imroot

Put the Flight Attendants on the Jumpseat, and put the pilots on the UPS flights that to go SDF. If they were truly "Space-Positive" must-rides, they would have had seating assignments.

Seriously, this wasn't hard.

In the past, I used a USBank based service for small businesses. Low rates, API to get purchases, and fairly easy to get/qualify for. Assign credit limits per-employee and per category (so, for example, Maintenance Guy A can't purchase any food/beverages, but, can buy stuff at Grainger/home improvement stores, and has a limit of $500 per transaction, but a total credit limit of $5,000).

I was part of a startup that put on a hackathon with a 10K first prize many, many years ago. We had a group of presenters who had a polished product and were looking to put our API/whatever into their product so that they could be eligible for the prize, and you could tell that this was all that they did.

I also know that there's a group of people who attend as many hackathons as possible in the bay area for no other reason than living is expensive, and there is generally free food at the hackathons.

Honestly, I'd be a part of one of these again in a heartbeat -- the hours were crazy, but, it was a great way to get your developers, your API consumers, and everyone else in the same room, to validate if it will burst/scale up, and you can solve a lot of really interesting challenges that weekend.

This isn't just something that's limited to John Deere tractors -- even though John Deere is using provisions of the DMCA to 'highly discourage' farmers from screwing with the internals.

Caterpillar also has a fair share of tractor hacking going on -- with dealers in China actively encouraging hacking and modifications of their equipment.

The reality is that if you've ever grew up on a farm, this type of thing is the norm -- smaller farmers don't always have the cash to do costly repairs and if there's a way to make it work in a non-standard way, a lot of times the temporary solution becomes the permanent one. Buy a tractor with a smaller PTO, but, have a larger one available? Cut it out, put the new one on. Diesel tractor but your family also owns a restaurant? Modify it to run on old oil.

As a society, we have no way to differentiate who we're mad at, and who we're truly afraid of. Rehabilitation options are nonexistent, as most prisons and jails removed them in the 90's. Offenders go to Prison and come out Convicts -- with better training, some more street smarts, complete with access to more drugs, guns, and tools of the trade.

America is not a country of second chances. Look at sites like beenverified and mugshots -- their sole purpose in life is to shame those who have been arrested/convicted and allow employers/landlords to discriminate in ways that really skirts the FDCPA (beenverified isn't a CRA, so, there are no repercussions of reporting inaccurate information, nor are there ways of getting that information changed).

Hell, even AirBnB performs silent background checks on people who are renting homes -- even after presenting them the official copy of my clean (aside from a few speeding tickets and an accident from 1999) FBI background report, they still say that there are 'public records' that they are using and for the 'safety of the AirBnB platform,' they don't want my money.

We have a long way to go until this country can truly start to fix the 'prison' problem, but, it won't start until the country, as a whole, starts taking a different view of rehabilitation, corrections, and punishment.

This is one of my favorite hobbies to take part in.

I've got a hot glass shop on my farm in Kentucky (where I will make blanks and other artistic pieces), and I have built a cold shop with some tools (my favorite is a mold that uses pennies instead of the porcelain that they use in the article) and then using a HD projector and a DSLR that I remotely trigger, I get a map on the screen of where the imperfections are relative to the "top" of the mirror (that I indicate with a dot on the side).

Once I've worked the imperfections out, I'll then take it to an observatory in Ohio to get mirrorized -- and generally speaking, I'll donate my last telescope to the observatory (for public use) once I get the one I'm building done.

It'll be interesting to see the intersection of this and forge.mil (which was/is the DoD's implementation of SourceForge and associated services). About 5 years ago, there was a fair amount of Open Source Software being ran in DISA for supporting the branches and the software that they wrote, but, there was little open-sourcing of that software, even amongst the individual branches of service (the Marines might write something that the Army could use, but, there were political or other factors that precluded that from happening).

I've used http://www.shipwire.com/ in the past with a fair amount of happiness. Decent API's, not a horrible cost, and minimal hassles (I had issues with shrink and damage at Amazon warehouses, haven't had the same issues at Shipwire yet).

There's a really good book about the design of the slot machines, called Addiction by Design. It talks about the different UI and design elements that go into keeping the gambler engaged and why they keep spending more money. It's a really amazing and enlightening book to read if you're interested in learning more about the mechanics of the slot machines and the designs of the casino.

https://www.amazon.com/Addiction-Design-Machine-Gambling-Veg...

I hung out at the Board of Elections office. It was printed, and posted, every 15 minutes or so, as polling locations came in.

When I was there, it was me and a college student from the local college who was there working for the AP awaiting the results; everyone else was getting them online.

I did this in the 2014 election cycle, reporting a county in Ohio.

They pay $50 for someone to go to the county and report the election results. There's an iphone, android, and mobile web site, as well as a call center that takes that input.

Honestly, it was a really fun evening in the middle of nowhere Ohio...

AirBNB is interesting.

Before I even stayed at an AirBnB, I paid for a AirBnB, and then was kicked off of their system, because after they "searched public records," they discovered that they didn't want me as a customer.

Interestingly enough, at the time I was a contractor for a three-letter agency, so my background was pretty-damn clean.

They didn't follow FDCPA, no adverse notice telling me what their "source" of information was (so that I could correct it), and no appeal. It took me another week to get my $$ back from AirBnB.

The irony of this is that they still send me emails telling me of terms of service and marketing emails, even after telling me that they don't want me as a customer.

Oh well.

That's actually a pretty egregious violation of Amazon's Seller policies -- if you report it to Amazon, they'll get their seller account blacklisted.

There's one or two power people in the Fulfilled by Amazon world who do podcasts/vlogs, and they were telling the people who subscribe to their podcasts to start stalking/tracking down the people who purchase their products and start calling them to ask for reviews.

Needless to say, it backfired when Amazon started cracking down on it...

But what you'll get in performance, you'll lose in sanity.

I know that everyone has their "Horror" stories about a provider that they'd avoid at all costs, but, Softlayer still has an IBM "Mindset." Provisioning servers? You ask them, then their sales team approves -- hardly automatic. Seemingly minor changes to their system will force a hypervisor restart, and dealing with their account reps for anything is a nightmare.

I'm not saying that Amazon is the end-all, be-all; I'm just saying that the grass isn't greener on the softlayer side of the fence.

I'm a big fan of DevOps; for one reason or another, I've been in this 'space,' if you will long before it was DevOps...since about 2004/2005. If you ask me what DevOps is, this is the answer that I will always give:

It empowers the developers and developer teams to get up to speed quickly when writing new software, or when they add new team members to their teams, It streamlines and optimizes the delivery of software within the service lifecycle, and It changes and improves the relationships between development teams and IT operations by advocating better communication and collaboration between the two business units.

When done correctly, DevOps can help developers write better code, push to production faster, and be agile in their iterations and respond to the needs of both external as well as internal customers quicker.

I have a friend who is a sergeant in the LAPD. She was asking me a question and followed it up with something about trying to not seem stalkerish, and I made a joke about "isn't that what NCIC (National Crime Information Computer) is for?"

She comes back a few minutes later and tells me that she finds much more information on the internet than she could ever find through NCIC.

My friend (who is an ER Doctor) had a medical emergency (man had a stroke) on her flight from Pittsburg to Miami when she came to visit my family a few months ago. She actually told me afterwards that she thought that the bag was extremely well stocked and that she had the ability to perform whatever she needed. They used the Airphone to validate her medical license, gave her the med bag, and told her that if she needed anything to drink, to just call.

I've had similar experiences on US Airways (Pre-American); I'm a paramedic and someone had an MI -- they airphoned me to a doctor on the ground and he and I diagnosed the patient together, and he gave me orders to push drugs.

On my friend's flight, the Flight Attendant gave her many many small bottles of bourbon to say "Thank you" and American Airlines gave her 25,000 bonus miles as a "thanks," and they upgraded me to first class for my trip home as a way to say thanks for me.

I'm a HUGE fan of using softcover.io to build documentation for runbooks and other technical documentation. You can write the text in Markdown (with some LaTeX and other goodies), and it automatically converts it to both HTML as well as epub, mobi, pdf. I like using it because you can make mobile documentation that can be pushed out to Mobile devices (and optionally managed by Apple's tools) so your on call resource has the ability to pull up the documentation about the alert that they are receiving on their mobile device so they know how to remediate/mitigate that issue.

The ownership stake in Atlas with Amazon is interesting to me.

Amazon was contracting with Air Transport Services Group (Airborne Express/DHL US, for those keeping track at home) for flights into and out of Wilmington for an air sort program. Amazon must have crunched the numbers on what they were paying to FedEx and UPS and realized that they could lease planes for what they were paying for someone else to do the deliveries...

40 Aircraft pushing packages from one corner of the globe to another? This means that they can cut their logistics costs (or, alternatively, move them in house from an external vendor, giving them more control) and be able to fine-tune delivery.

There was a DA who did this in California when he was running for re-election in the early 2000's -- no more plea bargains. What happened is that the ADA's workload tripled, they ran out of courtrooms (and had to get courtrooms in other counties to fill the backlog), and people were released because of their right to have a speedy trial were being infringed.

While the wheels of Justice turn slowly, plea agreements are the oil that keeps the wheels turning at all. Think about it -- if you're speeding, and you know you're speeding, do you really want to take time from a Judge and a Trooper to have them present evidence to know that you're speeding? Even more so, if the trooper wrote your ticket so you don't get any points -- just a fine? Better yet...do you want someone to sit in jail if they're innocent because he can't afford his bail to sit longer because of all of the backlog?

What's to stop the factory to cut you out and just sell on Amazon?

That's why many folks use freight forwarders who break out, wrap, label, and send the items to Amazon.

This is a copy of the contract that the OHP with ERAD Group:

http://oklahomawatch.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2016/06/E...

Highlights:

* ERAD is taking 7.7% of all funds seized.

* Anywhere between 9.95 and 14.95 per each virtual terminal used to scan for the funds.

* $1000-ish per physical terminal used.

Upcoming Games, player stats, feeds of player photos.

Ford tried to do the "No inventory" dealerships in the late 80's and it was a spectacular failure. While buying a vehicle isn't the same as Amazon's same day delivery, do you really want to be the person who just told someone who dropped 80K+ on a vehicle that they won't be able to get it until it's driven off the line?

Cadillac has an image and an innovation problem. Have you driven a Cadillac recently? The entertainment system is buggy if you have an iphone -- you'll be driving down the road listening to something on the satellite radio and it'll just switch over to your iPhone...even though there's nothing playing on your iPhone. Disable everything's microphone access...and it's still randomly connecting to your iPhone. GM's blaming Apple...Apple's blaming GM...who cares, just fix the damn thing. You're paying a premium for features that should just seem "standard" if you're buying a luxury vehicle (Heated/Cooled seats are a 3K upcharge, you can get them standard on the Kia Forte EX). Unfortunately, the In-Car Entertainment has been the same for the last three years.

I realize that GM is trying to innovate and do things outside the box, but, I really think that they should step outside the comfortable world of badge engineering and try to create something that is out of the box...and unique to the brand.

ESPN had an API for a while, but, it didn't provide scores (they were getting the scores from a third party).

I've been looking for something like this for one of my personal projects, but, haven't really had the time to spend on it recently.

My issues with Instacart is that not every shopper knows how to shop for produce.

I order avocados from instacart: They're all black on the inside when I cut into them.

I order specialty chips or cheeses? They're marked as "Item out of stock," but when I run to the same grocery store that they shopped at after my delivery it's right there in plain sight to me.

I order deli meat from Instacart? They ignore my comments about how I would like it to be sliced and deliver it to me shredded.

Outside of that? I love instacart -- as long as they're packaged goods (pick and ship) and they're not hot deli items or cold/frozen items (I've had drivers put yogurt in the same bag as a lot of frozen veggies and peas and stuff that shouldn't have been frozen was frozen.)

It's not a bad "base" bourbon, and for the longest time, it was distilled and aged at Four Roses. It also pairs really well with citrus (for use in an old fashioned).

The pricing of Bulleit is sometimes weird: I was in Vegas last year and a 750 of Bulleit was $60, but, a 750 of Woodford Reserve was $35.

I like Odoo, but, there doesn't seem to be enough glue in the Open Source release to do things like billing for services in a sane and coherent manner.

The UI for LedgerSMB is just horrible. I don't think it's really been updated since 1999.

I really haven't messed with ERPNext, mainly because I can't get it to install correctly.

It's my opinion that there really are not a lot of good, truly open source ERP/Accounting systems for businesses out there.

If you look at past cases where the All Writs Act has been invoked, the Courts have rejected this type of government conscription.

Effectively, the government is forcing Apple to take receipt of a device that it does not own or posses, then perform potentially destructive services on a device, and then perform services that could potentially require Apple to testify at a trial under the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment.

I really think that Apple's in the clear here, and the AUSA's in the case are pulling all the stops to get Apple ordered to break the encryption.

That's kind of interesting for me to hear.

The last few times that I've rented an Uber, the driver (I usually use the "black car" option) usually shows up in a rented National/Enterprise vehicle (if you rent enough vehicles in a year you can tell the differences between the three big rental companies).

The plates/vehicle description tend to match what arrives for me (e.g., Uber tells me that I'm expecting a Black 300, I get a Black 300); admittedly, I do not know what happens on the back end to add a vehicle (if it's Uber or if it's the driver), but, it seems to me that this is already happening in some areas.