drop burritos, not bombs

Ars Technica was able to confirm the theft of 46,703 BTC, as individual units of Bitcoin are known, worth about $228,845 in US currency based on current exchange rates. More than 43,000 of the stolen BTC belonged to a Bitcoin trading platform known as Bitcoinica, the company's CEO and lead developer, Zhou Tong, told Ars. Another 3,094 BTC were lifted from the virtual purse of Marek Palatinus, a freelance programmer from the Czech Republic. He said in an interview that a separate Bitcoin user he's been in contact with lost 50 BTC to the same attackers. And Gavin Andresen, the lead Bitcoin programmer, told Ars he lost all 5 BTC he had stored in one online account.

There is almost no good reason to do this except that its the coolest thing ever.

This app was hacked together with python, php, google fusion tables, javascript, html/css, and a humble batch script. Here's how we did it:

1. We dug around in the Plow Tracker code and stumbled into the data feed of GPS plow locations. We pulled these dots.

2. In order to figure out which streets had been cleared, we needed to turn these dots into plow paths. Lukas Kabrt's MatchGPX2OSM did the trick. It takes a series of GPS locations and snaps them to the street grid in order to calculate the most likely path taken by the vehicle. The street grid itself was provided by the thousands of unsung heroes at OpenStreetMap.

3. We then wrote a script to import this data into Google Fusion Tables, so we could display it using Derek Eder's searchable map template. Finally, we styled the template and flipped the switch.

We'll post the code on Github later. It will be embarrassing.

Racing against the upcoming storm, these guys hacked a useful snowplow tracker. It's not perfect, but it's "done".

the way my next home will be built!

The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we've sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

Following an experiment first validated by Radiohead with the release of In Rainbows in 2007, Louis CK shows that everyone (except the middleman) can win.

Yep

all I need to do is to put this on a skateboard

In early June this year Steve Jobs took the stage at the World Wide Developers Conference, talked about the runaway success of the iPad, said that iOS5 was ‘cutting the cord’ and started to talk about in the birth of the post-PC era.

Read the rest of the my post here.... http://www.vibes.com/mobile_marketing_company/blog/?p=325

Let’s obsess about what is best for the end user. We often make product decisions based on strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice — the end user doesn’t care. We simply have to admit that Apple is nailing this and it is one of the reasons they have people lining up overnight at stores around the world, and products sold out for months. These people aren’t hypnotized zombies, they simply love beautifully designed products that are user centric and work how they are supposed to work. Android has a major weakness — it will always lack the simplicity and elegance that comes with end-to-end device software, middleware and hardware control. We really have a great opportunity to build something new and “uniquely BlackBerry” with the QNX platform.

From the open letter of a RIM executive to his bosses

If you don't renew the yearly $25 subscription, your iCloud store goes away. iTunes purchases will still be available to all devices, and anything that you have downloaded from iCloud to you devices you keep. This includes iTunes Plus versions you have chosen to replace older, lower quality rips in your main iTunes library. Apple explained that replacing those lower-quality rips is optional.

The biggest question amongst my tech obsessed friends is "What happens if you stop paying for iTunes Match". This is what I suspected (hoped really) the answer might be.
The above quote show what i think is a very interesting loophole that, uncommonly, benefits end-users AND Apple.
In short, you can pay for Match, use it for a year and then quit and have ALL of your music 'upgraded' and on your machine(s). This is truly great for the consumer and makes it easy to 'quit' the cloud if you want to without losing any part of your collection.
How this is good for Apple is that even if you quit iCloud you get all the features of it for music you purchase from Apple. So you could pay for the year, quit, and just keep buying everything from iTunes. If you want to keep buying from Amazon (or pirating) and have the benefits of iCloud, then you'll pay the $24.99. Which, I have to say, is dirt cheap considering i was very worried they would come out with a per song license cost.

Hey Everyone - don't forget that SkyNet JUST went self-aware and turned on it creators.