sethg

5 ms·

1.
by sethg 14y ago
It would be perfectly logical for Nokia to have an alternative OS waiting in the wings, in case Windows stops being useful for them, or even as an incentive to discourage Microsoft from squeezing them too hard. Of course, once upon a time,
2.
by sethg 14y ago
“I’ve been seeing spots in front of my eyes.” “Have you seen a doctor?” “No, just spots.”
3.
by sethg 14y ago
As I understand it, psychopathic traits are very good for getting what you want in the short term . If this author’s interview subjects had appreciated the long-term consequences of their antisocial behavior, they wouldn’t be behind bar
4.
by sethg 14y ago
Genius!
5.
by sethg 14y ago
Or, as others here have suggested, simply give public defenders’ offices a budget comparable to the prosecutors’ offices. If the interests of justice make it worth spending $100K of taxpayer money to prosecute someone charged with a relativ
6.
by sethg 14y ago
The government doesn’t charge anything for GPS: http://www.gps.gov/policy/funding/
7.
by sethg 14y ago
Why did you not realize that “this guy is worth it” until he already has one foot out the door? If his only reason for being dissatisfied with his current job was the money, why didn’t he just go to his manager and say “hello, I was looking
8.
by sethg 14y ago
Expedia is (allegedly) lying about one of their “partner” hotels in a way that drives customers away from the hotel. Isn’t this the kind of thing that a lawyer would call “tortious interference with business relationships”?
9.
by sethg 14y ago
I once suggested to my wife that we use the RT bug-tracking system to keep track of household chores. And then, I said, we could create an RT account for each of the kids, and buy each of the kids an iPad Mini, with the Safari homepage set
10.
by sethg 14y ago
In the US, your employer can forbid you from revealing your pay to outsiders , but the National Labor Relations Act guarantees that employees have the right to discuss their pay with one another . (I believe this falls under the heading
11.
by sethg 14y ago
A lot of Russians still view Americans as self-indulgent, somewhat retarded know-it-alls, bathing in life's luxuries that make no sense. And they’re right! We are!
12.
by sethg 14y ago
In Boston, if you put too much money into the bus farebox, you get back a coupon that you can use to pay for another bus. The transit authority also sells one-day and one-week passes for the convenience of tourists. I don’t know how other
13.
by sethg 14y ago
they've apparently deliberately designated a large number of shipment delivery locations as residential delivery More likely: they have a database or some other kind of service that maps addresses onto “residential” or “not residential”,
14.
by sethg 14y ago
If X is some investment (gold, real estate, Apple Inc. stock, whatever), and I have structured my portfolio so that I would benefit from the price of X going down, then I am “short X”. If I would benefit from the price of X going up, then
15.
by sethg 14y ago
There is a case to be made for having precious metals as part of a diversified investment portfolio. (IIRC Burton Malkiel, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, suggests that it be about 1% of your holdings.) But the “gold bugs” are the peop
16.
by sethg 14y ago
In California, under Proposition 13, it takes a two-thirds majority vote to raise either local or state taxes.
17.
by sethg 14y ago
On a national level, yes. But on a district level, what proportion of the children who were educated in a given school district end up working there and paying taxes after they grow up?
18.
by sethg 14y ago
http://seekingalpha.com/article/49701-subprime-mortgages-cro... It doesn’t have exact numbers, but the tl;dr is that people from every income bracket were taking out subprime mortgages, including middle- and upper-class people who could
19.
by sethg 14y ago
You don’t need to live in the “ghetto parts” to be seduced by a long-term loan that has easy terms up front. The subprime mortgage crisis was built on respectable hard-working middle-class families that were persuaded to take on debt like t
20.
by sethg 14y ago
What I’d really like to know is: which countries have significantly increased their scores over the past five years or so, and how did they do it?
21.
by sethg 14y ago
I suspect that when people encounter government corruption in the US, it’s usually at the city or state level, in jurisdictions where a political machine controls important purchasing decisions and opponents of that machine face odds much l
22.
by sethg 14y ago
The Republican Study Committee was founded by Republicans who thought the mainstream of their party was too moderate. Proposals that go beyond what is politically feasible is part of their mission, because they want to change the boundarie
23.
by sethg 14y ago
According to the exit polls, voters aged 18–29 favored the Democratic candidate by 9 percentage points in 2004, 34 points in 2008, and 23 points in 2012. In 2016, is the Republican Presidential candidate (whoever he or she may be) going to
24.
by sethg 14y ago
It could be worse. I used to work at a hospital with an automatic elliptical revolving door (I assume it was designed that way so you could push a gurney through it). On the one hand: automatic revolving door, shiny! On the other hand: th
25.
by sethg 14y ago
For the things I actually use a personal server for, $150/month is overkill. A server that used to handle my family’s email\* and runs my personal Web site runs just fine on my Linode 512. Heck, if they offered a “256” plan with half the
26.
by sethg 14y ago
The article says the rootkit works by inserting a line into /etc/rc.local. If my /etc/rc.local file looks OK, can I assume I haven’t been infected, or does the rootkit use more sophisticated means to hide its presence?
27.
by sethg 14y ago
The US Federal government subsidizes agriculture to a certain extent, using price supports to keep prices above a certain floor, and the US is also a net exporter of food, so that may be blunting the impact of rising food prices.
28.
by sethg 14y ago
Do the actual statistics bear out the theory that inflation is significantly higher for the things that low-income groups purchase? See, for example, this graph: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=CPIAUCSL,CWSR... ,
29.
by sethg 14y ago
If you asked me which major party was more likely to preside over a period of high inflation, I would say “Democrats” (even though I vote for them). Yet according to this commentary, the demographic groups that perceive and expect the high
30.
by sethg 14y ago
Here’s a good article from the YouGov site that describes their methodology: http://today.yougov.com/news/2012/10/23/obama-stays-ahead-ju...

More ›