JonWood

Completely off topic, but TVCatchup provide an XBMC plugin which completely avoids the advertising they add. No idea why, since it presumably destroys their business model, but it's great.

I moved from Natwest to First Direct a couple of months ago, and have had a great experience so far.

Their online banking isn't quite so nice as Natwest's, but that's more than made up for by the amazing phone service. I've had to call a couple of times (once to replace a lost card), and almost instantly been put through to someone who can solve my problem.

They can track response rates for particular flyers by pointing them at different URLs. Measurable A/B testing for physical advertising.

Your cat may already have an RFID tag - they're used in the process of "chipping" cats so that they can be traced if they find themselves at a vet without their owner. If there is one, it'll be on the back of their neck.

Having just got to the end of a frustrating couple of days and realising I haven't left the house since Tuesday, I totally endorse this.

And on that note, I'm going out.

> now 90% of the work is done

Which presumably leaves the other 90% to finish.

> That bread you find at Kroger, somebody had to work to make it appear in your cart.

In any community there is likely to be someone with a passion for something. Whether that something is making bread, helping the sick, or teaching children.

It's true that there are some jobs which people aren't naturally inclined to do, but in the society being described I think that communities would become smaller, and more cohesive. Some the of the jobs required to maintain a large city no longer need to be done, and those that do still need doing become less of a strain and can be distributed amongst people.

> A programmer's salary is great, but why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary?

You can. You just have to learn to negotiate.

I currently work 4 days a week, with the other day being split between helping with a youth club, and Open Source hacking, and throwing a mountain bike down hills. I had to spend more time looking when I last changed jobs, but that also ended up with me in a job that I love for other reasons as well.

This is why I love open source. 30 minutes ago I was thinking "I wonder if there's a WYSIWYG editor that integrates with Bootstrap."

And now, here I am, reading about it.

Yup, police with submachine guns are completely routine at Heathrow. They're also not an uncommon sight around certain parts of London these days - all the big government buildings have a couple of policemen with MP5s hanging around the entrances.

This strikes me as being similar to extracting bits of a model out into modules that then get included back into that model. It looks like you're reducing the complexity of the model, but in fact you're just hiding it elsewhere, without making it any easier to stub things out.

One advantage of "Heroku's" nickel and diming is that the money is actually being split with other companies in most cases, and those companies core competency is providing exactly that service, whether that be a Redis server or email delivery.

You do pay more than just throwing another service on a machine you're already running, but you've got a fairly good chance of it being massively optimised.

If you're hiring dedicated people to manage your servers bare metal becomes even more appealing, especially if they know what they're doing and can allow you to burst out to a cloud provider when you need extra capacity fast.