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Oh? Check out this article:

https://www.washingtonian.com/...

But the localsâ"whose farms and homes had been condemned and displaced to make room for the observatoryâ(TM)s campusâ"didnâ(TM)t take so kindly to the influx

https://www.washingtonian.com/... "Two USC baseball sources confirm that Cohen and his son were in fact on campus visiting the baseball program on the 29th."

There is a LOT of non government tech work in the DC area. The Dulles Toll Road corridor is full of various commerical tech companies. Hell 70% of all internet traffic goes through Northern Virginia.
70% of the internet's traffic flows through Loudoun Co, VA

Equinix and Verizon have several large datacenters in the area. Amazon does as well. People seem to forget that Northern VA was home to MAE-East, one of the earliest internet peering exchanges. Verisign's headquarters are out here as well.

I fucking hate the DMV region but the job market for IT workers is one of the best in the US outside of California. I've never been without work for longer than 2 months in 20 years in the area.

The beltway bandits are really a small part of the local economy, but at the same time the government largess does make the region recession proof to a great extent. Even if you aren't a government contractor, those positions open up a lot more headcount in private commerce.

was being burned on the National Mall today....

https://www.washingtonian.com/...

How can he be sensitive to Wifi, but not to the rest of the ubiquitous RF emissions that surround us all? Cellular signals, commercial radio+TV, microwave ovens, radar, etc.

Sounds like he needs to move to The Town Without Wifi

in The Washingtonian probably inspired the Guardian's article.

Pretty neat... I thought the online reviewing space was going the "reputation" route, becoming more "social" by allowing more highly weighting reviews from people in your group of friends (as well as entries in your "feeds" when friends visit a place). This seems to be the route of stuff like Foursquare... and... well, other similar services that I ignore because I don't have a very extensive network of friends who dine at the same sorts of places I go to.

The other route is to just have a place with reputable journalistic integrity do the reviews, which works OK in big cities. But then you pretty much have to know which journal to use in each major metro area, and deal with the reviews possibly being a year or two out of date. And, of course, probably little to no app integration with your favorite map search engine. http://www.washingtonian.com/s... is a great example for the DC area; we'd pretty much cycle through the entire "Cheap Eats" and "Dirt Cheap Eats" section for nearby neighborhoods, and maybe a few of the "100 best" for special occasions.

Other than that, I really do like Yelp for local recommendations, and have had great experiences using it. So much so that I downloaded the app when Google Maps switched from Yelp to Zagat for local search.

As an aside, I tried to like Zagat, even paid for a subscription back in the PalmOS days. But ultimately, Zagat reviews and ratings always seemed to be biased too much towards decor and not at all enough towards food quality, authenticity, and "interestingness", which Yelp excels in.

So it does suck to hear that Yelp is starting to extort business owners for listing good reviews, since I do make go/no-go decisions based on relative rankings. I dunno, maybe Yelp could start charging users extra for "journalistic integrity" mode that turns off some of their extortion effects, while the "free tier" of user gets rankings based more on advertising.

Anyway, articles like this do make me upset with Yelp. But a lot of places do seem to have yelp sticker on their window, so perhaps it's just part of the cost of doing business these days. I applaud this italian joint for lashing out against it in an entertaining way, and I'll start searching for some of the lowest reviewed places too, since I mostly use Yelp to find the exceptional places anyways.

So law enforcement budgets will be lower, but the need for law enforcement will also be lower because you won't have to pay as many cops to run around patrolling the roads and writing tickets.

I thought the same thing. I would love to see more analysis on that $300k figure of annual revenue per officer. Is that uniform across the country, or are there a small number of communities with aggressive enforcement? How many police hours are dedicated to ticket enforcement vs. other duties, and how does that change in urban, suburban, and rural areas of the country? My guess is that urban police don't spend as much time enforcing speeding laws as their suburban and rural counterparts. However something else to consider is parking tickets, which do generate a lot of revenue for many urban areas. Since my driver-less car can drop me off at the curb, and find parking anywhere, or just drive around until needed, there will far fewer tickets written here too.

Yeah, I think I'd even take the spotty Yelp ratings over Zagat nowadays, it's actually quite sad. I used to play with Zagat a bunch of years ago, and even maybe paid for their Blackberry app once, but it didn't really deliver the goods when we turned to it for our night out. My suspicion is that Google will simply add some of the Zagat editorial to some of the Yelp content, and maybe level out some of those 5-star crap chain listings that litter the listings of unique establishments, but I don't intend to pay the Zagat blurb much mind.

In our area, we do have a really great alternative, the local Washingtonian. I wish more of these services could figure out how to emulate some of their features and quality, or if we could get something that consistently covers other metro areas.

But wait, if we have a new economic model, then Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman, haughty, almost-french-looking not-Enron advisor, might not afford his palace any more. http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/1673.html

Right about here:

http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/5226.html

Well, not so fast, He has to be convicted first, then go through all the appeals etc. Word is out that he has hired Washington's most powerful and expensive lawyer[1], Brendan Sullivan [2]. You may know Sullivan as he was the attorney for Oliver North during the Iran contra affair. Sullivan was also hired as the lead attorney against Microsoft, on behalf of nine state attorneys general who were unhappy with the federal government's decision to drop an antitrust case against Microsoft.[3] You may remember him from this quote:

"Internet Explorer, your honor, is the fruit of Microsoft's statutory violations and it should be denied them."[4]

Oh my, so do I root for Stevens to get convicted, or do I want to see his attorney fail? I mean, gee nine attorney generals hired this guy to fight Microsoft, he's gotta be a heck of a lawyer.

1) http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/capitalcomme nt/4457.html
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Sullivan
3) http://ag.ca.gov/newsalerts/release.php?id=1061
4) http://money.cnn.com/2002/03/18/technology/microso ft/index.htm

I mean, really, various on-line resrouces even tell us where the bars are that the congressional staffers hang out at!! What would this country do if the Senators and Representatives had to read those thousands of pages of documents themselves!?

I don't even want to think about what would happen if the terrorists thought about using THIS map.

Think carefully about giving up your freedoms; you won't get them back.

Their only mistake was not breaking the law, like RIMM did. Basically, NTP is holding a very vague patent and trying to extort manufacturers who want to make very obvious products.

NTP isn't holding a "very vague patent" either. They're holding a half-dozen patents which RIM has violated. Last but not least, RIM's actions in court have been, not to put too fine a point on it, mendacious. The citations they've received from the judge are nothing short of astonishing. At one point they appealed to Congress to throw the case out of court because Congressmen make heavy use of the Blackberries RIM gave them, and thus fining RIM would somehow create -- get ready -- a dent in national security.

Best burger: Five Guys
Best tacos:
Picante (The Real Taco), or you can default to the very good chain Don Pablo's, or Baja Fresh.

Of course, all of this stuff is mondo expensive. A burger, cajun fries and coke at 5 guys is essentially $10 after you donate the change to the tips jar.
It's a splurge.
So I will settle for Mickey Ds or Burger King especially when those deceptively good (but artery-hardening) fries are accompanied by a tall, diet coke (my absolute favorite chemical cocktail by far...) and the food comes 10 times faster.

Also, about Taco Bell. It can't be written off completely. Because it's a franchise... We have this Taco Bell in reston (which I've mentioned before) which is absolutely FANTASTIC. It's difficult to describe. All the food tastes completely unlike any other taco bell... its actually good and the vegetables/meat/tortillas are fresh, and you don't get indigestion afterward. I see them making the tortillas out of dough in the back any time you go in there.

I have this feeling that they don't necessarily use the same distributors that the less involved owners default to. The prices are higher of course than some other ones.

Only problem... the sell that Pepsi swill. I'd be there more often because if not because of that.

Finally, she reached Hayden, who was sipping a beer. He suggested she use the pay phone he maintained in the restaurant. She haughtily replied: "I wouldn't be caught dead using a pay phone.

At Franklin's (the local brewpub) they don't have a traditional payphone, what they have instead is a cellphone for customer use. You just make your call and drop $.50 into a box. A lot of businesses used to maintain payphones for their customers, often as a losing proposition for the business since the Phone Co's charge the biz something like $200/month to have one. At first businesses tried to get around this by instead using the oversized desktop payphones some independents were offering. But with "free" phones and unlimited mobile plans now running about $60 - $70/month I think a lot more places will be doing this. At $60/month it only takes 4 calls a day to break even - plus there is a redundant phone system available in case the main POTS line phones goes down.