Those kind of tasks would go in the online calendar, scheduled on some future date.
> The one outside tool I use is an online calendar, and I put everything on this calendar, even things that aren't actually for a fixed time like "make a coffee table at the workshop" or "figure out how to recruit new PhD students" — I'll schedule them on a date when I want to think about it. That way all my future plans and schedule are together, and not a bunch of lists I have to keep track of.
I had a similar experience as the author I broke my cell phone in Chongqing, China. If you have a chance to go to China, I highly recommend it. The society is just so different there, and it's incredible in so many ways.
You may be able to do it without speaking Chinese, but it would be much more difficult, and I'd be afraid of mutual misunderstanding of what I wanted the repairperson to do.
I learned the basics of Chinese before I went to the country, and took an intensive course in Mandarin the first time I went there.
I think learning a new programming language is more about logic. There's not a lot of memorization, but you need practice (some need it more than others) to make the connections. After learning one programming language, other languages may have different structures, but the logic required is not all that different.
In my experience learning Chinese, there's no shortcut to putting the hours in and memorizing vocabulary. I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.
Learning a new programming language is difficult mentally. Learning a new human language is extremely tedious, but I think anybody can do it if they put in enough time.
Google seems to have no interest in protecting android users from this either.
There was an app called 'App Ops' that gave android users the ability to choose which permissions they wanted to grant applications. No root required.
Get too many notifications from an app, or don't need location functionality? You used to be able to turn these features off one-by-one for each app. You could also see the last time an app used location services. Android developers have a bad habit of requesting every permission under the sun, so I've gotten in the habit of disabling the permissions that don't add value for me.
Unfortunately, Google later removed this feature saying that its release was accidental. I thought it was a clean solution to a major problem.
This would be my biggest problem, I think it's just nuts: "all travellers transiting in the USA using either a transit visa or the Visa Waiver Program will be photographed and fingerprinted."
Shareholders with voting shares have the right to attend shareholders meetings and vote in the board of directors. In such large corporations, shareholders usually appoint a proxyholder who attends the meeting and votes on the shareholder's behalf.
My understanding was that Nokia Plan B was basically soliciting such proxies by asking shareholders to give their votes to them for the purpose of replacing the board.
Corporate law usually doesn't require a proxyholder to be a shareholder, so they actually didn't even need such a (weak) claim to authority.
As a side note, soliciting proxies usually requires following proper corporate law procedure by sending prescribed materials. Nokia Plan B just had a website, which was an early indication this was a fake.
From what I've heard:
* If you paid by google checkout, you were never actually charged
* If you paid by paypal, you should have been refunded by August 17th, 2010 (http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/08/17/timing-update/)
So if you paid by paypal, just check your transaction history around that date to ensure you actually got the refund.
Nope. It was registered April 26 2010 by ".CO Founders program".
.CO founders are hand-picked to ensure the domain will "contribute to the .CO community in a meaningful way." In return, they get get first dibs on a .CO domain name, which will be publicly launched in July 2010. (http://www.cointernet.co/domain/become-co-founder)
Maybe it is registered under the program's name instead of the actual registrant to ensure registrants under the program stick with their originally-submitted plan. Or at least they can't turn around and change it to a domain parked ad page.
Or perhaps the whois registrant name will be changed after the public launch.
"Skype-to-Skype calls will always be free but there are a few things that cost a little such as calling mobiles and ordinary phones when you want to get hold of your friends that havent started using Skype yet."
In the author's world, people who would otherwise get an organ now will not be able to. If we allowed organ purchases on the free market, they would be allocated by ability to pay rather than by need.
Similarly, a person undergoing financial difficulty may end up selling organs to stay afloat.
In my opinion, the most morally acceptable result is not necessarily the most economic efficient one. The author disagrees, which is fine, but he doesn't look at the downsides to a more efficient system. The dilemmas above are completely ignored by the author, and he only focusses on the end result: economic inefficiency (more home foreclosures and deaths).
I'm weary of any argument that only looks at one side of the coin.
I was especially disappointed after reading rmc's comment that "One of [OpenStreetMap's] statements is 'We make beautiful maps'".
It's great that the data is made public, and they play an important role there. But if we're only comparing map styles (as the article did), OSM has a long way to go.
> The one outside tool I use is an online calendar, and I put everything on this calendar, even things that aren't actually for a fixed time like "make a coffee table at the workshop" or "figure out how to recruit new PhD students" — I'll schedule them on a date when I want to think about it. That way all my future plans and schedule are together, and not a bunch of lists I have to keep track of.