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Well, not get rid of DST per se, just make it permanent. Like Florida is thinking about doing. It is antiquated and disruptive and only worked when everyone had to be at work or at school at the same time.

I know its to late to get it into this year's legislative calendar, but can we please put it on next year's?

That's why I'm writing this article at 1:00 a.m., dammit!

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In 1998 Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (aka COPPA) to protect the privacy of children under the age of 13. Wikipedia explains it this way:

The act, effective April 21, 2000, applies to the online collection of personal information by persons or entities under U.S. jurisdiction from children under 13 years of age. It details what a website operator must include in a privacy policy, when and how to seek verifiable consent from a parent or guardian, and what responsibilities an operator has to protect children's privacy and safety online including restrictions on the marketing to those under 13. While children under 13 can legally give out personal information with their parents' permission, many websites altogether disallow underage children from using their services due to the amount of work involved.

The key is that compliance takes enough work that many sites simply disallow children under 13. And now the requirements are changing. This past December the Federal Trade Commission outlined updates to the regulations to expand the definition of personally identifiable information, update the verification mechanisms for parents, and expand the definition of “collect”.

So compliance is difficult and often simply not worth it. Regulations like that create opportunities to outsource both the compliance and the liability. About four years ago I was involved with a Startup Weekend project to provide a service that did that but sadly, as often happens at Startup Weekends, the team never gelled so we made very little progress. But the idea had merit and a solid business model.

Enter Mix.ee. The brain child of two local Atlanta entrepreneurs, Dave Walters and Andrew Watson, Mix.ee provides “parental consent as a service” by augmenting a website's sign-up form. Future plans include a portal for parents to monitor their child's site access, examine the data that's been collected, and revoke access.

Technically its very doable. But one big question is compliance and liability. Will Mix.ee apply for COPPA safe harbor status which allows their customers to claim compliance with COPPA by adhering to Mix.ee's rules? That would be huge. Anyway, I have a meeting with the Mix.ee team on Friday. I'll update this article with any new information I discover.

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Earlier today a friend asked me about this:

infographic suggesting that the wealth sitting in the hands of the 400 richest families is somehow wrong. After looking through faireconomy.org its obvious its meant to suggest their money shouldn't belong to them and should be taken away to “do good” elsewhere.

From Wikipedia - Pareto Efficiency:

“In economics a Pareto efficient economic allocation is one where no one can be made better off without making at least one individual worse off.” … “It is commonly accepted that outcomes that are not Pareto efficient are to be avoided, and therefore Pareto efficiency is an important criterion for evaluating economic systems and public policies. If economic allocation in any system is not Pareto efficient, there is potential for a Pareto improvement—an increase in Pareto efficiency: through reallocation, improvements can be made to at least one participant's well-being without reducing any other participant's well-being.”

Now, the Fundamental theorems of welfare economics state that:

any competitive equilibrium or Walrasian equilibrium leads to a Pareto efficient allocation of resources. The second states the converse, that any efficient allocation can be sustainable by a competitive equilibrium. The first theorem is often taken to be an analytical confirmation of Adam Smith's “invisible hand” hypothesis, namely that competitive markets tend toward an efficient allocation of resources.

The assumption that most would make from this is that to do the maximally best job of distributing resources one should create the most open and free marketplace as possible. The problem is that for many pareto efficiency is not only not the goal, it is an error. Others critique the concept because of the theorem's assumptions:

However, the result only holds under the restrictive assumptions necessary for the proof (markets exist for all possible goods so there are no externalities, all markets are in full equilibrium, markets are perfectly competitive, transaction costs are negligible, and market participants have perfect information). In the absence of perfect information or complete markets, outcomes will generically be Pareto inefficient, per the Greenwald–Stiglitz theorem.

What that critique does not prove is that any system can ever have enough information quickly enough to make the decisions necessary to move to a more Pareto efficient state that can already be gained by the competitive market. Especially since the Greenwald-Stiglitz theorem depends on actors not having perfect information. If no actor can have perfect information then no organization of actors can either. The pareto efficiency provided by a competitive market may not be mathematically perfect but is the best that can ever be obtained.

In the case of the infographic above one is left with the assumption that the goal is not the efficient allocation of resources but the idea that the pie is fixed and that for one to win another MUST lose. Given simple observable reality that the pie is not fixed, then the idea may simply be the desire to make the other guy suffer. To simply take his stuff because you want it.

No matter how pretty the infographic, jealousy and theft are still ugly.

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Pipefish is getting ready for its first cohort of interns this summer. When I was at Masten Space we generally had a cohort every single semester. Each semester we had far more applications than we could ever use so we had the luxury of choosing interns that had significant experience that we could use.

Today I read through the 50 internship applications from Georgia Tech. This summer we are going to try four (!!) interns: two UX/UI and two Machine Learning. Of the 50 applications I found four people who had experience and depth I can really use.

But also in that list of 50 students were undergrads with no work experience who I knew desperately needed something like this as an undergrad. It could really help start their career and make finding a job after graduation much easier. But from experience I know that managing two interns is work so managing four will be a challenge. But I hate that I can't give those inexperienced undergrads a chance.

I don't know exactly how I will do it but before the end of the year Pipefish's internships will have at least one inexperienced undergrad. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to balance grad vs undergrad and how to manage the resulting cohort of students with such wide ranges of experience?

After initialing posting this I found these useful links:

9 Tips for Hiring & Managing Interns at a Startup The Simplest Way to Manage An Intern Inside Your Startup Managing Interns - How to Find and Develop Yours

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I know a few things about how hard VTVL rockets are so this is impressive but not new. SpaceX has joined McDonnel Dougless (DC-X), Armadillo Aerospace, and Masten Space Systems with a reusable VTVL vehicle:

What I haven't seen before is something that tall and with engines that powerful. I also don't see any indication of roll control. Elon says they expect hypersonic flight by the end of the year. But I can't see that happening with that landing system.

Its still damn impressive…

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I'm definitely playing the “I walked uphill to school both ways” card on this one but its something I have to get off my chest. I don't think Mark McCahill gets nearly enough credit for the modern Internet and Web.

My first time on the Internet proper was in 1990 when I started working at the Office of Information Technology at Georgia Tech. Since I worked for OIT I had access to the Sun 386i and a few other UNIX machines used in the machine room. A few weeks into the job I discovered FTP and Archie. A few months into 1991 came Gopher from Marc McCahill at University of Minnesota. I installed the basic server and client on various machines and started serving any campus content I could find. This marked the first instance of Georgia Tech running something other than an FTP and NNTP server for the general Internet.

Later that same year Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau released the NeXT web client, a “line mode” browser, and a rudimentary server. I played with them but the line mode browser was a god awful pain to use and few people had NeXT machines. The idea was attractive but the implementation wasn't really usable by the campus. This will be hard to believe for most readers until 30 but most of the campus still used text oriented terminals. It wasn't until the Lynx browser came out in 1993 that a useful text browser existed.

That meant that all of the content we created from early 1991 through 1993 was put on the campus Gopher server. We did run a web server but the only content it had was a link to the Gopher server. Mosaic was released in a functional form in late 1993. I distinctly remember being at the Houston IETF (the one without any hot water) and being in the terminal room when someone from UIUC showed TimBL the Mosaic browser for the first time. Specifically the use of the newly minted <img> tag. Prior to that point all web browsers simply linked to images, they couldn't display them inline.

But even then, most web browsers were used to access Gopher servers. It wasn't until the Common Gateway Interface and the NCSA HTTPd server in 1993 that content began to be written specifically for the web. Without Gopher would the team at NCSA have been willing to write Mosaic? Without that existing content being available to text mode terminal users I know that Georgia Tech would have waited a while before using TimBL's invention. At that time Tech was investing heavily in Oracle's higher education products that had its own proprietary Campus Wide Information System. Without Gopher there to open that door I doubt a single standard would exist.

So yea, I think Mark McCahill deserves way more recognition and credit for where the Web is today than he does.

P.S. While researching some of the links I used some of the standard Wikipedia articles. I can't exactly find the evidence readily at hand but there is a good deal of revisionist history in some of those articles.

P.P.S For giggles here is the old Georgia Tech homepage circa 1994

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Earlier tonight a friend asked an interesting question. Given a Wordpress theme are there tools to make translating that theme to another platform. In the past this has been how many web designers have made their living. But the strong trend toward the View part of a site living more and more in the browser may mitigate that issue entirely.

There are now several theme sites for Twitter Bootstrap: wrapbootstrap.com and bootswatch.com. Apparently now that you can use Backbone.js with Drupal it looks like CMS engines like Wordpress and Drupal will become simple controllers and models.

If that is the case then themes become very difficult things if View parts of the design aren't done very carefully. If the semantics of the View live in the same set of code as the theme it becomes very tempting to comingle the two.

I sincerely hope someone has a design here because theming could get very ugly very fast.

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CBS This Morning had Neil deGrasse Tyson on to talk about SpaceX's flight and Inspiration Mars:

The interesting bit is that Tyson has moved away from his position from a few years ago that private companies and organizations will only stay in LEO. As much as I admire what Tyson does for education his past pronouncements about what business can do in space is another example of how being an expert in one field doesn't make you one in another. Lets hope the stream of assumption busting businesses continues. Or maybe Tyson will go get his MBA?

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I am in a position to work with a development team in Asia. There is a huge difference in the kinds of projects a startup does and what a Fortune 1000 enterprise would do. Startups are about “science projects”. That's why Agile and Lean methods work so well. If a startup knew the answer well enough to write a detailed specification the team would just go ahead and build the solution.

For those who have done the traditional “offshore development” thing, how do you get the remote team to get on board with helping figure out the detailed specification iteratively? I spent years working with people in the IETF that I still haven't met face to face and we did it almost without thinking about it. What makes off shore software development different?

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Pipefish shares a co-working space that has very 'institutional' lighting. Florescents are in most of the offices and those drive most people crazy after a while. I personally hate bright overhead lighting. Our solution was to replace all of the lighting with multi-color LEDs. We bought three of each of these:

The bulbs go in the lamps. Each workspace gets one lamp and the LED striping goes underneath the desk pointing downward. I personally like the deep, pure blue while others either set the autocycle or go with a light green color. The colored, low-key lighting sets a mood that's much more conducive to getting things done.

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