Woot calls out the AP.
Woot calls out the AP.
Mariano Rivera’s cutter dissected. Even if you’re not a baseball fan, the video has some great visualizations. (via daringfireball).
You know how when you draw a map for someone, you just sketch out a few lines and labels, and they usually end up getting where you want them to go? Or how when you print a map from online, every time you look at it, you end up spending ten seconds just filtering out all the information you don’t want before focusing on what you do? Bing Destination Maps might be your happy place, assuming you’re willing to install Silverlight. (via kottke)
Clive Thompson has a great article in New York Times Magazine about IBM’s Watson question-answering AI.
The IRS released data that Forbes turned into a map of migrations for every county in the United States in 2008. It’s really weird to see that I was one of less than 10 total people who made the move from Norman to San Francisco that year.
Absolutely spot-on analysis of AT&T’s new data pricing plans, from Christopher Schanck. In summary: by looking at how people use the phone today and developing a pricing model to lock people into those habits, AT&T is screwing Apple and application developers who want the device and data to become ubiquitous parts of people’s lives, and devaluing their own product.
Aza Raskin describes a clever phishing attack. If you use a password manager instead of manually typing your passwords, you’re safe from this one.
Via Burrito Justice, Eric Fischer uses only Flickr and Picassa APIs, OpenStreetMap, Perl and Ghostscript to recreate maps of 50 major cities from geotagging data. What’s this good for? Well, for one, I didn’t know Vancouver looked like a duck, and now I do.
Have you tried Duck Duck Go yet? No? You should. It’s a search engine run by one guy, and in my experience, for most searches I’ve done, the results aren’t that far behind what you’d get from Google or Bing. There are also some nice distinguishing features, like a prominent “zero-click info” box at the top of the search results that gives an overview for the search term. Check out their about page for more.
You should bookmark grellas Hacker News comment page, it’s pure gold for free. His take on the Zuckerberg securities fraud story makes it clear that the real issue isn’t “securities fraud”, it’s that the settlement as enforced might be overturned on appeal:
When disputes arose about the detailed terms, FB filed a motion with the court to enforce the settlement. In doing so, it asked the court to enforce the terms it had put form in the complex documentation and not as set forth in the 2-pager. The court, on hearing the motion, ordered that the settlement agreement be enforced but did so based on the terms set forth in the 2-pager. The ConnectU parties were then forced to deliver the ConnectU stock to Facebook, which (given that it then controlled the company) promptly fired the attorneys who had been representing ConnectU and its founders. This left the founders scrambling to appeal and to do so under circumstances where the only party with standing to appeal (ConnectU) was controlled by FB as an adverse party. This led to a logistical nightmare, from a litigation perspective, but it eventually got sorted out when the court let the ConnectU founders “intervene” and make their case on appeal. The brief filed before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (discussed in this article) is the opening shot on an appeal seeking to overturn the lower court’s order enforcing the settlement.
I hope it’s not hopelessly naive to suggest that ramming a disputed settlement through court and then firing your opponent’s lawyers sounds deliciously evil.