Don't show the notification if you won't show me the updated page.

Sync up the notification to be as slow as your slave replication or other caching system, at least for the user, or otherwise trigger a pull from an updated db/cache copy. I bet Asana has that taken care of... hehe...

While I don't think we are yet reaching bubble status, the amount of April Fools Day celebrations online yesterday felt like a sign of a bubble...

Techcrunch seems to win the prize for going bubbly on April Fools Day, with multiple posts, and starting them even the day before April Fools Day. It was interesting to then see this article: "Is Techcrunch Over?" I bet they fooled a huge number of people including me. At the end though, it seemed like they overdid it. What do you think?

Yesterday seemed like a good day to ignore the April Fools joke sites... and just put one's head into hacking cool stuff for people to use productively.

"It gave him an extraordinary degree of privacy, as well as control over his travel schedule -- privacy and control over his time ranking in the top handful of things that Buffett cared most about on earth." -- about Warren Buffett's jet, from page 535, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.

A relevant and interesting quote in the context of various memes swirling around today, including Wikileaks, TSA searches of commercial, non-private-jet passengers, financial regulation, Passports broadcasting id's via RFID, Biometrics and RFID becoming default requirements without thought, DNA swabs of non-criminals and UN officials, assymetry of government versus individual power, ...

Update: The % has increased to 98.67%

In a U.S. News & World Report online survey, 95% of travellers think the U.S.'s TSA has gone too far with it's policies of invasive pat-downs that have become grope-downs, and scanners that produce naked-like photos of travellers, using radiation.

Survey respondents were asked, "Is TSA going too far with air security measures?" (survey results ; poll)

In addition to the required airport security stops, the TSA has started stopping travellers in bus and metro stations, requiring them to be searched, with recent deployments in Tampa and Washington, D.C., with the support of local police departments and government transit organizations, which are being trained to support further roll-out of these search stops.

The TSA's scanners use radiation which causes damage to DNA, according to scientists. While TSA administrators have compared the radiation to the sun's radiation, the radiation employed by the machine is different and affects the body and skin differently. No extensive medical tests have been performed with such kinds of radiation, leading scientists to report that its effect on travellers, including children, pregnant women and the elderly, is likely very different from radiation from the sun. It is possible that TSA-scanner-induced cancer could kill more people than have been killed by terrorists.

In contrast with the untested deployment of the radiation scanners to airports across the U.S., significant medical testing over a period of years would normally be required of a private company to get FDA approval for a new medical pill.

While the TSA continues to say that the machines cannot record images, the machines do have that capability in accordance with the specifications required by the government in their purchase.

TSA agents viewing the scanner photos are permitted to bring cell phones with cameras into their work area. They are also able to communicate verbally with agents bringing passengers into the machines, which has led to a number of unprofessional comments being overheard. TSA agents also have access to security camera videos of the scanner area, enabling them to match faces to scans at a later time. 

I'm a HUGE fan of Amazon Web Services.

Which is why Amazon's AWS blog post describing why they cancelled Wikileaks-related use of EC2 has me confused, concerned and even a little scared -- because I'm building a service using EC2 with user-generated content.

They say:

"For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.”"

However, I can only find this wording in their WEBSITE Terms of Service ( "Amazon Web Services LLC and/or its affiliates (“AWS”) provide this site to you subject to the following conditions.").

Doing a quick search, I can't find the wording in their Service Terms, Customer Agreement, or Acceptable Use Policy which govern the actual web services themselves -- or what they call in the blog post: rented computer infrastructure. If they are going to apply their website terms of service to use of EC2, it would seem to rule out any use of AWS and EC2 for social websites with user-generated content.

For those of us who are literally buying into the AWS platform, this is a major concern. Furthermore, the tone of the blog post gets into making assumptions, political judgments and moralizing -- rather than focusing on legal agreement issues, which make the decision-making appear to be politically motivated.

"Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy."

Is Amazon now going to be making judgments about the credibility of its customers to handle an extraordinary volume of content? And this from the very company that's supposed to be selling us infrastructure on which to build scalable solutions, amazing stuff like EC2 and mturk?

If I have any factual errors or have made any bad assumptions in this post, please let me know.

Now that Oracle is suing Google over Java... or maybe I should say, now that Oracle owns Sun... how many companies are going to want to develop enterprise applications in Java?

James Gosling writes:
    During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle.

How does it feel to be a Java developer and see this going on?

And then what about Mysql?

A trip down memory lane... Back in the day I was hired to do some of the first online ads in Java... they were for Symantec's Java IDE Cafe and then Visual Cafe, contracted by Symantec's Ad Agency, GMO... the first one I wrote the code by hand since Cafe wasn't out yet, and then I used Cafe for the subsequent 2 ad campaigns... the first one featured a frog croaking and went on Javaworld and other sites... it led to a page with a frog in a blender... it had huge click-through because of the sound and caused some new restrictions on ads accepted by Web Publishing Inc, if I recall correctly... then there were the early days of Marimba, where I organized a couple of user group meetings, including one w/ Arthur Van Hoff in my loft, and visited their office once too... I recall running a Marimba app (tuner/channel?) that one of the Marimba team managed to access even though I was serving it via a Ricochet modem... fun, fun...

I never found Java to be as productive as PHP and other scripting languages, so I focused more on the more productive scripting environments.

-A

Robert X. Cringely ( http://www.cringely.com/2010/05/carried-away/ ) and Fred Gibbons ( http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/why-taxing-carried-interest-as-ordinary-income-is-good-policy.html ) write in support of taxing carried interests as income in the U.S.

Cringely ends with "We need a better idea."

I ask, a better idea to do what? To take more money from venture capitalists?

What makes us think that giving the money to the government is better for the economy than leaving things as they are. Is the government becoming more efficient in using the resources it takes from people? Have they improved their efficiency the way Wal-Mart has in the past decades?

Financially-saavy folks, while still irrational, do respond to incentives more readily. This, in any form, sounds like a huge incentive for them to leave the U.S.

The U.S. lost its international lead in IPO's in the last decade (thank you, Sarbannes-Oxley). Now it looks like the government will help the U.S. lose its international lead in venture capital in this decade.

At least this comment attributed to Michael Arrington, reminds Fred on this: 

"I agree with you on this Fred, it's simply not logical to tax carried interest as capital gains. But on a more fundamental level I completely disagree. Our government wastes so much money and our politicians are so...bad...at governing that I cringe every time someone wealthy starts talking about how they need to pay more taxes..."

I have now turned off autoposting to Facebook from Posterous...

One step backward for Posterous, one step backward for mankind...?...