matasar

I helped make Scatterdot, and would be happy to chat about some of the things we talk about here. We thought this might be a helpful thing for Slack app authors.

A funny thing about the family pack is that for at least one version of OS X, the only differences between the family pack and the single user version were a sticker that said "Family pack" on the front, and the price. The contents of the box were identical.

I think of this as a Kickstarter to pay for a year's worth of comics. These guys keep a schedule of three comics a week, and they're offering to do that in a novel way. They also have some stretch goals as well of things they'll do instead of dealing with advertisers.

In some states in the US, it's illegal to ask for id for a credit card purchase. In all states, the credit card companies don't like it. Here's a good set of google answers about the issue:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=71792

This is all to say, credit card processing is incredibly complicated. Here's another quote, directly from the federal government [1]:

"MasterCard wants to hear about merchants who break their rules. Send the name and address and an account of what happened to MasterCard International, c/o Radio City Station, P. O. Box 1288, New York, NY 10101. The merchant's bank will get a stiff letter, ordering it to investigate and bring the offending store into line - or pay a $2,000 fine.

Visa enforces the same rules as MasterCard. "When we hear about a violation, we ask the bank that signed the merchant to get together with the merchant and see that the practice is stopped," Visa representative states. To report a merchant, send a letter to the bank that issued your Visa card.

American Express also prohibits merchants from asking for IDs. "All a merchant is supposed to do is take an imprint, make sure the signature matches and swipe the card through the terminal, to get authorization."

[1] http://www.in.gov/dfi/2554.htm

You may run afoul of the credit card companies if you try to verify ID on purchase.

re: 1 - For user shared links, Facebook redirects to anonymize the referring profile. I suspect they forgot to do the same for ads, and it was an honest if frustrating mistake.

Concierge is the software that they use to keep track of support appointments, not an individual person.

Maybe investors could pool resources to start their own rating agency that would be answerable to them, and publish ratings for everyone to use? There has to be a better system.

It seems to me that rating agencies should be paid by the institutional investors that buy the bonds, not the banks trying to sell them. That might help the incentives line up better.

Am I crazy? Nobody suggests this, and I think I'm missing something crucial here.

Setting aside the question of whether they needed a bailout, which I'm not qualified to answer, Goldman Sachs did receive federal assistance. The best link I can find is a reference to them paying it back:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmV...

I think the team is by far more important than the two sentence summary of the idea, so in that sense it's too early to judge.

I believe Mozilla distributes Flash as a plugin in the Firefox download. If they don't, they certainly make special allowances to make Flash easier to download and install than other plugins.

I assume Firefox has a public API for video codecs, and they choose to distribute codecs or not. So I don't see the difference, really.

While it's nice to build a cool narrative around Steve Jobs and a long time "tragic flaw," this doesn't hold up. Steve Jobs was not at Apple when they sued Microsoft. It was filed in 1988[1], and Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985 [2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso.... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

I vastly prefer being able to redownload software that I've paid for, but some people may prefer physical copies.

Getting a complete list is very hard due to the nature of zip codes, but the wikipedia article I linked to has an incomplete and unordered list.

This is going to be wrong for some of your users, because some ZIP codes cross state boundaries. So you'd need to let them correct the guess in that case. It is unusual for one zip code to be in two states, but it does happen. [1]

It's also going to be wrong for military addresses, as I understand it. [2]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code#By_geography

[2]: http://www.usps.com/supportingourtroops/addressingtips.htm

That's not true. Civil cases can have a jury.

He's referring to Balkanization:

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

There are many web browsers and email clients available in the app store today, so I'm not sure where you got the idea that Apple blocks them. This doesn't solve the background apps problem, but there are also many apps that play media.

I assume it's a pun on paper size.

Are his books as overwritten as this review? Honest question, as I found the review pretty leaden, but I'm always looking for interesting sci-fi.

The Terminator, Terminator 2 and Aliens are his best in my opinion. The Abyss is also quite good but not as much of an action movie.

I wonder if there's some correlation/causation confusion in stories like this. Do the special interests donate to sympathetic candidates, or do the donations influence the candidates unduly? I always thought it was some combination of both, but the exact combination is a mystery to me.

For me the only really dangerous one is Civ IV, which I play until bedtime whenever I start a game, whenever I start a game. Thankfully I have enough willpower to avoid starting a game most days.

Civ IV is an incredibly well made game, just amazing.

This is how it used to work, and what the policy change is about.