DISQUS

That "month of work" is only a month of waiting for an account to mature. Sending emails and requesting search results is incredibly easy to automate, as it's all text. You might think that this will introduce a significantly larger barrier of entry for a new spammer, but what will end up happening is that instead of buying CAPTCHA entries, they'll begin to buy slightly aged emails/profiles. In bulk.

At least there weren't any "COMEFROM"s

If a startup relies on ad income -- yes, they will get hit by a recession.

Though it seems that a lot of startups, especially in the earlier stages, are really zero-revenue operations. If the plan is to simply grow the user-base for a while, and worry about having a business model later, then the only additional caveat is hoping for the economy to be out of recession by that "later".

Indeed. In my experience startup-level developers would prefer to stay out of large corporate environments (perhaps with an exception of dedicated R&D units). Still, banks seem to enjoy having software. I guess this explains why my online banking experience sucks so much.

Having a degree is an excuse to get hired by an HR (one of those people who doesn't understand what Computer Science is) into one of those large corporate cubicle positions that pays well (it has to for anyone to put up with any of _that_) and chugs out the code that gets peer-reviewed... on The Daily WTF.

Though the same type of person chasing to cash in on a career trend will be in the same sort of a mess in any other sufficiently technical field. The programming community takes a hit because it isn't a regulated profession (imagine the same type of people buying a job of a doctor or a lawyer with just a degree). Though by the looks of it, the video game dev colleges are even worse.

The problem with Beacon was that it infringed on user's privacy in the background. ("hey, maybe I don't want to tell all my friends that I just bought whatever it was").

On the other hand, if I can follow a business I like on Twitter, or get my friends to recommend me businesses I'm interested in on GigPark -- that opens a channel of communication and perhaps even conversation, that I think many consumers are in favour of.

Tony's last blog post..Online introduction to Computer Science from Stanford Engineering (for free!)

Should have been "lonely teenagers with a short attention span". Seeing as next year all of the social networks will bump their age up to 70.

Tony's last blog post..re: CompSci.ca Survey.

A couple of Waterloo students were talking about putting together a group interested in startups. I'm not sure if they are behind this or not, but there's certainly student level grassroot interest in this.

It's a great idea, but it's prone to problems. I think the biggest would be determining who gets into this residence -- there needs to be just the right mix of creative/technical/business people to foster a startup environment, but I can see a lot of students applying to get in just for foosball.

A couple of Waterloo students were talking about putting together a group interested in startups. I'm not sure if they are behind this or not, but there's certainly student level grassroot interest in this.

It's a great idea, but it's prone to problems. I think the biggest would be determining who gets into this residence -- there needs to be just the right mix of creative/technical/business people to foster a startup environment, but I can see a lot of students applying to get in just for foosball.

Well if you curl the feedburner url, you just get a 302 redirect to the second url (I figure it's there just for click-through stats). So why not just follow the redirects and use the end result as the content's url?

You should manually look up your benchmark stats (PR, Alexa, Technorati, RSS subscribers) and send an email to TLA support. (If you've made it into ReviewMe, you should as easily make it into TLA). I've recently have done so myself, was accepted into the program the following day, and had a first link sold the day after.

You should manually look up your benchmark stats (PR, Alexa, Technorati, RSS subscribers) and send an email to TLA support. (If you've made it into ReviewMe, you should as easily make it into TLA). I've recently have done so myself, was accepted into the program the following day, and had a first link sold the day after.

It's surprising just how different of a video one can put together, just by editing the order of a bunch of short clips. Though even with that in mind, some responses are pretty funny.

One is probably better off with

\'; DROP DATABASE; --

Though ether way, this is simply awesome. I wonder what kind of an excuse ("I have _really_ weird parents?") would get special characters into a legal name...

Ben, it sounds like you really don't know what you are talking about. Quality comments are not spam by definition, as they contribute to the discussion and are wanted. The author gets a linkback out of it? Well it's a recognition of his/her contributions.

Virtually all of the "spam" spam is caught by Akismet or Spam Karma plugins.

And you clearly don't know how the WordPress platform works. Or much about good programming practices...

Well there are some SEO reasons for nofollow. Having every other "cool post" comment link out to an arbitrary location dilutes the value of the links that you do endorse explicitly. My personal choice is to moderate for quality comments that really extend the discussion of the post, and reward those on a case by case basis.

Oh yeah, and it appears that spammers are not educated enough to know what rel='nofollow' is, as automated posts still flood the internet tubes.

I would think this is a bit more trickier. For one, Engineering is the application of not only Science (and Math, etc), but also of the existing Technology. We use tools to design better tools.

"sub-domain of information science"? Maybe...

Biology is a wealth of information. The genome project would be the most trivial example, perhaps followed by computer models of various systems - playing around with evolution theories perhaps?

Ultimately "life" is execution of DNA encoded information, in a given environment. Computer Science would just facilitate the use of computers as a tool to work with all that information.

That was quite a well written story, yet about something as trivial as cleaning one's keyboard. Quite a perspective, impressive =)