rustyconover

"A reputation based economy is what we're moving towards", we should be resistant to that. I think it would be fair to say a "reputation based economy" is a synonym for crony capitalism -- I'll only do business with you if I know you.

This is a socially unfair economy at best, and at worst will generate inequality as social cliques will continue to preserve and enrich themselves and "the people they know". If we're going to move more toward social and economic fairness this isn't the direction to go.

I'm comfortable knowing that Whole Foods takes dollars rather than Klout points or retweets. That way anyone who can make a dollar can eat and not worry about starving because they failed to impress some arbiter of social currency. Reputations aren't fungible hence they are flawed as a just economic currency.

I wonder if it is cash only. Credit card transactions would also be revealing to interested parties. If there ever was a time for the "Company" to pick up the tab, this would be one just to prevent the data leak to the outside world.

This is a good guide to some of the ways that evercookie uses to live on even after you've cleared cookies:

https://github.com/samyk/evercookie

Its really simple technology...

1. Brighter projectors.

2. The common technique called projector stacking. You'll see it in large outdoor events and more sophisticated projected mapped productions such as in theaters and fashion shows.

These stacks (which may not only be vertical in nature) automatically can adjust the projection for the offset of each projector so that everything lines up at the destination.

This is pretty neat from a technical standpoint. I've used MadMapper before and it was kind of a pain to setup to use to do projection mapping.

First you had to hand map each section of the object you're mapping the texture onto. This involved having the projector project a pattern and you'd move and deform various mapping polygons (using a mouse) until you didn't have any bleed or holes in the projection. If someone moved (or more likely accidentally bumped) the projector or the target object the polygons had to be manually adjusted. It seems these guys have automated the process of mapping the object in physical space, against a pre computed model. They had some bleed above the top of the chair in their demo video so its not yet perfect.

If you're Ikea and can set this up in the store, for buying a couch, and just have people click their fabric combination they want to see. I see this being very useful because they can't show every fabric. Granted Ikea's are huge to accommodate lots of floor models, but this would still be a draw.

If Ikea had a whole bedroom or living room with projectors all around, you could try out an entire decorating scheme without having to pull everything together. I'd take the ferry from Wall Street to Red Hook just to play with it for a bit.

So rock on VizeraLabs, and start talking to Ikea and BoConcept.

Actually, while you can't short SF medallions, I do know that can short a company that primarily finances NYC medallions.

Look at the symbol TAXI.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=taxi

From their profile:

Medallion Financial Corp., through its subsidiaries, operates as a specialty finance company in the United States. The company is engaged in originating, acquiring, and servicing loans that finance taxicab medallions and various types of commercial businesses.

So while it was probably hard for you to short subprime mortgages directly in 2008/9, this is the same type of thesis. Short the company that has made loans on an asset that is quite likely going to depreciate in value over time. Just like you could short the banks that made the bad home loans. Given a long enough time horizon, it seems that you'll do well. But check with your own financial advisor.

The only reliable way I've found for Android to be supported for streaming is using RTSP. Typically, you'd push a RTMP stream to a CDN that will transcode it to RTSP. Scale Engine is a good CDN that offers this service via Wowza.

With RTSP you lose adaptive bitrate streaming, you have to pick a bit rate and stick with it. But with newer version of Android HLS is apparently working better but caveat emptor, Android streaming is hard to make work well on every device.

It doesn't appear who ever Y! is using for the streaming has a RTSP setup.

It's not quite time to go into full Dustin-Hoffman-killer-virus-movie paranoia yet, but the it seems the inability to safely process the biohazards, bodies and healthcare paraphernalia is a real problem. Even if you're quarantined, someone eventually has to cleanup the mess you leave behind and its becoming tricker to do.

Ebola is a incurable and statistically fatal disease, but it is being made worse by people wanting to see their families and friends before their will likely expire. This behavior places infected persons in communities and situations where proper care and quarantine may not be available therefore the disease has spread. People acting in their own self interest when confronting their mortality is nothing new. We'd likely all do the same.

Maybe we need to start treating this outbreak we fight wildfires. Start digging a proverbial fire line. Setting broad travel restrictions and geographical quarantines and hope that the virus fades away over time. Of course this is cruel and inhumane to people with the disease not to mention impractical to implement physically over such a wide area because people inside any area would rush out possibly taking the virus with them.

I think we should all look at the example of Mohammad Ali's appeals to the Supreme Court regarding charges of dodging the draft. In a documentary about Ali, I recall the one of the supreme court justice's clerks going back through the record, and it turned out the Ali's beliefs (being a member of the Nation of Islam) did qualify him as a conscious objector much like the Seventh Day Adventists. Before this point the courts has ruled the N.o.I. didn't deserve the same treatment for its members. Ruling for Ali posed a large problem for the Supreme Court, if they ruled in a way that set a large precedent that many people could claim they were objectors the country would have huge problems feeding the established "war machine" (the draft). So the justices went back through the record and found a technicality, as such they found a way Ali wouldn't be found guilty of dodging the draft due to a procedural error. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_v._United_States for all the details.

I expect if the court comes to review the facts in this matter they will either be impeded in succeeding due to national security concerns or find a way to decide for the plaintiffs in the smallest possible way to not upset the established order. Very rarely are judicial decisions groundbreaking in precedent. They are more like the tree trimmers of legislation and executive privilege, they typically only trim branches not cut down entire trunks as this ruling would possibly do for Internet surveillance.

So this the world we live in, encrypt your life.

It's getting closer and closer to 2038, the 32-bit time_t overflow... I'd figure by now more bugs would be found with that event than Y2K bugs 14.5 years after the fact.

Your mindset for all of those questions is mistaken. You're thinking that we all live in vast urban sprawl. A lot of us don't live there. Come see what life is like in a functioning city with good planning and density, like Manhattan.

1. Take your kids to school on a bike?

If you're living in a dense metro area, your school in within walking distance. So yes. You could bike there, but more likely you'll walk with them. If they go to a further away school, they'll take the subway or a bus.

2. Ride in a business suit?

Yes, I see it all the time with Citibikes. Even on Wall Street.

3. Go to Ikea or Costco?

Sure you'll go there, but you'll have your items delivered like any sane person who doesn't live in BFE.

4. Going to ride in from the suburbs?

People do it every day. You'd be surprised how many showers and locker rooms are right next to corporate bike rooms.

Just because you can't imagine something doesn't mean it isn't normal in another part of the country.

I have the same thoughts about tomatoes. Tomatoes today have no flavor compared to what I remembered. It could be the flavor notes of childhood-backyard-summertime nostalgia, New Jersey terrior, and simply explained by the genetic modification such that tomatoes could be mechanically harvested weeks before they're ripe in the field. I'm a tomato luddite.

The same things could be argued as for why, why C didn't win, or C++ didn't win, or even really PASCAL/Smalltalk/Lisp didn't win. "Winning" is temporary and not the end goal of any language and is best left to be declared by Charlie Sheen like pundits trying to demonstrate their language bigotry.

Is Perl the first tool that some of us think of when solving a problem? It might not be for you but it is frequently for me. Ruby might be your first choice, and really that's fine.

You're not a lesser or better programmer than anyone else if you choose something besides Perl either. Honestly, if you can solve the problems that you need to solve and you can work with your team, that's the only thing that matters. Not that you're using some language that isn't "winning".

As for Perl not having support for recent things like Stripe, that's just silly to argue (the author really should have searched the CPAN). Perl has many new modules, Dancer, Catalyst, Moose, Plack, Starman, Net::Stripe (maintained by me), and full support of AWS's offerings. And, yes modules written in 1999 do get used today, just look at all of LWP.

"Winning" isn't everything. Admittedly, Perl 6 isn't out or even moving forward visibly but doesn't mean that the language is irrelevant. Just watch https://metacpan.org/recent to see the pulse of the community and the new modules released and updated daily.

I'm shocked, shocked to find that wiretapping is going on in here! -- said no-one ever without irony after Snowden's leaks.

My default assumption is now everything with tapped, everything is monitored and recorded and while cryptography can help it is increasingly hard to trust both the implementation and correct use by both parties. The further this belief and approach spreads, the sooner we'll see constructive steps towards restoring privacy, security and trust in communications.

Determine the demand for your product and price your solution right below the point where people will think you're charging too much, such that they would continue to use the old way of doing things.

The finding of that price is hard. So try to find it pragmatically. Ask questions like how much do you pay your employees to do this task? How many employees do this task, what is their hourly cost? How much time will the new software/website save those employees? How will revenue or profits be increased?

Your price should be what the market is willing to pay, not what you think your software is worth or how long it will take you to build the solution. If you're going to price the solution as a service with recurring revenue, make sure you can continually justify your value to your customers on an ongoing basis. If you want to build this solution as a one time custom project, price it accordingly to the value delivered, the cost of your time, your opportunity costs, and establish a rate for ongoing care and feeding of the code base before agreeing to build the solution.

It would be interesting to compare these benchmarks against the performance of Amazon's Redshift.

If the benchmark can be run without changes on Redshift would be my first question. There are some interesting differences that Redshift has rather than just being a columnar PostgreSQL protocol-speaking database. But if its possible, I'd be very interested to see the results.

Actually yes there is data.

A cursory reading of the literature would suggest that American Lung Association, Natural Resource Defense Counsel, and Physicians for Social Responsibility all concurred that coal burning does impact our respiratory system.

See: http://www.lung.org/assets/documents/healthy-air/toxic-air-r...

And:

http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/coals-assault-chapter-3.pdf

Your second argument is a bit like saying, well we have to get nicotine from somewhere. If not smoking, what else will people do to get their fix. Are we really ready to give up our nicotine habit?

A lot of people did give up smoking once they figured out it was killing them. If people realize the same thing about coal, I suspect there will be a much faster and stricter set of regulations coming into force.

As for the problem of where to get energy, natural gas is a more efficient and cleaner burning alternative that you didn't mention. Of course if that gas is delivered via fracking there are a whole lot of other problems with ground water pollution. So the energy mix needs to change and it needs to be found in a less impactful fashion.

All of our lungs should breathe a collective sigh of relief for not having to deal with so many particulates from coal burning after these rules go into force. Not to mention saving our water from pollution of coal ash.

It will be pleasant to have less of these types of plants in operation:

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

And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.

Just think of the legal licensing concerns this database would entail. GNU/BSD/ASPL/MPL/whatever else code all living together, and trying to assemble it into a reasonable harmony would be almost as complex as actually compiling viable software.

Then we get into architectural details, like 32/64 bit, endianness, unicode flavor of the decade/ascii/ebcdic strings. Not to mention call by value, call by reference, calling across cross languages, reference counting, value boxing, garbage collection, thread-safety, pointer data alignment, struct packing, dynamic linking dependencies and symbol versioning.

I'm sure someone long ago wrote that we'd have replaceable car parts by now, so that one spark plug works in every car. And we'd just pick out an axel, suspension, steering wheel, paint color, transmission, starter motor, and wind shield wipers from a catalog and be able to build the car of our dreams just by pointing to its parts.

Are there really enough other places besides Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool's CAPS and StockTwits that publish people's recommendations in such volume that the number of recommendations would be large enough to be valuable outside of these already large established communities?

Or is this whole site's effort merely a feature that StockTwits and the other sites may add later on?