I doubt taxes would be raised for that since the USPS is a quasi-independent "federal corporation" and therefore doesn't use tax dollars to sustain itself.
It looks like the author is aware of the similarity. His book this was adapted from is titled "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work", no doubt a reference to the latter part of the title of Pirsig's novel "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values".
for someone who's been around computers as long as he has, it's surprising that pg's only reactions around them are either happily surprised or insanely angry.
well, in this instance you could upvote the dupe in the hopes that more people will see it on the front page. on a slightly related note, i've noticed these days that the posts with higher numbers of votes depend not only on the quality of the content, but also the reputation of the submitter.
The path this article prescribes is almost identical to my own story, and so far I strongly agree that financially it makes a lot of sense (although there are cases where this may not necessarily be true, based on tsally's comment).
The only difference in my own personal path from the article's is that before coming to grad school I worked for two years in a position that was extremely relevant to what I wanted to study. Not only did I make enough money to pay off my undergrad debt, but I also gained a great recommendation from my boss (who was a PhD, which helps a lot) as well as an interesting story to add to my personal statement when applying to grad school.
"California’s Department of Public Health has issued cease and desist letters to 13 genetic testing startups - most notably 23andMe, which Michael [Arrington] tried out earlier this year. The C&D’s are mandating that the labs demonstrate that they have been certified by both the state and federal government, and, perhaps more importantly, that all genetic tests were ordered by a patient’s doctor, which is required by state law."
{Still, Apple could end up at odds with some developers - particularly creators or distributors of content and media - who offer applications that compete directly with iTunes. Rajeev Raman, chief executive of Mywaves, an ad-sponsored free mobile video service available on millions of handsets, including Nokia and BlackBerry smartphones, said he would like to offer Mywaves in the App Store.
But he has made little headway in his discussions with Apple, he said: "We have a reverse conflict because they are not providing video for free, but we are. We are interested, but we don’t want to jump into anything that will have our hands tied behind our backs."
When asked about it, Mr. Jobs said: "He’s right. We will compete." He added, "That’s a discussion to have."}
"It's stupid to think that the #2 social network is worth 30 times the #1 social network, but it'd also be dumb to wholly discount the value of all of that data."
I agree. To me it seems like the data that one enters into their profile in Facebook is much more organized and uniformly formatted than the train wreck that comprises most Myspace pages. Facebook also one-ups Myspace by making users prove that certain data is true, for example using email confirmations to verify which school they go to.
The bottom line, though, is that none of us know exactly how much data is being aggregated by Facebook (ie. are they tracking things such as profile trends by logging changes in each user's likes/dislikes section?). Just like Peter Norvig explained at SS, the real value doesn't lie in the code, or in this case the application itself, but in the amount/value of data collected. The trick is just finding the right way to manipulate that data to yield the highest value/most profitable data for their investors. And something tells me that Facebook, and its investors, already know this.
Thank you for the excellent suggestions! I've been working on bigger DoD contracts at my current job, so I'm pretty oblivious to the small company/university grant process.
Since I'm entering Stanford with the intent to obtain a terminal Master's, I'm not sure how much research I'll be allowed or encouraged to participate in. Continuing for my Doctorate is certainly still an option, but I think I'm leaning towards getting my Master's and finding/founding some small company to work with.
Any other insight you have into my situation would be appreciated!
Sigh...I emailed Trevor last year about my desire to work there but never heard back from him. Now that I'm going to Stanford's ME grad program this fall maybe I can weasel my way into some other robotics startup...
Processing is also the development environment for the Arduino ( http://www.arduino.cc/ ), a very cool open source hardware platform for small-scale electronics projects/prototypes.
I use both of these pretty heavily at work and at home and they've proved to be immensely useful for whenever I want to test out ideas that pop up in my head from time to time.
It wasn't working for me yesterday as well, but it looks like all is well again.
However, one thing that I've gotten used to with sites using textareas meant for copying and pasting is that when you click in the box it automatically selects all of the text for you, eliminating the need for any scrolling. For sites like yours whose success is based not only on its usefulness but also the small amount of time needed to get started, minor shortcuts like that can dramatically change the overall user experience if you can make your set up as painless as possible.
In his defense, he wrote this in response to a comment similar to yours:
"Actually, I am paying for TextMate, I guess I wanted to make a comment about trying to do things cheaply - bad joke. If one piece of software is worth buying it, it's TextMate!"
He also just deleted the part about resetting your clock from the post. Sounds like he was just trying to spice things up a little.