As a programmer, my dream service is an API that lets me code against all of the financial institutions/businesses that I deal with. Not a read-only thing like Mint uses, but something I can actually execute, receive events, etc... so that I could automate my finances with code.
A few examples of things I'd like to be able to do:
Every Saturday, automatically transfer X% of last week's revenues to a savings account (which I use to pay my quarterly taxes).
When my personal checking account balance drops below $X, transfer $Y from my savings account at another institution.
On the 10th day of every month, pay off my MasterCard balance from my personal checking account. If doing so would leave less than $X in the account, then don't do it, and alert me (probably by email) every day until I fix it.
Every time my personal account receives a transfer from my business account, transfer X% of that to a retirement account.
Etc....
Of course, the barriers to doing something like this are enormous. Enough that it might simply be impossible, but you're the one who asked for "dream[s]." :)
Water doesn't dissolve oil, although it could help mechanically remove it -- but if the material is actually olephilic or neutral it could be an issue.
I was wondering what would happen if you turned on a firehose and just slammed it for a good length of time...how durable it would be? If they're planning to use it on the surface of an airplane wing -- curious how durable the surface is.
I've been wondering the same thing... Besides, there are other differences between lab environment and the "real world" - actual water is full of impurities (e.g. limescale, urea in pee, mud, salt, acid rain, ...), I wonder if the material retains its hydrophobic properties. The other thing that worries me probably even more than "wear-and-tear" (i.e. scratches, abrasion, ...) is dust - once dust covers the fine nano-structure, water will once again stick to it, and it might well be impossible to clean!
Dust, at least, is not an issue like you suspect. The researchers who developed this technique took the dust from a vacuum cleaner and dumped it on a treated piece of metal; water picks up the dust and then slides right off, so the surface is actually incredibly easy to clean.
Sure, but if you dump something on it which has a grain size that's similar to the voids in the material, all bets are off. If the average void is 1um and you put 0.1um dust all over it, I would suspect that it would embed itself in there pretty nicely.
Or a liquid that's not repelled by the surface. What would happen if you just dumped a lot of washing up liquid on this nanosurface? How would you rinse it off?
Watching the video I thought the thing with the teflon was a bit silly. After all if you wanted to think of something that won't hold water at an angle, wouldn't you think of ordinary glass rather than teflon?
This is true, but as a cyclist, often the sound of my own tires on the road, plus the wind in my ears and sometimes even my own breathing, masks the road noise of an oncoming electric car.
The problem with ratemyprofessor (and virtually any 3rd-party "review" platform) is the potential for participation bias. Students only participate when they 1. Know about the platform and 2. Have strong enough opinions that they feel a need to share. This means that the ratings are biased in favor of the exceptionally good and exceptionally bad. (throw in a little human psychology, and the bias moves towards bad reviews appearing proportionally more often than they should).
The advantage of having the data come from Yale is that they can mandate that every faculty member must take class time to conduct the student evaluation. This ensures that [nearly] every student's experience in every class will be considered in the final results, which gives much more legitimacy to the results.
The things you've listed are all "skills." Learning new skills is great, and you should do it for the rest of your life.
Don't limit your 'trying things' to just new skills, however. Consider new experiences you'd like to have. Others have mentioned travel, skydiving, etc... Those experiences are what make the memories that last a lifetime, long after you're past the novelty of being able to plunk out tunes on the piano. Here are a few suggestions:
* Go eat at a Michelin 3-star restaurant, even if it the price seems crazy.
* Next time the Mormons or Jehova's Witnesses knock on the door, invite them in and listen to what they have to say.
* Go to a concert, especially one that's outside your "norm" (Been to a few rock concerts? Go to the symphony. Or vice-versa).
* Volunteer at a soup kitchen, homeless shelter, or some other place where you'll work hard for nothing more than feeling good about contributing to society.
That said, when you do tackle the skill stuff, I highly recommend Josh Kaufmann's book "The first 20 hours" (http://www.amazon.com/The-First-20-Hours-Anything/dp/1591845...). In which he teaches how to become "not a beginner" at something fairly quickly.
I built and sell a collection of plugins for the Delphi IDE at http://www.twodesk.com. (Yes, people still use Delphi), for a consistent single-digit multiple of $1K each month.
That is AWESOME... back in 2000, I was writing a vertical app for an oil company using Object Pascal/Borland Delphi (it was still Borland... and Kylix... at that point) It got me using Interbase/Firebird/FirebirdSQL for a couple of years. Glad to hear it's still around.
I was developing primarily in Delphi for 5 years, took a year off, and now doing it on a the side again a little bit. It's not SO bad mumble mumble mumble
FYI, I just tried to send you a message via the "Contact Us" link on your site, and clicking "Send" results in a classic Ruby on Rails "We're sorry, something went wrong" error page. You could be losing sales if those messages aren't going through.
I can't speak for the church or any particular mission, but from my experience as a Mormon missionary over a decade ago, backpacks 1) Make missionaries look like students, when they are not. 2) Are awkward on public transportation (and using them on transport is considered quite rude in some cultures). 3) Are more prone to being pickpocketed or losing things than a bag at your side/front that you can see more readily.
This is pretty cool. How far do you intend to take it? Here's a "use case"/feature request:
In addition to being a developer/entrepreneur, I moonlight as a high school marching band instructor/arranger. In other words, I'm a semi-professional composer. I work with a team of people who write different aspects of the music: One guy writes the winds, I write the percussion, and others contribute as well.
Currently, whenever one of us has an idea about something to do with whatever we're arranging, we have to either get everyone together in a room with a piano to talk through it, or someone has to sit down with a professional music notation program (we use Finale) and "sketch" it all out.
It would be really cool if there was something online like RiffUp that would let me put together that "sketch" quickly and easily, and send a link to my colleagues. Like a "pastebin" for sheet music.
To get there, it would need to do a few more things, in roughly priority order:
* Allow you to save your creation and send a link to someone else.
* Support "-let" rhythms (triplets, for example)
* Use multiple staves
* Set the tempo
* Allow other time signatures (time changes would be good too)
* Choose a different voice for each staff
The great benefit here would be simple composition without having to worry about all of the stuff associate with making a real score. So much of music notation is about making stuff that prints nicely, which is actually a separate process from just creating the music. And, of course, being able to easily share it with colleagues without requiring them to have the same software I do (or to download a file and open it in that software).
And to answer the followup question that you'll ask: Yes, I'd be willing to pay for this.
Your use case would certainly be supported by the kind of service that I've had in mind. That said, it sounds like Noteflight would already fit your need to share quick musical sketches.
I'm not sure how far I'll take RiffUp. Competing directly against Noteflight/GuitarPro/Sibelius/Finale/... is an option, and there are a few innovations that can be made in that space. That wouldn't be an easy path, though.
I was more excited by the prospect of creating a community based around mass collaboration. The idea that a few notes could be forked to create many distinctly different songs.
For now, finding money to live is the overwhelming priority, so I can't justify spending much time on this. It could be that I pursue things further, later on.
