fluxquanta

>Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.

This is already happening at Lidl. I was standing in line one day and the lady in front of me asked if I had the app, because there was something like a $5 off $50 purchase coupon in there I could use. I did have the app and checked, but my coupon instead was for $15 off $150.

Thinking a little more deeply about it, every time I go there I tend to spend an average of around $125. My hypothesis is that they have that data and know a customer's average spend, so they tailor the coupon's dollar amounts to the customer to entice them to spend slightly more than they usually do.

> aircraft surveillance has moved from controller-based interrogation to automatic broadcast

I'd take issue with the phrasing "moved from" and would rather use "supplemented by". Controller-based interrogation is still widely used.

Athletes on that level rarely have just one coach throughout their careers, and are constantly striving to do better. Players of team sports demand trades due to (perceived, if not actual) deficiencies in coaching all the time. It's possible, maybe even desirable sometimes, to have someone who is less accomplished than you to coach or guide you, but it would be probably be detrimental to follow everything they said without question.

>if someone keeps getting passed up for an award, it just signifies that there are people who deserved the award more

I would be less salty if another author received it over Murakami, but to make the jump to songwriter sets a precedent I don't particularly like. You can make a reasoned argument for authors who deserve it more than Murakami, but to switch genres sort of implies that either all the Nobel caliber authors have been exhausted, or that nobody cares about literature anymore, or that the Nobel committee made this pick to satiate the complaints over the lack of American laureates, and Bob Dylan was the best the US could offer. In any case I find it troubling.

Yeah, I just happened to read that last chapter of Colorless Tsukuru at the right time in my personal life where I could relate directly to just about every sentence, and at the end I just felt empty in a satisfying way, if that makes any sense. Then again, I find that with age I'm becoming more susceptible to melancholic or sappy fiction, even if it's not particularly well done (as in the case of some TV shows).

I'm not the OP, but Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore are my favorites.

I can't upvote this enough. I have a degree in physics, but even so every year around this time for about the past decade I pay more attention to the literature prize, waiting for him to get recognized. The last chapter of Colorless Tsukuru hit me so hard I cried, and immediately went out of my way to get an autographed copy. His novels have certainly helped me transition into adulthood, and I think he definitely deserves the prize.

On a related note, a couple of weeks ago I wanted to meet up at a friend's house to watch the Overwatch ELeague finals airing on TBS (basically a competitive video game event on national tv). They did air a bare bones version on Twitch.tv but without commentary and filler stuff. He doesn't have cable but I have a PlayStation Vue subscription which includes TBS, and we wanted to watch the whole production to see what competitive video games on national TV would be like. So I get to his house in the next town over and try to login to my Vue account. That's when we get a message saying that they detected my login location was not my house, and that the only way to access the service was to permanently change my home location. I verified in the TOS that if I agreed to change my home location there's no going back.

In the end we just watched the Twitch stream, which meant I didn't get to access the service I pay for just ten miles from home, and TBS didn't get our eyeballs on their advertisements. Seems like a bad policy on their part.

I went from an original Kickstarter Pebble, to a Samsung Gear 2, to a Moto 360, back to the Pebble Time Steel. It really does seem like Pebble provides a better product all around. It was a fun trip, I guess.

The clients I work with tend to still use physical fax machines to send/receive financing details to small banks and credit unions. The banks themselves probably use some sort of internet service, or at least I hope they do.

>Faxing is 90% dead as far as I can tell. I've got a fax machine, I think the last time I plugged it in was 2008.

Depends on the industry. I would say probably 80% of the clients I work with still rely on faxing as a regular part of doing business. Is it the ideal way of sending documents? Probably not, but I've also never heard of anyone who had to call in technical support to clear off malware or reformat their fax machine. It just works.

>Small sensors are getting better.

They are, but they will also hit a physical wall at some point (if not already), and you'll continue trading "natural" dynamic range and low noise for software interpolated dynamic range and smoothing, which as others have noted, starts looking like Madame Tussaud's museum.

Then again, if Apple really wanted to impress me with their camera skills they would have to develop a medium format mirrorless digital camera for less than $5k. One can dream, I suppose.

>The Tao is not a physical system.

If these are unmeasurable, non-modelable systems that we can never comprehend, then how can we say that they are "physical systems" that differ from the Tao?