nicara's comments

Uhh, do take a look at the FAQ on his website ... Incels are probably the lesser evil when compared to bona fide racists?

>However, the normal convention when stating a nationality or, for instance, saying one is from Berlin, would be to leave out the indefinite article "ein." Though JFK's intention would have been, and was, understood by Berliners, he should have said, Ich bin Berliner.

Funny how in an article about common misconceptions a myth like that gets to live on (by being replaced with a new one).. I can't speak for Berlinerisch, as I've never lived in Berlin myself, but in standard German both versions - with and without the indefinite article - are 100% correct. The version suggested in the article might be slightly more common ("Ich bin Berliner"), but for JFK's speech I'd even go as far and say his version was better, simply because it stresses that he's "ein Berliner", just like all the other people listening to his speech. As I said, though, both versions are correct, and neither of them sounds better/worse. (Sorry, no source, but I know a bit of German.)

Maybe I missed his point, but first of all, yes, hospitals do have waiting rooms - just (obviously?) they're not filled in the middle of the night, as only people with, well, emergencies tend to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. Secondly, e.g. going to the dentist is almost guaranteed to be an hour's wait (at least where I live), even if you have an appointment. Say, you do have an appointment for 1500, then what many people around here do is, check in at 1455, ask how long the wait might be, and then actually leave to do some shopping or similar and come back in whenever their wait is nearly over.

So really, I don't see how this could be superior to any other system.. And is he pleasantly surprised at the 250ish Euros or did he consider it too high? In case of the latter, I don't know why he doesn't have German insurance in the first place. I currently pay less than that amount per year (though that's the public health care kind, not the private one, which arguably would be more expensive, but also better), and IANAL, but I think if he lives here [in Germany] he is forced by law to have some kind of health insurance.

Don't want to come across as too negative, but I just thought I'd give you the other side of the story as well. (I currently live in Germany and I am covered under public health care.)

(warning: going a little off topic here, sorry) Might I ask how you got started in the first place? I've got a fairly reasonable background regarding the theory of it [programming], I know the principles of OO and basic algorithms, etc., but in school we don't cover the actual writing of code. (And even if we did, it's probably safe to assume it'd go nowhere near as far as I'd like it to.) Anyway, I picked up some Ruby lately, worked through a bunch of tutorials, and it's been going decently - at first much too easy for someone like me, then challenging, but then there's stuff I just don't know how to do. On the one hand, I've repeatedly had big problems with blocks in Ruby - I can't seem to grasp why to use such a weird format when you could just use regular loops instead. On the other hand, and much more importantly, I don't really know where to go from there. I can't write any real programs, and I'd like to get into Rails eventually (as a gateway to Web developing as a whole).

Edit: Out of the tutorials that I did, this one[1] was the one I liked most, as it had a lot of cool tasks that you could just try and solve for yourself, it really helped me get the basics down. However, none of the tutorials have gone any deeper than that one, and as I'm sure you'll agree, I'm not exactly a programmer yet after that tutorial :) Additionally, I've started to read this[2] book, but it appears to follow a really strange direction and is generally not very pleasurable to read (IMO). And, again, the moment it tries to explain blocks to me I just stand there puzzled.. dropped it after I hit that point, as I did with all the other materials I've tried out so far.

Again sorry for hijacking the thread and apologies for being unable to offer any advice on your situation. Regards

[1] http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/

[2] http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

Edit2: Alright, just saw you've been a developer for longer than I've even used a computer :) So I suppose you can't answer this question either, bah. Wish there were more people that didn't get into programming either 1950 or at age 5. Really, where does someone start nowadays when they're 20 and have no clue.

Anyone have any idea what those 'scars' are that are only visible in x-ray wavelengths? I'd try and find out myself, but I'm not qualified enough to even know where to start looking or what to look for. :/

This isn't about IMDB, it's about Studio Briefing. And regardless of whether you consider it garbage or not, it might have had value to other people - which is why they were using it, I suppose - and it appears Google has been unreasonable in taking it off the index / shutting down the ads. Either that, or we're just hearing one side of the story.

Sure, and I admit I have no idea how much lead building such a spaceship might take, but keep in mind 2 things:

1) "More than half of the lead currently used comes from recycling." (from your article) - Once the spaceship is built and has left Earth, the lead is essentially gone (for the time being), so the more of those we build, the fewer lead we will have to recycle, and it will get even more difficult to build additional ones.

2) 400 tons for a small capsule, and consider they're proposing a spaceship in which multiple people could live in autonomously, i.e. they need places to live in, but also room to grow food, process their waste, etc. So I'd guess it's much higher than you seem to have assumed.

Oh and btw, I'm fairly certain we also need much of that lead on earth - hence why we're producing so much of it in the first place, so it's not like we have some spare lead in the order of magnitude of, say, 10000s (I'm really just guessing here, though) of tons lying around collecting dust.

"It is now known that any prolonged human presence deeper in space would need to be behind a shield of the effective strength of two feet of lead, which would weigh 400 tonnes for a small capsule."

Uhm, the first thing that comes to my mind - regardless of whether this black hole propulsion might actually work - is the amount of lead we have available. Just building the spaceship seems to be just as much a problem as accelerating it..

marketing gone wrong; check the twitter stream (#holidaywindows)

Anyone else feel their lineup is extremely.. non-Apple-y now?

It used to make a lot of sense - to me anyway - how they arranged their iPods from cheap(ish)/only basic features to the luxury-versions with more features.

I.e., shuffle -> play music; nano -> all of shuffle's features + view album covers, song texts, song titles to the music, calendar; iTouch -> all of nano's features + the whole smartphone without phone thing

But now, ever since the introduction of the iPhone 3G, this doesn't hold true any more. The iTouch is supposed to have all the features of the nano plus more - but now it doesn't have a camera?

The only reason to give the nano a camera and not the iTouch would be to distinguish it from the iPhone and market it as a gaming device. But then it doesn't make sense how the basic model of the iTouch has a slower processor and GPU than the iPhone.

I don't know, but from these oddities in the lineup I'd almost go as far and predict more changes to come very shortly. Either push the iTouch more in the gaming niche and make the nano the new multimedia device (as opposed to just audio in the first two generations of it), or push the iTouch more into the all-in-one direction - which would mean there ought to be a new iPhone as well in order to keep the two apart.

Not sure if I'm making sense here, but right now the nano, iTouch, iPhone lineup is quite counter-intuitive and almost non-transparent (yes, choice is not always a good thing).

Most of the value in YC comes from meeting interesting (read: influential) people, learning a thing or two, and, seeing how important it is to know people to get a job, networking - surely it can't hurt to know people if you're running your own business, I'd even go as far and say it's more important than if you were just on the lookout for a regular job.

It's not really about the money.

For some odd reason it wouldn't let me register my real name (Felix) even though I entered only a few (<10) seconds after the giveaway started.. the minimum lenght is supposed to be five characters, and Felix is still not taken as I type this - kinda annoying, since now I had to take something else when apparently Felix would've been available, but wasn't due to some bug. And the giveaway was at 6 in the morning in my timezone...

http://www32.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=12am+EDT automatically detects your time zone and tells you your local time for that event, in case you're too lazy to determine it from the countdown on the official page

Edit: nevermind, I just saw they added that to the official site already, my bad - I only went there and saw the big countdown, didn't read the small-ish stuff above. Sorry again.

What I find similarly odd about bilingualism is that often I can't seem to translate one of the languages I speak into another. I don't have any problems expressing my thoughts in whatever form in either language, but converting already thought stuff from one language to the other is extremely hard. Maybe this stems from the way I learn languages (I've never been able to relate to the classroom-way of teaching; learned everything from talking to friends / reading prose in the foreign language - I don't think about which language to speak in, it just comes naturally, maybe best seen by the fact that I can dream in 3 languages, depending on what language I've spoken most on that particular day), so it might be hard to reproduce so you guys probably can't see what I'm saying, can you. :/

Slightly OT, but new iPhone (as mentioned in the OP article) as well.

For those who feel like following the liveblog, http://live.gizmodo.com/

I concur.

He was ranting about Apple even though he didn't use any of their services or products? And I'm quite sure doing so would've saved him a lot of time and trouble.

I use Windows as well as OS X, and, knowing both sides, OS X is just so much more comfortable to use. Especially for people without previous knowledge, such as my mom or my sister. I did install OS X on my sister's Eee PC a while back and it runs great, she's never had any trouble with it. I'm confident it would've worked with his mother too. (Though buying a MacBook is much less trouble than hacking OS X on any other system)

There should be a wiki page about the creation of the Wikiid page (which apparently got deleted?). Surely that's relevant?

I don't get it - taxes are a percentage of your overall income... so how can you have to work 6 months for taxes?

I do realize that you have to work more to be able to make a living, but keep in mind that:

- By working in any state, you are also subject to their rules/laws/customs. That means you have to pay taxes, and you don't pay them for nothing, but you get something in return.

- If you disagree with the tax system in your country of choice, feel free to move somewhere else. But don't be a jerk and take the advantages (health care, free education up to a certain degree, ... the list goes on) without the disadvantages (giving a (admittedly quite considerable) part of your income to the state in the form of taxes).

So, I rest my case. If you need a secret account, something with your attitude towards finances is wrong. Period.

And on a more anecdotal level, let me say that I am by all means not someone who encourages a very restrictive government in terms of economy. E.g. I'm going to university in Sweden (though not from Sweden), but I'll never work here, simply because, while living here is great, taxes get ridiculously high when you earn more than the average. But tell you what, I'm not going to open a secret bank account, cheat the government and deceive the Swedish people.

I hear Nigeria is quite the place...

No, on a more serious note, if you need a secret account, something about your attitude towards finances is wrong in the first place.