Nekojoe's comments

On a similar note George Orwell got shot once in the Spanish Civil war. This article documents his thoughts on it - http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.h...

I agree. The BBC have more analysis here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010...

The figure also includes Apple iTunes Store App purchases and Kindle subscriptions. But they're not broken down. For all we know 3 people could have bought direct access to the website and the other 99,997 people could have bought the App to read something on their iPhone while taking the train to work.

It's interesting to see that the Guardian are now earning around £40 million from on-line ad revenues. While the back of a napkin calculation by the BBC blogger puts The Times paywall at £7 million.

The difference is that the Times and Sunday Times are aimed at the public. There's plenty of competition and free on-line quality alternatives in the UK from the BBC News Website and the Guardian. What I'm interested to see is how other sites traffic went up as people left the Times site as the pay wall was put up.

I'll bet the type of news you're willing to pay for isn't aimed at the general public. I reckon sites that will do well behind a paywall are either specialist sites or industry specific sites or even sites that offer time sensitive information first. The kind of sites that either offer quality information or hold a monopoly on this information. They also won't price this for the general public they'll price it for the corporations.

From what I've heard it's because the buttons and the case are made by different companies and they can't get the colours to match. http://www.reghardware.com/2010/10/15/white_iphone_spied/

I love this quote - "We talked a lot about how perception leads reality and how if you are going to create a reality, you have to be able to create the perception."

It sounds like the concept of the reality distortion field.

This way of memorising things is called Chunking - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_%28psychology%29

Chess champions use this technique too. I remember seeing a TV documentary where they got a chess champion to look at a board layout for a few seconds and reproduce it in front of them. They could do this easily for a valid board layout. But when they got people with no knowledge of chess to design the board layout in an invalid manner the chess champion could not reconstruct the board as accurately or as quickly.

I guess a common programming equivalent would be a design pattern.

If this was in the EU it would be a case for Protected Geographical Status - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Geographical_Status

I like it. It would be nice if the buy button was more prominent. I found a book I was interested in buying, or at least finding more about. I tried clicking on the book cover and nothing happened. I did notice the Buy button in the top right at the end, but it's not prominent as it's the same colour as the shelf.

Don't forget to mention Ben Goldacre's own website too which has more of the same stuff - http://www.badscience.net/

TweetDeck on iPhone is the same. The multi account feature was what won me over in the first place. I liked it as I could use it for managing both my personal and websites twitter account. Unfortunately that's broken right now. The issue is mentioned on their support forums, but no one at TweetDeck seem to have picked up.

The only other issue I have is a minor UI gripe. When you click on the run in background button, the progress bar and cancel button for the background tweet covers the back button on the main part of the app. It’s odd that they did that.

I remember seeing a documentary about these foxes last year. IIRC they were part of a science experiment to see if it was nature or nurture that was the key factor in the domestication of dogs.

Basically with each litter of foxes they selected the most friendly, and allowed them to breed, creating more friendly / domesticated foxes. They also selected the most vicious and bred them separately as a control. Later when the behaviours became more pronounced they artificially inseminated the vicious foxes with the domesticated foxes embryos to find out if they would be aggressive or domestic. They turned out to be domestic.

Interestingly because foxes are solitary animals they behave more like cats than dogs.

Borrow money on the internet?

Isn't that what start-ups like http://www.zopa.com/ are all about? Disclaimer - I'm not affiliated with them in anyway.

Baker Tweet uses the Arduino - http://www.bakertweet.com/

The official Arduino blog always has lots of interesting examples too - http://arduino.cc/blog/

According to this [1] it costs £2.15 a hit. Which isn't that bad spending wise if you consider the worst website in the UK government cost £11.78 per visit.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/gov_websites/

It all depends on where you are. One guy tried to get 4 weeks off at a place I used to work. He needed sign off from a high up manager to do this. The manager retorted if we can get by without this guy for 4 weeks, why do we really need him at all? Suffice to say, he didn't take his 4 weeks holiday.

If you're interested in this blog post I suggest reading Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science - http://www.badscience.net/

It covers the problems with homoeopathy in great depth and includes other similar alternative medicines, along with flaws in scientific studies promoting them and quackery in general. I highly recommend reading it. Not just to learn about the problems with these kind of treatments, but also the difficulties in creating unbiased scientific tests.

El Reg has a better write up including safety fears - http://www.reghardware.com/2010/06/16/arctic_laser/

A question mark can be part of your name -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8206280.stm

Certain characters like the defunct yogh have had issues in Unicode -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4595228.stm

Some names can be changed if they're cruel or too unconventional -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7522952.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6939112.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6937327.stm

Everytime someone mentions the a Sinclair and accounts, I always think of Hey Hey 16k - http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

You can generally get cheap buckets of Lego at people's yard sales, eBay, etc... The good thing about Lego is that it ages well, The bricks don't become obsolete. For more specific parts you could try BrickLink - http://www.bricklink.com/