Posts by Petrea Mitchell 446 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
The famously mild climate that Silicon Valley enjoys is limited to a mere strip of California along the coast. Head east over the hills, and you reach the Central Valley, where temperatures over 35C are perfectly normal in summer. Head further east to the Sierras, and -12C is perfectly normal in winter. And you're still in California.
"This does reveal the essential issue that usability, like art, is subjective, however."
Aesthetics are subjective. Usability can be objectively measured-- give a series of users a task, and see how long it takes them to complete it. (Or, as is so depressingly often the case, whether they are able to figure out how to accomplish the task with the given interface at all.)
The police are really, really sure it's homicide, so I presume there are clear marks of violence and the "passed out" explanation didn't work. (I know, I know, maybe they aren't clear and the police are jumping to conclusions.)
But other than that, yeah. Stroke, tumor, lots of possibilities.
"Those details, combined with the fact that someone went to considerable effort to hide Wheeler's body in a trash dumpster in nearby Newark, Delaware, would suggest the homicide wasn't a random mugging."
Quite the contrary-- a guy wandering around disoriented and claiming he has lots of money is going to look like a great target to your random mugger, and the nearest large trash bin is the easiest place to think of to put the body.
Under the $225/year for the license fee quoted in another comment, one hour of available programming works out to about $0.0004. If I just watch one show via this new global arrangement, the price may come out to less than what you're paying for full access, but it's sure as heck going to be more than 1/25th of a cent per episode.
I don't know what version of BBC America you have, but mine requires me to pay for basic cable or satellite to get it, and I sometimes have to wait over a year after a Top Gear episode first airs in the UK to see it over here, plus I only get to see about two-thirds of it. (Did you know that in the UK, it's a full hour without commercials?)
It's long been known that Mars has an excellent defensive system which has been able to disable most planetary probes when they approach. Clearly one of the rovers has discovered one of the ground-based portions of it.
All right, here's a serious guess so that you can all point out how wrong I was later: amino acids on Titan. With lots of weasel words like "probable chemical signature" and "possible" and "likely explanation".
Two days after my account started working again, I get this:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi,
We apologize for the inconvenience you have experienced. Your account was disabled in error. Your account has been reactivated and you will now be able to log in.
Thanks for your understanding,
The Facebook Team
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was amused to see this in the headers:
X-Mailer: ZuckMail [version 1.00]
I'm reasonably convinced that's not just a joke insert, because there's also this internal tracking info:
X-Facebook: from zuckmail ([MTI3LjAuMC4x])
by tps.facebook.com with HTTP (ZuckMail);
And here's how much they'd really like to hear back from me:
From: Facebook <noreply+kjdmp-hvkhv_@facebookmail.com>
Reply-To: Facebook <noreply+kjdmp-hvkhv_@facebookmail.com>
Errors-to: noreply+kjdmp-hvkhv_@facebookmail.com
Facebook disabled my account with no warning and no explanation of what rule I might have transgressed so horribly, so my best guess was maybe I'd been judged in violation of the anti-symbol rule by spelling my name correctly. It contains a diacritical mark, which meant uploading my ID (as if I was going to trust FB with a scan of it anyway) wasn't going to help any, since the issuing DMV can't handle non-ASCII characters.
(You don't see the mark here because many commenting systems can't handle it and aren't intelligent enough to check the input before garbling it, so I don't try it on anything that requires registration before any kind of commenting, because if it gets garbled then I'm usually stuck with it.)
"Less than 10,000 words or more than 50,000: that is the choice writers have generally faced for more than a century"? Not in the magazine fiction world!
Definitions vary, but here are the Hugo Award categories:
Short story - <7500 words
Novelette - 7500-17,500 words
Novella - 17,500-40,000 words
One other barrier to "farming" the super-silkworms in certain places occurs to me, though: UK and EU regulations restricting GMO farming. Or are those worded so as only to apply to plants?
I can already visualize Mr. Page's column from ten years hence, railing against crushingly expensive attempts to produce super-silk vests in some other way, rather than just buy cheap ones from the Yanks...
...is that graph of coverage by company next to a graph of actual market share. And then some data on what percentage of journalists own Apple products-- I'm truly curious if it's really that Apple is brilliant at playing the media, or it's just that the journalists already think the products are cool.
_AntiPatterns_ has been the second biggest influence on me as a programmer of all the books I have ever read. (The top spot goes to _The Design of Everyday Things_.) I'm having trouble reconciling what I'm reading here with the voice of that book. I guess the "Fire Drill" section (see
http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/fire-drill) was written by his co-author.
"[W]hen discussing pre-loaded apps, it doesn't distinguish between apps provided by the phone manufacturer — think music-player and maps apps — and service provider–supplied add-ons."
Users can't tell the difference. Any data from a survey asking them to try to distinguish between the two would be useless.
"...after the company ran a study proving that employees were less likely to gorge themselves if they couldn't fit as much on their dishes. Not that you would expect anything less from a company that believes it knows when an employee will jump ship before the employee knows."
Or from a company with a bad case of "not invented here" syndrome... there have been a number of studies on this topic before. (The thing that makes the biggest difference in how much a person eats in an all-you-can-eat cafeteria, if you're curious, is whether or not there are trays.)
The local garbage company where I live (near Portland, OR, allegedly one of the centers of militant forced greenness) has a much simpler incentive system: they charge based on the size of garbage can (with a surcharge if it's clear you're trying to do too much with a small one), but will take away any amount of recycling for free. No weighing or bin-policing needed.
The BBC already has a huge music library licensed. As long as it tracks what's being viewed where and pays the appropriate fees to the appropriate royalty-collecting body, the RIAA et al. can't do a thing about it other than throw a huge tantrum the next time those agreements are up for renewal. And I don't see why they would once they see that they're still getting their money.
How about this: the iPlayer remains free to use for catch-up inside the UK, and instead of being totally blocked outside it, it becomes available for a fee, either subscription or on a per-episode basis. People already paying the license fee can use the BBC Web sites as their VCR for free, the rest of us get to see BBC shows in a timely manner instead of waiting for the tapes to be delivered to our shores via carrier pigeon, the most impatient people use BitTorrent less, and that takes the pressure off ISPs to become copyright cops. How does that sound?
Allow me to be the first humorless pedant in line to inform you that Mythbusters did an experiment a couple years ago that showed that your china is surprisingly safe around rampaging bulls.
As for the topic at hand... well, I'm at a loss to see how anyone, even Google, could make the whole music rights and delivery situation significantly worse than it already is. (Yeah, I know, I'm just asking for something to happen to make me eat those words.)
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