cosmicray

> Why is no one competing with PayPal?

Go raise yourself 20-50 mil in VC money, then get several suites of legal types. PayPal has licenses in (by my count) 42 states. To operate in foreign countries, I'm sure the issues become much more involved. This isn't a matter of writing some cool code and getting server space somewhere.

https://www.paypal-media.com/licenses (which for me Safari is unhappy about the certificate for some odd reason)

How about ... RAID isn't backup.

RAID is there for system interruption protection. RAID is there to keep flickr cruising along without interruption.

If they delete content from a volume covered by RAID, then all the mirrored copies go poof simultaneously.

What you are suggesting is a higher level content management system. Apparently (from the drift of the comments) that is something flickr doesn't want to get involved with.

> The tower-devices will be broadcasting their presence and location

To a certain extent, yes. You could use highly directional 802.11 antennas (yagi or shotgun) and disguise them. If they have minimal side lobe bleed, they may be indistinguishable from the normal AP background levels. You should be able to get 1-5 miles out of such a link. A few dozen such links could criss-cross a city such as Cairo.

Part of that the result of the Vietnam Conflict. The US military did not control the spin of the daily war news, and suffered mightily as a result.

OK, I clicked on Site Map. I get this zero-pixel border/gutter on the left side (on Safari), which I find incredibly annoying. Does anyone else see this ?

Started out in a college in the early 70's as an EE major. Fortran was a required course. Decided I like it so much better, that I switched majors. Spent a summer hacking the OS internals on the college mainframe to make it more efficient. Learned 360 BAL in the process.

What I carry in my pocket (an ipod touch) is orders of magnitude more powerful than that mainframe was.

Keep one eye on Steve's participation on the BoD at Disney. If that drops off, that could be an indicator as well.

Apple licensed variants of OS 7 to the clone makers. When Steve returned, someone decided that the clone license agreements did not cover OS 8 ... so boom. New OS, but no new license. IIRC, Apple did buy one of the clone makers (possibly Power Computing).

Someone should make the CNC milling instructions for the driver head, then open-source it under the GPL.

Make that a $5 billionaire (not counting the Apple stock value).

Back when Disney bought out Pixar, I made a little spreadsheet that calculated how many DIS shares Steve wound up with. Assuming that he has not sold off (or gifted) any/much since then, his DIS stock is now worth slightly more than $5B. It has a net gain of $2B since the Pixar buyout. He is doing what he is doing out of internal motivation (and certainly not because he needs the money).

Considering his monetary pay is $1/year, I think he really enjoys doing something, where he has the resources, and backing, to "do it right".

And when something doesn't come out right, he can breath a little fire (e.g. MobileMe problems a year back or so)

carriers want you to take the subsidy bait. because it makes you less likely to jump ship than if you were only paying the monthly usage fee. I hope that having ~4 providers on compatible LTE bands will reverse that behavior.

Early developers used to put NOPs into code, so they would have a place to insert hex patches later on. At a minimum they could plug in a branch instruction, bounce down to the end of the code segment, put a longer sequence of code there, then branch back. Old school stuff.

It could also be an LTE iPad, leaving the iPhone for the usual summer product refresh. I don't really believe that, but it is an alternate possibility.

An interesting question left unmentioned in all this ... will the Verizon iPhone have a SIM slot & card ?

What isn't mentioned in all this, is that the runways were slightly east of true north in the first place. Please see the FAA diagram on wikipedia... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/KTPA-FAA.pdf

If probably didn't take that much more magnetic north change to prompt the need to relabel the runways.

You could also restrict it to people who buy, and sell, on Google Checkout. Putting real money/goods on the table tends to weed out the fake accounts.

and every consumer should multiply those speeds by 0.707

> One of my clients is a Bank.

In that case, and based on their brush off, don't deal with IT. Send your concerns to the Internal Auditing department. They (usually) have the stroke to make people sit down and take things seriously. Internal Auditing is the ones who have to interface with federal regulators, and possibly with the SEC.

I wanted urm.om, but Oman didn't seem like the kind of place that go there.

I would hope, and hope is a strong word, that having multiple carriers (plus MVNOs) on the interchangeable LTE bands will encourage some competition that is sorely lacking due to incompatible frequency allocations.

Every spot in the US will be covered by 4 (5 is they ever find a buyer for the D block) licenses. In some locations, one carrier already has 2 of the licenses (e.g. VZW). I still see room for competitive behavior.

> The problem is, there's no great alternative.

Always remember, Google (by themselves) lives and dies based on original content. Google supplies very little OC (other than perhaps Google Maps). The millions and millions of sites that present themselves at the doorstep of AdSense are seeking a quick and painless way of funding themselves. These same site are providing the OC that supports AdSense (while others provide the advertising spends). Google is the switchboard between the OC and the advertisers. I see no particular impediment (other than Google's size) preventing another from entering the same type of market.

I'm expecting it no later than Apple's next quarterly earnings report (mid Jan iirc).

Yeah, those banks were slow getting on the bandwagon (for whatever reason).

I was working at a bank in 1977 (in the systems/apps group) when they installed the first ATMs in Tampa. It was an interesting time. The original development unit had to be moved across the street, from the data center to the main branch. So one Saturday, 6 guys got out there and pushed it down the sidewalk and across the crosswalk. Good thing no one from IBM was around, they would have freaked out. (it was an IBM 3614 ATM)

I've had the same problem using Preview. While recent versions of Preview might open the USPS labels, they did not render as well as they did in Acrobat. An earlier version of Preview did a better job of rendering.

Some of those lands you refer to are leased for for the fiber optic conduits. Lvl3 has 12 ducts on one side of a US Highway not far from me (it also has a state highway number). Lvl3 is paying a periodic lease (probably annually) for the right to be there.

back in the 1960s, USDA drew up several sets of plans for ag facilities, and homes, that contain fallout shelters. LSUAgCenter has a few of them still posted...

Three Bedroom House with Emergency Shelter http://www.lsuagcenter.com/en/our_offices/departments/Biolog...

Bunker-type Fallout Shelter (for beef cattle) http://www.lsuagcenter.com/en/our_offices/departments/Biolog...

Stall Barn & Fallout Shelter http://www.lsuagcenter.com/en/our_offices/departments/Biolog...

Fallout Shelter, Dairy Barn & Family Center http://www.lsuagcenter.com/en/our_offices/departments/Biolog...

> Another solution would be for them both to negotiate a lower price.

I disagree. If you want to get something for less than the offered price (i.e. OBO) you should talk to the seller before you place a binding order. Taking a valuable commodity out of play, to force a negotiation, is plain wrong.

> Telling a salesman you'd like to buy a product doesn't contractually oblige you to buy, submitting an order for a product does.

When the order is binding, has much to do with how the ToS of the site/store is written. Some sites take the attitude that an order is not binding (on the buyer or seller) until payment is made. Some sites take the opposite view.

In some cases it gets rather squirrelly when you have a seller with a limited quantity of the item (like 1 or 2) and a buyer who wants to use a very slow payment method (check, MO, etc). What do you do if the buyer wants the last one, in a hot market, but also wants you to wait week +/- for payment ?

> I think Verizon did the right thing by turning down Apple at first.

It would be helpful to understand what actually went down...

Back in 2006, Apple wanted a new way of selling handsets. Apple did not want to do subsidized, they wanted to supply the handsets to the carriers, charge a fair price to the purchaser, then share in the revenue (that was received by the carrier). VZW declined that deal. AT&T (which at the time was still Cingular) liked the possibilities, liked the prototypes, and decided to buy in. The 'revenue sharing' deal ended up being a bad thing for Apple, because a very large number of original iPhone handsets sold (perhaps as many as 30%) were never activated on AT&T. A few were jailbroken/unlocked and used on T-Mobile, but large number of them ended up on the far side of the Pacific (in various countries). So Apple had to go back to AT&T and renegotiate a more conventional deal. Now that the deal is similar to what VZW normally has (and exclusivity is about to end), we will (hopefully) see some competition in the US iPhone market.