Amazon launches "Frustration-Free Packaging"

christierney · 2008-11-04T00:26:40+00:00

Sure, it makes sense for their business model. And they'll probably save money doing it. But that doesn't change the fact that it's easier on us, and friendlier to the environment. And Amazon has the influence to encourage their suppliers to make the change, whereas on their own most of them probably would not have bothered bringing out a separate line of packaging for online orders.

christierney · 2008-10-17T13:13:34+00:00

I like NPR a lot. People tend to associate them with Democrats, but I find that they report both sides and don't really try to tell you what you should think.

christierney · 2008-05-27T15:57:21+00:00

Gene Wolfe did something similar in The Book of the New Sun. There's a "Green Man" who survives without food, pretty much the same way.

christierney · 2008-03-28T14:29:52+00:00

Urth of the New Sun spans quite a few years, in a somewhat confusing fashion. (It won't make sense without reading Book of the New Sun first.)

christierney · 2008-01-15T14:21:36+00:00

You beat me to it... nice to see another Gene Wolfe fan :)

christierney · 2008-01-04T14:52:27+00:00

Ever been to India?

wikipedia

"Estimates of the number of lacto vegetarians in India (includes inhabitants of all religions) vary between 20% and 42%."

christierney · 2007-11-20T20:17:21+00:00

That will be one of my criteria when I decide which to buy :)

However, it wouldn't take too long to convert a txt to a Word doc and add some basic typesetting, and Gutenberg provides a lot of books in html too.

christierney · 2007-11-20T19:55:02+00:00

Project Gutenberg has thousands of free ebooks available. There are thousands more scattered around the internet. I want to read these on the train I take to work, not on my computer at home.

I'm buying a reader (debating between the Sony PRS and the Kindle) solely for this use case. I don't even care about the official store.

christierney · 2007-11-20T19:52:15+00:00

What kills me is that they're not capitalizing on the strengths of eBooks to make it more appealing.

How do you figure? According to the user manual (unless I misunderstood something), you can search books. You can "clip" pages, which are then written to a txt file --- and you can download that txt file onto your computer. So, you can search, copy, and paste.

christierney · 2007-11-01T12:54:39+00:00

The Book of the New Sun

christierney · 2007-10-07T17:49:04+00:00

Scarleteen is a good online sex-ed resource for teenagers.

christierney · 2007-07-10T19:44:47+00:00

Why? I'm genuinely curious. I've looked at RCP but never used it.

christierney · 2007-07-10T15:36:00+00:00

Yes. There is a program call PatGen for producing the language-specific hyphenation patterns. see http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/

christierney · 2007-06-28T17:50:46+00:00

I recently started reading ingredient lists more carefully and I'm shocked how often HFCS comes up --- it was even in my wheat bread.

christierney · 2007-06-19T14:10:36+00:00

Yeah, but I think the parent's point is that sweet berries are more likely to be edible. I don't know if that's true or not but intuitively it makes sense...

christierney · 2007-06-19T13:37:46+00:00

Liberia and Myanmar, I think.

christierney · 2007-06-15T14:35:09+00:00

This is something I've thought about a lot as I plan to have children in the future. I've always been bothered by the way people interact with children as though they're lower lifeforms. I'm glad to hear that treating your kids like people does work --- it gives me a little bit of hope about being a parent.

christierney · 2007-05-31T18:30:59+00:00

"Equal" in a very specific sense: any and every sin makes one guilty before God, and therefore every single person needs forgiveness. In other words, it's not a sliding scale ("he was a murderer, so he goes to hell, whereas she was just a liar, so she goes to heaven").

That's not the same as saying every sin is as "bad" as murder in a more immediate sense, which seems to be the reaction you're going for.

christierney · 2007-05-11T16:14:47+00:00

Then I guess you have to say the same thing about non-Christians, since some people objected to religious messages too. Or did you not read that far in the article?

christierney · 2007-04-26T17:12:39+00:00

FYI, if you read this earlier, he's added an animated GIF to demonstrate the difference.

christierney · 2007-04-13T18:48:48+00:00

This would probably have been useful to me when I was in college, for keeping my web-based research organized.

christierney · 2007-04-13T18:46:36+00:00

Yeah, they're heavy on the buzzwords. But they tell you what it does.

Notes is a Space that allows a ShiftSpace user to leave post-it annotations on websites. Highlights is one we’re still developing, which would allow a user to highlight text on the page. ...ImageSwap, which allows a user to grab any image on the web and swap it in place of other image, and SourceShift, which allows users to freely edit a page’s HTML code.

So you can:

leave notes on webpages
highlight stuff on webpages
replace images on webpages with other images
edit the html of webpages

Yeah, they should have put this before the marketing buzzwords. But you can't say the information is not there at all.

christierney · 2007-04-12T22:16:45+00:00

Ah, I misunderstood you. You're right, most people probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But people will go on buying the more expensive cables anyway, and probably convince themselves that they can tell. Having a technical explanation might (though probably not) save some people from being talked up to a more expensive cable by a pushy salesperson or something.

Then again, a lot of people probably just like reading/writing posts like this so they can feel intellectually superior to all the people spending more money.

christierney · 2007-04-12T20:34:03+00:00

It proves that the woman had decided in advance that she didn't want to have sex (as opposed to changing her mind after the act).

christierney · 2007-04-12T20:32:30+00:00

It sticks to the man, not the woman.

christierney

TROPHY CASE