Viewing profile — davidblair

Essential Craftsman is fantastic. For anyone who doesn't know, the concept is that he is building a spec house and walking you through every step of the process, from surveying the…

One of the strangest business practices Greyhound has is the $18 Gift Ticket Fee [1]. Want someone to buy a ticket for you online? That will cost an extra. Think you can avoid it b…

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20170721121215/http://www.wescot...

Last month the network CEO and Mayor of Chattanooga did an AMA where they discussed setting up the fiber network and how they overcame cable operators attempts to block the network…

Deposits have been restricted at this time, not withdrawals.

Perception is far more important than reality. When online sales first took off, credit card theft was a huge concern. Even though nothing would go wrong for the vast majority of p…

The reason Blackboard doesn't have competition is due to the patents they hold. They have made a commitment not to sue free, open source projects, but as soon as you start charging…

The FCC strictly prohibits this I believe.

I've never run into this issue and have booked many tickets (on the northeast line).

The app still works as of 8:00 PM ET on my AT&T iPhone. Based on what I've read about others tethering apps, Apple will not remotely disable Tether. The only major downside is that…

Just a photograph at this points. Post is likely soon to follow.

I phrased that poorly. You are absolutely right, peer reviewers are unpaid. I also have a big problem with the fact that journals receive a perpetual copyright to the work instead …

arxiv.org has >700,000 open access articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. It's a great resource. The major c…

I have seen substantial Federal grants that restrict overhead a university can take to ~20%. These grants were tied to the PI and the money follows the PI if they change institutio…

Amazon limits you to 100 Spot instances per region without contacting them to change the limit for your account. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run...

I was a talk by Stephen Wolfram at MIT in fall of 2010 about Wolfram Alpha. Never spoke to him personally. When Wolfram answered questions he was always direct and gave grounded an…

The story comes from a friend who was involved in the project. If you have any specific questions I would be happy to ask them on your behalf. A quick google search returned a news…

Coinstar is a great example of this. The machine is able to calculate the total change deposited almost instantly. Yet, during testing the company learned that consumers did not tr…

In some respects HN is a Gopher server adapted for today. Focused on content, links to information, and just enough detail to keep you going. As a protocol, Gopher is straight forw…

Caller ID is really important for me. Unless I know who is calling I will probably ignore my phone. Spoofing the phone number of the actual business would be really handy and great…

Either the topo data is wrong or something is not rendering right. Take a look at http://kosmosnimki.ru/3d/index.html?x=-13348730&y=472501...

What do you use as your p-value cutoff? I've heard many arguments for .05 being the highest acceptable for research but it seems like you have found an acceptable p-value that is o…

The problem with the 100 "normal" users is the number of support calls they generate. It's a tough trade off to make. The way I see it is that you can plan for the increase in data…

I hate the nickle and dime approach to productivity. In fact, the happier I am the more I get done.