jonprins

For the NYC crowd, there's a spot very much like this in Williamsburg: www.nitehawkcinema.com

Food is quite good, service is impeccable. It's a more intimate affair, only two people per booth - and there's only 30 or so seats per house. They do drink & entree specials themed with the films, which is pretty cool I guess. They helped get state law changed in order to serve cocktails and beer in the actual house.

In-between the featured presentations is curated from local (often quite good) film artists.

Cafe Ghia, Jefferson stop of the L train. 24 Irving Avenue.

And their food is a lot better than Table 12 ;)

It's trivial to use a proxy to modify the referral headers.

Re: "Coffee Klatch."

Sure, we need more of these around. I'm just happy there's a place like this that fits the bill right in my neighborhood. It's more of a cafe than a coffee shop, but that didn't stop the owner from putting dual power plugs in between every couple of seats at the bar. And getting a darn fast wifi connection.

That they make some of the best drip coffee in the area, and serve brunch 7 days a week, combined with affordable prices...

The owner has a coffee shop too, but it's too cramped to work in all day. He recognized that people were starting to try to do that there - and kept it in mind when he opened up this cafe. During a typical weekday, the bar is filled with people with laptops open.

In The Sprawl trilogy, cash is almost never used for legitimate purchases. It's almost exclusively used for black/grey-market transactions.

It's kind of crazy. I know that my battle.net account is more secure than a lot of people's online banking credentials: not only do I need a user name and password to access my bnet account, but my account is linked with a mobile app that gives me time-sensitive one-time-use 8-10 security code.

Recently I had to wipe my phone without being able to get the serial number information from the bnet app. It was kind of a pain, but I had to actually scan and send in an image of my drivers license for them to release the old authenticator from my account so I could attach a new one.

Think about that. An online gaming company is more secure about account authorization than a lot of banks are.

"Blemish free" .... guy obviously has never used iTunes.

This happens when you listen to and then improperly handle keyboard events.

Somebody probably just copied a script from w3schools and smashed their face into it for a few hours until it did some approximation of what they might have maybe wanted it to do.

Unfortunately, the buckshot approach to software development leaves a lot to be desired. Especially when you start with such a horrible original product as w3schools.

Indeed. Spending more per prisoner than per student (even when you divide by three, considering students spend ~8 hours a day at school) strikes me as pretty backward. When you spend money, you're investing it. So Michigan is investing nearly twice as much money per prisoner ((40k / 3) / 7k).

Which is a better investment: keeping bad people out of society /now/, or educating the future generations to keep them from being a bad person? I won't argue that the first one shouldn't happen. But should we really be investing more in the short term than in the long term? Especially when the only benefits in the short term are a society that feels (and might be) safer along with enriched privately run prisons and their employees, and along the long term is a sustainable and expanding economy based on, you know, not imprisoning people.

Because then you could bypass them for each subsequent The Oatmeal comic by just going to The Oatmeal.

I'm wondering why someone hasn't done a tineye-dmca-sending mashup to help control these issues..

An example search from tineye of oatmeal images (almost two pages worth): http://www.tineye.com/search/657460f93292f13484a028f4828b838...

Which isn't that big of a deal. Take a look at Chrome's upgrade curves, compared to the other browsers:

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/04/08/the-modern-browser-wars-...

But the problems being chunked up in bitcoins are the actual bitcoin transactions, thus churning them is not pointless. It strengthens the system.

Until you realize that your bones were 'out of alignment' because you have weak core muscles that you should build up instead. In fact, 'pushing spinal column bones into alignment' without any x-rays or further inspection sounds pretty dangerous to me. What if the chiropractor pushes it too far and strains something, causing me to return for another adjustment? Everyone I know who has tried a chiropractor ends up going back over and over again, like an addiction.

Meanwhile, I had some back pain and started doing pilates and it evaporated, because now my core can actually hold my backbone up.

/plural of anecdote is not data

"We also have far fewer snake-oil salesmen ripping people off for cures"

Yet we still have chiropractors and homeopathy.

Am I completely missing a key part of bitcoin, then? My understanding was the 'pointless tasks' were actually the verifications of previous transactions. And to make such a system verifiable, several nodes in the network must hash out the same blocks the same way.

The author is fundamentally flawed in his approach. He thinks bitcoin mining is just mindless churning on your GPU.

But in reality, it's cryptographically checking the validity of bitcoin transactions. So the system churns for the benefit of the system itself, instead of churning for the benefit of some external goal.

Another problem with stopping and restarting with every mistake, is you learn to stop and restart when you make a mistake.

This makes it really, really awful if you're playing a recital and slip up just a tiny bit (obviously, you should practice it so you don't slip up /at all/, but let's be realistic here. Even people studying to be performance majors make mistakes in their recitals) - your first instinct would be to start the passage over, which is the /last/ thing you want to be doing.

It also makes it nearly impossible to play with a group.

Lift does do a lot of persistence, it just seems that this intro didn't touch on it much:

http://www.assembla.com/spaces/liftweb/wiki/Mapper http://www.assembla.com/spaces/liftweb/wiki/Persistence_Alte...

The shakiness has always confused me a little. Can they not dampen the momentum vectors somewhat - so little back-and-forths in the actual calculations don't propagate up to the render?

Very true - I've been following the Wilson situation fairly closely. I've urged the people I know down there to contact their elected officials about it, but got mainly apathy in response.

And yeah, I can't see Cary ever installing its own broadband. Though, the layout of the main roads (cary pkway, maynard) could make for a fairly easy rollout.

Except, well, all those twisty windy mcmansion subdivisions with their eighty page home owners agreements.. :/

Welp, this kinda screws over a couple family members. I know someone living in Cary (not even 20 minutes drive from Research Triangle Park) that pays something like $60/mo for a measly 6mbps home connection.

For another business they were working with, they used to get DSL through a local computer shop (Intrex). Intrex stopped their DSL service. AT&T refused to service that location at the speeds Intrex would. And the local cable monopoly refuses to run lines to the business.

The only saving grace would have been a municipal ISP, but this just screwed that over.

Good luck being relevant to technology in ten years, North Carolina....

It's right on their page. Under 'Find a new alternative:'

"However, BankSimple is not a "bank." We partner with chartered banks who provide FDIC-insured products, leaving us free to concentrate on designing the complete consumer banking experience, via the web and your smartphone."

They themselves aren't a bank. They partner up with banks that provide FDIC insured products. They just provide the customer service and the user interface.

Not really. The breakup of the Bell monopoly helped, but Hush-a-Phone vs. US helped set the stage for competing long distance carriers like MCI. It set the stage for devices like the Carterfone ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone ). Things really didn't take off much until the breakup, because of the monopolistic practices of Ma Bell; even though interconnect was legal, they brought insane market pressure to bear.

No, GP is not saying 'down with capitalism.' They're saying 'down with restrictive terms of service similar in scope to the prevention of the Hush-A-Phone from being used on the Bell System in the 1950s.' Which, well, is pretty much the opposite of 'down with capitalism:'

The restriction from connecting your own devices to the Bell System forestalled the production, sale, and invention of devices such as the answering machine (Bell invented one in 1930, along with magnetic storage - but scrapped the project because they thought it would cause people to use the phone less), fax machine, and so on and so forth. The 1956 ruling against Bell in favor of Hush-A-Phone effectively allowed the invention, sale, and use of foreign attachments to the Bell System.

The restriction of doing what you want with your own console/computer is essentially the same damn thing. We've already fought this war against monopolists in technology; it's sad that we have to do it all over again.

Further reading:

Hush-A-Phone vs. United States (Hush-A-Phone appeal to an FCC ruling): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_v._United_States

The Master Switch (Tim Wu): http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-Borz...

Is it just me, or is their choice of name a terrible branding decision?

It's bothered me for quite a while. I'm surprised they haven't been lampooned on Fox News as being a terrorist weather outlet.

Solar-powered medium-altitude flocking UAVs could provide a semi-temporary mesh WiFi (or sim.) network. We have flocking software. We have UAVs.

Is anyone researching solar-powered UAVs that can stay aloft for long periods of time, inexpensively?

Quick google only found this: http://www.gizmag.com/go/3891/

I spent about twenty minutes googling around trying to find a central repository/library/listing of games available/ported to it... with no luck. That would probably be important for gaining traction.

Neat project... except for the 8 games available on it. Why develop for something with 20 users when you can develop for a (more powerful) mobile phone with several orders of magnitude more potential customers?

Pretty cool that it's open and finally (after what.. three years or so?) shipping units, but I doubt it'll ever gain steam.

I tend to do the same thing. Except, since JavaScript doesn't have block scope, it all ends up at the top of the function.

Which is much more preferable than scattered around the function. Especially due to hoisting[1].

My functions typically go in the order of:

declare variables; declare any local functions if necessary (most of the time these eventually get refactored out to somewhere else, because they tend to be one-off utility functions that can be abstracted); do stuff; return value.

1. http://www.adequatelygood.com/2010/2/JavaScript-Scoping-and-...