gdee

Anybody from Spain knows of a better address to send letters to the new Spanish "Minister of External Affairs and Cooperation", Trinidad Jiménez, than informae@mae.es (which itself is rather well hidden on the ministry's website) ?

That project is about 5-6 years old. I remember being exited when I first saw that page. It still is exiting. But not news :)

  >  PayPal doesn't need to freeze your account, they can
  > just as easily prevent you from withdrawing money to 
  > your bank account, which sucks but it probably won't 
  > kill your business. At least your customers can still 
  > pay you.

I can't believe I'm writing in PayPal's defense but facts are facts.

They did this to me last week. They sent a message Friday night that they would need some extra documentation. I acted upon that on the spot. They then proceeded to restrict my account next Monday because they didn't bother to process my response to their request from Friday. That sucked, but they only locked withdrawals. My customers didn't see a thing, and they finally suspended restrictions Thursday. Took a few phone calls to make sure they hurry (to a number that is not free and not on the front page, but definitely not "10 pages deep": from your account > contact (footer) > call us).

Like anticipated, I feel dirty for speaking to their defense.

Thanks for the advice. Will look into it.

  >   But I'm no longer accepting paypal payments myself 
  > and I would advise everybody to keep their account 
  > balances as low as possible.

Sound advice. In my new private project, I redraw from paypal every 200 euros. Thankfully, that's a lot of redraws (for certain definitions of a lot) and I'm a bit behind redraws but I learned the lesson from the losses the company I work with endures every month. Details in this same thread. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1679288)

  >   I bet that somewhere in paypal, it works like DEA style 
  > asset forfeiture, and the people who freeze accounts stand 
  > to benefit financially, personally and directly.

You'd lose that bet. They refund the money to the original payer. For better or worse. My company loses a few hundred euros each month to this. They keep asking for proof of delivery. Yet we sell internet access. No proof in that unless I'm willing to break the law (and my client's trust) and tcpdump my clients. No way I'm doing that so I swallow the losses. No client ever filled a complain in the first place and no client ever complained about returned funds for consumed services either. :P

  > ssh prod-db 
  > mysqldump what-i-need > file.sql
  > exit
  > scp prod-db:file.sql .

You can definitely do better than that with ssh:

  ssh prod-db "mysqldump what-i-need" > file.sql

If the dump is large and the network is the bottleneck, you can also do it like this:

  ssh prod-db "mysqldump what-i-need | p7zip" | p7zip -d > file.sql

Edit: Noste gave the right oneliner, sorry I didn't notice it at first. Consider mine only as an expansion of his second point.

Here's a nice book about, among other things, a similar country: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Beware. That resolution might mean that the screen was produced for landscape viewing. If that's true, it will be quite horrible to use in portrait. It will show slightly different colors to each of your eyes which will make the screen seem slightly semitransparent and silvery. I have this problem with a Sandisk Sansa mp3 player I have.

I don't know about Netherlands, but in Spain you can contest any customs tax. They send you a printed form to fill if you want to contest it in the same envelope where they send you the invoice for the tax. Things can't be very different there.

direct link to video interview

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/4177270/wozniak-on-mass-ipad-...

I didn't use to be. Then I had a problem and my bank took 2 months and almost 10 phone calls to fix it. Then I became a little paranoid.

Have them not touch the CC#. Leave that last part of the funnel to some certified external. You'd also make them a big service. I simply abandon most carts if the CC entry stage is still on the merchant site and not on someone's big and recognized like PayPal, and I hate PayPal. I just don't trust the little, unknown, guys with CC# & details.

>> It just doesn't want them on the app store.

Where else exactly could they go?

>> Forcing Apple to repeal 3.3.1 doesn't allow offending software to be built and sold (as it already can be), it forces Apple to stock its shelves with it

Those two things are the same, by Apple's design.

>> Prior to the iPhone, there was virtually no real development allowed on phones that achieved any levels of success (carriers had the platform locked down hard).

cough The development for mobile phones partially sucked (and still does, partially; it's in the nature of the beast I suppose, for now) before the iPhone, but I don't know about it being not allowed. You have to draw a distinction between so called feature-phones and smart-phones here. Feature-phone dev was and still is largely restricted (not to mention uninteresting from most POVs) but the same cannot be said about smart-phones. Seeing how the iPhone is supposed the be a smart-phone, we should compare it to those I think. And to that end, I seem to remember writing mobile apps for Windows Mobile and Symbian long before the iPhone existed. Some of that writing didn't even suck that much and I definitely didn't have to ask nobody's permission to distribute the apps. Python for S60 [1] appeared before the iPhone not to mention the c/c++ based toolchains from MS and others. Even the appstore concept is not really Apple's invention, Handango predates it by quite some margin for example.

>> In many ways, the iPhone has been the founding of "open" phone development

I don't know in how many were those ways. I would say it made it's (phone development) products cool (albeit not yet mainstream) for the masses, and that is very nice and respectable, but "founding" and "inventing" and "reinventing" are just hyperbole filled, marketing words that Apple touts around.

>> Post iPhone, we've seen actual competition in this space - the entirely open Android strategy (though their App Store also has restrictions, they just apply them post-release rather than pre-release); the semi-closed iPhone and Nokia Ovi models, the web app model of all the platforms.

A few lines up, you were talking about "phone development" and I assumed you were referring to application development because you mentioned carriers platform locks. Now you refer to appstores. Not the same thing. And even there, there was competition [2].

>> People claiming that Apple has created a locked-down environment have very short memories

I would argue that it's somebody else exhibiting short memory here but I have already.

>> even the closed nature of the App Store via 3.3.1 would have been considered insanely open only 5 years ago. No... it would not have been. Again, please see [2].

The thing is, we had "open for development" smart phones before the iPhone. The platforms were less cool. Some of today's platforms, that are still more "open for development" are more cool in at least some ways that the iPhone.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60 [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_distribution_pl...

You're describing theater with special effects and JIT scene changes. I thing it's a fabulous premise and I've been thinking the same about the supposed destination of 3D movies.

>> so I figure between you and me we have all the bases covered You both list four personal characteristics. On all four I resemble one of you too so I guess I don't expand the "bases" :)

I also find his points are somewhat offensive. I say somewhat because I have learned that being offended by someones opinions (as opposed to him lashing out on you personally) is not a good thing. They are just that, opinions, ideas. Maybe thought inducing or maybe boring. Offensiveness alone, I think, should only ever be used held the offender when offensiveness was the purpose.

Assuming non-homophobic heterosexual parents, why would they be the "wrong setup"?

I suppose your reply was made in a joking tone but maybe not it was not completely a joke. You made me curious. Why would homosexuality be fabulous? I mean, few of my friends are openly gay, maybe more are... I see no life quality differences between us based on that. Other criteria, sure, but sexual preference... no. I think it's just as fabulous either way. Why would you say otherwise? (assuming I was not wrong on it being only partly a joke)

responding to csarva(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1271567)(I can't seem to reply to individual messages anymore):

>[re-]building core strength

That's [re-]building strength in core muscles (the ones that hold your skeleton together)... as opposed to motor muscles(those who move your limbs)... that is the crux of the whole article, and I think it makes a lot of difference. The way you put it leads to think to core moral strength.

Edit: The excruciating pain is also not core to the article. In her case, damaged nerves lead to muscle fatigue being manifested in lack of power and quite pointedly lack of pain in certain circumstances when pain was to be expected (though she also describes experiencing said excruciating pain).

Edit2: Actually, although the article is interspersed with passages of personal drama (it /is/ a blog post, on /her/ blog) it is also filled with too much information to be easily tl;dr'ed... Also, the post itself is a postmortem style post in which what happened over a long period of time is condensed. Further compression runs high risks of being lossy I think.

I wonder if it's tail call optimized or you get to DOS Google by clicking one too many times on it...

Why do you miss it? Older versions are surely available for download somewhere if the new ones annoy you, and even the new ones can be custom installed to filter most unneeded things.

Wow, they not only recognize (as we all know, many publishers, willingly, don't) but they actually take steps to facilitate the effects of the "first-sale doctrine"[1]. Hats off to that kind of treatment for their customers. Never heard of them before. I feel strangely impulsed to become a customer now.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Seeing how it consistently happens on the horizontal, I think it's by design. It probably tries to suggest with some degree of subtility that the UI goes on in that direction.

There's a question mark missing in you link. Hopefully it will work this time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdDAeyy1H0A&feature=404

>> on a 720p screen

There is no 720p video possible on that screen. It has 1024 pixels horizontal when in landscape, and it would need 1280.

I don't know if they were being nice or not but I think they pretty much also had to make it 4:3. I have a convertible netbook (Gigabyte T1028X) and its wide screen is ugly in vertical orientation. Books look really weird formatted that way. Web pages too. The only saving grace is that I can dock an OSK at the bottom and the remaining area is more or less 4:3 and I get the keyboard there too, at the same time. That's handy at times. But still looks ugly. So seeing how beautiful is important to Apple and how they want it to be usable in any orientation, I don't think they had a choice.

got it, thank you.

geppa.dee at that mail system owned by google

Please. Thank you.