cannikin

Does this require the client to pay by credit card? I've worked for several clients where they'll only pay by direct deposit, or check.

Funny, I just learned about this command a couple of days ago as a simple way to max out your CPU. I was trying to drain the battery on my Macbook Pro and running 4 of these at the same time did the trick nicely. Redirected to /dev/null and run in the background: "yes > /dev/null &"

Yeah, what kind of strong typing is going to keep you from NOT calling a function?

The judge said that the webcam provided them the same view, from a public place, that agents would have had if assigned to watch the guy 24/7. (It seems to me that the view from ~30ft up is very different than one from the ground.)

Is there a line where the surveillance would NOT be legal? Could they have had a drone circling his house? What about a satellite? Do you have an expectation of privacy from ABOVE your house even if you don't have it from public roads?

It seems like this could be huge for small/local fire departments and law enforcement. If your town can't afford its own helicopter with FLIR imaging, now you can get a dedicated system for ~$1500.

Imagine the benefits if there's a night time 911 call complaining of an ominous crowd gathering in a public place or a band of hooligans tagging homes in a crowded suburban area. Cops could scout the area ahead of time by just launching a drone from their trunk before putting themselves in harm's way. There may be some issues in trying to maintain radio/video contact during something like a high speed chase, of course.

It's interesting that DJI is specifically not targeting these markets with their advertising because of drawing attention from the government? Is the government concerned that the technology will somehow relay the imagery to Chinese spies? Or that it will report false data that would put people in danger?

1099 here. My wife has great health insurance through her employer so I was okay. If I had to purchase our insurance I'm not sure I would have been as quick to make the leap.

See above. :)

No problem: [email protected]

I was strictly a full-time corporate guy until about 2 years ago. I got an email out of the blue from a tech recruiter guy, asking if I was interested in freelance. I hadn't given it much thought at the time, but figured I'd at least ask what the rate was.

$100/hour.

My eyes bulged out my skull. My highest fulltime salary to that point had been $120k/year (about $58/hour). My wife has benefits so it seemed like a fairly small risk to jump out of the fulltime pool and try my hand at contracting.

I've since been freelance-only, getting as much as $180/hour for a 6-month commitment. I haven't been unemployed at all during that time. It's just been word-of-mouth. In one instance an ex-fulltime employer needed someone to come in and work on some code. In another a previous co-worker at a fulltime gig recommended me to just consult on the codebase and that led to my current gig.

All positions have been work-from-home except for the first one, that was about a 30-min drive 2 days a week.

I'm a full-stack dev, Ruby on the backend (almost 10 years experience with Rails). I'm not too shabby a designer, either, so I'm lucky that I can kind of fit in with any dev team or become a company's sole development resource if needed (which is my role at my current gig).

My advice would be to hit up several recruiters and get them looking for jobs for you. At one point I had 3 separate ones hitting me up for positions on a daily basis. They only get paid if they get people hired so they're very motivated to find you a job ASAP. I always figured that becoming freelance meant you had to spend your days marketing yourself, schmoozing people on LinkedIn, etc (all stuff I hate). It's turned out to be nothing like that. When you're a month or so from the end of a contract let the recruiters know you're available and the offers come rolling in. In my experience, at least.

I want to love Digital Ocean but is there any talk about providing load balancers? It seems like as soon as you want to scale beyond one server you're stuck rolling your own with something like HA Proxy, but you've still got a single point of failure. I guess you have that with a hardware load balancer as well, but at least those things are specifically built to be available all of the time, versus just a piece of software you're running on yet another VM.

Dropbox isn't even close to this experience. Yes the files themselves would be everywhere, but I don't want to have to go into the Dropbox app to view my photos (not to mention the Dropbox app being extremely slow in my experience). With iCloud they're all in your regular Photos app ready to be shared or used in other apps just like the photos you shot with your phone.

I've been running the beta for a month or so and I can't imagine going back. FINALLY all of my photos are available everywhere and safely stored without me doing any extra work. Photo Stream was a nice first step, but it was a rolling 1000 latest photos—everything else just disappeared if you didn't open iPhoto occasionally and let it download the latest stuff from your stream.

Now everything is present on all devices and they don't even take up a ton of storage: by default only the thumbnails are saved locally and then when you expand a photo you'll see a little cloud icon in the corner until it has a chance to download the full res version from iCloud.

The only downside I've noticed is that now that I have 25,000 photos on my iPhone, apps that want to access the camera roll take a few seconds to open the photo browser now (most noticeably in Instagram). To me that's a fair trade off, and, if possible, I'm sure most apps will release updates to make it faster.