>>Thinking back, I almost totally stopped posting stuff around the time they did because the site just began to feel creepy (foto tagging, etc) and started feeling like a mostly empty room at the end of a party.
I can almost picture your friends snickering at you saying thinks like "Boy, look at vabmit, still has not realized that Facebook is so yesterday"
>>You have to defend even terrorists' rights if you want yours to stand.
Completely agree with this. Unfortunately most people are too stupid to realize that in order to protect your constitutionals rights you must also protect the rights of people you do not like, i.e. hate spouting religious extremists, of any religion. Even the rights of killers like the Boston bombers must be protected if we want ours to be protected.
No they are not, but they sure are important. Anybody who says otherwise is lying or being naive. We all want to find a mate, is in our genes. Those that profess not to want sex are either lying or are sick.
Hark! Unfortunately girls are just as shallow as guys, for the most part. Most want to date the cool guy, who cares if he is a looser in hindsight. Guys are just as shallow, to be fair.
News used to be bad for me when I was a young kid in my teens. It used to depress me. Now that I'm in my thirties I've become desensitized and pretty much nothing bothers me. News is only bad for you if you let it affect you.
I think is a great article because it provides the perspective of an "outsider". It was pretty refreshing to read the ideas of somebody trying to get into the software business. What makes it more interesting is that it is a sales person, the type of people that many coders dislike because they kick our butt in, well, selling ourselves.
Many times sales people do better then engineers in a big company because they are better able to impress people and forge political alliances. Note that I also think that a sales person is closely related to a business person. If you've ever been to a large corporation, many times the engineering offices are some of the crappiest while the business offices are some of the nicest.
yes, in fact I think this is the perfect time for it. Google has hit a wall. It has not really gotten that much better in years.
Any new player cannot be just as good as google. It must be much better than google. If you manage to build something that is objectively better you can expect investors to shower you with money. Would not be surprised if google, facebook, MS would enter a bidding war to buy you. Don't know if Apple would be interested though.
The only way google can improve search is to drastically change their search algorithms. Perhaps throw away whatever they are doing right now and approach it from a new direction. This is the opening I believe new players have. A new approach to search, like contextual search will probably be enough to seriously threaten google.
>>>Despite the literature I never accuse visualizers of the reverse (ie that you only think you have mental images), but when I do challenge incredulous friends about their phenomenology some discover it's actually much less pictoral than they'd believed: eg, "imagine a tiger, how many stripes?" or "imagine an ant crawling across a checkered picnic table toward a jar of grape jelly, what color square is it on now? what about now?" or "imagine a 3x3 word matrix whose rows read 'too', 'aid', 'ole' -- read the column words straight off without sounding out or going letter by letter". Granted, others can do these with an ease that amazes me.<<<
I'm not a freaking computer.
"imagine a 3x3 word matrix whose rows read 'too', 'aid', 'ole' -- read the column words straight off without sounding out or going letter by letter"
You might as well tell me to add 182748+37638373 in my head. The reason I cannot do this is that it requires short term memory and I don't have much of it. I can only remember four, five, maybe even six number in a row at a time in short term memory. You giving me a bunch of instructions to visualize exceeds my short term memory so I cannot do it. In other words, I'm not a computer, neither are you.
>>>Meanwhile, it astounds me that a single picture can pop into your head: how do you know what position to put the stick figure in.
Well if nothing pops into your head then I guess you really cannot visualize. The stick figure is usually standing up straight.
Thank you for this. Even though I consider myself pretty average now you've made me feel like I have some secret power. It helps a lot when I visualize things. Also, writing ideas out in a narrative also helps. So, I guess I can do both. Genius Here!!! (Standing up, wide eyed, looking proud with an idiotic smile)
p.s. I don't actually believe that you cannot visualize images. Can you draw a stick human figure? Did it pop into your head when I mentioned stick human figure? There you go, you just visualized it.
p.s I guess inability to visualize something could be something similar to dyslexia?
Is great that you at least admit that your problem is part laziness. I'm sure ADHD must be true for some people but I wonder if too many use it as an excuse for their failures.
<half-joking>Even I've wondered if maybe I suffer from ADHD since is really hard to keep my attention on a project past the prototype stage. That is, once the last 10% starts. </half-joking> All joking aside, it feels almost like pulling teeth when working on that last 10%. Don't really know how to fix it other than to just force myself to keep at it.
I can almost picture your friends snickering at you saying thinks like "Boy, look at vabmit, still has not realized that Facebook is so yesterday"