don't blame this startup for trying. i don't know how big a cut the telcos take and yes, a phone should not be that expensive but we'll see where the price goes. for a start, higher prices are completely normal and later hopefully some competition will bring the price to more reasonable levels. ultimately anonymous would it only be if wallmart started buying them in bulk and people could grab one at the counter paying with cash.
You know that Walmart, and gas stations, and bodegas sell these already right? That's why this is a bad idea. Not only is this less anonymous from buying from Walmart, but it's more expensive as well.
The price was really a minor point against the idea. There are more fundamental issue that makes this a non-starter for supplying an actual "burner phone".
I hope you fail with CC and let the public know bitcoin's strength rather than see sneak in some paragraph in the small print of your TOS that allows you to keep the CC data for half a year just in case.
We've added Bitcoin support since this comment was added -- but if you look at our website copy now we've revised it to pushed users towards using Bitcoin as the preferred payment medium.
I am 100% sure that automatically landing a pizza in your front yard will be technically feasible long before the theft rate of these neat gadgets would drop to an acceptable rate. Maybe the first copters will parachute the pizzas :)
I disagree!!! Facebook is great from the sender side and so is G+ but both suck at the receiving side. What we need is not a way to select who we spam as that is a feature that would be ignored by the loud mouths. We need a feature to select what we receive. There are "friends" I easily want to read all ten messages per day but there are others that I just want to be on my friend list cause it publicly shows my appreciation but that are too noisy to actually read their updates about their cat pooping again.
I am well connected in 3 communities that are not mutually compatible, so I don't share everything I would share if I were only in community #2 because I spam-filter on the sending side what I send to all 3 communities. This sucks for my community #2 friends cause they miss out on #2 stuff and it sucks for those that really are not interested in #2. If #1 and #3 people could black list buzz words from my #2 community (bitcoin for example), I could share much more with the peace of mind not to annoy my other "friends".
All anecdotal. Wish they would gps-tag a dog and proof it's commuting between a small set of stations regularly visiting the same stations.
I mean, using the train to just get away from where you are would already be cool, but that's not the author's claim.
I'm not at all surprised by the story growing up with working dogs on a rural farm. Dogs would constantly surprise you with the understanding of the world around them, often better than people you would work along side. One dog we had knew the locations of buildings by name, and you could tell it the speed to get there and wait for you (I think via the urgency in your voice). You could say "met at the house" and it would turn and head straight back to home, or "go to the kennels", it'd shoot off and wait for there etc.. (Collies BTW, various other breeds we had struggled with simple things like avoiding running head first into barns if you called their name out loud while they ran LOL).
It's not so much that it's anecdotal, it's that article that's poorly written. Financial Times has a better one.
> Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. [...]
“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their biological clocks.”
Oh great! ;) So I can order a pizza to my GPS coordinates paid with bitcoin from my Android on the beach? That's cool!
Only problem with an anonymous order (hey, of course it should be anonymous!) is that people might want to take the drone instead of the pizza so maybe they will have to parachute the pizza from some altitude :) … oh I love this idea :)
… ok so maybe the drone would not operate 100% automated and the pilot would drop the pizza only some meters away from any person that might want to snatch the drone?
I searched for variance and apparently nobody mentioned this before:
They talk of
Mean request time: 306ms
Median request time: 46ms
Which indicates a very high variance, so don't take for granted that an x50 increase of performance would result from intelligent routing. The problem is that the fast tasks suffer from being queued after the slow tasks, so each such fast task takes an extra latency. If the variance is lower, the random routing will be favorable at some point as the delay of getting the task from the router queue to the dyno is not zero neither. In the case of no variance, "intelligent routing" would always add that delay as soon as all dynos are at their limit. Before that, the router would simply keep a list of idle dynos and send work there without delay.
Sure if you never hit 100% load, intelligent routing is cheap and comes at no delay. Imagine 40ms jobs getting all dynos to 100% load. Now the dynos would be idle for the duration of the ping that it takes to report being idle. let that be 4ms. That is 10% less throughput than with items queuing up on the dyno.
The router being the bottleneck would therefore justify to make it stateless and give the dynos a chance to use these last 10% of processing power as well, ultimately increasing the throughput by 10%. Sure, a serious project would not run its servers at 120% load hoping to eventually get back to 100% within time, so all this being said I would always favor intelligent routing to get responsive servers, add dynos in rush hours and only opt for dyno-queuing for stuff that may come with a delay (scientific number crunching, …)
A shop charging 20% to shop for you is not the bitcoin break through that would change the rate within hours. Look at the trade volume in $$. It increased faster than the exchange rate, so my guess is that speculators parted from their coins too fast and the rally will continue for some time and has nothing to do with very recent events. I consider all this the aftermath of the reward split, wordpress.com and the slowly materializing ASICS.
