Be assured that the Amateur Radio community is quite active; especially regarding emergency communication and disaster preparedness.
Personally, I am active with the Connecticut Amateur Radio Emergency Services(CT-ARES), which is a local organization part of the larger national ARES organization(http://www.arrl.org/ares). Both of these offer training and procedures for facilitating communication during emergencies. CT-ARES works with the state of CT, in particular the Red Cross and many local town governments.
My activities include participating in regular 'nets' (http://www.ctares.org/networks.php) which are station tests which serve to prove that my radios work in various failure scenarios. Other members are even more active and practice their communication skills by offering supplemental communication for various events like marathons, fairs, etc.
It comes down to this; you don't know something works unless you regularly use it.
de K2CHA
PS: One should also test their backups by actually restoring from them...
Thanks for the assurance! My grandfather was a lifelong ham (KJ6NK) and I have many fond memories of sitting with him in his radio room while he participated in various nets or picked up QSOs.
I'm embarrassed to say that I have accidentally upvoted many times. This always happen on a particularly egregious comment that caused you to be distracted while clicking.
We should not remove down votes outright. I've seen a comment get downvoted to -4 because people didn't like the commentary, but then shoot back up to +10 when it was shown that they were correct after all.
…but if we remove downvotes, they will just stay at 1 instead of getting downvoted. Later they will still be able to shoot up. They will only get flagged if they are actively in the wrong spirit of the community. (spam, abuse, etc..)
The concept of "down" is conflated in people's minds in a way "up" isn't. It is used by people to mean either "I disagree" or "totally inappropriate". The first is not supposed to affect karma but the second is. If you simply replace "down" with "flag" it changes how people think about it.
As for accidental up-voting, moving the links so that there is separation would fix that.
Ah, ok, that makes a lot more sense. I was imagining removing comments that had been downvoted; not removing the link to downvote.
I generally agree with that, but it reminds me of another problem. The Karma number is now an ever-growing and meaningless figure. I think it should be harder to improve your karma as you get higher, and it should be easier to lose it. That it actually has a meaning.
ah.. Progressive taxation. You're a commie liberal aren't you. ;-) (don't worry, I am too)
Inflation may be a problem some day, but for now I think it's under control. The leader board is still at a human understandable scale: https://hackertimes.com/leaders
I feel similarly constrained when traveling and using my limited bandwidth 3G card. I did the following:
* Installed Squid locally - This has the benefit of allowing all your browsers to share one cache.
* Run AdBlock in Firefox - This causes advertisements to not download. The latest AdBlock in Chrome also stops the downloads (this wasn't always the case)
* Run Flashblock - Whitelist sites where you need to see flash.
* Rarely I'll disable images to view sites that I know are wasteful of bandwidth
* Use elinks, rather than lynx. elinks feels much more user friendly.
My current machine runs OSX and I used brew to install squid/elinks.
With the exception of Mint, the other examples were already quite successful before improving their domain name. Establishing causality in these cases is tenuous.
I seriously doubt Groupon.ThePoint.com would today be valued at over a billion dollars.
Dropbox went on a tear after their domain purchase, but I suppose it's possible they would have anyway (though I know from personal experience it was tricky to tell people about Dropbox and then try and remember the domain).
The left part of any graph that shows exponential growth looks linear. You could just as well argue that the growth has been exponential from the start.
Yes, I am very uncomfortable with the logic that since Wesabi didn't lay out their every effort to save the company, they must therefore not have put any thought into it. That's an unjustified leap; perhaps they didn't think it made for a very interesting read, if nothing else.
Oh, that sounds easy enough to do, we'll implement it right away (it should be live in a few minutes. Thanks for the tip, we didn't know about this duplicate content situation...
I think it is horrible. It shifts blame entirely onto the shop, doesn't explain how it went wrong, isn't clear about what what GroupOn is doing to help this business, and doesn't give any clue how they will avoid this situation in the future.
If I were a small business owner looking to use GroupOn I wouldn't feel comforted by this response in the least.
Its clear from the writing that she didn't know what she was getting into when she struck a deal, she set her deal at a price point that she could not possibly sustain (against the advice of her husband/business partner) and never once contacted Groupon for help with the situation.
What was Groupon supposed to do? Read her mind?
To be fair, I'm sure going forward Groupon can put up big bright red signs warning sellers that they will send them a ton of customers (the horror!) and that they'd better plan to appropriately deal with it or pick a price point that they can sustain, but the implication in your post that Groupon is somehow at fault for the situation makes steam come out my ears.
edit: looks like they already have something like this for sellers "We responded to those concerns by creating merchant preparation materials, including this video featuring a Groupon merchant who sold 10,000 bagel Groupons in a day:"
But it IS the shops fault. They entered into a bad deal that they apparently didn't have the fundamental business to handle. It was a terrible business move on the shop owners part, but I don't see a single thing that groupon did wrong in this case. It's not their job to audit your business and make sure you can handle it. They're in the business of brokering specials to large groups on behalf of the business. That's it. What further responsibility could they possibly have?
There is this old fashioned notion that sometimes you put the health and safety of others ahead of your need for immediate profits. That is, you don't sell someone something that they can't afford or that will cause them harm, especially if they there is a serious information asymmetry. If this seems quaint, antiquated and foolish to you; well that would be unfortunate. And it is unfortunate that our national character has changed to the point where we lionize people who became rich selling shady financial instruments, and pushing bad loans. _Caveat emptor_ is a good motto to practice, but taking advantage of those who are deaf to the caveats does not make you good, or right, and it is not a sustainable success.
> That is, you don't sell someone something that they can't afford or that will cause them harm
Seeing as she negotiated the terms down from Groupon taking 100% commission to 50%, I don't think the Groupon rep could have had an inkling that the woman was the type to be taken advantage of in the manner you're describing.
> And it is unfortunate that our national character has changed to the point where we lionize people who became rich selling shady financial instruments, and pushing bad loans.
Lets not stray into the melodramatic shall we? ... its a step too far to equate Groupon with people pushing bad loans. In 95% of cases or so, the businesses benefit greatly from doing business with Groupon ... they weren't uniformly getting screwed over like case of the punks selling Mortgage Backed Securities and Subprime Mortgage loans.
Sure, it is the shop owners fault, she admitted that.
Still, a partner that drives you out of business is not good to have. This is not good for groupon, they should have done things better, made sure that the owner could afford the deal for one. If margins are that thin, maybe they should be looking at not such a good deal, or no deal at all.
> This is not good for groupon, they should have done things better, made sure that the owner could afford the deal for one
What do you suggest they should have done differently?
Should they have filed her Taxes for her, balanced her books and determined her cashflow before turning her down.
Maybe then she would only have written a blog post about how the Groupon people were a bunch of elitist asshats that wouldn't do business with her instead?
> If margins are that thin, maybe they should be looking at not such a good deal, or no deal at all.
I'm sorry but this is arrant nonsense.
What is she .... five?
She's a business owner for goodness sake ... if she couldn't do the math and see that it wouldn't be beneficial to her business to do a deal with Groupon then how is it Groupon's fault?
Many people are casting Groupon as a "partner", not as an advertising vendor, which is all I think they really are.
A partner may understand my business and be in a position to help me improve it. A vendor is not. When I buy yellow pages ads, AdWords, or direct mail postcards, I don't expect my supplier to give me advice on my business. Why should Posie's expect Groupon to give them financial advice?
I'm not going to defend or support OpenSSL, but I find your tone extremely frustrating. For better or worse OpenSSL is an open library for you to use, and you should be thankful for that.
Also, insulting the people working on it is no way to improve the situation.
Have you ever actually talked with any of the OpenBSD developers?
Marco is a fantastic human being and absolutely hilarious. On top of all that, he's also an amazing programmer. Yes, I've met him in person, and we've traded emails and packages for years. In fact, there's a half a pallet of donated gear sitting behind me in need of being shipped out to him. --It should go without saying, but he's a friend and I have a strong bias.
Getting frustrated by widely deployed but poorly written software should be expected. Just voicing said frustrations solves nothing and wastes time, but voicing frustrations while providing an alternative is actually beneficial.
It wasn't intended as a comment on anyone's personal worth as a human being, or what they're like in person. I have spent a good amount of time following OpenBSD-related mailing lists, though, and I'd say "polite and collegial" is not the prevailing tone--- hyperbolically trashing other people's work and calling them stupid monkeys is more par for the course. Admittedly, they don't have a monopoly on that; plenty of GNU mailing lists are similar (esp. anything RMS or Ulrich Drepper regularly posts to).
And ponder it a bit, you'll see how it applies to open source projects, and interactions on mailing lists, or as the case may be, a homepage article by an open source developer.
For me at least, the more fascinating question is why open source projects eventually degrade into "sick systems" of interaction? --I wish I had an answer, but the only speculation I have is it's the result of frustration.
"Welcome to OpenBSD" is customarily spoken as "Fuck you moron" or "SMP is for retards and jackasses like you" or "Threads are for idiots and no, we don't care."
I love OpenBSD though. Use it everyday. They don't pretend. What you see is what you get.
My favorite is the well-known flame by someone at the MIT AI Lab back in its heyday (early Lisp Machine development time)--I'm pretty sure it was RMS: "I've deleted all your <bleeping> code and also erased all the backups" (paraphrased).
It has been a few years since I had to work with OpenSSL and I had much of the same reactions to the code.
OpenSSL has always been bad, so it is not likely that it will improve any time soon unless someone who has a talent for API design decides to spend an immense amount of time sanitizing the library. This is a crypto library, so it is code that requires a lot of scrutiny. You can't simply make changes willy-nilly. Undoing the damage is no simple matter of programming.
I think it is important to point out badly designed APIs and make an example of them so people can learn why it is important to care about API design. It doesn't matter if it is open source or not. That is completely beside the point. Lots of open source code gets worked on by people who get paid for it or whose companies benefit from it directly or indirectly, so let's just be grown-ups and not derail the discussion.
Something being open source is not an excuse for doing a poor job. Bad code is bad code and OpenSSL does deserve harsh criticism for being unnecessarily hard to use.
I find the thought that you should not be able to criticize someone for designing bad APIs just because a project is open source offensive.
Personally, I am active with the Connecticut Amateur Radio Emergency Services(CT-ARES), which is a local organization part of the larger national ARES organization(http://www.arrl.org/ares). Both of these offer training and procedures for facilitating communication during emergencies. CT-ARES works with the state of CT, in particular the Red Cross and many local town governments.
My activities include participating in regular 'nets' (http://www.ctares.org/networks.php) which are station tests which serve to prove that my radios work in various failure scenarios. Other members are even more active and practice their communication skills by offering supplemental communication for various events like marathons, fairs, etc.
It comes down to this; you don't know something works unless you regularly use it.
de K2CHA
PS: One should also test their backups by actually restoring from them...