Amazon.com filed a lawsuit on Monday to fend off a sweeping demand from North Carolina’s tax collectors: detailed records including names and addresses of customers and information about exactly what they had purchased.

via Amazon fights demand for customer records | CNET News.

It seems that Amazon’s case is somewhat unique because the purchase of books carries certain court-protected privacy protections. Of course, they sell more than books. Regardless, it’s hard to see how the “no-sales-tax-online” situation can be maintained forever. I’m not fundamentally opposed to paying taxes, but I don’t want a pure, complete, and identifiably record of my purchased passed along to the government. I’m curious what compromise arises over the coming years (decades?).

Update: Thanks to Patricia Clausnitzer from PC for translating this blog post into Belorussian.

We hope you’ll support us by donating $5-10 (or more) via our FirstGiving page (a secure way to send directly to Farm Sanctuary, and they’ll mail you a tax-deductible receipt).

We visited Farm Sanctuary’s California farm in Orland last weekend (they have one on NY, too). We stayed in the farm’s guest cabin and were able to spend a lot of time with all the animals (Aimee discovered I’m something of a turkey whisperer). It was fun to see them in action and we had a chance to volunteer a little by preparing food and feeding many of the animals and brushing the goats.

Aimee posted a set of photos (ad 2 vids) from our time at Farm Sanctuary on Flickr.

Also, if you vote in California, please join us in supporting Prop 2 (sponsored by Farm Sanctuary) with a “Yes” vote in November.

Prop 2 is a modest measure that would allow farm and food animals the ability to stand up, stretch and turn around. Through the reduction of these inhumane caging/crating practices (most commonly used by factory farms) will improve the health and safety of our food, support family farmers, and reduce the environmental degradation caused by these unnecessary practices. The NY Times has endorsed Prop 2 in a thoughtful and straightforward article.

We hope you enjoy our pictures and hope you’ll consider helping us raise money for this important organization.

Thanks and love,
nate & aimee

You can read more about it and grab it on his site, or save him a bit of bandwidth and grab it from me (.zip, 85mb). (It’s public domain and he encourages its wide distribution!)

Here’s a great DJ with a great ear and premier turntable skills that pulls music from across genres. This mix is no exception.

I agree with his signoff:

I honestly feel if we make our voices heard, this time WILL be different.

I’m not a particularly savvy financial person, but “think long term” always struck me as wise. There’s no doubt that it’s pretty hairy out there right now, but I think changing course or being overly emotion is the worst reaction. It’s tempting to be emotional and run for cover, but this article cites research that should give you strength and resolve.

As the title says, switching to cash may fell safe. But:

But if you sell now, you’ll be locking in your losses. And once you’re in cash, there isn’t much upside. In fact, with interest rates low, you’re likely to lose money in cash, because inflation will probably eat up the after-tax returns you earn from a savings or money-market account.

Beyond the low upside of cash, selling low is, obviously, the worst time to sell. It’s bad because you lock in your losses, but the read damage is that you’ll miss the eventual upswing, to devastating effect.

The research they cite is pretty amazing (emphasis mine):

From 1963 to 2004, the index of American stocks he tested gained 10.84 percent annually in a geometric average, which avoided overstating the true performance. For people who missed the 90 biggest-gaining days in that period, however, the annual return fell to just 3.2 percent. Less than 1 percent of the trading days accounted for 96 percent of the market gains.

…

A portfolio belonging to an investor who missed the 10 best days over several decades across all of those markets would end up, on average, with about half the balance of someone who sat tight throughout.

They note that if you need the money in the next five years — if you’re about to retire — then perhaps the loss of the move to cash might make sense. But for me, and for many of you, “today’s price is not your price. Your price is 10 or 20 years from now.”

So, hang on to what you’ve got and don’t make any rash moves.

Congrats, iheni! I hope to see at a conference soon.

Update: I wrote this post in the middle of the night after working entirely too long and late. In my delirium, I misread Henny as Henry and used incorrect pronouns. Further, in the headline I mistakenly typed Swar instead of Swan (though I got it right in the body and in the permalink).

Sincere apologies for my clumsiness. Thanks to Henny for setting me straight!

Story on www.telegraph.co.uk – YouTube permalink.

From the story:

Now a larky but accurate rap song explaining the point of the 17 mile circumference machine [under Switzerland and France], which formally starts up on September 10, has made a star of Kate McAlpine, 23, aka “alpinekat”, who stars with her friends in a YouTube video that has been downloaded more than [was 400,000 times when the article was published, and nearly 1.4mm now.]

I liked watching the video. I’ve heard about the LHC before, but this 4 minutes taught me new facts about both the collide *and* its science. And there’s funny dancing.

(graphic snagged from tweetip site)

That Twitter routinely breaks news fastest is often discussed, notably in the wake of the May quake in China.

Today the AP’s wire posted news of the earthquake 9 minutes after it happened. 9 minutes is fast. Negative :43 is amazing.

(Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s explainable as an accounting error in twitter’s api or tweetip’s processing. But the point remains that twitter is always on the scene.)

Some worry that the acquisition will hurt the effort to make Twitter scale. It can’t and won’t.

I believe Twitter’s engineering team is headed up a mountain (they need to switch architectures at a low level), but that they finally know which mountain. True, it’s a tall mountain not quickly climbed. But they finally know their problems and have people in place. Better days ahead.

Others worry that Twitter’s scaling ills will infect Summize. I don’t think that’s possible because they are distinctly different engineering problems. Summize is “fresh search,” an understood and known problem that Summize apparently designed for from the beginning. Twitter, in contrast, evolved a product into a service that no longer matches their architectural model. It didn’t start out as (and therefore wasn’t built to be) a massive-to-massive (when each massively is unique, personal, exponentially expanding) real-time messaging protocol. I believe architectures exist for that problem space, but unfortunately that’s not how Twitter was initially built.

Put briefly, Twitter’s already on the path to health and Summize is immune from Twitter’s disease, so it should all work out fine.

While they are different systems, they may be complimentary. Jettisoning Twitter’s track and reply functionality to Summize’s infrastructure may offer Twitter engineers the headroom they need to roll updates into Twitter’s codebase with a bit of a cushion.

As the name implies, they publish big photos. Not thumbnails or small one-column photos like most news sites (and sites in general), but true large format photos. Generally 990×660. It’s remarkable the greater impact that larger photos can have.

Today’s feature is on California’s Continuing Fires.

There are a LOT of fires burning. Coming home from Golden Gate Park yesterday after Tasty, we crested Twin Peaks and had an eastern view of the entire bay as we drove on Portola Drive. In near unison we all noted the “fire smog.” The air is thick with smoke, even in SF which is currently fairly removed from the fires.

About a month ago, my buddy Matt’s house in the Santa Cruz mountains came within a kilometer or two of being engulfed. If the winds had been normal his house would have been gone. But luckily the winds were anomalously blowing the opposite directly. They evacuated, but were spared.

About 10 days ago, my friend Jud’s mom was evacuated from her home in the Brisbane hills just a few 2 or 3 miles south of SF. She avoided disaster, too.

Last week I flew out of SFO. All flights were delayed because of lack of visibility due to fire smoke in the air across the whole region.

So, take a look at the fires through the Big Picture lens to get a better sense of what’s really going on, and the amazingly tough and dedicated firefighters. There are more than 20,000 hard-core people out there fighting to get it all under control.

Here’s to them.

And here’s the feed for the Big Picture so you can add it to your reader.

everything in this article is my paraphrasing of speakers’ presentations. not my own words.

(Video coming soon.)

1. We run web applications. We’re only focused on this narrow goal.
2. We handle the entire lifecycle of an app.
3. Apps are run on Google infrastructure.

“It’s hard, but it’s worth it for us.”

“For the first time you can use the same infra we use…Auth, GOS, BigTable”

The Stack

1. Scalable serving infra
2. python runtime
3. SDK
4. Web based admin console
5. DataStore

Demo: App from scratch in 8 minutes.

More details

1. Scalable Serving Infrastructure: fault tolerant (redundant). Fluid: don’t need to schedule needs up front… more servers come online dynamically.
2. Python Runtime and Libraries. All tools are generic, so new languages can be dropped in later. Python used in same python available otherwise. Goal: you can use any language eventually. We don’t want to limit you.
3. SDK: Environment to develop apps locally. Avail for Linux, Mac, Windows today. (But can probably work anywhere.)
4. Admin Console: web-based admin console. (Looks like google finance meets google analytics.) Tools for request logs. Data explorer. Usage/quote numbers. App-version balancing. Can hook up domain (don’t need to run at *.appspot.com).
5. Scalable Datastore. Schemaless object store. Not a clustered sql thing. Instead based on BigTable. (Whitepapers online.) Horizontally scalable. Reacts to hotspots. BigTable instead of SQL is a big change, and may take some time to get used to. But we think you’ll come to like it. Schemaless means you can add a new datatype or entity whenever – no need to update your schema.

Now we’re looking at a Datastore Model Class.

GQL Query example

SELECT *
FROM Story
WHERE title = 'App Engine Launch'
AND author = :current_user
AND rating >= 10
ORDER BY rating, created DESC

Other Notes

Mail Sending API

no setup needed.

Make HTTP Requests

Authenticate with Google Accounts

Frameworks

The whole Django framework.

Guido van Rossum: Creator of Python and member of Google App Engine team

My passion is making life easier for developers. With python i’ve done that for decades. Now i’ve joined GAE team. Excited by potential. (and that python was first picked)

First time that GOogle has let third-party people run software on their infra. That’s fundamentally a big deal.

8:13 PM “We’re offing 100% of the python lang.”

8:14 PM – we don’t offer threads, but you won’t been it because of our scalable arch.

GAE uses a quota system so nobody monopolizes the infra.

me: if it’s so scalable, why do they need the quotes?

What’s Next?

• large upload/download support
• purchase additional capacity
• other language support
• offline processing.