http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare hourly 1 1901-01-01T00:00+00:00 http://gmane.org/img/gmane-25t.png http://gmane.org http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49312 <pre>https://github.com/divegeek/uscode _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Jeff Bone 2012-05-25T20:56:51 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49297 <pre>Blodgett's story is serious business. I've never seen something like it before outside of the banking scandals of the last few years. But a dot-com is not going to be protected from itself like the big banks are. Or am I overreacting? How big a hit will FB take? _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Lucas Gonze 2012-05-22T23:30:26 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49278 <pre>The Open Source efforts are rapidly lapping the Amazon/Google/Rackspace offerings... http://owncloud.org/ </pre> Adam L Beberg 2012-05-22T16:26:05 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49277 <pre>Wheee! sdw _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Stephen Williams 2012-05-22T08:17:11 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49269 <pre>It occurs to me that "artificial gravity" can be trivially created by simply following one of two methods: A) Always be accelerating or decelerating perpendicular to the desired plane of gravity. B) Put out a tether to a chunk of your mass and spin. In this design, the "saucer section" has a gravity wheel, which is also good. Let the "turbo lifts" work out moving between modes. Gimbal all of the living spaces perhaps. http://www.gizmag.com/engineer-proposes-uss-enterprise/22532/ sdw _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Stephen Williams 2012-05-21T06:41:13 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49265 <pre>Is it Zevon's "French Inhaler"? "But tell me: how are you going to make your way in the world, woman, when you weren't cut out for working? And you just can't concentrate? And you always show up late?" Or Liz Phair's "Divorce Song"? "And the license said you had to stick around, until I was dead. But if you're tired of looking at my face, I guess I already am" Or Dylan? "And now I understand, after waking enough times to think I see The Holy Kiss that's supposed to last eternity Blow up in smoke, its destiny Falls on strangers, travels free Yes, I know now, traps are only set by me And I do not really need to be assured That love is just a four-letter word" _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Joseph S. Barrera III 2012-05-21T03:14:25 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49263 <pre>Well ? http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m40raknCnt1qz78pio1_1280.jpg </pre> Noon Silk 2012-05-20T08:27:52 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49253 <pre>Snakes can't swim, right? ... please tell me they can't. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-03/pythons-swallow-whole-deer-in-florida-6-million-tab.html?cmpid=otbrn.sustain.story "Last October, a snake in the Everglades was found to have swallowed a 76-pound (34-kilo) deer. Another specimen was discovered with an adult alligator bursting from its insides -- a tooth-and-claw encounter neither animal survived." "In January, the proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences &lt;http://www.nationalacademies.org/&gt;published a study showing "dramatic declines" of mammal populations in southern Florida -- raccoon, opossum, bobcat, deer and rabbit -- all believed to have become snake food." P.S. http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/florida.shtml the worst part is that global warming won't even drown snakeland first, it seems. NEVER MIND _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Joseph S. Barrera III 2012-05-18T22:10:51 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49242 <pre>I don't comprehend this [stock market silliness]. It doesn't matter what Greece does; they're screwed anyway. If they refuse the bailout and continue deficit spending they're screwed and will default. If they accept the bailouts and try to implement the brutal austerity measures that are the condition for the bailouts they're screwed and will default. The only question is which course will force them into default quicker. Can someone tell me why the stock markets are in such a tizzy about this at this point? It should have been obvious months ago what the outcome will be and should already be priced into anything that might be affected by a Greek default. ..... Shouldn't it?? ...ken... _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Ken Ganshirt < at > Yahoo 2012-05-16T23:23:29 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49231 <pre>60 Minutes just did a segment on Harmony schools, a large number of public charter schools in the US. They are are based on an organization founded by a Turkish Islamic imam (who's sick and has been living in the Poconos for several years). An imam that mainly has been preaching that teaching and learning science, and working to achieve financial success, is the way to please God. The schools, while they import a lot of Turkish teachers, teach no religion whatsoever. Why can't other religious foundations act in such a constructive and selfless way? Bill Gates is in there some where also. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/education/07charter.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all http://www.harmonyparent.com/charterschools/see-how-informed-the-people-attacking-harmony-are/ Stephen _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Stephen D. Williams 2012-05-14T03:43:05 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49223 <pre>Fig 1. on the 3rd page of "Do Values Grow on Trees?"[0] shows relatively different editing behaviors for (a tiny selection of) students who went on to receive, respectively good, fair, and poor grades in a programming class. The interesting thing is that (consistent with industry practice) the good student spent a much larger fraction of time with intermediate programs that, whether or not they had the desired functionality, at least compiled. My speculation is that programmers may be like riders, in that a classical goal of riding is to be in such an equilibrium that an outside observer does not notice the dialog between horse and rider (software is like sausage: the people who consume it often have little to no interest in how it is produced), and the great distinction between good and poor riders is that when a horse requires correction, a strong rider quickly restores the invariant that the horse is at least doing *something* in good form (even if it remains to patiently, incrementally, teach what was desired in the first place), while a weak rider expends a great deal of time in which the horse is not doing anything in particular besides being confused about what might possibly be expected of it. Do good programmers make frequent, effective even if occasionally not subtle, interventions in their programs, while poor programmers make infrequent, ineffective ones? -Dave [0] Marceau, Fisler, Krishnamurthi "Do Values Grow on Trees? Expression Integrity in Functional Programming" 2011 http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mfk-val- grow-tree-expr-integ-fp/paper.pdf _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Dave Long 2012-05-10T11:18:18 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49204 <pre>http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2012/05/the-viral-video-stars-of-roflcon/256889/ 'The "ROFL" in "ROFLCon" is an outdated web acronym -- Rolling on the Floor Laughing -- basically an old-timey way of saying "LOL." ROFLCon uses it ironically.' So like, shit. Am I so old that an AOL endless-september neologism "ROFL" is now quaint??? "old-timey"??? How can ANYTHING about the internet be "old-timey"??? Does this mean I can no longer wear my ROFLcopter shirt in public without people calling me "grandpa"? - Joe P.S. Well shit, if MCA is already dead from cancer, I guess I know the answers to the rest of my questions. Shit. And shit shit shit. RIP Adam. _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Joseph S. Barrera III 2012-05-08T21:15:06 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49203 <pre>http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/the-difference-between-the-us-and-europe-in-1-graph/256857/ Michael Cembalest, the JP Morgan analyst and author of themy favorite new chart about monetary unions &lt;http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/the-funniest-graph-ive-ever-seen-about-why-the-euro-is-totally-doomed/256793/&gt;-- it's not a crowded field, admittedly -- passes along another clever graph which shows fiscal transfers (don't worry, that's just another word for money) between the rich California-Connecticut-Illinois-New Jersey-New York quintuple and poorer states like Tennessee. If similar, seamless transfers existed in the EU, the rich north would have to send to Portugal and Greece at least an additional 30 cents for every dollar they paid in taxes, year after year after year. _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Joseph S. Barrera III 2012-05-08T20:46:07 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49182 <pre>----- Forwarded message from Dmytri Kleiner &lt;dk&lt; at &gt;telekommunisten.net&gt; ----- From: Dmytri Kleiner &lt;dk&lt; at &gt;telekommunisten.net&gt; Date: Tue, 08 May 2012 09:21:40 +0200 To: nettime-l&lt; at &gt;kein.org Subject: &lt;nettime&gt; Privacy, Moglen, &lt; at &gt;ioerror, #rp12 Organization: Telekommunisten User-Agent: Roundcube Webmail/0.6 Privacy, Moglen, &lt; at &gt;ioerror, #rp12 I gave a talk with Jacob Applebaum at last week's Re:publica conference in Berlin. It seems it had fallen to us to break a little bad news. Here it is. - We are not progressing from a primitive era of centralized social media to an emerging era of decentralized social media, the reverse is happening. - Surveillance and control of users is not some sort of unintended consequence of social media platforms, it is the reason they exist. - Privacy is not simply a consumer choice, it is a matter of power and privilege. Earlier at Re:publica, Eben Moglen, the brilliant and tireless legal council of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the FreedomBox Foundation, gave a characteristically excellent speech. However, in his enthusiasm, he makes makes a claim that seems very wrong. Moglen, claims that Facebook's days as a dominant platform are numbered, because we will soon have decentralized social platforms, based on projects such as FreedomBox, users will operate their own federated platforms and form collective social platforms based on their own hardware, retain control of their own data, etc. I can understand and share Moglen's enthusiasm for such a vision, however this is not the observable history of our communications platforms, not the obvious direction they seem to be headed, and there is no clear reason to believe this will change. The trajectory that Moglen is using has centralized social media as the starting point and distributed social media as the place we are moving toward. But in actual fact, distributed social media is where we started, and centralized platforms are where we have arrived. The Internet is a distributed social media platform. The classic internet platforms that existed before the commercialization of the web provided all the features of modern social media monopolies. Platforms like Usenet, Email, IRC and Finger allowed us to do everything we do now with Facebook and friends. We could post status updates, share pictures, send messages, etc. Yet, these platforms have been more or less abandoned. So the question we need to address is not so much how we can invent a distributed social platform, but how and why we started from a fully distributed social platform and replaced it with centralized social media monopolies. The answer is quite simple. The early internet was not significantly capitalist funded, the change in application topology came along with commercialization, and it is a consequence of the business models required by capitalist investors to capture profit. The business model of social media platforms is surveillance and behavioral control. The internet's original protocols and architecture made surveillance and behavioral control more difficult. Once capital became the dominant source of financing it directed investment toward centralized platforms, which are better at providing such surveillance and control, the original platforms were starved of financing. The centralized platforms grew and the decentralized platforms submerged beneath the rising tides of the capitalist web. This is nothing new. This was the same business model that capital devised for media in general, such as network television. The customer of network television is not the viewer, rather the viewer is the product, the "audience commodity." The real customer is the advertisers and lobby groups that want to control this audience. Network Television didn't provide the surveillance part, so advertisers needed to employ market research and ratings firms such as Neielson for that bit. This was a major advantage of social media, richer data from better surveillance allowed for more effective behavioral control than ever before possible, using tracking, targeting, machine learning, behavioral retargeting, among many techniques made possible by the deep pool of data companies like Facebook and Google have available. This is not a choice that capitalist made, this is the only way that profit-driven organizations can provide a public good like a communication platform. Capitalist investors must capture profit or lose their capital. If their platforms can not capture profit, they vanish. So, if capitalism will not fund free, federated social platforms, what will? For Moglen's optimistic trajectory to pan out, this implies that funds can come from the public sector, or from volunteers/donators etc? But if these sectors where capable of turning the tide on social media monopolies, wouldn't they have already done so? After all, the internet started out as a decentralized platform, so it's not like they had to play catch-up, they had a significant head start. Yet, you could fill many a curio case with technologies dreamed up and abandoned because they where unable to be sustained without financing. http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/ Give the continuous march of neoliberal public sector retrenchment, the austerity craze and the ever increasing precariousness of most communities, it seems unlikely the public or voluntary sectors will be the source of such a dramatic turnaround. Given the general tendency of capitalist economies toward accumulation and consolidation, such a turnaround seems even less likely. Thus, there is no real reason to believe Moglen's trajectory will come about. The obstacle to decentralized social media is not that it has not been invented, but the profit-motive itself. Thus to reverse this trajectory back towards decentralization, requires not so much technical initiative, but political struggle. So long as we maintain the social choice to provision our communication systems according to the profit motive, we will only get communications platforms that allow for the capture of profit. Free, open systems, that neither surveil, nor control, nor exclude, will not be funded, as they do not provide the mechanisms required to capture profit. Facebook is worth billions precisely because of it's capacity for surveillance and control. Same with Google. Thus, like the struggle for other public goods, like education, child care, and health care, free communication platforms for the masses can only come from collective political struggle to achieve such platforms. In the meantime, we have many clever and dedicated people contributing to inventing alternative platforms, and these platforms can be very important and worthwhile for the minority that will ever use them, but we do not have the social will nor capacity to bring these platforms to the masses, and given the dominance of capital in our society, it's not clear where such capacity will come from. As surveillance and control is enforced by the powerful interests of capital, privacy and autonomy become a question of power and privilege, not just consumer choice. It's not simply a question of choosing to use certain platforms over others, it's not a question of openness and visibility being the new way people live in a networked society. Rather it's a fact that our platforms are financed for the purpose of watching people and pushing them to behave in ways that benefit the operators of the platform and their real customers, the advertisers, and the industrial and political lobbies. The platform exists to shape society according to the interests of these advertisers and lobbies. As such, how coercive these platforms are largely depend on the degree to which your behaviour is aligned with the platform-operators' profit-driven objectives, and thus privacy and autonomy is not just a feature any given platforms my or may not offer, but determine the possibility of resistance, determine our ability to work against powerful interests' efforts to shape society in ways we disagree with. As Jake said at our talk "We can't have post-privacy until we are post-privilege"http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/ Eliminating privilege is a political struggle, not a technical one. I'll be at Stammtisch as usual around 9pm, please come by, anybody still hanging around after #rp12 is more than welcome to join us. You can find us here: http://bit.ly/buchhandlung A sharable version of this text can be found here: http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/ </pre> Eugen Leitl 2012-05-08T12:35:34 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49178 <pre>OK, so in the past two days I've been forced to watch not just "Snatch" but then also much of "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels". I kept thinking (and loudly saying) "Bad Tarantino". Am I being unfair? Or should I be entertained when 5 billion characters are paraded in front of the camera with NO character development and NO dialog worth listening to? - Joe (cranky) _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Joseph S. Barrera III 2012-05-08T10:27:03 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49157 <pre>----- Forwarded message from Michael Hrenka &lt;metahorse&lt; at &gt;googlemail.com&gt; ----- From: Michael Hrenka &lt;metahorse&lt; at &gt;googlemail.com&gt; Date: Mon, 7 May 2012 02:50:52 -0700 (PDT) To: Doctrine Zero &lt;DoctrineZero&lt; at &gt;googlegroups.com&gt; Subject: [ZS] Prestige Bitcoin User-Agent: G2/1.0 Reply-To: doctrinezero&lt; at &gt;googlegroups.com At the AGM we discussed combining my reputation system with the official Bitcoin currency. I wanted to give you an update on my thoughts on that topic: First of all, it's a good idea to focus our economics projects in that way, because we can put everything into an integrated system. When I tried to develop a reputation based economy I finally realized that it's a bad idea not to integrate some kind of money currency into the system. Money is very useful, after all. My first idea how to combine both concepts (reputation and money) was to make some kind of "pot" which is then paid out to all users of that system - in proportion to their Prestige index. But to make that system a reality you really need such a pot in the first place. So, I've come up with the idea of creating a new currency that is coupled with the reputation system directly, the Fluido. That would have eliminated the problem of getting a pot of external money. But many people prefer using already existing currencies, for obvious reasons. Yesterday I had the idea that users of a Prestige Bitcoin system could pay Bitcoin into a general fund. They wouldn't get a direct gratification for that, but if they decide to make their donation not anonymously, they might get some reputation from other users for their generosity. Every user with at least some Prestige would get regular payments out of that general fund. Let's say every week 5-10% of the fund are distributed to those users. Then there's also the problem that people need to mine blocks if this new hybrid system is supposed to work on a decentralized basis just like Bitcoin. My idea regarding that problem is to grant users who mine blocks a fixed number of Prestige points. This creates different ways for getting Prestige points, so it would not be very clear whether those points represent public approval or mining rewards. By displaying the mining rewards explicitly and contrasting them with the pure "public appreciation" Prestige people would still get a clear information what a certain Prestige score actually reveals. Still, both types of Prestige are equivalent in the sense that they are used by the system in exactly the same way. Apart from those considerations I think the project can be split up into different phases of development: Phase 1: Develop the core Prestige system with a centralized architecture, because that's the easiest thing which can be implemented in a reasonable time frame. In any case, already this relatively simple system would be quite useful for many small groups like ours as internal economic tool. Phase 2: Make a pure Prestige system that's decentralized, based on the ideas of the Bitcoin technology. This system would already have the potential to go global and become a widely used tool for representing reputation. Phase 3: Create the Prestige Bitcoin General Fund which couples the decentralized Prestige system with the official Bitcoin currency. It would be simply a kind of add-on to the Prestige system. In a similar fashion it would also be possible to design the Fluido as another add-on to the Prestige system. Users of the Prestige system would be able to decide which add-ons they use. Eventually, third parties could even create their own add-ons. What do you think about those ideas? </pre> Eugen Leitl 2012-05-07T13:49:05 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49152 <pre>Sounds like something fun to hack soonish. Yea, right. How long will any such restriction last in the face of "curious" hackers? Just another in a long line of steps that will make current restrictions on things look silly soon. We need to concentrate on ethics and peer pressure, along with occasionally just adjusting to a new reality, to manage these kinds of advances. In the not too distant future, with a little work individuals will be able to concoct nearly any molecule, nano shape, biological component, computer, sensor, robot, or nanobot, not to mention their own AI / AGI to automate it. http://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/ShowPR.aspx?PUBCODE=055&amp;ACCT=0000100&amp;ISSUE=1204&amp;RELTYPE=IN&amp;PRODCODE=000000&amp;PRODLETT=DZ.html?et_cid=2605275&amp;et_rid=60834710&amp;linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wirelessdesignmag.com%2fShowPR~PUBCODE~055~ACCT~0000100~ISSUE~1204~RELTYPE~IN~PRODCODE~000000~PRODLETT~DZ&amp;CommonCount=0 **New Research Could Mean Cellphones That Can See Through Walls* * /Team Finds New Possibilities in Untapped Terahertz Range With Implications For a Host of Devices/ Terahertz rangeComic book hero superpowers may be one step closer to reality after the latest technological feats made by researchers at UT Dallas &lt;http://www.utdallas.edu/&gt;. They have designed an imager chip that could turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects. The team’s research linked two scientific advances. One involves tapping into an unused range in the electromagnetic spectrum. The other is a new microchip technology. The electromagnetic spectrum characterizes wavelengths of energy. For example, radio waves for AM and FM signals, or microwaves used for cell phones or the infrared wavelength that makes night vision devices possible. But the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, one of the wavelength ranges that falls between microwave and infrared, has not been accessible for most consumer devices. “We’ve created approaches that open a previously untapped portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for consumer use and life-saving medical applications,” said Dr. Kenneth O, professor of electrical engineering at UT Dallas and director of the Texas Analog Center of Excellence &lt;http://ecs.utdallas.edu/TxACE/&gt;(TxACE). “The terahertz range is full of unlimited potential that could benefit us all.” Using the new approach, images can be created with signals operating in the terahertz (THz) range without having to use several lenses inside a device. This could reduce overall size and cost. The second advance that makes the findings applicable for consumer devices is the technology used to create the microchip. Chips manufactured using CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) technology form the basis of many consumer electronic devices used in daily life such as personal computers, smart phones, high definition TV and game consoles. “CMOS is affordable and can be used to make lots of chips,” Dr. O said. “The combination of CMOS and terahertz means you could put this chip and receiver on the back of a cellphone, turning it into a device carried in your pocket that can see through objects.” Due to privacy concerns, Dr. O and his team are focused on uses in the distance range of less than four inches. Consumer applications of such technology could range from finding studs in walls to authentication of important documents. Businesses could use it to detect counterfeit money. Manufacturing companies could apply it to process control. There are also more communication channels available in terahertz than the range currently used for wireless communication, so information could be more rapidly shared at this frequency. Terahertz can also be used for imaging to detect cancer tumors, diagnosing disease through breath analysis, and monitoring air toxicity. “There are all kinds of things you could be able to do that we just haven’t yet thought about,” said Dr. O, holder of the Texas Instruments Distinguished Chair &lt;http://www.utdallas.edu/chairs/profiles/o.html&gt;. The research was presented at the most recent International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The team will work next to build an entire working imaging system based on the CMOS terahertz system. Other authors of the paper include Ruonan Han and Yaming Zhang, former students of Professor O, Youngwan Kim and Dae Yeon Kim, TxACE members, and Hisashi Sam Shichijio, research professor at TxACE. The work was supported by the Center for Circuit &amp; System Solutions (C2S2 Center) and conducted in the TxACE laboratory at UT Dallas, which is funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the state through its Texas Emerging Technology Fund, Texas Instruments Inc., The UT System and UT Dallas. *Posted by Ron M. Seidel, Editorial Intern* April 19, 2012 _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Stephen Williams 2012-05-07T03:55:12 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49146 <pre>Lol... http://programming-motherfucker.com/ Nice resource list: http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html sdw _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Stephen D. Williams 2012-05-07T01:45:29 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49145 <pre>Lol... http://programming-motherfucker.com/ Nice resource list: http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html sdw _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Stephen Williams 2012-05-07T01:43:55 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49144 <pre>Lol... http://programming-motherfucker.com/ Nice resource list: http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html sdw _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Stephen Williams 2012-05-07T01:44:24 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare/49143 <pre> Apropos of some recent maker / hacker threads... I'm one of the evaluators for this event, which is turning out to be a lot of fun: http://kalamazoo.startupweekend.org/ Finally, I get to judge other people and they THANK me for it!! lolz Hip space, cool folks, GREAT energy! Kalamazoo's mayor attended all of Friday evening's events -- after spending the day at the grand opening of TechShop Detroit. So... he gets it, and wants more. When one of the group told him there'd been no Startup Zoo coverage on local news, he pulled out his phone and started texting reporters. Big turnout for a town this size: http://twitpic.com/9hllhc Some crazy pitches last night -- but also a few with real potential. The international parent group has solid sponsors, including Kauffman: http://startupweekend.org/ It might be worth checking to see whether they're active in your area. I stumbled onto it by meeting one of the local organizers over Thanksgiving dinner... and I'm glad I did. GS --------------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Stock gstock&lt; at &gt;nexcerpt.com Nexcerpt http://www.nexcerpt.com/ 269.624.1140 direct _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork </pre> Gary Stock 2012-05-05T14:14:38 Search the mailing list at Gmane query http://search.gmane.org/?group=$group=gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare