matthewsimon

Sorry to quibble, but I don't think that's what "disintermediation" means.

Disintermediation typically refers to "cutting out the middleman", not introducing additional middlemen.

Cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation

... and how much does the price increase in month 25?

Three hours seems extreme. I live in Manhattan and can get to LGA in under an hour on a public bus, or by taxi in 35-45 minutes, and a taxi to JFK might take an hour but certainly not three.

Google says "You need permission / This form can only be viewed by users in the owner's organization."

You could read this as a cautionary tale about the difficulty in launching a social networking service: Even with $1.6 million cash (earmarked for a development project in Pakistan) and 500,000 mobile phone subscriber records (stolen from the incumbent telecom), their free service couldn't reach 5% market penetration and was shut down when it ran out of money.

The federal Animal Welfare Act specifically does not apply to farm animals, and many state statutes also make specific exceptions for agricultural operations.

Cf. http://awic.nal.usda.gov/farm-animals

The Guardian's UK stylesheet calls for this treatment of acronyms that are pronounced as a word -- people say "Icann", not "Eye See Aye En En" -- which does seem odd but may be acceptable as a regionalism.

There's no magical shorting mechanism -- you'd have to find a counterpart and enter into a futures contract. A few exchanges offer this as a service.

[0] http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/05/betting-against-bi...

... did they point a gun at any of the suspects ...

This may seem a minor point, but the housekeeper and other staff were not "suspects", they're innocent members of the public.

Intriguingly, 349 of the largest Bitcoin transactions ever are all part of an interconnected and obfuscated web of exchanges between November 2010 and August 2012, involving at least 430,000 BTC.

> ... the most densely populated zip codes ...

It turns out that zip codes aren't as populous as you might imagine.

As of the Y2K census, only a dozen zip codes have over 100,000 residents -- 80% of all zip codes have less than 15,000 residents, with the median zip code at 2,500.

(Source: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places2k.html )

I use a cooperating set of Mac apps: connect to the server using Cyberduck, browse to a file and double-click to open it in TextMate, edit the file and type command-s to save, peripheral glance to the corner of the screen where Growl puts up a notification that the transfer completed successfully, then type command-shift-r to tell TextMate to tell the currently open web browser to reload its front-most window to see if the change had the desired effect.

A number of Mac file transfer clients and text editors support this type of integration.

Ripe for data-driven visualization.

http://daytum.com/robynt/categories/191024

I'm getting the Etsy mini as well, and I'm in New York City.

(The Etsy iframe that's being served is 368px wide, but your sidebar only has 300px available.)

As I understand it, there was some vague talk about being selective, in case they maxed out the capacity of the space, but in the end I believe they sent out tickets to everyone who signed up, and nobody was turned away.

I was at the same FourSquare hackathon today, and you're right -- there was a lot of socializing going on, and there were people who seemed to be trying to figure out how to present their previously-existing project or startup.

On the other hand, the New York hacker scene is anemic enough that we can use any chance to socialize and network that we get -- and there were people there actually coding things from scratch today, myself included.

I had to leave before the presentations, and haven't see most of the apps people have been working on, so I can't comment on the "overly polished" aspect of this... But in an ideal world, I would hope that people would be able to enjoy whichever aspects of the event were relevant to them, and not get sidetracked by the people who were on a different track.

Sheesh, did you bother to read the linked document?

The "client" in pubsub registers a call-back URL with the server, and the server then POSTs new data to that URL.

No periodic polling required -- that's the whole point of this.

The Guardian has posted headers and metadata, but not the message bodies, as a Google Fusion Table:

  http://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?dsrcid=317391

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables-data#data

It's the latter -- the quoted passage is referring to relocating the existing long-term prisoners already housed at Guantanamo. ("Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison")

My understanding is that new prisoners are no longer being brought to Guantanamo, but instead to other sites outside of the United States.

Obviously, a passive income doesn't just depend on "smarts", it also requires initial assets and cultural capital that are generally inherited from the previous generation.

There's recently been a round of debate about whether the alt attribute for media (eg, <img alt="Foo">) should remain required or could become optional.

As I understand it, some web page creators say "some of our images don't have good logical, human-readable alt text, so why make us put in alt attributes with crappy made-up values", and other people argue that it is worth the extra effort to improve accessibility. (No doubt I've butchered both sides of the argument, but that's what I was able to take away from it.)

See http://blog.whatwg.org/omit-alt for an argument in favor of making it optional, and http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/articles/altinhtml5.h... for it being required, or http://juicystudio.com/article/requiring-alt-attribute-html5... for a list of pros and cons.

The two standards groups hosting the draft HTML specs appear to have different centers of gravity with regard to this issue, and to be making increasingly snippy comments back and forth about the other's handling of the dispute.

Oh my god -- a class of fifth graders in 2009 wasn't aware of two relevant scientific papers published in 2008?

The only way to explain these pre-teen children's ignorance of this knowledge is that there's a conspiracy dedicated to hiding the facts from them!

No, in practice eleven-year-old kids usually aren't reading the current scientific literature -- they're learning from their teachers and reading texts that have been written for students, and it's not surprising that it takes a few years for new information to permeate the educational system.

I understand the concern the piece is raising, but surely there are better examples than that, right?

FogBugz, with under a dozen users.

I find it a bit frustrating (missing features; Unix compatibility issues), but the user interface was easier for our non-technical staff to learn than was the interface for RT, which was our initial choice.

You're definitely not too old -- I'm 36, and my co-founder is in his forties.

Possible drawbacks to older founders include: - may not be able to work for free (or nearly so) for as long a time, because they have families to support (or have simply grown accustomed to a higher standard of living than ramen and crashing on someone's couch). - may not be able to work for as many hours per week, again because of families, accustomed comfort, etc.

On the positive side, older founders are: - more likely to have the business and professional relationships that will facilitate customer sales and/or investor deals. - may be able to work more efficiently and effectively, because of the things they have learned (technology, management, specific domains, business, etc).

There might be some business plans that can best be executed by college-age folks, but there are others that are best executed by someone older -- figure out how to make your idea work for you, and go for it!

It's not as "hip" as Python or Ruby, but I remain a big fan of Perl for server-side self-hosted web/database applications -- depending on what you're building, you can often find pre-existing modules on CPAN that provide a lot of the plumbing you'll need.

And of course, Perl's syntax is very similar to PHP, so the transition might be a bit easier than to a Python, although your milage will vary.

Lastly, it's worth noting that the choice of server-side and client-side technologies are mostly independent... You can use either HTML/JS or Flash as the client interface to talk to server-side logic written in any of the PHP/Perl/Python/etc. languages discussed above.

RT is very full-featured and customizable, although it has a few rough edges and can take some time to learn. It's open source and is also available in as a hosted service. http://bestpractical.com/services/hosting.html

FogBugz is decent -- not as flexible as RT, but may be a bit easier for non-techies to get started with. It's also available in both hosted and installable versions. http://fogcreek.com/fogbugz/