If the USPS would implement something like this in a reliable fashion...well.. it would eventually end them.. but in the interim I would be so happy. Imagine you sign up to have every one of your standard size envelopes opened / scanned automatically. Magazines and Birthday cards (weird sizes) would still come through. It would be terrific. I'd pay 5-10$ per month to have all of my tax things, pay stubs, financial product offer letters, invoices, all scanned and searchable, and they would have to deliver so much less physical mail.
However for a startup to try to replicate the multibillion dollar infrastructure that is already in place there is silly, and the USPS won't do it because of federal laws that would need to change about opening mail.
Tear gas and Water cannons are the best non-lethal methods for crowd control available... honestly I think the turkish police are doing a good a job at controlling this as possible.
All the media and reddit pictures are from the side of the protesters, a few pictures of people who get knocked in the head with a tear gas container != cops beating and shooting innocent people as they would have you believe.
Also from empirical evidence as an American who spent two weeks in Istanbul last year I've found the city and police to be totally welcoming and open ... to include bar crawls around taksim, walking 20 miles on foot through every nieghborhood in the city, to visiting some of the holiest artifacts in Islam at topkapi palace.
I'd like to see the other side of this... I understand the government has been culling the ranks of the top military to weaken their influence and push the Islamist agenda.. I do, but that said, turkey is not syria or iraq, it is a large cosmopolitan and wonderful country I would hate to see it destroyed.
Edit: I'll add for reference if it matters I'm a large, shaved headed and tattooed, obviously american man, who was a solo traveler.
I think the 7$ dollars a month is reasonable for a great service, I'm a student (while working) but will continue to pay for my repos. I hope others do the same. I think a significant percentage of GitHub's user base are in school for something and could potentially qualify for this, but probably shouldn't if they can afford to pay. That said I use the student discount for Amazon Prime, so I am a hypocrite.
I'd say given the salary data, the fact that medicine is a stable and growing field, and the amount of high level training required , these numbers are not really crazy or out of line.
After six years of practicing, even a non specialized doctor will be at 200K with the lowest starting salaries around 140K. That is a fantastic amount of money when you consider that it is the lower end of the pay scale for doctors and that it will be a completely secure position in which you can work until death or retirement.
250K is a small price to entry into 8Million+ lifetime earnings.
Being highly successful in most fields is equated with 150K and beyond salary point, which comes with increased competition and no job security as you move up the ladder...I don't see this as being a bad deal at all, even for those totally self/debt funding.
The danger of this, is not (IMO) people inserting personal data or financial data on the end page (which would be avoided by paying attention to the URL bar), but in targeted attacks where the page serves up a IE/Flash/Java exploit compromising the users machine. At this point it doesn't matter what the end result is, as the damage is done. Also, an attacker can simply redirect to to the orig page/target after exploitation in such a way that the majority of casual users wouldn't notice, as there is no user interaction at the end.
Example a link to an article or PDF report of interest is Hijacked via this method (where the hover is correct but actual target is malicious) the user quickly hits the exploit site and is compromised/malware dropped while the exploit site displays a splash page of some sort briefly, it then forwards to the orig. destination.
I don't see the majority of non paranoid users detecting this, even if they are in the right mindset, as they end up at the proper site with nothing more than quick, and now ubiquitous, splash/ad page in between.
EDIT: I'm not necessarily advocating any change, this behavior can be tracked and blocked in a properly secured infrastructure, but this is where I see the potential for harm.
You might consider some simplification of your web page... there was a cool automatic "tutorial" JS app posted here a few days ago... and maybe security as a selling point. I'd like to throw suspicious pages at it and see what happens if anything... big market for that and you can charge a lot more than you are if you make it remotely "cyber" related. Feel free to talk to me/pm if you want some pointers on the security side of the house.
On the same token, albiet a bit off of the trail. Does anyone have any suggestions for effectively storing fields which can contain BIG5 (IE non utf-8) chars in them, but usually do not? IE Email subject lines or senders.
JSON is picky in this regard, and I don't want to convert the whole string to B64 etc encode/decode it going in and out, as I would like to retain regex search capability for the 99% of email titles and names which are not Chinese within mongo from my php application which lives on the front.
Facebook would be far more successful, and a better experience, if they simply charged for the service. Even a nominal fee of 20$ per year will exceed their add revenue. Potentially charge users only 5$ per year, and business a larger amount based on some metric.
The add supported model is terrible for social networks and needs to go. If you can afford a computer, smartphone, etc. Then you can pay 5-20$/year for an account.
Free limited accounts for people <18 years old, which have limited access to adult content? (Idea, but may work to both hook future customers, and protect kids)
Windows has always been the base OS on my home computers. I've used a separate ESXi box, or local virtual box VMs for development. Thus far windows 8 tells me that it is time for me to shift totally to Linux and just sacrifice gaming, which was the sole reason I held onto my windows 7 environment on my primary home PC's. I also dread the day I will have to deal with it at work. I have between 20-30 windows open at any given time with anything from ArcSight to multiple putty sessions running. How will that possibly translate to this blocky touch screen interface?
I can't be alone in this feeling, although I do feel a bit like the old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn..
This is why I shop for groceries at Aldi instead of more popular brand name supermarkets. They have only the store brand of all products. I find that in addition to saving 50-60% on my food bill, the trip to store is super fast, stress free, and I have all of the same food I would have otherwise gotten. The only thing I go to a regular supermarket for is deli/seafood/meats which are not branded.