sethg

46 ms·

421.
by sethg 16y ago
To me, as a Jew, “Diaspora” just means “outside of Israel”. Of course Jews live in so many different countries outside of Israel because of our history of being persecuted, but when I first heard of the “Diaspora project” I did not have
422.
by sethg 16y ago
From the government’s point of view, there is no reason to make it easier for citizens to anonymously and untraceably send money to one another. It’s politically impossible for them to eliminate paper/metal cash, but they’re not going to m
423.
by sethg 16y ago
If I were a British subject I would totally get behind a campaign to un-decimalise the currency.
424.
by sethg 16y ago
I like the idea of a ternary currency: redefine the dollar¹ to be worth 81 pennies², and then issue 1p, 3p, 9p, and 27p coins. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary ) Of course no country other than Geekistan would actually d
425.
by sethg 16y ago
N.B.: Indian citizens cannot be dual nationals: if they accept citizenship or a passport from another country, they lose their Indian citizenship. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Automati... ) I assume this is why th
426.
by sethg 16y ago
Now Linus can make the same complaint.
427.
by sethg 16y ago
If the advice in that particular book is correct, then any entrepreneur who spends $100 on it will recoup the cost fairly soon. If the buyer is a college student rather than an entrepreneur, well, the cover price is comparable to the pric
428.
by sethg 16y ago
So back in the day, when the Supreme Soviet issued its Five-Year Plan, was there a line item in the Plan allocating so much sheet metal and paint to People’s Video-Game Console Factory Number One? Or did some factory that produced military
429.
by sethg 16y ago
You’re missing the part of capitalism that deals with capital . If your organization is, say, an automobile company, you can’t just get together with your friends and say “hey, let’s make cars and sell them”. You need a factory building,
430.
by sethg 16y ago
I once saw a slogan on a T-shirt that said “Labor creates all wealth”. I would suggest that if your first reaction to that slogan is anywhere in the range from “that’s an exaggeration, but yeah, it’s mostly true” to “HELL YEAH!”, then you
431.
by sethg 16y ago
Is “everyone could be a cabbie” really such a lucrative prospect, from the drivers’ point of view? My understanding is that when you take into account the uncertainty of income, the fixed cost of leasing and maintaining a cab (of course, p
432.
by sethg 16y ago
I know someone who puts a warning in her .sig file: “I do not read my email every day, or even every other day.” I assume she was fed up with people who sent her an email question and then bugged her an hour later asking her when she would
433.
by sethg 16y ago
Talk to a lawyer. In some states, corporate officers can be personally liable for the unpaid wages of an employee. From my casual Googling, I’m not sure if California is such a state, but you should know how much leverage you have, even
434.
by sethg 16y ago
Ah, yes, “Potemkin Consulting”.
435.
by sethg 16y ago
I am surprised that an algorithm designed to compress a graphic image would be at all useful for compressing bytes of text.
436.
by sethg 16y ago
So “food-miles” is like “lines of code”—a way to substitute a half-assed metric for actual thought?
437.
by sethg 16y ago
Four interruptions per hour ?! I never realized how good I have it....
438.
by sethg 16y ago
Unless your point is that the Flash codebase may be similarly bloated. Yeah, that was kind of what I had in mind.
439.
by sethg 16y ago
Open-sourcing would open so many doors. Apple could modify Flash until it worked on iOS properly, Google could modify until it worked on Android. If Adobe has spent years growing the Flash player code on the principle “make it work well o
440.
by sethg 16y ago
I assume that JetBlue is making this offer for the same reason that any airline offers a discount tied to an abnormal schedule: they can’t sell enough full-price (or even normal-discount-price) tickets to fill their seats during September,
441.
by sethg 16y ago
Yes, the cost is nonlinear with height, but my point is that the benefit to density can also be very high. (I can believe that in the specific case of the Burj the cost outweighs the benefit, given that the skyscraper was built primarily to
442.
by sethg 16y ago
There’s a very simple reason: air conditioning. One skyscraper with a thousand residents is going to be more energy-efficient than a thousand single-family homes or even a hundred smaller apartment buildings. It also allows the developer
443.
by sethg 16y ago
Congratulations! The late Tracy “Baby Whisperer” Hogg pointed out that swaddling is a neurological hack to help babies sleep. OK, she didn’t phrase it that way, but... Until they reach about 4–5 months, babies don’t really have voluntary
444.
by sethg 16y ago
The OP claims that employers don’t value the institutional knowledge that is built up by employeees. I can refute this from my direct experience, which, as I understand, is not atypical for a developer working at a startup. I worked for fi
445.
by sethg 16y ago
Back when HTML was invented, it was based on SGML. In retrospect, this was a fundamental design flaw. SGML has all sorts of fillips that were intended to make documents easy to type (back in the pre-GUI era) but which in practice make the
446.
by sethg 16y ago
I have even heard that Manhattan != New York, although my relatives on the Upper West Side treat Brooklyn as a distant and inaccessible planet.
447.
by sethg 16y ago
The last time I looked at the procedure for running Perl/PHP within a jail, it looked like a sysadmin’s nightmare. Of course, that was a while ago, in the pre-kernel-virtualization era. (There must be a way to run one virtual machine insi
448.
by sethg 16y ago
I used to use OpenBSD as a personal mail/web server on a freecycled 486, and decided to go with Linux when I upgraded to newer and faster machines. My rationale was that even though I respect OpenBSD’s security philosophy, if anyone pwns m
449.
by sethg 16y ago
From my observations, I would surmise that in a school of mediocre teachers, the direct approach is probably better; a more flexible approach to lesson planning would just gives those teachers an excuse to throw up their hands and say “fo
450.
by sethg 16y ago
I suspect that the two are related. If the people setting your salary see you as a cog who is expected to do precisely what you’re told, they will see your labor as cheap.

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