Author: Deano

Four seasons is a great thing, that allows you to both consciously and subconsciously note the passage of time, changes in your own body/health, etc much faster. It keeps you on your toes in a way that a "sunny and 60s" Bay Area never will.

Perhaps that's why there's such a focus on college students and recent grads in the valley – they're among the few people left who seem truly and consistently motivated, in cities filled to the brim with laidback flakes?
Say what you will about Chicago, but between the "nice factor" and the general vibe that people are, well, a bit more "alive" – if not always terribly interesting in purely intellectual terms – they've definitely earned their place as toppish startup hub.

All that said, if you're not a native of the cold, and don't have an entire childhood of "worse winter" stories to pull from, the winters can be pretty hard to take – especially if your job role doesn't include a fair bit of travel, and you haven't found a girlfriend/boyfriend to "bunny up" with through the darker months.

Why is Chicago depicted as a great place to work and live when it is so miserably cold there?

Key differentiators in my experience, primarily from a business perspective, but a lot applies to consumers as well:

• Fedex tends to leave fewer "high dollar" packages exposed at a delivery address, and require more signatures in general.
• Fedex has saturday delivery that actually works.
• UPS is preferable for larger/more sturdy items that can be shipped ground (no hurry). Fedex ground service is a terrible afterthought to their superlative express offerings.
• Due to UPS being unionized, it's much harder to deal with a situation in which you have issues with your assigned delivery/pickup person.

In short: if it's not going to break, is huge, and/or you're not in a rush, UPS. Everything else, Fedex. Most of the time, pricing will also favor the companies in parallel to this rule.

How should one choose between UPS and FedEx?

The traditional differentiation of bridesmaid and bridal dresses has varied in its nature throughout history, and hasn't always been about color:

• Bridesmaids historically have been available single women – one of their roles in the ceremony was to signal their own availability to the bachelors in the crowd.
• In more extravagant occasions in the past, as well as most modern weddings, the focus is simply on making sure the bride is seen as the most beautiful/resplendent woman at the wedding.

The main problem with Pippa's outfit, is that it both adheres to the first, and breaks the second 'rule' with such force, it's like a sonic boom of va-va-voom!

By popular acclaim (and Internet analytics), Pippa was far and away the most talked about woman at the wedding outside mainstream media, which one may take to mean that the bride herself was in many ways upstaged not just in the event itself, but in changing the conversation from the nuptials to a great big game of "who's next?".

Still, it's hard to ignore the possibility that this was at least somewhat an intended effect – perhaps the Middletons are not done with their social climbing after all, and we'll soon be reading about one of the many invited foreign royals taking an interest? Poor Prince Harry, one year Pippa's junior, is already being goaded into dumping his longtime girlfriend to have a go: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.co…

In any case, the answer is:

If the goal was to use Pippa's role as maid of honor to draw attention to her availability for future marriage, then yes, she should absolutely have worn the dress she did. On the other hand, if she really was there simply to support and keep the media focused her sister on a very special day, then wearing the more "modern traditional" ugly bridesmaid dress (perhaps in teal or mauve?) would've been much better suited to the job.

A quick look through the Royal Wedding official photos reveals that Pippa was not the only other member of the wedding party dressed in white, and even that there were several others trying to upstage her by wearing flowers in their hair and showing quite a bit more leg:

Should Pippa Middleton have worn a white dress at Kate's wedding?

Warrior beats Gladiator almost every time the possibilities of tactical conflict exceed the rules of engagement. That said, a gladiator is often far more expert at maximizing the damage dealt by their preferred weapon.

As a soldier, John Rambo is likely to rely on a variety of martial arts as source material, even for what amounts to a bare-knuckle brawl. This will make his own actions harder for Rocky Balboa to predict, and allow him multiple means to deflect and reduce the effects of blows received.

As a boxer, Rocky will have a much harder punch, likely more "pure fighting" stamina in a toe-to-toe battle, and the ability to take more direct hits and shake them off.

What it comes down to is this: can Rambo land enough punches (and I assume for fairness' sake, kicks) to knock Rocky out quickly, before he himself is worn down by a focused and unending knuckle-attack, and/or get inside Rocky's attack radius, and incapacitate him via some other means (choke out, arm/leg locks, etc).

We can even look to Rocky III for some hints on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2…

It's pretty clear when Rocky fights Thunderlips that:

• The gloves impair his ability to damage his opponent significantly
• pure boxing presents too many fighting limitations – throw rocky to the ground (or pick him up above your head), and his fighting force is greatly diminished.
• Rocky's arms and chest are his strengths – while Thunderlips is unable to choke out Rocky, Balboa's much smaller "pythons" seem to have a greater effect on the wrestler when an improvised sleeper hold is attempted

Overall, the idea that Rambo would win "most of the time" is probably statistically correct given his more fluid fighting style. That said, in a "fair fight", it's hard to imagine that Rocky wouldn't emerge victorious, due to his greater ability to give and receive pure pugilistic hurt.

On a more personal note, and given recent events, I'd just like to say that this fight would sadden me to no end – because when Rambo and Rocky fight, the terrorists will truly have won.

Who would win in a fight between Rocky and Rambo?

Facebook, thus far, has never ever been about being deep. The whole point is to cover the breadth of social interest – to surface the little bits of who you are, to as many people possible, so that you'll have some reason to chat with each other at the next barbecue.

It's about eliminating the search for potential like minds, or at least making it vastly easier to do so using (overly?)simplistic measures – shared interests, friends in common, and perhaps to stretch a bit, similar styles and topic of commentary.

Quora, on the other hand, is a lot more about thorough understanding of a topic, and/or intense desire to learn about it. Functionally, this carries a huge overlap with Facebook in terms of potential to surface friendships from the ether, but it is successful precisely because such discovery is based on the interest, rather than the social graph.

To answer your followups – I think Facebook could go a lot deeper as an app itself, but I feel pretty strongly that they've ceded "depth" to apps developed via their API, and want to continue to focus on the much looser flow aspects of "surface bonding" – that is, to choose speed (especially in terms of viral expansion of Facebook the platform) over strength. Because, once everyone on Earth is a Facebook member, there's an innate strength that's built simply in terms of network effect defensibility versus competing products and platforms, along with a fluidity of form and function that could allow FB to gain adoption in widely disparate countries and cultures in the manner that suits these societies best.

Simply put, it's obvious to Facebook that their products are lacking, but they choose, for now, to ignore some of the aesthetic and intellectual deficiencies precisely because doing so creates a wider, more all-encompassing platform that more people/organizations will choose to adopt.

Quora, for its part, goes so far as to specifically call out the fact that it is pretty much "English only" for now in various parts of the interface – an indication that they're intent on creating a much more robust, deep solution to a smaller set of problems, before worrying too much about how to conquer the Chinese market.

What makes Quora successful and can the new Facebook questions do the same?