cjoh

I'm an author who wrote an Amazon "bestseller" -- it was the #1 Culture book in the store for six months, and the #1 Technology book for about one month. (http://amzn.to/infodiet)

I sold more than 4,000 books (closer to about 15,000), but have basically made a relatively comparable amount of money from royalties from the book.

That said, if you're writing a book looking to profit from the sales of the book, you're doing it wrong. I easily pull in six figures for speaking fees that result from having written a book. I wasn't getting those offers before having written the book.

Maybe fiction is a bit different. But you can always find a way.

Petitions are completely ineffective because the citizenry doesn't have enough civic knowledge to ask for the right things.

Take for instance, the top one -- "classify the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group" or the various succession petitions. Is there a federal agency that regulates hate groups? Or classifies who is a hate group and who is not? No. "Hate Group" is a label used by the private NGO sector -- in this case the ADL and SPLC (two non-governmental organizations) maintain lists of hate groups.

Nor does one "incorporate" via the federal government. You incorporate in a state. Stripping Westboro of their tax exempt status should be the lead ask there, and yet those petitions are far less popular than the original? Why? Because it's a more severe ask.

Same with "recount the election" -- the federal government doesn't count votes!

Restrict pay for senators? Seriously, c'mon. We all learned about separation of powers, right?

Petitions do work. What a lobbyist does is petition the government. They're just professional at it, and why we presume that a developer or a plumber or a chicken farmer should be as good of a lobbyist as a professional lobbyist is, is beyond me.

Petitions work. But there's a lot more to getting petitions to affect change than writing some nonsense on a web page and getting a bunch of people to agree with you. Is the expectation that if .01% of the US Population clicks a +1 button on a website then the federal government will change a law? That's a scary proposition.

Direct democracy enables citizens to vote for every service imaginable and vote to pay no taxes for them.

I know Jeff. Jeff taught me rails. If my kid was of the age where it was productive for me to spend this level of money on Jeff teaching him, there's no question in my mind I'd do it. Fwiw, I've been trying to get Jeff to teach me a "How to Teach" class for 5 years.

The article all but ignores the fact that there are political social networks that exist. Experienced political organizers already know this, which is why so much effort goes into courting the endorsements of unions like AFT, NEA, AFSCME and SEIU and churches and their leaders like Billy Graham.

These ARE social networks, and they're WIRED, and have a lot of structure at the local level where, as O'Neil instructs us, is where all politics is anyways. Any up-start "political social network" that ignores that existing infrastructure is like Facebook ignoring colleges.

Except it's more expensive, and the screen and CPU are not as good.

It seems like with a keyboard "dock" the Nexus 10 might be the lightest "retina" laptop available at 25% of the price as the new 13" Retina Macbook Pro.

This is amazing. One thing that would be nice to be noted on this that isn't: 1920 was when Congress began its 435 person cap on the house. Gerrymandering begins.

The integration with other things is a big deal fwiw. I'm currently playing with NFC and doing things like "when I tap my phone on my night stand, make sure all the doors are locked and turn off all the lights except for the bedroom"

We're headed towards the Internet of Things but right now they're all sort of talking with their own software. A house with the Nest thermometer and the Lockitron lock won't be able to execute on the scenario I described above -- and if you're a homeowner you may want to think more long term than investing in one-off solutions for every latest thing a chip goes in to.

I've been using a MiCasa Verde[1], alongside the compatible KwikSet Deadbolts[2], an android app called Automator to accomplish the same thing. It's actually a little pricier but you get:

a. Remote entry -- unlock your door from afar. b. A nice home automation system (mine's expanded to control lights and thermostat now) c. Keypad and key-entry as backups

I love it. Being able to remotely lock and unlock your doors is super handy, whether it be for guests, contractors or what not. But what's really handy? Never worrying about locking yourself out of your house again.

If I could just get rid of my car key, I'd be thrilled.

[1]http://micasaverde.com/ [2]http://amzn.to/QGn2Im

I'd say "my mom/sister/dad/cousin" is not going to host this themselves is a tricky assumption. I can imagine a world where my mom creates an account with a service that kicks off an EC2 instance on her behalf without her even knowing it. Want to build a facebook that scales cheaply? Make every user bring their own server. On top of that, make "bringing a server" as easy as a registration process.

So it's taken 9 years for anyone to notice that SSL is broken in the most widely used(?) open source IM client?

As an author, it's depressing to see empty books -- stickers and all -- selling for twice as much as full ones.

Isn't this a chromebook?

Nonsensical sensationalism. The petition expired, and didn't get 25,000 signitures. Should it have gotten special preference because it got on the front page of Reddit and Hackernews? No. Should you have signed it 2 days ago instead of upvoting this article hoping that somebody else would? Yes.

Here's where it says clearly what happened: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-transporta...

This isn't a dig but just a note: every human being in all of these photographs is white. Even the parade picture at the end is, from what I can gather, all white. Makes you think about the real exclusion happening then, and how much progress we've made today, where its almost unsettling to see pictures of major events with political figures containing all whites, and where the president we have today apparently wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near these events.

It's name will just be changed to "Gmail" in the next release, I suspect.

I don't understand why someone does not just fork PHP and create something that's syntactically similar but fixes a lot of the problems people complain about.

Can we appreciate for a moment that this is a product that is _manufactured in the United States_. I hope this is a step forward in the manufacturing of our consumer electronics, and by doing this, it makes it so doing manufacturing in the United States becomes more of a possibility to more of our companies.

I'll happily shell out an extra $200 to buy a product that is built in any country with halfway decent environmental and labor laws.

Linode or Appfog.

You're absolutely right. I'm the author, and I left that part out entirely. I think there are a lot of posts giving that kind of advice already, and while important, I had a hard time figuring out how to do the prepwork it took to be able to do that stuff, so I stuck with that.

And now Alexis wants to move Congress?

Interesting that it's a Lexus. I thought they were using Prii for the self driving car.

It goes to a backup number you add that is the phone number of a friend or other phone number you specify.

Don't do what I did and stupidly use your google voice number. facepalm

Man this discussion would have been so much better had the phrase "You clearly don't understand" not been uttered.

Actually, no, they're not. They're tied at the waist. Governments antiquated technology acquisition schedules mean that govt cannot tie itself to Moore's law. Because currently government buys from an exclusive system rather than an inclusive one, it means the tech they do end up getting, often 18 months late, isn't very good, and is very hard to upgrade.

Thus a mandate that "all agencies should do x" with tech, before reforms in the acquisition arena create severe problems down the road, and only really benefit the contractors who make them.

By the time these Apis really see the light of day, we will be complaining about them.

Wish they'd done some reasonable amount of procurement reform before this. All this means is another big payday for gov contractors

When I worked at ask Jeeves, we thought a browser toolbar was how we were going to beat google, too. In 2001.

Only one of the organizations involved here has a court mandated consent decree.

Agreed. If he's looking to "disconnect" it'd be more interesting to see him also go rural for a year.