on top of huge piles of snow seems particularly dangerous.

I really enjoyed this book on the discovery and definition of electromagnetism.

Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics (http://www.amazon.com/Faraday-Maxwell-Electromagnetic-Field-...)

I was wondering if anyone had information about this.

It looks like it ties to Microsoft HealthVault. That is not available in Canada. It appears (from the outside) that MS sold the "rights" to HealthVault to Telus, whom did absolute nothing with it. Does anyone know, is that the right read of the situation? Can MS ever offer HealthVault to Canada or will we have to hope that Telus will?

Also, to the people below. As far as I can see, even a service to forward the hardware from the US to Canada, this probably will not work. If you register your live account in Canada (which you probably would, so you can put a CC on it) then you will not be able to active HealthVault on your live account - it will send you to a Telus page.

I agree with you but for discussions sake...

What if this wasn't classified as a corner case? As you said - most MSOs are running either an old Moto or old SA as their standard box. Because headends are either Moto or SA there are actually very few unique STBs in the field. And of those, they are all versions of the same OS that either Moto or SA have been using for a long time.

If MS just threw a bunch of resources at common SA and Moto boxes to enumerate and add special code to handle these cases... could it work? Would it be a better experience? Is it worth it?

This looks to be shaping up well. Might I suggest a new word for "Favorites" though. Maybe it is silly but it seems odd to me to Favorite gore pictures et. al. "Important" or "Impactful" or something else might be a better word when the content could be that of loss and suffering.

I think they are implying you only pop() when you are doing the replacement (Trim). The rest of the time you Sink and Swim depending on how the LRU was done. IE: every time you get() an item you set the access time to now() and then call sink/swim to fix the ordering. This would give logn time to get and set.

See here for a very good writeup of priority queues and variants. http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/24pq/

(not hugely familiar with Java so this stuff might be wrong) The implementation presented has some bad timing issues (List.Contains is a linear search). I think List.Remove is also a linear search. As well this implementation doesn't seem to do Point (1).

Reminds me of Stable Matching[1] but the groups aren't the same size. I guess if we can relax the "opposite sex" requirement then we reduce the problem to a Stable Roommates Problem[2] ;)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_matching [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_roommates_problem

Political musing aside I think it may be disingenuous to compare modern collision-free Ethernet vs shared-medium solutions.

Modern Ethernet over twisted-pair connect directly to a switch, a quite intelligent piece of technology. During this transfer you will not get a collision because it is your wire. When all the various clients packets converge at the switch the software there will sort and buffer the traffic in a hopefully 'fair' way and then send all that traffic out a collision-free link. Repeat. (Note: old Ethernet did at one time transmit on a shared medium but most people thing of Ethernet as our modern twisted-pair-switch-n-router architecture).

ATM and other channel access methods[1] are solutions dealing with a different problem. A shared medium can quite easily become overwhelmed even if everyone is playing fair. If the link just has too many clients the network collapses. One might liken this to the "hotel wifi" or "stadium wifi" problem.

While I think more open wifi is good, the technical challenges are not trivial. Many hotels and stadiums are moving to WLAN Controller architectures coupled with highly directional APs. Just a bit ago we saw an article on how the Super Bowl will be RF Spectrum policed this time around - just to try and keep the shared medium working. There would be many policy questions around deploy, management, policing, etc. and many technical questions about channel access, network health, buffering, etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_access_methods

I am not a doctor. The body is quite good at keeping high ox levels. If your ox level is too low cell damage can occur, organ damage, etc. If your ox level gets way to low your die.

Lower than normal ox levels can help diagnose that something is "wrong" with your body (or your environment) - lung damage, heart issues, etc. It can't tell you what is wrong, just something is up.

I wouldn't use the headrest personally. In an accident the magnets will detach and the ipad will become incredibly dangerous to the passengers in the car.

Cool idea.

I am confused by the implication of this code

  var prices = new(Table, String, Int);
  put(prices, $(String, "Apple"),  $(Int, 12)); 

Stack objects are created with "$" so these are on the stack and then placed into the Table? So if this was in a function and the function returned, the Table (lets assume it was global) would now be pointing to destroyed stack variables? Is that the correct interpretation?

Is this all done with header files and the preprocessor? It looks like that is the case - if so, I am impressed at the dances you got it to do ;) Also, have you read http://www.amazon.com/Interfaces-Implementations-Techniques-... which does some "Object Orientation" in C tricks?

To answer number one:

- Increasingly health monitors are on a network so that all the stats of a ward can be displayed at a central nursing station. The alternative is to turn the beeper really loud so that nurses at the station can hear it go off. In the case of (as an example) children, these monitors go off regularly - especially at night. The warning beeps are usually not a big deal but they do wake up both child and parent (whom often sleep at the hospital with the child). Oxygen Sat monitoring in particular has a high false-positive during regular monitoring on children. To ease the burden of parent, child and nurse these monitors are connected to a network and remotely monitored by nursing staff. This allows nurses to weed out false positives without waking everyone up.

- These networks should not be on the internet, I agree. But I can see low budgets (why run so many wires when one will work?!) and less-than-competent IT (also related to budgets) causing these networks to be connected to the internet.

I had the exact same thing happen in Canada. Asked for Amazon gift cards for the Kindle I just got for Christmas. Got hundreds of dollars worth. None of it usable for my actual Kindle because they were "Canadian" Amazon not "US" Amazon gift cards.

After being very confused, I was very disappointed.

Yes, 1st gen are getting the upgrade as well.

From: http://www.nest.com/blog/2012/10/02/the-next-generation-nest...

I bought one 3 months ago (damn!) and am very happy with it. I can't say for sure I saved X dollars but between airwave, auto-away and it's easy scheduling (compared to my old, confusing, impossible to understand thermostat) I can't imagine it hasn't saved me at least some money.

But on top of that it looks good in my high traffic hallway. Being in the hallway to my bathroom it acts as a nice night-light (it turns on when I step out of my bedroom to goto the bathroom and visa-versa) and overall has been a joy to work with.

I felt the WP7 icons looked 'ok' until I saw/used them in person. The movement aspects of the tiles, personally, are important to the overall feel of the home screen. I really liked the tile interface after using it (so much so I switch to a WP).

Just as an anecdote: I used to stream my Netflix through my console (PS3) as my primary usage of said console. I got so frustrated with having to do Software Updates, seemly "every time I turn the bloody thing on!", just to launch the Netflix app that I went out and bought an AppleTV. My console is no longer even connected to a TV or power cable.

I think almost every company would have to have such a banner. Everyone has a price. Even Marco ("and they didn’t want to pay enough"). Some prices are higher than 'the market' wants to pay right now but that doesn't mean there isn't one.

That is interesting because I really like the aesthetic. Some of the apps I have used are indeed not consistent but I found the same on iPhone and android as well.

Another thing I think to keep in mind as well is designing and implementing for a 'metro' UI is new for many developers and it will take time to get used to (and create) the conventions. I can't recall: when the iPhone came out was there a period of 'flailing' as devs figured out conventions that worked?

I don't think twittering teens is their target market.

"To help tell the story, we introduce our muses, Anna, Miles and their son, Luca. They represent classic Life Maximizers – busy personally and busy professionally, constantly juggling priorities, settled rather than seeking, and valuing technology as a means to an end, a way to get things done." http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=189338

And most of the "screenshot" images I have seen involve young families with 'hard working' parents that are trying to balance work and life 'in more demanding times'. Kids are almost always featured (not the target, but within).

I just switched to a WP (Titan II) last week. It may be new phone smell but I really like it. I wasn't a heavy app user though.

In showing the phone to my family/friends the biggest confusion I have found was the People pane. They thought in terms of the Facebook app and the Twitter app. Once I explained that those apps are all 'in' the people pane and linked to their phone profile things went smoothly. Overall I felt they really liked the look of the phone.

Personally I like the social media integration and the tile interface look. Rather than a feeling of reaching out to Twitter or Facebook those things are delivered to me. I don't have Joe on Facebook and Joe on Twitter, etc. I just have Joe and all his updates are delivered and grouped together in a nice way.

Do you have any good links/references/experience with 'managing social media'? My wife has been offered a social media position with a small local company but neither of them know 'what to do' beyond managing facebook and she really wants to do well at the job (she's excited!) so is looking for ideas.

I don't think so, obscure but not anonymous.

Here: http://developer.mintchipchallenge.com/devguide/developing/c...

Each transfer message has both the Sender and Receiver encoded within it. These are opaque but generated by your mintchip provider.

Looking here: http://developer.mintchipchallenge.com/devguide/ecosystem.ht...

Suggests that your provider ("trusted broker") creates your mintchip ids. It might be possible to associate many keys to your physical person but I believe all of them could be traced back with the co-operation of the providers.

It also appears to have a random? element with regards to ball behaviour. Each run of this https://developers.google.com/events/io/input-output/ahNzfmd... ends up different. Sometimes it hits the wall, sometimes goes over it and sometimes it makes in into the output. (should be two items on your screen - resize until you see a Track and a Wall)

Seems difficult to design and share if ball behaviour changes run to run. Unless that is part of the point - simulating real world user input ;)

Second jshint. I use syntactic vim plugin, could never go without it anymore. http://stackoverflow.com/a/5893447. Also node-dev https://github.com/fgnass/node-dev

Oh also: python -mjson.tool is great for formatting json on the command line. Like: curl -XGET http://example.com/API | python -mjson.tool

Looks good but the scrolling on iPad feels really wrong. So much so that it actually bothered me and I had to stop. Actually a very weird sensation - like nails on a chalk board - it is the first time I have had such a 'physical' response to pictures under glass.

Like? Require all ticket purchases be done on a G+ account and before you get to the theatre. Mine the purchases for the most relevant ad from all the people who purchased tickets (80% of the G+ accounts like..., 50% like..., etc). Show the ads in stock that are most relevant and also re-sell the ticket stats back to the advertisers. Offer a discount on your next ticket purchase if you blog/comment/review the movie (and feed that back into your G+ data-mine profile).

Feedback to advertisers will increase relevant ad pool to make better matches from ticket purchases. Advertisers get more data to target their ads to a better audience. G+ profile gets more data for profiling. Win win win. ;)

I read through a number of the docs and can't quite find the answer to this question, hopefully someone here can help me out quick.

I already have a bunch of (large-ish, deeply nested) JSON objects defined for my application. I don't really want to go about redefining these since they work great between my various node processes and the front end. I am saving them in a nosql database already, I am curious about switching (to save on devops costs). I only request based on 1 Hash Key (int) and 1 Range Key (int) for all my current get operations.

Looking through the docs/examples I see a lot of this type of thing:

    {"TableName":"comp5",
    	"Item":
    		{"time":{"N":"300"},
    		"feeling":{"S":"not surprised"},
    		"user":{"S":"Riley"}
    		},
    	"Expected":
    		{"feeling":{"Value":{"S":"surprised"},"Exists":true}}
    	"ReturnValues":"ALL_OLD"
    }

The JSON item has a kinda-of 'type syntax' on it. I really don't want to redefine my deep objects, but would be willing to redefine the Hash key and Range key, while leaving the rest of the nested types alone.

Ok, my question: Do my JSON objects need to conform to this 'type syntax' JSON notation in the examples? Or can I save just any JSON object into this database and only annotate the Hash Key and Range Key using this special notation?