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Sales operations discussions. Strange desire to sing complete lyrics to "Do The Bartman" at the top of my voice. Disruption!

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@frogcroakley German bread containing smaller recursive German bread, etc: Mandelbrot

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Feel very solid about my decision to get a new Fitbit. Already confirming some lifestyle suspicions. Recommended.

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@hondanhon If only the Martians had used a language with buffer overflow protection amirite

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Some genius graph manipulation (for actual evil). http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/3077619.html

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I'm happy. I think we're living in a golden age. Still so much to fix, but we get to connect people.

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Being constantly angry implies powerlessness. Luckily, as a developer, you get to make stuff better.

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I'm ecstatic that the Guardian and the Washington Post won the Pulitzer for their Snowden coverage. Amazing. http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2014-Public-Service

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@tef I'm not sure, hence the question. Bigger Q is: how do we protect users?

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Completely wide awake at 1am. Thanks, timezones (and Whataburger). This hotel room has two TVs; considering streaming Dark Side of the Moon through one, and Wizard of Oz through the other.

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I have a very nice hotel room in Austin. Also, Whataburger.

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Turbulence reports

thumb.jpgI'm a nervous flyer. I've been trying to get better over the years, and I'd never let it stop me from actually going anywhere, but I jump at turbulence, and I certainly can't ever get relaxed enough to do anything like sleep. I avoid red eye flights if at all possible, and try to sit over the wing.

Something that's helped is the US government's Aviation Weather Center, and sites that use derivative maps, like Turbulence Forecast. When I'm not surprised by turbulence - I know it's going to show up during part of the flight path - I'm much less nervous about it. The same goes for in-flight interactive maps; if I know I'm flying over a mountain range, for example, I know there will be updrafts which might cause some choppiness as the air warms and cools.

Now that so many of us are connected to each other, the web has the potential to do that for our lives. Job applicants can get turbulence reports on sites like Glassdoor. Entrepreneurs can get turbulence reports on sites like Quora and The Funded. Women can avoid predatory men on dating sites using apps like Lulu.

Just as I don't know which pilots for which airlines submitted turbulence reports, the reviews on all of these sites are anonymous. However, airlines have the benefit of being regulated and tracked; we know that each turbulence report is almost certainly real. That's not necessarily true with anonymous feedback sites. The potential for harm on all of the above is greater, although Quora is very well-moderated. Yet at the same time, a "real names" policy is not sensible. Imagine if all whistleblowers had to use their real identity. For lots of reasons, including safety and user comfort, I am very much against "real names" policies in most online spaces.

Correspondingly, the challenge is to establish trustworthiness in anonymous communications, preferably with a cloak of plausible deniability. You should be able to feel free to leave a comment about a person or organization without leaving your identity with anyone, and we (as readers) should be able to trust that information. If someone points a finger at you for making the post, you should be able to plausibly say that it wasn't you, to avoid recriminations. Finally, if I'm the subject of the post and someone is attempting to smear me with false information, I should be able to take action to remove the comment, and have protection against denial of reputation attacks, where distributed mobs of people endlessly post false information. There are, to be sure, ethical problems with many of these services as they stand; effective reliability, anonymity and redress would mitigate them.

These are hard problems to solve. Full transparency does not cover everyone; sometimes deliberate opacity can be protective. This touches identity, network security, trust metrics and social algorithms - and, of course, would need to be wrapped up in an easy-to-use interface to be useful.

All of us are, one way or another, sitting at the gate, wondering if our journey is going to be bumpy. Hopefully, we can help each other out.

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That the Democrats have the reputation for being big spenders still surprises me. http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/04/surprise-obama-might-just-leave-office-with-budget-surplus/

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My first act when I get back from Texas will be to clean up the mess I made packing for Texas.

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Filed a tax extension for the first time ever. I'm not proud of it, but I want to get them done right.

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After a week of corporate conference, a day far out of signal range was exactly what I needed.

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The things that matter are bigger than any of us.

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Of *course* older versions of Internet Explorer have trouble downloading large files.

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@haverholm PS: any comments / feedback / "applause" you'd be willing to share would be really appreciated: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/submissions/idno-a-collective-storytelling-platform-tha...

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Not at all keen on using cloud storage with actual war criminals on its board. A good prod to move away from Dropbox.

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You need to change your Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Soundcloud, TurboTax .. hell, all your passwords. http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/

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Does anyone happen to have a list of IP ranges for S3? My searching is drawing a blank.

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@erinjo I like the interfaces; hate curated "digest" news. How do they know what I want to read?

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Really hate NYT Now style apps. Don't decide what I need to know for me. That way lies homogeneity.

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Sincerely wish George W Bush had become a performance artist rather than a painter.

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