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I think you have the question backwards. I wonder why more people, especially in tech, don't have agents.

Broadly speaking, writers are freelancers who enter into short-term high-value contracts for work-for-hire. Agents negotiate the contract on the writer's behalf, with the agents compensation depending on the writer's (this, in fact, is what the current dispute is about, as this has become less and less true). This ensures that the writer gets a good deal, ideally the best deal possible. Talented writers aren't necessarily talented negotiators or networks, so this division of labor works well.

Seems to me everything I just said also applies to freelance Tech Workers. But instead of Agents we get marketplaces like oDesk or TopTal where freelancers are competing against each other, often in a race to the bottom.

While 3% is a good deal, there have been internet-only banks for quite some time now, all of whom look pretty much like this. Radius and Axos are two examples that have been around for a while.

Looks great, but email composition is only half the battle.

The page is silent on what, if anything, is being done to help deliverability. Does the site have any kind of relationship with the big ESPs? How 'clean' are the IPs right now? What, if any, mitigation is in place for the sending IPs inevitable reputation degredation? Or is a EDS being used to actually send the emails?

In a sense, yes. 'sed' is basically 'ed' for streams. Not exactly the same syntax & commands, but very very close.

Except that the incremental cost of someone using a Gym is almost zero. Once you have enough members to cover the rent & employees, it's almost all upside.

MoviePass will pay about $12 each and every time someone sees a movie -- more than the monthly fee any one member is paying.

So every super movie fan watching 10 movies a month requires more than 11 other members paying the monthly fee and then not using their membership at all. Hard to see that math working out.

Enpass, all the way. Free (Gratis) on Mac, Windows & Linux, US$10 for iPhone or Android.

100% local storage, or sync the encrypted file via Dropbox.

OK, fair enough, "no product ever" is probably too broad. But for consumer products, I stand by what I said.

Price has never been correlated with quality, for any product, ever.

Price is correlated with perceived value, which includes quality, brand recognition, brand opinion, current style, and a long list of other factors.

(And, yes, this is a horrible use of the word 'correlated.' 'Derived from' or 'based on' would be much better.)

0. An opt-in Census is useless.

I find that a very weak analogy. The house wins in Vegas over the long haul because the odds have been tilted in their favor. Any one hand of blackjack is luck, but the house winning over the course of a million is a mathematically certainty. It has nothing to do with 'not giving up.'

What are the odds of becoming a billionaire? And how does someone tilt those odds in their favor?

Perhaps more to the point, Amazon was the first company Bezos founded. MicroSoft was Gates' first, and Michael Dell founded Dell while still at school. In what sense did these men go through repeated failures?

That's not to say these aren't exceptional men. Of course they are. But luck played a huge role in their success.

If there is no penalty for not making them available for the deaf, why would any institution pay for captioning?

UCB wasn't ordered to take them down. UCB was ordered to make them accessible, and chose to take them down rather than spend the money.

A 14 year old can't sign a contract, so how does he own a business? I don't doubt he's done all the work, and I've nothing but admiration for him, but there's no way this is the complete picture.

Can verify, have done. The clerk looked horrified and shook her head vigorously while pointing at the coin tray.

100% serious. The definition of girl is "A female child".

To refer to females who code as children while at the exact same time NOT doing that for males who code is sexist.

You call women coders "girls" while calling men coders "male."

Yes, I see sexism.

No, Its as if the Post Office agreed to delivery my mail at .43 a letter, but then asked me for more money when my Mom started send me 10 letters a day with the proper postage.

I (and millions of others) pay Comcast a certain rate for a certain data plan. In my case, about $50/month for 50Mb down, 2Mb up, capped at 250GB per month.

So if I want to watch 250G of movies in a month, at those data rates, why should I or anyone else have to pay more? I've already contracted with Comcast for that much bandwidth.

The reality, of course, is that Comcast (and all other ISPs) MASSIVELY oversubscribe their own network. They don't have any where near the capacity to actually support what they sell. And they want Netflix to foot the bill for the buildout required to provide the capacity they claim they sold me.

That's a reasonable argument against Google announcing what needs to be done. It's no argument at all against someone from Google contacting Matt Haughey directly, and telling him.

That's what surprises me most in all of this. Why hasn't Cutts picked up the phone, and called Haughey? Haughey's a long-time and well respect Web Dude. He's not a spammer, nor some 'random dude with a site.' Sure seems like a win/win for Google to help MetaFilter out of this jam.

The other way to look at this is a guy smart enough to rise to VP of Marketing at a major corporation and make in the low six figures isn't smart enough to manage his own retirement savings.

He's a VP of Marketing. Why is it that we expect him to know how to manage a retirement fund, even if it is his own?

The wide-spread end of the pensions system and the rise of 401(k)s is going to be a disaster as more and more Baby Boomers retire.

That's not what 'warming up an IP' means.

If Google (or any other ISP) suddenly sees an big spike in email from @example.com on an IP that @example.com hasn't used previously, Google is much more likely to mark those emails as Spam.

So senders need to 'warm up' an IP by sending a small amount of email first, usually for a few days at least.

So if you're a SendGrid customer expecting to send 2,000,000 emails today, you can't just switch to a new ESP and send those same emails. Spam rates will go through the roof.

Once upon a time there was a single father and his son. Every day, the father was overprotective and worried about his boy. One day the boy went out on his own, and got kidnapped. Because of that, the father went on a quest to find him. Because of that, the father had a lot of new experiences, met lots of new and different people, and realized what was important in life. Until finally he rescued his son, and they lived happily ever after.

I'm sure you could write it up other ways, and do a better job with more time, but basically, that's Finding Nemo.

You would need to start by raising a large amount of capital. Tens of millions, if not hundreds.

Now, you have two choices. "Easiest" is buying an existing, up and running cable company. There are quite a few: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cable_television_compan..., and if you've got a hundred million or two in cash, I'd bet you can find a seller.

Much, much harder is finding at least one municipality willing to give you franchise rights. That's going to take a lot of time and a lot of lawyers. Franchise rights aren't cheap, and generally require an "OK" from a city council. Once you've got that, you'll can start running cables. Even more time, and plenty of that capital. Figure on a couple of years to get to the point of actually being able sign up your first customer.

Certainly true that JIRA is neither Gratis nor Libre, nor does Atlassian accepted patches from the public. But it's Open Source in the sense that every license holder can download and build it: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Building+JIRA+f...

(disclosure: I am a former Atlassian employee)

It's outdated in the sense that the original reason for the high fees was to make it economically viable to provide service to people in rural areas. But the original sunk costs of wiring every home and business have long been paid off, and the digital-ization of the phone network has drastically reduced the ongoing costs of providing service to those folks. So it's outdated.

On the other hand, there are plenty of local CLECs in rural areas that make money from these fees, and they continue to lobby hard to keep the tarriffs and fees as they are.

So it's both, really.

Best definition of Steve Gillmor's work I've ever read.

Great! The FAA needs a new radar system. You six can tackle the software portion. Let me know when you're done.

Single most important habit I've developed as a SysAdmin: measure twice, cut once.

I never just

   sudo rm *

First, I do

   echo sudo rm *

inspect the output, and then use CLI editing to recall the command, and delete the "echo"

I do this for damn near everything that involves a wildcard. It's a lifesaver.