makaio

As far as I can tell, they really do offer phone support to every 1 man startup. I've dealt with them on behalf of both higher and lower-volume clients, and in all cases their support was available via phone and very helpful. And they list the phone number very publicly on their contact page.

Disabling embedding in frames is the default on Rails now, so that feature would have to be specifically disabled to use with this tool.

You might want to check out Padrino (http://padrinorb.com). My understanding is that it is built on Sinatra, but makes it easier to add some of the Rails-like functionality in a more modular manner.

Objective-C is a fine language and is pretty easy to learn. Nevertheless there are a few advantages to RubyMotion for certain developers:

* No XCode. Getting comfortable with Xcode takes time and I frequently hear people complain about it crashing, being bloated, etc. With RubyMotion you can just use your regular text editor and a command line.

* Ruby. While Objective-C isn't bad, I actually enjoy using Ruby. I'm much more likely to refactor and abstract functionality.

* Third-party gems and code: While there are limitations, it is generally pretty easy to use gems and other ruby code in RubyMotion. From what I understand, you can also call out to third-party Objective-C libraries from within RubyMotion, so you don't lose out on that ability.

* REPL: Using a terminal and the simulator you can interact with your code while its running.

I use encfs instead because it encrypts at the individual file level, so there is no need to sync an entire volume. Additionally the volume can be mounted on multiple computers simultaneously without causing sync conflicts.

http://www.packetslave.com/2011/04/21/dropbox-encryption-w-e...

Perhaps the difference is that one of the founding principles of the US is that the government should be a strong defender of property rights. This is probably a good thing in the long run. On the other hand the US government does not have a history of ownership or investment in private companies. In the long run this, too, is probably a good thing as it seems that these actions tend to lead to cronyism and corruption.

The reason this system seems to be working so poorly now might be that its increasingly difficult to define just what "property" is nowadays.

After reviewing the options some time ago, I ended up using encfs on top of Dropbox. You still mount and unmount it like Truecrypt or Apple's encrypted disk images, but behind the scenes instead of creating an opaque block device to store the files, the individual files and directories are stored with their names and contents encrypted. I like this method because individual files can be synced (which is the whole purpose of Dropbox), safe syncing does not require unmounting the volume, it can be mounted on multiple computers at the same time, is cross-platfrom, and I think it should be possible to revert individual files to a previous revision (though I've never tried). The main disadvantage, from a security perspective, is that the existence of and approximate size of your files can be easily determined without decrypting. This does not matter for my purposes, but might for some. It is also slightly more complicated to set up, although if you've ever mounted a filesystem from the command line in Unix you should have no problem.

Here is a nice overview of its use on OS X: http://www.packetslave.com/2011/04/21/dropbox-encryption-w-e...

Yes, but while the trees are alive and before they have completely decomposed they are sequestering the carbon. It is more useful to consider the population of trees in this case. While the population of trees is higher, the amount of carbon trapped in trees is higher and therefore the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is lower. This effect would have ended when the population of trees declined to its pre-Columbian levels.

What gives courts in East Texas the jurisdiction to hear these cases, anyway? If it were possible to prevent users in these districts from accessing your online service (either using geolocation of some sort or through an EULA), would that make any difference?

I agree that this business model has little in common with that of Google or other online businesses, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wouldn't work. I think a better analogy would be a Subway or a Starbucks in which you have a small staff at each location. By standardizing business processes and sharing expenses (advertising, accounting, etc) across many small locations, they can generally outcompete the local, independent operations and, in aggregate, generate a large amount of revenue.