dialtone

What this service does is analyze which URLs are fetched from the sites you visit and compare them with a list of known tracker URLs. It doesn't need to care for flash cookies or such, it's there to inform you of who's on a page potentially tracking you. It raises your awareness so you can properly act on it. Another plugin that existed for a while is Ghostery: http://www.ghostery.com/ this one also blocks the fetch of the URL so whatever cookies they might be using becomes irrelevant.

Most of these tracking pixels are not flash anyway so blocking flash won't accomplish anything. Blocking Javascript will do something of course but some are only images so it will still be pointless and you'll still be tracked.

The reality IMHO is that it's better to be targeted by relevant ads than to see dating/scammy ads everywhere.

There's a reason why those are called 'panic doors'. When a mob is trying to escape a place you're gonna have a hard time trying swing the door inside rather than outside and usually people get trampled while trying to open it.

This is great. I organized EuroPython 2011 and I wish I had something like this to help the attendees to find each other more efficiently.

San Francisco, CA. Full time.

I work at AdRoll (http://www.adroll.com), a rapidly growing, well-funded startup based in downtown San Francisco. We are adding to a small team of smart, driven and friendly people who are passionate about taking on new challenges. We are mainly a Python shop but we also work with Erlang and Java.

We are building the platform to bring the cutting edge of exchange advertising to the masses. We work with many great YC startups like Hipmunk, WePay, MixRank, Minomonster, Humble Bundle, Olark and many many more, we also work with other non-YC companies like Tom's Shoes and American Apparel and over 2000 active other advertisers. We've been on a rocket ship ride, and 2011 is looking even brighter.

Our infrastructure is currently hosted on EC2 across 3 regions and multiple availability zones in each region.

We come with all the good features of startups: full ownership of projects you feel passionate about, the laptop you want, a competitive set of benefits (medical/dental/vision, 401k, equity, paid time off, pool room, beer on tap, snacks and more), the need to solve new and interesting problems. We can sponsor relocation and even H1B if we love you.

We are looking for developers with: good experience and the ability to learn new things rapidly, love Open Source and take lots of initiative.

If you are awesome, you know ec2, hbase, hive, redis, cassandra, python, erlang and java it would be even better.

Email: valentino@adroll.com

Instead of having monkeys typing random characters and then collating together, it would have been more interesting to have monkeys typing the entire work at once and then selecting the work from the monkey with the closest output to 'breed' (use the output as the basis for a new generation of monkeys that will always type those letters in those positions with a very high probability [you accept mutations]).

This would have been faster and more interesting.

For reference, this theorem was and is often used to counter evolutionism, but those that try to use it in this way fail to grasp that evolution is not random but selects the fittiest according to survival ability. By setting the survival rule to 'proximity to Shakespeare' you'd reach the end result relatively quickly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

The "intelligent person" would be the survival of the monkey.

I fail to see how this is related to "forego the benefits of cloud computing"... Does your startup have the resources to manage multiple datacenters by itself (such as one in US and one in EU)? Isn't this a clear benefit of cloud computing (and a pretty big one too)?

CloudFormation is also affected now.

However I think most of the criticism doesn't come from trying to picture Truman as a killer or as someone who has vaporized a city for lust of violence.

Criticism comes from the fact that today we know what nuclear warheads are capable of doing, and yet these are still a viable weapon. This means that somebody still considers the possibility of using them, and this creates the need to do something to stop it (and makes people still feel guilty).

It's not a factual blame issue. Are then only those that dropped the bomb responsible? It's a mentality problem, people feel guilty because they don't think anything changed in their society and feel powerless and afraid that something like that could happen again, which is also why they keep writing about it, to keep awareness high and try to change society.

And with this I'm not saying that you should feel responsible instead. I'm simply saying that dismissing this by saying "My parents weren't around 60 years ago" without including an analysis of the context and environment is a pretty weak argument. For example, would you have made the same decision in the same circumstance in 1945?

Actually besides airport taxiing and unexpected events there's no reason to have humans in the cockpit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

Delayed action though leads to speculation and uncertainty as was shown in the past few weeks. Nothing changed in the Italian economic policy since friday last week, but monday and tuesday brought deep losses and the Italian BTP bonds reached the highest spread against the Bund in recent history. Today, 3 days later, Italy is back to a less crazy spread (still pretty high) and _nothing_ changed in its policy, 100 base points less over 300 in 3 days is pretty crazy.

The problem is not an economic problem but a political one. The cost of Greece bailout is a rounding error in Europe's total budget, the test ahead is about how the EU can start unifying the economic policy and grow more cohesively.

Lots of countries gave up monetary control power but without a unifying economic government body it's absolutely impossible for the weakest links to survive with all their issues without some help.

Lack of real unification is the problem, not economy per se. I think this is your point somewhat, am I right?

Obtained like that it's not that interesting... A more interesting number would have been 'looking for love' but weighted on the size of the gender group.

That results in: 2.3% of Men looking for love and 0.37% of Women. These are very little numbers.

More than the size of the increase since 2003 would be interesting to know what are the components of this increase.

Python has a proper GC to remove cycles in reference counting, it's just not the "main" one.

http://docs.python.org/library/gc.html

  Since the collector supplements the reference counting already used in Python, you can disable the collector if you are sure your program does not create reference cycles. Automatic collection can be disabled by calling gc.disable().

What EuroPython 2011 and PyCon Italy Four did to avoid multiple meetings for rating talks is to setup a community voting system.

http://ep2011.europython.eu/blog/2011/04/11/talk-voting

All the early bird tickets are allowed to vote on the talk list so that we have a reasonable guarantee that we select talks that the community wants to see and that it's a conference tailored for our attendance. Writing the schedule still remains a multi-night work that requires a lot of flexibility also from the speakers themselves.

It's incredible how accurately this applies to EuroPython 2011 (I'm part of the organization this year).

Beyond normal reasonable help to people who can't make it, this year we decided to ask for the speaker, who usually pay discounted price, to forego the discount in order to donate to the financial aid fund.

http://ep2011.europython.eu/blog/2011/05/16/special-grant-st...

It is stressful and a couple years ago 2 of the organizers had to put down a personal and generous sponsorship to pay a few of the bills that were due. Sometimes the numbers are just not on your side.

For your application though a failure is a failure in any scenario. EBS went down in one zone and was slow in a couple others for a few hours, it's a bad downtime but some services survived the problem relatively unscathed. This suggests that something could have been done to avoid any trouble at all.

If the datacenter you are in has a slight conditioning problem this summer and 10% of your drives breaks down due to excessive heat, how quickly will you be able to re-provision the data center?

About a week after AWS outage the italian ISP Aruba had a UPS failure due to a fire in the UPS room and the entire datacenter switched off automatically during the night. For the following 8 hours that datacenter was off for every customer. How would your new solution handle such a situation?

Designing a hot standby replication solution for MySQL/PostgreSQL that works across regions seems easier to me rather than implementing a database from scratch that should solve a very complex problem.

The importance of the short release cycle has decreased a lot for us since we moved to EC2. It's really simple to re-deploy the entire infrastructure on newer and supported images. Using puppet and cloudformation or whatever it is that you prefer you can upgrade with very little trouble.

This is even more serious than the one in 10.04. While in 10.04 the bug would slow down the machine for a while in 10.10 with 2.6.35 kernel will simply hang the machine and requires a reboot (which can only be achieved by rebooting from the AWS console multiple times) of the instance to be "fixed".

I'm in the process of upgrading all of our instances to Natty from 10.04 or younger. It's actually weird that this issue didn't get any attention whatsoever.

First you need to resolve the other bottlenecks or more megapixels will only make the inadequacy of the lenses more obvious.

The lesson to learn here is that the camera needs to grow more organically, it's useless to grow megapixels so much without improving lenses or the size of the sensor, instead, as the article states, it makes it _worse_. Like megahertz, megapixel is a nice single number that many customers associated with performance but it's pretty far from truth. A more detailed sensor will only see what the lenses let go through and a smaller sensor will become that much less sensitive. It is cheaper however.

How exactly do all these cost comparisons factor in the ability to quickly deploy hardware in 4 different regions in the world without having people at location to swap broken hardware or reboot an instance that is not available for whatever reason?

They probably would use replication to a different region/zone and then they implement their own snapshot/backup mechanism on those replica machines so that they can use them to re-create instances when they lose them. Also PostgreSQL ships logs that you can store in S3 and bring up an instance from another area starting from a known backup point.

EBS is a pretty bad product regarding reliability and consistency of performance unfortunately, it's better to design your system without it.

It doesn't seem to me that people enjoy pirating or not paying for goods. The ITMS volume or seeing how piracy in US has been declining steadily are good indicators.

People go towards piracy when the system doesn't satisfy their requirements. Downloading a pirated movie is not as easy as it is to pay Netflix $10/month to have a vast catalog of instant streaming options. There is no comparative service that is free (legally or illegally). It's also argubly easier since you don't have to choose the format of the movie you are downloading or the encoder or several other options while being unsure wether it will play on your PS3 or XBox.

If you create an intuitive and reasonable system for consumers to operate it's very likely that they'll stop looking towards a sub-par alternative like pirating things.

A couple of examples:

Why should I care, as a consumer, that Hulu hasn't reached a deal to stream some TvShows to my PS3 but did reach it for the Web site? It doesn't make any sense to anybody but those who profit from this. How can this be helpful? People got Hulu Plus with the idea that everything would have been available on the PS3 and then some more, but this wasn't the case. This is a frustrated consumer whose demand couldn't be met not because of lack of technical capability or just impossibility. It's really just because of obscure business deals that have nothing reasonable attached to them from a consumer point of view.

The same could be said about music releases that are not international. What is the point of this? How is it that a UK consumer can listen to a given album while a US consumer can't (and vice-versa)? Provided both want to pay its full price.

People go towards piracy as a last resort, not as a first step, it's almost a precious feedback mechanism that tells the market what people really want.

You can of course dismiss all of this by simply saying that the consumer has no right to decide whether he agrees or not with the business decision. It's true, but that's not moving forward the discussion in any useful way.

The start date for the paywall is March 28th.

This is absolutely false. Standard lifetime for nuclear reactors is 40 years. With lifetime extension they can reach 60. Fear mongering is not in sight, the problem is nuclear plants cost a lot of money and time to build.

Especially not true for Japan, the country with the highest number of nuclear plants in the world.

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2007/npp_extension.html

I believe the problem here is a bit tricky and fundamentally a lack of trust in the government. The reason why Japanese are not panicking yet is because they trust their government and themselves to cooperate and help each other.

In US this is a bit different and trust in Japanese government, with an history for downplaying problems or just keeping them secret, is lacking.

The reasoning would be that the Japanese government, in order to prevent general panic, will downplay the problems, until it's too late, just to reassure its citizen that they are dealing with it. In the US many believe that things are already worse than what they're being told and would rather be ready to react immediately after something changes rather than be caught in the middle of the rage if something should go wrong later. A similar pattern is what happened for Chernobyl, although the political situation there was very very different.

They are because the vast majority of "but"s related to this event are about how this reactor is 50 year old technology and how it's been running for 40 years so it's somewhat excusable that it melts. Since 40 years is a standard reactor life[1] and many countries pursue life extensions on their reactors it is _not_ exceptional that of the roughly 450 active reactors in the world the majority of them is not up to the latest greatest tech standard or safety measure because it's expensive to keep up with all the upgrades and it's even more expensive when you just spent 10 years and $7B building a modern nuclear reactor[2]. So if it's ok to extend the life of a plant to 50 or 60 years as some would want then they need to upgrade them to latest standards.

[1]:http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2007/npp_extension.html

[2]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor

You might be surprised to discover that a 40 year old life is fairly standard in nuclear power plants[1], in fact some countries hope to keep their plants active for closer to 60 years. At close to $7B+ investment in just the building phase of a modern nuclear plant and close to 7-10 years construction time per plant[2], the limited lifetime of the plant does start to become a concern in the financial sense though.

[1]: http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2007/npp_extension.html [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor

I interpret the "worse than worst case" as "What the designers thought was the worst case in reality was not" so we are now faced with a case that wasn't predicted and the outcome is unknown.

I can see the sense, this reactor was designed 50 years ago even with upgrades it's old technology and there have been huge improvements in the past 50 years. So this shows that the designers 50 years ago didn't do a perfect job. This is what the author means I believe.

And a "major nuclear accident" is defined as a level 7 accident in the International Nuclear Event Scale[1], I have no idea if the author refers to it when he talks about major nuclear events but probably not since there has been only one level 7 accident and that's Chernobyl.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sca...