It should seriously not take much more time than it takes to warm up a nasty styrofoam cup of noodles to cook something cheap, easy and - above all - tasty.
The first step is to get a rice steamer. The second step is to realize that you can, in fact, prep your vegetables, meats and sauces ahead of time and just leave them in the fridge. Feeling hungry? Pour a little oil into a pan, toss in some ingredients, and voila - stirfry in no time at all. Grab a bowl, stuff some rice into it, and top it over - lunch!
It's more cost-effective than takeout, at the very least. Timesink may be an issue - if you aren't working with one or two cofounders. If you are, the minimal amount of competence to use a rice steamer and heat up pre-prepped ingredients means you /should/ be able to safely rotate cooking duties without excessive risk to your health.
Or, at least, less risk than a diet of salty ramen and oily pizza.
Er, yes? Guess what the first results are when you type in "American Nazi Party?" That's right - the homepage of just such an organization.
I rather doubt they have any real influence or electability, though. As bad as the dichotomy in US politics is /now/, there are some levels to which we just can't quite stoop to.
Finding very little to disagree with here (except that odd stance on MDMA, but I don't so much disagree as find myself cold and uninterested on the issue).
Patton Oswalt needs to spend more time doing actual research on the state of geek culture and less time watching cat videos on Youtube. Shaking your metaphorical stick at the kids on your digital lawn doesn't make for interesting or insightful dialogue on pop culture.
From the article, it seems as if its breaking was done A. by hand, and B. more as a hobby than anything else. It was explicitly noted that if they had bothered feeding it through a computer, it would've taken "a fraction" of the time.
Before we colonize anything outside of our own self-sustained gravity well, we kind of need to have a working model of a self-sustained /ecological system/.
Which we noticeably lack.
Let's not forget that, under the criteria of self-sustainment, Biosphere II was a failure, yes? And that subsequent research in ecological systems indicate that we are, collectively, more ignorant than wise as to the mechanics necessary to sustain a fully functional off-world environment.
Yes, we could be wiped out by a kilometer-radius asteroid at any moment. That doesn't mean we actually know what to do about it. Colonizing other planets necessitates /self-sustaining/ colonization - it's utterly pointless, after all, to have a Mars colony doomed to a slow and painful death if its ludicrously expensive supply line to Earth collapses.
If that doesn't convince you, though, /you/ can be the first one to try out a Biosphere-3 on Mars. Go ahead - I won't take your place in line. I promise.
If people want to make donations in support of a fun (or at least funky) idea, I /don't/ think they should be barred from doing so. Discouraging goodwill isn't exactly a great stance to assert. As it is, though, the bulk of the money's coming from people who are requesting the product itself - it won't be 20x better, but there'll be 20x more of it, and hopefully sufficient profit that an enhanced tooling line can be made to meet demand.
Which is not to say that your concerns don't have merit, but do note that the success of Diaspora and the ipod wristwatch projects seem very much to be outliers. Kickstarter claims that a little under half of all total projects /approved/ actually meet their funding goals, and from a glance of the site, it seems as if most successes are rather /modest/ successes - we really only notice the outliers.
The site also does warn project organizers that failing to deliver could potentially leave them legally vulnerable. Given the relatively low success rate, the human curating and the necessity of maintaining a public and accessible persona to drive up donations, I wouldn't call it a great platform to scam with.
Of course, given my limited experience with scams, I could be totally naive about this.
It's not a "viable" model for the /developers/ involved in the Humble Indie Bundle. Not in the sense of pricing for /new/ releases, at least.
However, each of these games have been out for sufficiently long that having people name their price now is mainly extra frosting on top of an already well-decorated cake. It's a tiny bit of extra market penetration /after/ the game's already made an impact - along with some goodwill towards deserving charities.
If this doesn't turn out to be overblown sensationalism, then the team behind this (actual!) cure probably deserves a Nobel for their efforts and results.
Specifically, its businesses and citizens'll be doing just fine.
The government will probably be fucked up. But when was the last time it /wasn't/? I suspect even the older of HN's community'd really have to dig at their memories to remember a time when Cali's government was functioning at or near spec, regardless of party-in-power. We're pretty good at the whole revenue-generating shtick, but the governance bit seems to keep eluding us.
I'm only guessing here, not being an engineer or a mathematician, but... wouldn't that be rather dependent on what kind of engineering you're getting into?
...why would it NOT be okay? Startups might need cash, but so do big corps. If we're talking about "donating equivalent to big corporations," then obviously we're talking flights of fancy. But we're not. I'm sure there's tax incentives for it; you've alluded to marketing incentives. But in the end, it's just a matter of whether or not the startup thinks it's financially in a place to do a little good.
Penny Arcade's got a staff size you can count on one hand; they run one of the best-known charities in gaming circles. They're not a Big Co. by any account, even if they've since developed Significant cultural presence.
That's still model-dependent, I think. If the cost is sufficient barrier to entry that user skepticism remains high, then you'd probably have less initial converts simply by having a smaller pool of potential clients giving you a chance.
The first step is to get a rice steamer. The second step is to realize that you can, in fact, prep your vegetables, meats and sauces ahead of time and just leave them in the fridge. Feeling hungry? Pour a little oil into a pan, toss in some ingredients, and voila - stirfry in no time at all. Grab a bowl, stuff some rice into it, and top it over - lunch!
It's more cost-effective than takeout, at the very least. Timesink may be an issue - if you aren't working with one or two cofounders. If you are, the minimal amount of competence to use a rice steamer and heat up pre-prepped ingredients means you /should/ be able to safely rotate cooking duties without excessive risk to your health.
Or, at least, less risk than a diet of salty ramen and oily pizza.