"Call I.S. to increase your array sizes! Too many warehouses"

I love this site.

Container Store? Get off my back.

I can find my own damn shelf extender. Tell your clerks to stand down, before I knock one unconscious with a Keepsake Shadow Box.

[via Mighty Girl]

Laser eye surgery has the highest patient satisfaction ratings of any surgery, it has been performed more than 3 million times in the past decade, it is new, it is high-tech, it has gotten better over time and... laser eye surgery has fallen in price.  In 1998 the average price of laser eye surgery was about $2200 per eye.  Today the average price is $1350, that's a decline of 38 percent in nominal terms and slightly more than that after taking into account inflation.

Why the price decline in this market and not others?  Could it have something to do with the fact that laser eye surgery is not covered by insurance, not covered by Medicaid or Medicare, and not heavily regulated?  Laser eye surgery is one of the few health procedures sold in a free market with price advertising, competition and consumer driven purchases.

[via Marginal Revolution]

Dutch actress proves she hasn't augmented her breasts by posting x-rays online. I suppose that settles that.

Question for the Unix weenies:

I'm writing a start / stop script for a server. It is a typical thing you might find in /etc/rc.d (or equivalent), with start | stop | restart arguments. It will sometimes be run by hand.

I want to trap some signals, particularly ctrl-c, but only in the server start function.

Is it OK to trap signals in the functions, rather than at the top of the script?

Sergey Dmitriev: Language Oriented Programming

"It's not a question of general-purpose versus domain-specific. I want all freedoms. I want to be able to do anything, and also be highly productive at the same time. There aren’t any good ways to do this yet. Ideally, I would be able to use different languages for each specialized part of the program, all working together coherently. And the environment would fully support these languages with refactoring, code completion, navigation, and all the other productivity tools that are available for mainstream languages.

To achieve this independence, I need the freedom to create, reuse, and modify languages and environments. For this freedom to be practical, it needs to be easy to achieve. If we solve this problem of easily developing languages and environments, it will be a giant leap forward for programmers. This is where Language Oriented Programming comes in."

Ha! Gothamist interviews the "tell me off for $2" guy.

London Underground fares 'the world's most complicated.'

I am contacting you about cross linking. I am interested in bitpuddle.com because it looks like it's relevant to a site for which I am seeking links.

The professionally designed and attractive site centers around budget awnings for the home and business. Even though the site is new the business has been established for quite some time and I expect the PageRank to climb quickly.

I'll keep the web address confidential and will send it to you only if you give me permission to do so. Just let me know if it's OK, and I'll send you the web address for your review. If you approve of the site, then the intention is to exchange links.

Looking forward to your reply.

Sincerely,
Bert Cruz - Sr. Link Builder
bert.ba@LinkExpertise.com

Moron.

POTD

Kevin Sites: Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1

Kodak is offering a $1000 rebate on its DCS SLR/c, bringing the price to about $3500. That is a lot of money, but for a 13.8 megapixel, full-frame digital SLR, it is a great deal.

POTD

These are the people we have elected. Rather than enact vital reform of the U.S. intelligence community, a few conservative house members showed their true colors: protecting turf and consolidating power.

Duncan Hunter and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr.'s obstructionism make it very clear that:

• We have little hope for bipartizan cooperation in this Republican congress. Appealing to the democrats for votes was apparently a worse option than letting the bill fail.
• Republican "support" for the president comes in strange forms.
• Hypocracy never seems to be punished in Washington: the very party that campaigned against Democratic filibustering refused to let this widely supported bill come to a vote.
• Having another September 11 is apparently a better option than taking some budget and power away from a few politicians.

This is very disappointing.