This seems to me as though the phrase "denial-of-service attack" is being used loosely here. Firesheep is not a service being extended by a central server to many users. You're blocking the individual user (or users) of firesheep with this. This won't disrupt the users of web services that are legitimately trying to use a site. IANAL, but I think this could be argued to be different from the kind of DoS that would land you in prison for several years in at least the US and UK.
That said, a DoS attack against firesheep users, if convicted, would probably have more repercussions than what ever identity fraud the firesheep users could be prosecuted for (per case). This is a great example of where someone trying to benefit society (preventing possible identity fraud) could be labeled a terrorist. I fear the day that the FBI starts going after "terrorists" to protect identity thieves.
The targeting seems off. I expected the towers to attack the enemies furthest along the path, but it seems like they might be attacking enemies closest to them.
On the note of testimonials, this might be a good opportunity to leverage something like facebook or twitter. Testimonials can often look contrived. Linking a testimonial to a facebook account would tie it to a real person and make it more believable.
Is this definitely against the ToS? My feeling is that this was bound to happen. This is analogous to ebay sniping services, no? Even if they don't like it happening, I would be surprised if this didn't become fairly commonplace. Worst case scenario (though IANAL so I don't know if there could possibly be any legal action taken) is that your IP / account gets banned for violating the ToS.
As a thought exercise, can this really hurt their business? As you mentioned, $1500+ was spent in bids alone. Even if you won, only the other person lost, not the auction site. Now when everyone starts doing this, everyone uses this software to bid up to their budget, and we're back to square one. So long as people have competitive budgets, bidding just continues as normal.
If the Nook is any indication of how this will work (and judging by how the game has been played with price drops / wifi versions so far, I think it is) the lending will be "once and only once". The details for the Nook lending feature are here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/container/standard_bothna... with the relevant answer under FAQ #2. Don't get me wrong; I think some day we will get full lending abilities on these devices, but this will probably be a baby step moment. Publishers probably think that if lending worked like real books, no one would ever buy one, so they will prevent it for now.
For the most part, this seemed like an interesting blog post, but toward the end, it came across as a thinly veiled advertisement for this iOS framework. My apologies if I have misconstrued this, but the title is misleading. If you're advertising, say so rather than trying to disguise it.
My understanding of the kindle lending process currently is that we will only be allowed to lend a book once[1]. Unless they say otherwise, this model would not work. I do think that eventually this will be opened up to work like actual book lending would though. Also, remember that publishers will be able to specify whether or not books are lendable, so this may all be moot anyway.
Just finished Little Brother, in the middle of The War of the Worlds right now, and I plan to tackle Cryptonomicon once the semester starts winding down. I also read You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier recently, which is a great read.
That might work out well for Facebook. I don't know what percentage of their user base would care enough to do so, though. And at this point, with all of the ridiculous things that have happened with their privacy, it might even seem extortive to me. It's one thing to tell everyone their stuff is public unless you pay from the beginning, but publicizing what one would otherwise assume to be private data late in the game and then charging to reprivatize would be underhanded.
I'd highly recommend Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. I read it last weekend and simply couldn't put it down. It's along the lines of 1984 but less extreme and thus more believable. The (free) ebook can be found at http://www.craphound.com/littlebrother/download/. The author offers the ebook for free and asks that you donate a copy (explained on the site) instead of emailing him and offering to pay him directly for it (or anything of the sort).
I feel like I've seen so many alternative resume / business cards that I tend to dismiss any that are actually practical at this point. Something I'd really like to see a redesign of is the print newspaper. As it is, I get most of my news online, but I love the idea of reading a newspaper. I would probably do it more often if news stories weren't scattered across several pages and I could quickly identify stories that might interest me at a glance. I don't know exactly how I would tackle the problem, but, in my opinion, it could use some modernization.
I can't agree with this more. The best courses I have taken didn't have a textbook. If I don't struggle at least through some of a course, I'm probably not learning anything. Part of this seems to be that (in my experience) few people are allowed to fail a course. People who both don't understand the material and slack off are just pushed through with the minimum passing grade, dumbing down more advanced courses down the road.
There seems to be a lot of disagreement about lower bounds here. The best case lower bound is trivially 0 since you could start with a terminating permutation. The article is talking about a worst case lower bound, which is what one would use to assign the problem to a complexity class.
My university uses Java as the main teaching language. A few courses down the line (OS, Security) tend to use C, but it does certainly depend on the instructor. It seems to me that instructors shy away from C when they know students will likely have little experience with it. They don't want to be bothered with teaching students what a pointer is because it will take away from the actual material of the course.
That said, I personally enjoy using C when it seems to be appropriate. I would much rather write a piece of OS code in C and drop it into a linux distro than using Java to do something that would rarely be used in the real world. I've had problems with C that I wouldn't in a language like python, but if the task is better suited for C, I'd rather work through those problems and learn because of it. My personal opinion of students not learning C because it's hard is that they don't belong in a CS program. If you won't take the time to learn the best tool for the job, you won't do the job right, and no one will have benefitted because of it.
I like it so far. The site does seem a bit empty (expected for 4 hours), but there is nothing inherently bad about the design. A few comments about using it:
1) I think it would really benefit from displaying the expiration date / number of downloads left. Right now, there don't seem to be any pages for the files, but being able to see what I'm downloading before doing so would also be great.
2) You might benefit from giving some shorter links. This seems like something that would be used on twitter or the like, and links that take up over half the allowed characters could be detrimental to adoption. One could use a URL shortener, but I'd personally like to avoid more indirection than necessary.
As for monetization, my first thought would be to sell extra downloads / longer time. You could also try selling larger file sizes.
Microsoft and Apple did, at the very least. Apple started out with a bunch of people trying to buy more of Steve Wozniak's hand built computers than he could keep up with, and Bill Gates sold IBM an operating system well before he had an actual product to show them.
You'd really benefit by letting people know what this site does. It isn't immediately obvious, and it usually doesn't make sense to have the user presented with a login without any content (if ever). The docs also seem pretty long at first glance. Just a paragraph or so about the goal of the site right on the landing page would help a lot I think.
Overall a very pleasant read. I'm certainly going to check out the bibliography presented, and I'd like to read more along this line. I deeply enjoyed "The Nerd Handbook" as well. Could anyone recommend other readings in the fashion of those two?
IANAL, but this seems to be at least close to what you are looking for. I do not know exactly what constitutes the difference between a "document" and a "data set" (outside of the physical format"), but I would think that the license could apply to any data set printed on paper, so it could also apply to one in digital format.
I like the concept overall. The animations you get when you misspell a word are pleasant and informative. I didn't register, so this feature might be there, but it would be nice to always be able to see "percentage right" after completing a set of words, or some hard numbers you can compare over time. Also, is there any evidence that this will make you a better speller overall? Or will this simply help you spell words that you have spelled incorrectly on this site previously?
I would probably use this as more of a reservation based service. If I'm throwing a party, I might say "I won't want to do the dishes after it", but I probably wouldn't say "That party was long, I wish I could call someone over to do the dishes for me". Doing it with reservations would be easier to manage on your end as well. Having a schedule for someone is much easier than having them be on call.
I might, depending on the kind of place it turned out to be. If it was a constructive environment like this one, where I know the goal is not to become like facebook, I think I'd like the gaps it would fill in that I feel this site could use (private messages for example).
How about trying to sell ads directly to booksellers? Even if affiliate programs won't work, you could offer users up the same kind of book list as sort of a customized banner ad. Being able to serve up that many impressions must be worth something, even if only for a short time. Even sites that don't directly sell books, but are related (back to goodreads, because its the only one I have really used) would probably be interested in this. Hope you get something off the ground.
How about then giving the user a list of works by that author via amazon? If the users really do want to read more of that writer's stuff, this might be a good way to get some affiliate business. You could possibly even point to specific works that they "write like". You might also take a look at the goodreads api (http://www.goodreads.com/api) for some possible social networking aspects? Maybe you could show people reading things they write like via goodreads or something along those lines.
Also, she mentions people saying "She probably hit the gas pedal instead", not "She probably hit the gas pedal instead because she is in a certain age range and female". People shouldn't confuse a statement about a person with a statement about a group, data supported or not.