incomethax

Isn't that essentially what a PO Box is? The only caveat with a PO Box is that it's specific to a zip-code, but the principle is the same.

I can't help but think that there might be a business idea wrapped up in there somewhere, or at the very least, another product for USPS to offer.

Excuse my skepticism, but would Google pulling out ACTUALLY do anything? I can understand the argument that innovative businesses don't want anything to do with them, but again the Chamber of commerce is an organization aimed at protecting old businesses anyway. They could care less about what innovative businesses think.

Doppler for Heroku (http://dopplerapp.com/) works like a charm for having a quick rails console on your iPhone. It also allows you to provision your app and run rake tasks as well.

I'd be interested in something that also allowed code editing with github integration for the iPhone if any exist.

I can attest to that. We have two main "sides" of our app, one side that allows for editing of rules and another that just applies those rules on transactions. It took us much longer to build the editing side than than the transaction side, and when we hit users, we found out that they didn't even WANT to edit the rules. That was more than half of our app that users weren't using, even though in initial mockups/user tests they indicated that they would edit the rules.

IANAL but wouldn't these Terms of Service be unenforceable? It doesn't seem like Sony is offering anything extra in consideration, rather just limiting your rights. If they change their ToS to limit your rights, wouldn't they have to offer some consideration for this type of contract to be enforceable?

We are self funded, we didn't hire a designer for our iOS app, rather for a web-app that just went into public beta this past week.

Thus far we've funded ourselves out of client projects and a small grant we received about a year and a half ago.

In my experience a designer isn't as much useful for simple designs or "look and feel" so much as the design process helps you along product-market fit. When my co-founder and I started building our company, we made sure we followed the process of user-centric design and took wireframes and mockups and photoshop files to our customers well before we even started coding.

We would have completely missed our market if we had just jumped into coding before going after design. In that sense, I think if you don't have the designer chops, hiring a designer to get the good looking wireframes/mockups/etc to start doing customer validation is crucial - probably even more so than the code.

In a world of virtualized services, blocking IP or MAC will also only get you so far. It's fairly easy to switch servers onto a different IP address, a different MAC address by simply using a different machine or configuration.

DNS is the most vulnerable part of the stack simply because its the one thing in the stack that is centralized (loosely speaking).

I live in Madison right now, and I fear that I'm being spoiled on good beer. Between New Glarus, Capitol Brewery, Ale Asylum, and Lake Louie the selection is amazing. I went down to Orlando for a conference not too long ago, and found that the only thing drinkable to me was Guiness.

When I went to London a couple of years back, I found that the beer was actually quite enjoyable, though I can't remember which beers I had while I was there. (More as a result of time rather than of the beer)

If only user acquisition costs were that low...

I am just speculating here but my hunch would be that the value of Google stock exchanged could pose a difference between the time the deal was agreed upon, and the time at which the deal closed.

Not only that, but an individual company (as a single rational actor) has every incentive to hire workers with less "perceived" credentials and more actual work credentials.

Part of the reason I believe the education bubble is a bubble and will pop, is that the entire point of an accredited degree is to have a recognizable proxy for someone's intellectual capability. The ease at checking a person's ability prior to the internet and social media was in checking with their alma mater if they had the degree that they had and therefore if they were as capable as they claimed. Now it's even easier to check if someone has the intellectual capability by looking at their blog/github repo/facebook/twitter.

With that in mind, I think its only a matter of time before that starts to translate into educational institutions competing with industry for students.

It doesn't seem like its different people from Heroku. If you've seen Mark Benioff's cloudforce pitch (link below), he mentions that they're partnering with VMWare to launch a PaaS similar to Heroku (which they acquired in December).

That said, I think its a bit surprising that VMWare is launching this under their branding - the machinations of large corporations continuously confound me.

http://www.salesforce.com/video/cloud2011-nyc.jsp

Clickable link to the project website: http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/faast/

This makes me want to get a kinect to play around with.

Jae is thinking in exactly the right direction. The challenge I feel is not building a better EMR - but rather its convincing hospitals that their EMRs really really suck and the $MMs they spent on "Traditional EMR" was all a waste.

I think in this industry its all about understanding the environment of current medical practice and re-engineering it piece by piece.

I would suspect it is more of the latter right now, but as apps come out for the iPad, I think it's definitely going to be an asset for doctors, especially in the inpatient setting where doctors need their technology to travel with them.

I don't see iPads being very successful in an outpatient or ambulatory setting, mainly because most exam rooms are already equipped with desktops, and limited functionality may be more of a hindrance.

I've had this problem when playing sc2 as well, and if I play for any appreciable amount of time, even disabling automatic graphics switching doesn't help.

I've actually talked to Blizzard about this (I thought it was a problem confined to SC2), and they indicated that Apple was working on a fix for this.

If you were a CNN reporter, would you rather go to a fancy wedding or a disaster region?

I can't help but think this factors a bit into where the reporters are going. It also saddens me that we as a society are willing drive our attention (and ad dollars) to weddings over disasters and wars.

You're mostly right - the one caveat to this is that most providers are not as "revenue focused" as you'd think. Most of them are more focused on the potential outcome ratings improvement that they could see. Often times this means going with Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, eClinicalWorks etc.

The phenomenon going on here is that CIOs don't want to get fired. They're the gatekeepers - and as someone famous put it, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." Except in this market it's Epic.

Is it just me, or does this sound like the plot line of a B-rate Thriller?

I guess it could also be the basis for a reality t.v. show. Either way, I hope they record at least some of it for some ancillary income - who knows maybe webisodes of this could be popular.

It isn't about HBGary being competent or not, its about whether or not they were able to fulfill the letter of their contracted terms.

If the FBI believes that the company can still fulfill its contract terms, and in a lot of situations that comes down to providing the requisite documentation showing sufficient protocols in place, then the FBI will continue to work with HBGary.

Much greater incompetence has been rewarded by the government bureaucracy than poorly picked passwords.

The reason one base pair can encode 2 bits is that T-C and C-T are different valid base pairs. The same is true for A-G and G-A as well. A "single" strand (the famous double helix) of DNA actually contains 2 copies of genetic information.

It seems that the only way to actually be able to give those officials any form of repercussions would be to actually sue the government for damages.

I sincerely hope that the affected parties do sue the government successfully.

He hasn't really cost anything to the US government or the mint. There's no real harm to taxpayers here.

The people he's getting his money from is his bank/credit card company. If you want to say "screw you" say it not as a tax payer, but as a consumer of credit cards, who will eventually have to deal with higher rates/restrictions/limitations on rewards.

This is true, however, many times YC doesn't invest the first time a pair of founders shows up at their doorstep. Even Drew of Dropbox didn't get into YC the first time around.

Rails has been bundled with the developer tools for MacOSX since 10.5 - I admit that it was a bit annoying if you were compiling Ruby yourself in days prior.

I find Schneier's blogs infuriatingly annoying, mainly because to me it feels like he doesn't interject his own ideas, rather focusing on content from other locations (even if some of those locations are references to himself).

I feel that the point of a blog should be to present your own ideas, rather than leaning on content from others. Give me the entire story on one page; don't make me click to 3 or 4 other sources.

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray)

The Health Physics Society (HPS) reports that a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.05 μSv (or 0.005 mrems) of radiation; American Science and Engineering Inc. reports 0.09 μSv (0.009 mrems). At the high altitudes typical of commercial flights, naturally occurring cosmic radiation is considerably higher than at ground level. The radiation dose for a six hour flight is 20 μSv (2 mrems) - 200 to 400 times larger than a backscatter scan. According to U.S. regulatory agencies, "1 mrem per year is a negligible dose of radiation, and 25 mrem per year from a single source is the upper limit of safe radiation exposure".

The radiation exposure with Backscatter X-Ray's is really a non-issue.

IMO its much more damning to bring on the "think of the children"/"The Chinese government can hack your wife's nude pics" angle to convince the public against these machines.

There actually is a company, on of my friends built that does this - they're called Entrustet (www.entrustet.com) and they have something to "manage digital assets" after your death.

It looks a lot like how Greece was looking a few weeks back. (Probably still is looking in all likely-hood)

Most of the national debt is written off, public services are cut or re-financed through printing money which has the nasty side effect of inflation and then eventually hyperinflation.

Here's some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Examples_of_hype...