I think the difference is sales tax was paid when the toys were purchased. I don't think Regretsy was claimin to add value. They were just organizing a donation of toys. It's just like a bunch of friends getting together, all giving two dollars to one person who goes to target, buys a bunch of toys and then gives them to needy kids. I don't see how the law is broken in that situation. All taxes were paid.
The most damning evidence against PP in my opinion is that they specifically stated (accordion to the author) that the same scheme was acceptable when raising money for a sick cat but not for needy kids. Unless the Regretsy folks were purchasing toys with a business account and skipping sales tax I don't understand the logic. The PP reps subsequent attitude seals the deal: eff PayPal. If he isn't authorized I dole out financial or legal advice regarding the use of the donation button or wrt raising money for needy kids he should just say that instead of being an obstinate jerk.
tldr: tax presumably was paid, PayPal rep is a scumbag, screw PayPal.
True, but people tend to get a little irritated when the price is jacked up by what amounts to a government-sanctioned cartel. "Voting with your money" has little to no effect.
Being such a skilled programmer, one would think he could get a loan for a measly 10k and be able to easily pay it back with the kind of salaries we're paid these days...
That's a bit of a problem my friend. I have RSD in my hands, it's going to be 4 - 6 months before I can even begin to think about typing normally again. And probably a good three months after that to get my skill levels back up.
Has any of you know, if you've been away from programming for a long time, like over a year, and go back to it, it could take you quite a while to get your skills back up. And the older you are, the longer it takes.
Just the other day I needed to write a Python program that would go through my PayPal mail, and sum up the total amount of donations I got. It took me more than a day to write it. I cannot believe how rusty I am. I'm having to friggin look up everything.
But I really like programming. I miss it so much. But right now, they also need to focus on writing the book. Thank goodness for such capability programs as MacSpeech dictate. I'm impressed by its accuracy, but sometimes very annoyed when I have to use words that are not in its dictionary, and have to type them out, with my thumbs. When I pressed a finger to keyboard right now, it's excruciating pain. Not so much today, because I had the stellar shots Today. everyone in my postings was done using MacSpeech Dictate, it may have screwed up in places, but I'm too lazy to fix them. Enough said! I'm going to crash, I spent three hours on this forum, answering questions, and hopefully making some clarifications.
At some level I'm sure they are reading them, but it gives everyone involved in your communication a central place to track your issue. Always, always, always file a radar and let your DTS/WWDR rep know the bug number.
How does a machine taking advantage of small arbitrage opportunities that last fractions of a second represent an "investors assessment of economic conditions"?
That was easily the most misinformed article I have ever read on tc. I'm not even sure where to begin. About the only thing that is right is that services will be moving to the application layer in the long run because there are benefits the abstracting the network. But the idea that the people providing the data link upon which every service you care about depends on are becoming irrelevant is so absurd it makes me laugh. Where would apple and google be and where are they going without them?
They're "irrelevant" if people can easily switch to a similarly-priced competitor and have everything keep on working as it did before. Once the network is abstracted, the companies providing that network become interchangeable, and therefore about as relevant as the company that picks up your garbage each week.
The key word there is if (in the first sentence). I doubt it.
Telcos/ISPs are headed the way of utility companies. They are natural oligopolies because the barrier to entry is too huge for there to be many competitors and it's in everyone's interest to have them functioning well and at least partially profitable, so don't be surprised if they get subsidized or even nationalized.
The companies that pick up one's garbage happen to be cities in most cases. So as stated above, here you might even be right--if by irrelevant you mean, that we take them for granted yet are still extremely important (eg, without electricity we would have little, without garbage services we would die sooner, etc...)
You shouldn't be. It's quite normal. If someone recorded and then transcribed normal conversation of your's (or anyone else's), you'd be appalled at it. I know I was when mine was recorded!
Someone once complimented Cary Grant by saying he wished he could be as witty and suave as Cary was on screen. Cary replied that he wished he could be, too.
There's a good reason why politicians carefully script and rehearse their remarks in advance, even the supposedly 'extemporaneous' ones.
Well compare it to the utterances from the "other Steve" (Jobs) who takes brevity to the point of terseness. Compare, for example his D8 interview with, well, anyone else's.
Ballmer is a disaster for Microsoft and living proof of why you should have a product guy (not a business wonk) in charge of a technology company.
[On competing with Google]
“We want to make better products then them. What I love about the marketplace is that we do our products, we tell people about them, and if they like them, we get to come to work tomorrow. It's not like that in enterprise... the people who make those decisions are sometimes confused.”
“We never saw ourselves in a platform war with MSFT, and maybe that's why we lost.”
[On tablets replacing laptops]
“I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”
Did Jobs prepare those statements? Probably. Caching is the secret to articulacy. I think the human brain is just too damn slow to come up with really good things to say on the fly. You have to know about it, think about it, talk about it. Again and again. You have to know what people will ask you.
I think that even if you are a bad public speaker you can compensate with good preparation. You can fine tune and cache your answers. It’s hard work but it pays off.
I also think it's because Steve Jobs thinks about that kind of stuff all the time. It's something he's genuinely interested in.
If you ask me a difficult and deep question about a topic I think about all the time, I'll probably come up with a nice and concise answer.
I really think a good CEO is someone envisioning the future all the time. That's what makes the difference. Once you know where you should go, execution comes naturally.
Steve Jobs is both a salesman and CEO. He needs to think so much about what the company does that the answers come easy, he also is very curious and had read a lot.
I thought I was a bad writer(in other language, not English) until one day I won a contest,over 400people without effort, I just loved the topic so much words flew as a torrent, faster that I could write it down.
He(Steve) loves to be on the spotlight, and show them how fantastic is what they have done.
This is not really the same thing. Ballmer was answering a question from someone in the audience. The context and amount of preparation is certainly different. You would think he has some good clear prepared statements on a subject like the iPad and Microsoft's tablet offerings.
Agreed--these guys have been around for quite some time. I do think they are really just starting to take off though. I just got my reader about 3 weeks ago (It had been on order for almost 3 months).
i don't think they started actually shipping large quantities of readers until recently, though.
In any case, if you're freelancing and want to accept card payments, it's pretty good. I'd been doing a project and had been using an authorize.net processor, but square is cuter and, more importantly, has much lower processor fees than most other places with not even half the overhead (i.e. crazy account setup/maintenance fees/etc).
I noticed problems with their card reader when using with an ipod touch, but on the iphone, it's been pretty good.
In the time it took to act smart you could have just read the code and seen that his intuition was mostly right. The code is extremely simple. It reads like a half day project just for fun that happened to get picked up on HN. It doesn't seem to be at all related to his line of study either.
For you interest and information, he has a defined set of bounding boxes in the world for each of the user pickable regions. He generates random lat lons until one lands in an enabled region's bounding box and then makes a request for street view data to google. If google returns a 200 he sets the street view display to the lat Lon and otherwise tries to find another lat Lon. If he ever gets a 500 from
Google he quits.
I wasn't trying to figure out how it was done, I was trying to figure out how to do it fast (irrespective of the present implementation), responding to the question:
"I wonder if there's a faster way to do that with their API?"
I did check the source code. The most time is spent doing dozens to hundreds requests to Google API.
If instead of this you generated random locations just from "blue" regions of StreetView coverage, user experience would be better.
The simplest way how to do it would be to fetch StreetView coverage overlay PNG and use canvas getImageData to check pixel values for random locations, thus moving costly roundtrip validity query mostly to the browser.
This is not something terribly difficult and perfectly suitable for half day fun project.
There are ways how to get around cross-domain security restrictions. Long ago, I have done it myself by a simple server-side proxy here (few lines of PHP):
About Globe Genie optimization. In fact, I implemented it, sent a patch to the author and it's already live there (check the source code). It cuts cross-network locations validity lookups by about 60%.
Here I didn't do proxy, just fetched a complete set of overlay tiles once and stitched them together with a Python script:
It's just a static prebaked lookup map (served from the same domain), though if you really want to have it up-to-date, you could hook up Python script to cron.
All this took few hours (Sunday evening hacking) and was quite fun to do.
The most damning evidence against PP in my opinion is that they specifically stated (accordion to the author) that the same scheme was acceptable when raising money for a sick cat but not for needy kids. Unless the Regretsy folks were purchasing toys with a business account and skipping sales tax I don't understand the logic. The PP reps subsequent attitude seals the deal: eff PayPal. If he isn't authorized I dole out financial or legal advice regarding the use of the donation button or wrt raising money for needy kids he should just say that instead of being an obstinate jerk.
tldr: tax presumably was paid, PayPal rep is a scumbag, screw PayPal.