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torstesu | 14 years ago | on: If Money Doesn't Make You Happy, Consider Time

Since 1981 the real wages have risen with 65 % in Norway, i.e. people can buy 65 % more stuff now than back in 1981. However, if the growth in buying power instead of being used to fulfill materialistic 'wants' was translated into leisure time, that would mean three day working weeks. That put things in perspective, albeit might be considered to be a fallacy since the growth would probably not be as great if people did not increase their consumption since 1981.

torstesu | 14 years ago | on: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

I guess the reason why companies with a high application volume (like Google) tend to be biased towards "top" school and using your GPA as a selection criteria, is that it is so much easier to "cut the pile in half" and still have a decent number of good candidates, only the average talent might be higher. It reduces the overhead in the HR department.

That means a lot of smart people never get the opportunity to try out for the interview. In my opinion, you have to market yourself better and differently if you want to increase the odds of getting to the interview, where you get a chance to prove yourself beyond what is on paper.

torstesu | 14 years ago | on: Timeline of the far future

So... what your saying is that my master thesis won't write itself by some random fluctuations after all? I might have to alter my strategy.

torstesu | 14 years ago | on: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up

I completely agree, especially since Norway has large reserves of the stuff. One challenge though, is that uranium is also abundantly available and still much cheaper to mine than thorium. Another challenge is that it is not the fuel which drives the cost, as in conventional power plants; it is the capital cost concerned with building the reactors themselves. Therefore, a thorium-fueled reactor has to be considerably cheaper to build than a uranium-fueled reactor and it is easy to pose the question if this will ever be true. There has to be some serious subsidizing to incentivize commercial development, adaption and investment.

torstesu | 14 years ago | on: Draw Something craze 'banks dev $100k per day'

With 2 billion drawings, Omgpop possesses a valuable source of information. It would be interesting to see how different people illustrate equal words differently or equally in their illustrations. This could contribute to e.g. best practices when communicating with graphics or the like.

torstesu | 14 years ago | on: Defending Android’s Hardware Buttons

In my opinion, hardware buttons should be limited to only non-critical operations or operations with limited usage frequency (which may be an argument to why the button may be unnecessary in the first place).

A button such as the back-button on the android, is used to navigate in almost all applications. With the amount of "load cycles" the back-button experiences, it is bound to either fail or start operating inadequately [1]. If or when this happens, the phone becomes rather unusable as it is nearly impossible to navigate in applications that do not have any built in user interface options to perform the same action.

[1] I do not hold evidence for this to be true in general and my hypothesis is only backed by personal experience and the notion of failure rate in a load frequency perspective.

torstesu | 14 years ago | on: Coming Soon: the Drone Arms Race

This would have to be constrained to consumers experienced with flying RC planes. Imagine the number of planes crashing due to the incompetency of the operator if anyone could rent an RC plane over the internet.

However, I really like the idea. It would be like google street view, only you are the driver -- in the sky.

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