unwantedLetters's comments

Thanks for pointing this out. I've obviously not gotten my head around the concept of space-time and the article fails to mention this.

Also, http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2011/08/25/superno... is perhaps a more official story. They too don't mention that it's discovery was a few hours after it was possible to observe the explosion, not a few hours after the actual explosion.

He pointed out why that might not be possible. If an add-on is only supposed to work from version 3.6-6.0, and Firefox silently updates to 7, the user loses the add-on's functionality (and for many people, the only reason to use firefox are the add-ons)

While I understand that this segment of theirs was a joke, it did have a point to it. They were trying to show that it is possible to drive a Prius in such a way that you don't actually save any fuel over a non-hybrid.

I don't think anyone would dispute that a Prius is more fuel efficient than a sports car in stop-and-go traffic and having that segment on Top Gear just wouldn't be possible as it would make the show "fair" to the hybrid and actually about cars which it definitely isn't.

And I think they make these silly claims at times since they know they are so over-the-top that it's hard for anyone to take them too seriously.

Do you have any more info on how yelp.com has been running "extortion rackets"?

I don't know much about yelp, and don't use it much, but have generally been led to believe that they are a good company (admittedly, by the tech press) so it'll be interesting to hear if you have actual examples of people getting scammed.

First thing I thought when I read this headline was: Be a geek.

Is there some other reason why you think the idea I suggested is incorrect, or not worth it? Because it seems to me that claims like India "isn't a huge concern" might hold some water, but I've read of people complaining of flaky connections even in countries with better infrastructure. Does Apple really want to waste bandwidth on re-uploading data that has already been uploaded? Lion isn't the only multi-gigabyte application available for download on the Mac App Store.

To be very honest, I have a 3G connection with a limit of about 1.25 GB per month. Since I wanted Lion as quick as possible, I downloaded 1 GB of material using the 3G connection (took me a very, very short time - relatively). When I tried to resume the download from the App Store using my normal internet connection it didn't, and I lost about 1GB of stuff.

That's why I posted the earlier message.

In the interest of full disclosure, it was probably because the Mac App Store needed to re-authenticate me (I changed IPs remember), clicking resume resulted in me not being able to start the download, and the App Store just decided that the 1GB downloaded was useless.

The point about flaky internet connections, and "chunk"ed downloads still stands. I don't expect to be able to get through this download, and even my current issue would have been more gracefully handled with a smaller download size since only 1 chunk of data would have been lost.

Note: Interestingly, my 3G connection is more reliable than my broadband with respect to reliability. Even more interestingly, the provider is the same in both cases.

I am in India, and have a connection that is 256Kbps. This is sufficient for most things, but I cannot get Lion from Apple.

I don't mind waiting for 40 hours for ~4GB to download, but the likelihood that a connection in India is sustained for more than 10-15 minutes is rather low. The problem here isn't with the speed (it is with that as well), but with the reliability of the connection. Even at 8MBPS, this download will still take about an hour and it's rare that the connection won't be randomly dropped during that hour.

Why can't Apple download these things smartly like BitTorrent? Why this behemoth of a download? Why not break it up into smaller pieces of ~10-20MB each, with a checksum for all these pieces so that WHEN (in India it's WHEN, not if) the connection gets dropped, you're only effectively losing 10-20 MB of downloaded data, not losing an entire GB or more of downloaded material. To me, it almost seems silly not to do this. Is Apple really this ignorant of flaky internet connections?

I didn't understand what you meant when you said using mathematical constants, so for those who didn't know as well:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/02/us-dealtalk-nortel...

Her sentences sound forced to me as well. Specially the way she says "WYSIWYG".

If I hadn't read your comment, I too would have assumed it was a bot.

The release date will perhaps be 10th of July (written as 10/7/11 in some parts of the world), or perhaps 7th of July just to signify that it's 10.7.

I wonder if Apple will do something like that.

Here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/Dgh7A

I actually don't understand how this works.

Please correct me if I'm wrong (I don't actually know how the 'Find my Mac' feature works, so I'm guessing), but when the computer is first booted by a thief, it won't be online, which means that it won't be aware that it needs to disable access to all accounts except to the neutered guest account right? In fact, the only way that the computer will be made aware that the mac has been stolen is if the thief connects to the internet (Apple has done nothing so far to enhance the likelihood of the user connecting to the internet). Once the Mac is connected and is aware that it is stolen it's behaviour will change to block all access to user accounts. If anything, this change in behaviour might alert a thief that something is up (I'm giving a lot of credit to theives here) and that he should rid himself of the Mac.

I think what you say makes perfect sense, but do you have any information which actually says that "iCloud cleverly uses this to goad thieves into going online"?

This is indeed a really great reason to have this feature, but I'm just wondering if this was Apple's intended use of this feature.

An article on what learned blankness (or helplessness) is about: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/

I understand that the US Immigration guys can be fairly hard to deal with.

But this is really not what I experienced at all. I studied at a university in the US and I hold an Indian passport. I travelled in and out of the country multiple times, but not once was I asked questions like "Are you a terrorist?". I was only held by the officials once at immigration for 20 minutes. This was when I transferred from one university to another (You don't need to re-apply for a visa for this which is why it leads to some confusion cause you are not going to the university mentioned on the visa).

I never felt like anyone was trying to trick me, or insult me, or ever asked me questions like those above.

Do they treat students differently? And has anyone else ever experienced the issues mentioned by the parent poster?

This is one of those times where I wish I could see how many points your comment got.

I don't know whether you've gotten a lot of votes or not so I don't know if your answer makes sense to other people as well.

Why do you think you don't need permission to take pictures of a country from space? I think there are certain areas in all countries that they would want to keep secret, and if you allow people to photograph in certain areas and not in others, that's exposing where these areas are (which is an invitation for governments to spy on those areas).

I wonder how they get permission to scour Egypt with a satellite camera. And even if permission was given, will Egyptian authorities allow control of the satellite and the images captured to remain with a university outside the country?

Anyone have a better idea how this process works?

From Less Wrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/

I was simply suggesting that you can use those actions in the app and randomly assigned what they should do. I like the double tapping for the article directly idea a lot.

I think the details toolbar is more useful where it is since I generally don't flag or upvote an item unless I read it. But that is a great idea (the swipe-for-options). You can include adding to Instapaper, and perhaps twitter/facebook/email sharing.

Also, a small bug: All the comments on the submissions say 0 points.