a_m_kelly's comments

Not sure where you're writing from geographically, professionally or culturally but I can't imagine doing this to anyone.

In a professional environment, grabbing someone's arm and leading them around by it seems like an incredibly inappropriate breach of that person's personal space.

"A Stable (but perhaps unexciting) Business - This is where most people end up."

Really? "Most people" with a new business end up with stable but unexciting businesses?

I suspect most people end in failure, not Stable Business. In a post full of deeply questionable logic, this little gem takes the cake for me. I suspect some anecdotal evidence from otehr commenters will back this up or that there is a bevy of statistics to prove that this is true, even in the rarefied atmosphere of web companies.

This seems unlikely as Prometheus is being directly by Ridley Scott, not James Cameron.

I've done quite a bit of looking around re: 433 Eros's composition. I have found very little to suggest to me that there's large amounts of valuable minerals there. Can you cite someone that's done a composition extimate? This: http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Feb02/eros.html suggests such estimates are spotty at best, since the formation of the object hasn't even fully been agreed upon.

I'd welcome the evidence about precious metals coming from collisions, that meshes with some of my understanding of the early solar system, but would be glad to know more.

As someone who works in higher education, I'm most excited about this:

"...operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions."

In my opinion, today's course management systems go from pretty bad to worse. In using blackboard, moodle, and another platform called itslearning, these platforms suffer from major usability issues. I'm really looking forward to using a CMS I don't hate, students don't mind using, and which man be can modified at an institutional level. This could I think be the part of this announcement that has the biggest impact: helping to make online learning easier for everyone at a variety of institutions across the globe.

Try your local public library, it's free.

You may have to wait a day or two for ILL or movies to get to your local branch if they don't have what you're looking for right there. There's also going to be an online listing of movie that are available in the catalog, unlike most of the now defunct movie rental places.

I can second the recommendation of that book, I've heard a lot of good things, though I haven't read it. It's recently been updated in a 2nd edition [1], though I have no idea if there are substantive changes, presumably, there are, given more than a decade has elapsed. If anyone's read the updated version, I'd appreciate knowing if and/or how the book's changed, I've been thinking about picking it up.

I have read pretty big sections of Manning's Introduction to IR, and it served me fairly well as an introduction to the field. It's available online.[2]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Information-Retrieval-Concepts-...

[2] http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.h...

This seems like a really good idea, except that for me, it destroys two of the main reasons I send post cards when I travel:

* The physical mail is moving from where I am travelling to where the recipient is back home. It has to travel, just like I am.

* The best post cards are cramped with text.

* postmarks: (for me at least) you see where it was mailed from and when, additional ties to the time and place when it was written. A postmark from wherever the postagram warehouse is located isn't as interesting as the Paris mail exchange or the airmail stamp from Dehli.

seems to me like they've missed what gives value to postcards to me: their timeliness & physical history. No one really looks at the picture anyway, that's incidental, it's the message that's important.

I always put a _lot_ more than 140 characters on the back of a postcard. I put more than 140 charters just into the "DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE" space on the postcard. Postcards aren't about the picture, they're about sending a message from a specific time and place, forward to a person in a different place.

So, this is a good idea, but won't replace actual postcards for me. I could see using it for a number of other things, but I don't think this is in any way "at least 1,000 times better" than a long, thoughtful note crammed onto the back of some cheap cardstock you bought for a quarter at the beach. EDIT: spelling.

It seems to me, at least as far as my Google Autocompletes and general beginning linux searches, that many people who are new to linux are searching "problem $x ubuntu" not "problem $x linux."

That's just my anecdotal evidence, Linux, when it is adopted by new people seem to run Ubuntu and aren't as much aware of other distros, I for one don't know much about Arc or Redhat or too much about how they differ.

Thanks for responding, I certainly see where you're coming from, as you've said, you can't change an entire industry over night, but that won't stop people like me from wishing that you could.

I guess I'm impatient for a company like yours to succeed and visibly improve things for renters & buyers. I wish you the best of luck going forward.

I found my current apartment on Craigslist through an ad my landlord put up. I had to spend hours churning through what is essentially spam: brokers listing apartment or listing that they have listings but not actually giving out much information on individual places.

Services like this one and Rentjuice are services for brokers to find landlords and property managers who want to rent their apartments. (unless I misunderstand what's going on here.) Why are these services uniting landlords with managers and not with renters? I am tired of dealing with aggressive, bullshit-talking real estate agents who make money by having what amounts to a monopoly on rental information. In my experience they've got the incentive to get me into some apartment, any apartment as quickly as possible, they need me off their list ASAP, I need to find a place I'm going to spend most of my time in for at least a year. The general inability to listen to basic requests further annoys me, an agent has 4 apartments that fit my requirements, but I get dragged into places that don't meet my price requirements before getting around to the places I might actually rent.

The situation strikes me as ludicrous and it seems startups should be actively trying to dismantle this old-school ossified way of doing things. (see: AirBnB for hotels/temporary lodging as well as that car service one whose name I don't recall.) Craigslist listings moved us a big step in the correct direction, but they're still full of spam. It seems to me that real estate agents receive a lot more money than the value they're delivering. This may not be true with house purchases which is certainly more complicated and outside my experience.

"The SaaS allows landlords to post new listings, which get distributed in real-time to the brokers they’ve selected." Why aren't these being distributed to the people who need apartments?

Edited to add: "The software also includes tools for syndicate rental listings to general listing sites like Trulia, Hotpads, Craigslist and others. "

I can't believe I missed this the first time around. Worst case scenario (which I lean toward) means the above "feature" may as well read "We're going to ruin other services by helping you to spam them more easily." Sounds like a step in the wrong direction for renters, who should be the customers at the center of all of these transactions.

That's an interesting question. My [minimal] understanding of copyright law suggests that whether the book's in public domain in Britain has no bearing on the rights granted to Americans to use it.

If it is in the public domain in Britain, that doesn't give you a free license to start photocopying the book and reselling it here in the US. Those rights are assigned to a party here in the US. (and thanks to some oddness in the publishing world (or laws that help curb uncompetitive practices, the same company can't own the rights to a work in both the UK and US.)

I don't know enough about this to speculate on your importation and use of a book in the public domain elsewhere. I suspect personal use of the materials is fine. You could likely import a public domain copy of the work from England and as long as you don't adapt, resell, translate or otherwise re-purpose the work you'd be in the clear. I've got a friend who works for a company that does a lot of international rights work in publishing. I'll ask him and post back here, since now I'm curious.

(these sorts of byzantine international arrangements are one of several ways, along with translations, that authors of books have been able to make a reasonable living, selling the rights to the same book several times and being able to quickly drum up a blog post for slow news days with pictures of the Czechoslovakian cover of their most recent book.)

Google Cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QzG7EHf...

seconded. I live in Boston and I am almost never further than a single block from a BofA ATM here. Their ATMs now allow me to make deposits at nearly all ATMs, so until I move out of Boston there's no reason to switch.

If you find yourself to be interested in this sort of thing more broadly, in the justification of violence or it's utility, I recommend William T. Vollmann's exhaustive, intricate attempt to establish a framework for understanding the motivations, morals, and ethics of violence in his work Rising Up and Rising Down: Some thoughts on Violence, Freedom & Urgent Means.

To give some idea of what the text is like, here's a little bit of it from a section called "Where Do My Rights End?":

   Justified Choices of the Self:
   1. Whether or not to violently defend itself against violence; 
   2. Whether or not to violently defend someone else from violence.
   3. Whether or not to destroy itself.
   4. Whether or not to help a weaker self destroy itself, to  save it from a worse fate.

   Conditions: 
   1. No attachment to nonviolent creeds. 
   2. No attachment to collectivity or authority which might prohibit the self from removing itself from "the line of fire"
   Caveat to (1) and (2): So-called involunrtary attachments are not binding..." (pg 81-82. Abbr. Edition)

   ...

The abridged edition from which I quote above is over 700 pages and includes case studies and narratives of people, nations or groups acting a certain way, which Vollmann slotting them into his "Moral Calculus," I haven't had a chance to finish it yet but I remain interested in the elaborate thought experiment that is the book and the vividness of the historical anecdotes it contains.

Vollmann would fully support responding to violence in kind, there's a long section on non-violent movements and their utter hopelessness in the face of regimes unwilling (like bullies) to tolerate any dissent.

[The classic example of this is perhaps Harry Turteldove's story "The Last Article," which proposes Ghandi campaigning in a Nazi occupied India and ends just as you would expect it to.]

I think the thinking here is that hard drives are cheap and ubiquitous.

I have a whole drawer full of old hard drives, and though most people don't, I'm sure a lot of boxee's eventual user base does.

Given the amount of streaming content available, I can see why they didn't include it, I think if you're likely to want to have a hard drive inside this thing, you're the kind of person who'll have very little trouble finding one and plugging it in. The less savvy users won't notice it isn't there.

I realize I'm setting up a straw man problem here: a problem that'll only exist for people with the solution already, but I simply don't see a strong case for needing a hard drive. Do you need it to store video locally? If so, then they could never have included enough space, if you're only storing a few things temporarily, they you're likely able to buy a small thumb drive & store things there. Are there other reasons to have a hard drive that I'm missing?

EDIT: never mind about the flash drive: there's an SD Card reader on the front of the thing.

well, it looks like the Boxee Box _should_ be supporting Netflix "by the end of the year" and they appear to be in talks about Hulu+.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/10/netflix-and-hulu-plus-com...

I haven't been paying attention, but has eyetracking software gotten that good? Can you point to people or companies who are working on this, or currently available solutions?

I've been doing some usability testing stuff and it'd be nice to have eyetracking (especially paired with click/mouseover data.) and not much less helpful head/face tracking that is built into the webcam.

It's true: the old ones are very good, the recent additions to the Ender series for instance are terrible, they're an obvious cash in on his brand, I suspect he writes them quickly so he can make some quick cash (or to fill up his existing publishing contract.) and spends the rest of the time on stuff that doesn't suck so hard.

A review I read of his recent story collection said his recent stories didn't have to try so hard, he knew they'd get published and he was more or less keeping a hand in, his earlier work he's working hard and striving for quality, this applies in spades to the rest of his recent work and may well apply to any entity's (sometime) fall-off in effort or innovation after they've succeeded.

I know this article isn't about the content of your resume, but is your experience as a BSA camp counselor relevant programming or design work?

Very few employers will understand that being Nature Director likely meant you were an Environmental Science counselor and that that badge was one of the more difficult interesting ones likely offered at the camp. Are there benefits to signaling that you are part of a large organization like Scouting or a similar (generally) well regarded national organization like this? is it worth mentioning on the off chance your employer was also a Boy Scout?

What do other people think, is there a good general rule for where to stop including older work experience?

If you're putting one resume online and you can't tailor it to one job you're applying for, do you tailor it for the job you wish you had? What do you do differently for your general resume?