How Beer Gave Us Civilization

HUMAN beings are social animals. But just as important, we are socially constrained as well.

By JEFFREY P. KAHN
Published: March 15, 2013    

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...lifesaving social instincts didn’t readily lend themselves to exploration, artistic expression, romance, inventiveness and experimentation — the other human drives that make for a vibrant civilization.

To free up those, we needed something that would suppress the rigid social codes that kept our clans safe and alive. We needed something that, on occasion, would let us break free from our biological herd imperative — or at least let us suppress our angst when we did.

We needed beer.

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Fools in the Hotzone: Saruman as the Bold but Incompetent Firefighter

Every year the Man sends me to Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response class. These HAZWOPER classes are almost always taught by firefighters because they routinely deal with emergency responses to hazardous materials.

Wednesday, November 28th, 2012 | Posted by Adrian Simmons

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Every year the Man sends me to Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response class. These HAZWOPER classes are almost always taught by firefighters because they routinely deal with emergency responses to hazardous materials.

...most of the examples of what not to do when knee-deep in an emergency dealing with hazardous materials comes from the hard lessons of other firefighters. More specifically, they come from the gung-ho firefighters who charge into a dangerous situation, make said situation worse, and other firefighters have to spend time and energy rescuing them instead of dealing with the main problem.

Because I’m a nerd, and I’ve taken this class a lot over the years and my mind wanders, I immediately saw a parallel to the wizards of JRR Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

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Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners

I know that patent trolling happens, but this seems to be going a bit too far....

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by Joe Mullin - Jan 2 2013, 10:30pm MPST

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he'd paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

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The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs In Tow

This from TechCrunch, with some snippets of wisdom for API Marketplace developers...

Rip Empson
Monday, July 30th, 2012

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"We wanted to reach a critical mass before opening to everyone. When you’re a marketplace, you always fight the chicken/egg problem and the last thing you want to do is open up a marketplace when you don’t have enough supply yet … so we wanted to get to a place of infrastructure stability and to a point when the community was starting to become substantial."

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The Battle for Your API Proxy

We'll need to keep up on developments here...

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by Kin Lane on 06/11/2011

Every Web API is designed to receive requests from and respond to the outside world.

Every day an API can receive thousands or potentially millions of calls. Before the API can process these requests and returns a response, it has to potentially tackle a huge laundry list of functionalities:.....

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Many API owners tackle all these layers of the API themselves. But there are also several service providers out their looking to do this for them.

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Entrepreneurial Software Developers and the App Economy

Is it good or bad for App Developers?!

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by Joshua Wright 12/13/2012

The New York Times continued its excellent iEconomy series with an article on the job prospects for app developers. The lengthy piece gives a few snippets of labor market data for software developers and touches on the work of economist Michael Mandel in measuring the “App Economy.”

The gist of the NYT piece, and something that Mandel doesn’t go along with, is that the majority of entrepreneurs in the app writing realm have a difficult time making a living — despite all the buzz that surrounds the growing field.

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The Cleverest Business Model in Online Education

Keep an eye on how this service and model develops.....

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A startup called Duolingo taps the power of crowds to make learning a language free. 

By Tom Simonite on November 29, 2012

Learning a new language is tedious and demands a lot of practice. Luis von Ahn doesn’t want all that effort to be wasted. In fact, it might be a gold mine.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506656/the-cleverest-business-model-in-online-education/