2. Things that are obscenely expensive but don't cost much to produce/service. Examples: mobile broadband ($30-60 that you can't share, see above), mobile text messaging ($0.25 per 160 bytes!?), dealership car service, iPhone cases, Monster cables, etrade transactions, international roaming (data: $20 PER MB, voice $2.29/min), laptop batteries, retail books, music, DVDs, basic software (such as FTP/ssh clients, PDF readers, etc).

3. Getting ripped off, knowing I can't do anything about it. Examples: exchanging foreign currency, used video games

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 0.18 U.S. cents / byte

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 1,872 U.S. dollars / megabyte

My options for eating are

* Cook it myself [1]. Cheap but takes time and effort to make good food.

* Restaurant. Good food but expensive and takes time. I don't always want table service and small portions.

* Fast food. Quick and cheap, but unhealthy.

* Supermarket ready meals. See above.

So yeah, I would love an urban cafeteria serving a handful of healthy, cheap, fresh meal options. I'm sure it can be done.

Edit, re Tel: [1] I love to cook, but not when I'm in a rush, and I'm not always near home.

  1. It's easier to be healthier (and in time this transforms
     to "impossible to not be healthier".
  2. It's an impressive skill for attracting relationships 
     both friendly and romantic.
  3. Once you're confident, cooking for a party of friends and
     second degree strangers is a GREAT way to meet new people.

(edit: removed a superfluous link, so instead I'll just be anecdotal. Cooking and eating are great social activities when done right. In my mind it's incredibly relaxing to cut vegetables and manage a meal. Conversations can spring into new inspiration or just better bonding with friends. I understand that not all meals can put striving for that kind of bliss as a major goal, but I'm not trying to defend all meals.)

Every time I make pasta, I boil the entire box and make too much sauce so I can eat later.

Maybe that was the idea.

I find that one of the Whole Foods in Houston is a good option, so long as I don't want to pig out. (The one off Wesleyan - 4004 Bellaire.) They have a couple of long tables, but not enough volume of people interested in talking. The food is top-notch, though and they have a great selection of raw foods. Kirby - the food isn't as good though okay and the customers are obnoxious. (Some of the help is pretty unconcerned too.) Westheimer & Wilcrest - I liked the store and what food there was was good, but selection was gimpy when I worked near there. The other Whole Foods in town are not worthy of the name as far as the hot-bar selections and attention to detail go.

Sometimes I've eaten at the Kirby Whole Foods and looked down the row of 2-seat tables by the window. 4 people in a row eating by themselves and reading.

(There's some weirdos at the cheese bar at the Wesleyan/Bellaire Whole foods who know a bit and give a damn about cheese -- enough to give out delightful recommendations.)

It's really good (and healthy [steamed vegetables, fish, etc.]) and really cheap; it's awesome.

But as a loss-leader it doesn't make sense to have independent stores in town.

What do you count as good food? I find that it doesn't take me that much longer to make something good and healthy (maybe not gourmet delicious) than it would to wait in line at a cafeteria.

Also, in a food hall you don't have to do the washing up.

Still, it sucks that your setup is so expensive and the queues are so long. The worst I've seen is a university where they've outsourced everything to a bunch of chains. The food is overpriced, processed and bland - it's just like eating in a mall.

* open late.

where do I get food at 2am? silicon valley is full of Engineers who don't have to stumble in to work until 11 or noon, yet most places that serve food close at 9pm. what is with that?

There are hundreds of delis like this in midtown Manhattan, they just don't have much seating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/magazine/03wwln-q4-t.html

I am writing a book to solve this problem.

Which would cover topics like:

* Peer review * Double blind experiments * Anecdotal evidence * Statistical Significance

But I sort of lost interest and ended up just making it a blog post instead... http://www.startbreakingfree.com/504/how-to-tell-whats-bulls...

http://dannybhoy1.tripod.com/baloney.htm

It would be even better if we had effective sound bites. I suppose we have "Correlation does not equal causation", which rhymes nicely, but too many people think it means that correlation isn't evidence for causation, which is wrong. I guess this is a problem with soundbites in general.

Although your ideas aren't nearly as dire nor your followers as obnoxious, it feels like the 1960s Ayn Rand is all over Hacker News.

Unless one had to start one's thesis with null hypotheses (increasingly less common, but still a notable approach.)

This is just a tragedy.

2. Job interviews that require quizzes and an "intensive" multi-stage interview process.

As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code and offered to give you other code examples from my private repositories on request. I give you links to my previous work and letters of recommendation. Yet you insult me by being paranoid that I can't actually program and expect me to believe that this half-assed exam rife with trick questions and obscure trivia is actually going to tell you something about me?

This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth has disrupted the hiring process and made it more expensive, paranoid, and stupid than most other processes in a business. There has to be a better way to verify a candidates' potential. At least for programming jobs.

Maybe something like Ohloh's repo log-analysis tool that can create a dashboard view of a candidates' source-code contributions to the world? Obviously only works for candidates that can provide URLs to publicly accessible repositories. Probably ways to get around that.

Anyway, that has been really annoying me lately. :)

It's not a myth.

Its those kind of "programmers" that these tests are designed to find. A lot of companies seem to take it to far, as if to brag that their entry tests are harder, possibly even deterring the people they want.

Maybe I'm just not cynical enough...

update: and even if it were true, it's still a pain for qualified applicants to get through these draconian hiring practices.

From my experience and observation it's generally very lucky if you get anything better than a 50:1 ratio from initial phone screen down to a hiring offer.

I refute your argument merely by stating the exact opposite.

Large corporations are so risk-averse that they are usually afraid to fire people, even when they can't do their jobs. Also, the ones that stick around have gotten so good at working the political system and getting others to do their work that they can't fire them, because they will just say "you didn't ask me to do it in writing", or any number of other excuses why they didn't do their job.

Not to mention, let's say you do want to fire a programmer who can't program - you can't just fire them, they have to be given a verbal warning first, then a written warning, it needs to be documented with HR, then they are put on a 90 day probationary period, or "improvement plan." They claim they don't have enough training for the job, so then they need to be retrained, at additional expense.

The other factor is that some managers like to keep 10-20% dead weight around because it pads their department. Everyone is fighting for more direct reports; apparently whoever has the most employees wins some kind of management contest. So, they keep 10-20% slackers on staff, knowing that if layoffs come around, they can cut the dead weight and keep the good programmers.

It's frankly amazing that anything gets done at all in a large corporation.

Welcome to Atlanta. Or maybe many other cities. I've often thought that there must be some remote working solutions out there that just need to overcome inertia to be accepted. The benefits would be huge.

> As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code...

You're hired - just for having code out there. I'm not sure many hiring managers fully understand what open source is. That's part of the problem.

This is absolutely not a myth. I've seen it first hand in an interview. Having said that, it appears that you've been dealing with "interviewers who can't interview" or companies with really stupid hiring practices. These silly tests they do are designed to tease out what you've freely offered. They should just have their engineers look at your repos, verify which commits are yours and how good the code is.

But honestly, imagine working with a place that has such stupid rigidity. I seriously doubt this inflexibility would exist in HR in isolation. I think they did you a favor (accidentally).

I have a list of more than 25 items that I would love to work on, but have little motivation without someone willing to help out. I don't necessarily want to form a startup on these ideas, just get the ball rolling and see where it leads.

I would like a site that enables me to find others and create prototype apps in a matter of days, almost like a flash mob. It should bring together graphic artists, designers, developers, and specialists as seamlessly as possible. I think this would work especially well for mobile apps, where project size is often small enough that a 3-4 person team could finish a reasonable version 1 in a weekend.

Example: I want to build a mobile app to answer the question "Does this fit me?" The app would enable users to scan a bar code, upload if it fits or not, get predictions about if it fits or not, and receive recommendations on other items that may fit.

I have no idea how the design should look. I have no idea how to write iPhone apps and limited Android experience. I don't have a lot of experience building web applications. I can't do graphics for the life of me. However, I have a TON of experience in AI and data mining, and what I imagine to most people would seem like the "hard part"-- predicting if something fits, recommending similar items, etc.-- is actually the fun part to me. So I need a designer and an iPhone/Android guy with a free weekend.

If we planned on selling the app, then the site could optionally include some auto-generated legal code for agreeing to revenue/equity split. That would make it more of a flash-startup idea, though.

It would probably be difficult to go from a joint "proof-of-concept" project to a company unless all parties are on the same page. Like you mention, maybe the site could have optional legal agreements or something. Perhaps you could partner with something like LegalZoom.com to take care of those agreements for the users.

I am currently working on 3 apps (2 will go live in the next few weeks). If you are interested in working on some stuff together send me an email.

If so, then we definitely need to work together. :)

Note: I don't see an email in your profile.

What I really mean is that I work on apps that are simple on the front end and require lots of heavy lifting (example: Sentiment Extraction from Unstructured Text using Tabu Search-Enhanced Markov Blanket.) on the backend.

I am not a programmer or engineer. I am a hacker; but I am also a brilliant problem solver so I can teach myself what i need to know to solve the problem at hand. Even so I am not naive enough to think that I come up w/ anything close to the "optimal" solutions (mathematically). IMO thats where people like you come in.

Anyway, on the drive he asked what kind of music I liked and I said that I didn't like most contemporary music because so much of it was based on rip-offs of stuff that had already been done.

"Do you think classical composers are any different?"

That really annoyed me at the time but I totally understand and appreciate it now. As more things change, etc.

I grew up listening to "Classic Rock" in the 1980s, and it took years for me to realize that this had deprived me of the authentic music of my youth... It was the music of somebody else's youth, which makes it all the more dangerous and seductive. It appeals to geezers who were listening to it when it was new, and it still appeals to new generations of young people.

Classic rock dominates the airwaves in my locale; other than NPR, I find everything else unlistenable [there was ~one~ good urban music station a long time ago, but it's owned by Clear Channel and quit playing anything good rather abruptly after 9/11]

The situation has many dimensions (for instance, any credible 'new' rock has to make a rapprochement with punk) but the thing I hate the most is hearing the same doobie brothers song on the radio driving into work and driving home. I'll listen to NPR or a Shonen Knife or Red Red Groovy disc, but I feel bad for all the boomers who can't escape the gravity of 1968.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/the_current/

It's fully independent music radio station that's publicly funded. They don't play commercials, and they play a wide variety of known and unknown music. I first discovered it when I moved up here (the Twin Cities) away from the Clear Channel dominated airwaves and I haven't turned back since.

Broadcasts at 88.9 FM in the city and streaming at the site.

It seems worth investing in a station to replace these. (anyone have a good source on how to start one?)

For example, the other day I was listening to my opera channel on pandora, and because pandora has horrible displays for opera music, I could not figure out what aria I was hearing, and spent close to two hours trying to figure out what it was. ID3 is totally unsuitable for anything besides pop music.

Does anyone else here listen to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q50xzhDO9lI

They're obnoxious, obviously biased, and interfere with whatever it was you were doing (watching a show, visiting a website, reading a newspaper, whatever). It's just wrong. And we all know this, yet we just accept it like it's some fact of life.

In addition, it doesn't just affect customers, but all newspapers/magazines/sites that rely on "advertisement income" to make a buck. One thing that puzzles me greatly is, how pageviews and sales are apparently their #1 concern, yet at the same time they're talking, in all seriousness, about "being objective" and "journalistic integrity". It just doesn't go together.

Since the internet is already beating the hell out of pretty much all old business models, maybe it will get rid of this one as well, or at least transform it into something more palatable. But so far, the industry's response has been to make advertisements (on websites at least) even MORE obnoxious and intrusive.

However, everybody is worse off. Consumers got advertising displayed to them that they didn't want to see and they got to pay more for the privilege. The manufacturer of B lost totally. Even the manufacturer of A is worse off because without the advertising, he could have split the difference with the consumer and gotten a larger profit.

The only winner is the advertising company who is making something nobody wants.

That is totally inefficient. Can it be fixed somehow?

So it's not completely inefficient. How much would you pay to not have to look around who knows where for things that you want?

This may have been true in the past, but this is 2010... I constantly find out about products (and other things, and people, etc) that I didn't know existed, through other means than advertisements. Without paying for it, in fact; people put reviews about ANYTHING online nowadays.

I think what we really need is another business model for search engines.

What many people don't realize is that in the current situation, instead of paying (more) for the show/newspaper/etc, we pay for advertisements instead. When a business spends $$$ to promote their product, that money didn't fall out of the air; it's part of the price of the product they sell (much like some part of it is production cost, etc). So whenever somebody buys product X, they're also paying (a tiny fraction) for that product's advertisement.

So no, I would not be willing to pay to remove the ads from a website, since I am already paying to put them on there in the first place.

Personally, I would much rather that the price of all products would be a bit lower (i.e. minus any advertisement costs), and pay more for content that I actually want to see/watch/read, without obnoxious advertisements and commercials.

Admittedly, the current situation isn't anything like this, so if it were to happen, maybe I would actually regret it, or maybe it would have unforeseen drawbacks. (As it is, many people seem to be unwilling to pay for content...) It does seem like a fairer system though, that doesn't force consumers to read/watch things they don't want to.

That's why I want to create an opt-in advertising revenue based pizza place. When you place an order you are offered the choice between paying full price and getting discounts based on how much advertising material comes with your pizza. I figure you could get a stack of coupons, Chinese food menus, brochures, car insurance fliers, and magazines that would roughly equal the cost of a pizza. Free pizza.

I've been pondering this off and on for years; I think it might require a pretty fundamental switch in how the data is entered. So far the best I've come up with is, uh, pen and paper...

I think it's probably partly rationalization because they think it's inevitable (but it is not inevitable, and I'd like that to become a more mainstream view so we can hurry up and work on this problem), and partly ageism, which makes a lot of people think that old people have less value so their pain and loss isn't as bad.

It's difficult to conceive how little we know about the human body and biology in general. People are working on things related to it, but we're really nowhere near even understanding the problem. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't being worked on.

The problem is, almost nobody is working on that approach. It's all gerontology or geriatry, trying to squeeze out a year or two out of someone already frail and sick, or to mess with metabolism, something that will take way too long and might never be completely successful.

The third approach - aka the engineering approach - has a chance to work in our lifetimes IF we do the hard work and stop looking the other way. And few things are more worthwhile to support; if we bring forward these therapies by even 1 week, that's over a million lives saved.

If you want to know more about the biology of this, I recommend that you read this (and the papers cited): http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...

If you need more details, you can easily contact the SENS foundation or the authors of this book directly (they usually answer emails really quickly). This info should be enough to help you make up your mind about the feasibility of this kind of project. And if you need the latest science, there's a scientific journal called Rejuvenation Research that contains the most recent studies.

Double the annoyance factor when they refer to an engineering approach to the problem, given that the whole utopian premise is such stupendously bad engineering in the first place.

1) If there were no aging, everybody would most likely spend all of their time playing WoW and never leaving the house for fear of being hit by a bus. All of those slogans about how life is short become pretty impotent when it's actually not.

2) In engineering we generally make incremental changes to society, test them and either back away from them or put in place feedback mechanisms to keep them in check. "Wouldn't it be great if we abolished death by natural causes (and everything else stayed exactly the same)" is about as far as you can get from this. See Billy Vaughn Koen, Discussion of the Method, pp. 233-236.

2) I'm calling it the engineering approach because that's what it is (http://sens.org/sens-research/what-is-sens/engineering-solut...) as opposed to the gerontology approach or the geriatry approach. It is about simply repairing damage, the same way you maintain a vintage car or an old house for 10x longer than it was designed to last without necessarily having to understand exactly how that damage is created (by metabolism or physical and chemical reactions, etc), and without having to know how to cure all diseases (you repair damage before it becomes a pathology).

If you want to learn more about the biology and details of the proposals I'm talking about, check out the links I posted in other comments here. They have detailed plans for the 7 types of damages that accumulate from the operation of metabolism. Otherwise, your criticisms aren't specific, you are just attacking a vague idea of what you think this is about.

Nobody is in favor of malaria or smallpox, but most people turn a blind eye to the diseases of aging even though they kill a lot more people.

The real question is: If dying of old age didn't exist (if everybody stayed physically as fit as 25 years olds indefinitely, until they get hit by a truck or whatever), would we miss frailty and decrepitude? Would we invent death by slow diseases that make our bodies and minds fall apart? I kinda doubt it.

The general idea is that our bodies accumulate damage as a side product of metabolism (stuff that evolution hasn't equipped us to deal with - various long-lived molecules that we can't break down); over a certain threshold, that damage turns into pathologies. So your skin is less elastic, your arteries aren't as flexible, your immune system doesn't work as well, your brain accumulate beta amyloids that lead to alzheimer's, etc. If we could periodically repair that damage before the pathologies happen, we could potentially keep young bodies indefinitely and cure many diseases without having to understand how metabolism works, thus reducing human suffering tremendously (about 150k deaths each day).

For more on this, check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...

Or these presentations:

http://citywire.kuluvalley.com/player.html?pguid=E586AD51-41...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8554766938711591377&...

Or the work of this foundation (I'm in no way affiliated with them - I'm just a fan and individual donor):

http://www.sens.org

note: I have no affiliation with USAA other than I use them and really like them.

Their credit card (which she still has) isn't much better. Huge delays posting payments, and the customer service has a huge chip on their shoulder whenever she needs to call them.

What you cannot do (if you are not/were a member of the military) is use their direct deposit feature i.e. scan checks and upload them to their website. You are not also eligible to get insurance from them.

Other than that I agree that they have a fantastic website and awesome customer service. Because they do not have ATMs when you withdraw money from another bank's ATM, they refund up to $1.50 for the ATM fees up to 10 times a month.

Transfers are a breeze, fast, and everyone does it. Integration with cell phone infrastructure is also great.

Competition is pretty strong, so fairly comparable across the board.

I once had mistakenly setup a transfer from one bank to another and I wanted to cancel it. So I called up the destination bank and they said there was nothing they could do. I called the source bank and had to pay 30 bucks to put a stop payment order on the account AND they couldn't guarantee it would stop the transfer.

To make matters worse, all content seems to covered with a slimy film - the sorts of ads that normally appear on late night TV seem to show up on the best of sites.

Believe it or not, there are people who enjoy well executed television or print ads, either for their entertainment value or for their effectiveness. I haven't heard the same for online ads, with possibly the recent exception of the "Old Spice Man Who Your Man Could Smell Like."

There's a lot of room here for improvement not only of the ads, but for the online experience overall. While Google and others are milking the contextual cow, some bright minds are going to come up with something revolutionary that will change how publishers monetize their sites. Ads will fit better, be more engaging and monetize sites and drive results for their buyers.

Perhaps then those ads for diet pills, get-rich-quick schemes and their ilk will be banished to the gutters of the internet where they belong.

Currently it takes nearly 30% of my income just to afford the physical shelter. Then pretty much the rest for basic necessities. Not to mention the time it takes to maintain all of this stuff. Pay bills, car maintenance, home maintenance, clothing, grocery shopping. I feel like just living takes up so much of my time.

That includes banks, insurance companies, government agencies, utilities, and pretty much every business that I need to deal with to do anything.

90% of the pain I encounter during my life on the road stems from the fact that I don't own or rent property in the US, and therefore don't have a fixed address. There are tons of people in my situation (especially among the less well off), yet every time I have to deal with any official paperwork from any organization they make it seem like it's some novel situation they've never encountered before.

There are actually a few places that deal with this - http://earthclassmail.com/ being one of them.

I'm pretty sure it was a good experience, because I keep reading books about how my trip usually takes months in transit living in your own filth, if you didn't bring your family you'd never see them again, and sometimes you'd die on the way. I had to pay $8 for a sandwich though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Eddington

I had a great experience with two airlines recently, bmi and airberlin, but it was probably because i was prepared to pay a little more than my usual easyjet price.

Yeah, i think that it's probably more to do with the correlation of how much you pay to how much you will enjoy airlines though

This means that the means to treating most of your problems apply to everyone.

It is true that we have a similar brain structure and represent all but a mere point in the endless space of mind design possibilities, but there is a lot of variation within that point. Just think about the variables in operation over here. Billions of neurons with multiple connections in a chemical soup, firing in a patter and changing while sharing information.

It isn't surprising that we don't understand this, but you'll be amazed at the psuedo-science out there did you know that there was something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder (see: http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-Ps/Oppositional-defiant-diso...)? I cannot name one scientific, unbiased experiment for the root causes behind expression and functioning in gender variant, or intersexed children.

There is some amazing work being done at the national institute of mental health in the underlying neurological basis of mental health disorders like depression and PTSD, but it isn't enough. (see: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...)

The disappointing thing is not the lack of knowledge but the psuedo-science out there and the self proclaimed experts willing to ruin lives without a flinch. We've come a far way, but we have even farther to go.

For example, being lonely causes depression, bad parents cause a huge variety of problems, and so on. Human nature, our insecurities, our egos, our selfishness & greed, and so on - they're the same for everyone.

If you've got a problem, you can be pretty sure you're not the first one to have it, and that the way to treat you is no different from the way all the others with the same problem were treated.

So, I wouldn't think of it in terms of neurons, but in terms of humans.

Will post on HN if it works well.

"Was it $699 that I mentally converted to $700, or was it $799?"

If true, I don't think he realized the Sorcerer's-Apprentice-like consequences of his actions, as I'm now AWASH IN USELESS PENNIES.

They have a very liberal return policy so it's a simple way to encode where the product was bought so customers can't pass off outlet store items as if they were bought from Nordstrom proper.

That's one beneficial use to psychological pricey but I too would rather pay nice round numbers. It makes it easier to calculate sales tax too.

I've found my niche in Machine Learning, and have escaped this fate somewhat, but damn, it is a small and lonely niche. It would be great to go out and have a beer with engineers working on technically challenging projects, like you can in San Fransisco. (I'd love to hang out with the Data Drinking group for e.g.). The amount of talent wasted on legacy enterpriseware maintenance is unimaginable.

I've lived in the USA and I love the place, but I don't want to choose between doing good work and living "at home".

Meanwhile, HN keeps me sane. I don't have great engineers to talk to and learn from in the Real World, but online is a different matter.

I know the receipts are an IRS thing, but why can't the rest be easier?

Yes, Gmail was pretty innovative but I still think there are plenty of things to improve.

I think it would be great if email had a sort of simple XML data structure, it would be a lot easier to tie it in with modern day document formats.

I highly doubt both of these will happen in the foreseeable future, The standards for html email alone are still terrible

Managing email programatically in particular for me is a nightmare, sendgrid is an awesome service, but processing incoming email should be much easier. (I have yet to try lampson)

But the UI also irked me, it was far far to bloated with features I didnt care about (replay), when the thing that I care about was it being as fast and responsive as gmail, which it wasnt close to.

It's just a noisy mess, poorly designed, with a lot of weird design decisions and exotic patterns that only added to the noise.

It starts with a way to complex proposition. Google basically created the entire vision instead of the basic core functionality and then expanded on that, optimizing in the detail rather than for the big shows.

Etherpad started the right way. It started very lean with a basic principle that then evolved with time, slowly. And now it got bought.

Another problem with Google Wave is that it's inherently centralized. They transform the insert/delete operations so they can be applied out of order and still converge on the same document state. Unfortunately, the method they use for this requires a central server to maintain causal ordering of the operations. There are ways of doing this that don't require a central server, which could be handy.

But have you looked at it recently? I've been using Wave to manage most of my project-related communications (with one or two partners), and it's fantastic. Like Etherpad, but a lot more powerful. And fyi, the Etherpad team is now part of the Google Wave team.

They've opened it up now so that you can design a better interface if you wish to. They've also opened it up to anyone with an email address now, and expanded on the robots and gadgets.

Now I don't use Wave that much because I don't often need the collaboration that it offers. However, if they could integrate Wave and Gmail, it would be immensely useful, especially the gadgets and robots.

Is there an available solution for the reverse of SendGrid? Basically a service which would receive your emails and then post to a url on your application.

Anyone know which article I'm talking about?

Personally I don't like OpenID for this reason among others.

The added bonus here would be that people would not be sitting in other people's blindspots all the time and should reduce accidents.

More infuriating are people who change into the left lane and slow down.

* Living in a comparatively rich country that is so full of asshole civil cervants playing shenanigans that it makes you wonder why the hell you should continue providing for these jerks. I for one cannot believe the insane amount of taxes I have payed in my country just to get lied, cheated and straightout harrassed by people who should actually sit down and listen before telling you off.

* No funding for PhD research and travel expenses for attending conferences. Even though there is a shitload of money set aside exclusively for women in CS, I cannot get this kind of funding because of my gender. My research group is underfinanced and a recent grant proposal has been denied because of minor improvement suggestions. Of course I can re-submit, but I figure that I will be finished before any decision can be made. Man, I've had it with my country, I cannot wait to turn my back and go somewhere else...

The increasingly extended copyright term. Come on, create something new instead of milking the old stuffs forever.

Cut it out. I am trying to READ your WRITING, and you are actively distracting me from doing so!

BUT if that man dares drink a single beer with his dad before being shipped off to war, he will be treated like a criminal. His dad may be taken to court and punished for letting a minor have alcohol. The 18 year old could face severe punishments, including not being allowed in the army.

WHY THE FUCK are 18-20 year olds not allowed to drink a beer in the USA, but they're allowed to kill and maim thousands of people?

Ageism goes both ways my friend. We may let our young kill others, but we sure as fuck won't let them drink a beer.

That is not true in most states: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_A...

(still a bad law, I agree)

Being a good soldier and being a responsible drinker are two very different things. Just because you make a good soldier does not immediately imply you will make a responsible drinker.

Quite frankly, 18 is a pretty darn good age to start soldiering, but I know a TON of < 21yo who are not responsible, so my idea doesn't seem completely baseless.

Instead, why don't we look at the problem. The largest problem is that it's forbidden, so the majority of kids growing up have to sneak around and drink with other kids that are irresponsible. Telling a kid he can't do something just makes him want to do it even more.

If we introduce kids to responsible drinking at an earlier age, it wouldn't be so intriguing and they could learn a little bit about responsibility. You'd still have problems but I bet they'd be fewer and we could get back a little more freedom.

To elaborate: If everybody picks a slightly different speed and maintains it, any encounter between two vehicles will never last very long. There's more distance between any two vehicles, so it's safer, and large, impassable clumps of vehicles are less likely to form.

EDIT: bad markup

Imagine a pedal with a dead spot in the middle that represents 0 acceleration. Pushing down on the pedal increases the rate of acceleration. When you get to speed, ease back to the dead spot to maintain. Lift past the dead spot to decel.

Think of it as a hybrid cruise control. I'm convinced it would solve many traffic congestion problems associated with people not maintaining speed on, say, slight inclines.

I'm starting to think that there are a large number of people that feel some sense of comfort in these groups. Something that I've noticed is that a passing car will often slow up as they are passing another car so as to pace them. It drives me crazy.

Silly I know!

Disclaimer: I live in Florida. State with the highest cyclist death rates.

I don't see how that's true - washer driers circulate fluids with the aim to get maximum interaction between the fluid and the clothing. In one instance that fluid is washing water and in the other it is hot air. They seem very similar things to me.

Do you have a reference to some images I could look at?

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html (Figure 4 and 5 for the more recent technology, earlier photos are older technology)

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm... (photos as of 1995 tech)

Aschwin also notes this paper is important: http://www.ijcep.com/707005A.html

Here is an example of the scale I'm interested in: http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/atlas/1_6_2.stm

Things that look like the newtechnology.html's figs 4 & 5 can look very bad at higher mags. I know this from painful experience. I don't see any high mag pictures at newtechnology.html or in Lemler et al. 2004, which that page cites. These mags are quite accessible once one has gone to the trouble of preparing sections for transmission electron microscopy.

Sheleg et al. 2008 was interesting and surprising to me. It is published in a journal not included in the ISI Science Citation Index, so I can't tell at a glance how their paper might have been received by other workers. I might try replicating their results myself at some point down the road, it would be a pretty simple experiment for me to do (at least, the EM part, not the histology work).

I understand the hope that even anatomically degraded tissue could retain sufficient information for cryonics to be useful. I just don't plan to bet my own money on this hope, at least not at this time.

When one with a cryonics membership dies, is his life insurance benefit still paid out? Assuming he can be revived via the cryonics process. Cryonics and life insurance seem incompatible.

Yes, as many people pay for their suspension by taking out a life insurance policy that names the cryonics organization as a beneficiary.

My guess is that insurance companies haven't bothered to write that fine print yet, but who knows.

Alcor and the Cryonics Institute have been around since the '70s and don't appear to be in any danger.

You'll also need at least $50K of life insurance with them as beneficiary. I pay around $170/year for $250K, and went through Rudi Hoffman who does cryo-compatible life insurance.

I mainly do game development, but if you've made a game you know how time consuming it is to actually get something usable/playable/fun at the end.

Between projects I like to take brakes and work on other smaller applications. some of those applications are in c++ so I have some testing grounds to come back to so I don't loose my edge - and too often I get some grade-A BOZO telling me I'm using the "wrong" language and the falling into his diarrhea diatribe about his favorite language X and how it's SOOOOOO COOL and SSSOOOO HIP and SSSOOO EXPRESSIVE as if those are things I care about.

it's such a handicap being a c++ coder in an environment like that, it's like I'm not eligible to hang out with the hip kids/zealots because they have some religious animosity against something they never use. what a joke of a culture that becomes.