dennish00a's comments

This!!! "Prestigious" colleges aren't mostly about the course material, which after all must be learned and re-learned throughout life (at least in my case). The more important part of the experience is communicating with and learning from your fellow students. How do they approach problems? In what kinds of thinking do they generally succeed where you fail? How do /you/ deal with failures and stumbles when they occur? Truly, I think that the idea of online courses replacing the value of attending and living at an institution like CalTech, Yale, or Harvard is beyond laughable.

Hiring good people and keeping them happy is enormously difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Finding the right person can easily take a month or more--and the process must be repeated each time you lose your employee. The better and more qualified the employee, the more likely he or she is to go on to better things. If you can find a good person for $48K yearly, then you will also need to pay benefits, bringing the cost closer to $72K. To keep your employee happy, he or she will need time off, probably during times that he or she would be most useful to you. Your assistant will need to sleep, too, perhaps during times that you may be awake and hungry. You will also need to pay your employee for many hours in which they are not engaged in helping you because you haven't asked for help.

In short, I cannot imagine having the kind of wealth that would be needed to hire and maintain a group of employees that could assist me around the clock--and would do all of this without imposing a significant additional burden on my life. But I and probably many others can imagine paying a few hundred dollars for assistance with burdensome tasks.

> People who say this don't have a lot of friends, or don't care about their friends

I just wanted to add another voice saying that this isn't remotely true. I have a large and close-knit circle of friends, who work in technical fields, but Facebook isn't our thing. A few of my friends use Facebook a lot, but many use it rarely, and many don't have an account.

Sure, if you are looking for a beverage, then buy cheap wine, have a soda, or drink some water. All are tasty and thirst quenching!

If you are fascinated by wine as art, though, you are going to be looking for something /interesting/-- unique and handcrafted. And those qualities always cost money, because you are paying for somebody's effort and talent. If you love good cooking, for example, you don't eat instant ramen every night. You go out to have fun and see what the most inventive chefs are doing.

Bare Bottle is a startup trying to bring this creative aspect to the fore, by pairing great winemakers and designers (http://barebottle.com). Both artists involved are "great" because they are creative originals who make something unique, not merely because they produce something acceptable to wash down your ramen.

Disclosure: I am a co-founder of Bare Bottle.

I find it interesting to read about this "taboo" because, as a scientist at a public university, the issue is...nonexistent! If you are a scientist writing grant applications with other people (the norm), then you need to know their exact salaries in order to fill out the application. This includes the salaries of people above and below you in the food chain. There is no mystery or taboo in it whatsoever. Working at a public university, the mystery factor is even lower, if possible, because all the higher salaries are published online.

I remember dimly when I thought this complete transparency was strange and it made me uncomfortable. Now I don't usually give it a second thought.

I've had WiFi problems for many moons on 10.9: long latencies when pinging the router and complete dropouts for periods of 2-10 seconds every 3 minutes or so. The problem seems only to happen with certain routers. I was hopeful that my problems could be explained by the AirDrop issue (i.e., maybe I was only having problems when in proximity to certain computers using those troublesome routers).

Sadly, I don't even have the awdl0 interface. I tried taking down p2p0 but that didn't help either. Any other ideas?

I am really desperate!!!

Yes, it is that simple! I have found the experience of calling my congresspeople to be very rewarding and impressive. In general I have been connected to a very knowledgeable and intelligent staffer with minutes of calling. I explain why I am calling and say that I hope the Senator will support my position and the staffer generally replies with a few questions, clarifications of the Senator's position, etc., and says that he/she will relay my comments.

Truly, I cannot recommend this experience highly enough. Call! It only takes a few minutes and you'll be glad you did.

The same is true of scientists: the best among them say "I don't know" or "I don't understand" all the time.

I need to learn 3D graphics for some of my scientific projects. Specifically, I want to rotate clouds of points just as shown here. I have no idea where to start with doing this, however. Can somebody point me to a good tutorial or other resource in 3D graphics?

I've lived in this world: it was San Francisco about 15 years ago. People there used to leave their networks open (60%?) and now they don't (99%). It is an amazing change and I don't understand it. What has changed? I think it is the population using WiFi, which used to be more technology people and is now just...everybody.

My network is still open, though, and will remain so. Less than once a year I have to throttle a heavy user.

I don't believe that the author thought he was doing the right thing as a legislator! I think he was trying to save the state some money, without thinking carefully about how those savings would impact people's lives. As you sow...

Talk to a lawyer. A good lawyer is your best friend and won't make things more confrontational. He or she will vastly improve the situation by making clear to you (and others if necessary) that you know what you options are. For what it is worth (IANAL), my understanding is that California law does provide some protection for employees in this situation, no matter what the contract says.

I just need to add my voice to the chorus: OAuth really, really sucks.

I don't understand what problem it solves. A malicious app (native or web) can find a way to get your password, period. A well-behaved app can have your password and do no harm. And, practically speaking, I don't know any real person who's had a problem that has been solved by the existence of OAuth.

OAuth is just a massive pain in the rear end.

It is interesting...I had never heard of the Pomodoro technique but independently developed a method in which each "work unit" is: 25 minutes. I wonder how many others have also concluded that 25 minutes is short enough not to be scary (if you have to force yourself to do it) but long enough to get something done.

I love R--but I end up using Stata more often because it is easier to produce vector graphics that can be imported to Illustrator. I wish that the R community would start to focus on graphics.

Those of you who have heard Bill Gates speak about global health will know that he is NOT just "giving away lots of money". Doing that would be easy, for somebody who has so much money (though Steve Jobs never bothered!).

I've heard Bill speak about global health issues in large plenary sessions and in small poster sessions. Speaking as somebody who has spent two decades working in this area...Bill's command of the issues is stunning and far ahead of most of the scientists I work with on a daily basis. He has the kind of knowledge that comes only with a huge investment of /personal time and energy/ spent flying all over the world, speaking with scientists, politicians, educators, and people affected by these various conditions. Frankly, I have the impression that global health is now an 80-hour-a-week job for Bill Gates. He has that kind of knowledge and passion about the issues when he speaks.

Bill's investment of personal time and energy is what really impresses me. If I had $50B or so, I'd probably give most of it away, but I'd probably do that while lying on a beach somewhere. Not Bill. He's working hard to give his money away in the right way, while taking time away from his family to do it.

And that's charity.