shadowflit's comments

Sure, why not.

> Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends.

1) People are automatically added to my address book as soon as they email me. Maybe not my "personal" address book or whatever, but their address has been recorded regardless. This is not something I have to maintain, it happens as soon as you contact me.

2) If I change my primary email address I need to send out a blast mail to everyone who I might care to have my new address. A pain in the ass. I'd much prefer to have contact information pushed to me through, say, existing networks.

I honestly don't see a difference. I look at my address book as a "friends list" as well - just an annoying one that I need to keep up to date, instead of allowing my contacts to update as they need to. And if someone doesn't want me to have their contact information, why would we be friends in the first place? (I suppose you could fence off access to a select group, but really)

>> Even more practically, the GPS could use the timing information to slip in spoken directions at less distracting moments, like a human companion might.

I really like that idea. Of course, the GPS tends to be a bit of a nag, so it might be hard for it to find enough pauses.

I don't have my GPS integrated with the car, so I can just let the GPS audio compete with the car audio, and adjust GPS volume to mess with the intrusiveness factor. After listening to the original sample... wow that would annoy me a lot.

As far as I could tell, you "donate" $5 dollars a month to Kachingle, and they distribute this donation (after taking their cut) according to the sites you visit. It seems as if they are trying to "stop the paywall" by demonstrating an alternate way to generate the revenue, and in so doing convince sites that instituting a paywall is unnecessary. So, no, it seems no paywalls are being circumvented.

However, I don't get why they're sending the payment to the blog's email address and not the NYT (disclaimer: don't know how the NYT blogs work). It seems to me Kachingle would be better applied at the site level. Given my limited understanding, I can definitely see how applying it at this granular level would annoy NYT - their paywall solution would make money for NYT first (and trickle down later) whereas this seems to make money for the bloggers first, and not for NYT. At the very least, payment should be split between NYT and the specific blogger. (And if this is incorrect and the payment is in fact going to NYT - then why on earth do they send it to so many different places?!)

I like the idea of Kachingle for reading across multiple sites, but the NYT blog situation just seems weird. No matter what though - assuming my evaluation is even correct - figuring this stuff out took way too much digging and reading on Kachingle's site.

Sure, but I'm saying I want money. And given that I want money, a teaching position is a worse proposition for me than an engineering position (whether due to the annoyance of finding a high-paying summer job every year, running a second job in the extra time I have, or simply because the salary is less regardless). If this holds for other people as well, the only people a teacher's salary would attract are people who want time. Which means the salary is not high enough to attract smart people out of industry whose goal is also to make money.

> So teachers total comp is $60k per 9 months, just starting out (equivalent to $80k/year).

On one hand, I understand this statement - afterall, you're getting those summer vacation months. On the other hand though... if I'm used to a salary of 80k/year, it's going to be quite a cut to go to 60k. I would have to spend the summer working somewhere else to make up the missing 20k, or else get used to a different standard of living. Maybe I can find a summer job that combines my ideas of vacation with earning some money (probably less than 20k with those goals), but the whole prospect is not that appealing yet.

People are willing to take paycuts for increased benefits, but here what we're saying is you're simply taking your 80k job and deciding not to work for three months. Sure, the annual salary is the same, but 60k is a lot less attractive than 80k. And of course it's not 60k today either, it's 45k with 15 in the future.

Anyhow, what I'm trying to say is that while the number manipulation makes things look better, 45k/y + summer vacation + 15k/y in pension does not sound like enough compensation to forgo that 80k/y engineering job yet. Especially if I need to deal with the hassle of finding alternate income for the summer months. Also, I would imagine that similarly to SF, NYC offers >80k for starting engineers (if only because of living costs).

It is sadly quite possible to get things through the xray machine... all it takes is forgetfulness on your part when packing carry-on, and inattentiveness on the part of the operator. Now, I didn't count on it happening a second time on the same trip, and sent the offending item home by USPS, but uh, yeah.

I'm all for security in airports - and I'm not even particularly bothered by the idea of naked pictures floating around - but I am completely uninterested in a security blanket. If stuff slips through so easily by accident, how hard can it be for a determined person? :(

Agree there! When the like button started spawning everywhere, I consulted the internal annoy-o-meter and determined that the best solution would be to block the button.

"But you can let off your gas and not hit the break. Hitting the break is an instantaneous warning signal to people behind you, causing something of a reflex for them to also hit the brake."

...As long as you're careful about doing this, of course. If the people behind you aren't paying enough attention to notice a slow decrease in speed (and can't see the reason you're slowing down), they'll be hitting the brakes hard to slow down when they're suddenly too close.

In hilly city driving (hi, SF), I will actually intentionally use my brakes to signal to the people behind me I'm trying to slow down, because there's often not enough space to notice when your line of site effectively stops at the next intersection's brief period of flat road. And yeah, this behavior was inspired by seeing someone rear-ended right behind me.

"But a revision to comScore’s methodology sent Hulu’s viewership numbers plummeting, to 24 million in June from 43.5 million in May"

Is that a revision to methodology, or just an expected drop in users during the lull between seasons? I know I haven't been on Hulu since the season finales of my shows...