Just like with IMDB, MySQL and Red Hat Linux, I love it when people give away their labor for free so that people like me can become millionaires when we package and sell their work.

Now if I only could find a way to launch an open source gardening movement so that people would mow my 40 acre mansion lawn for free...

see ya suckers!

A. Capitalist

I have a dual core i7 2.8Ghz laptop with 8Gb of RAM with 2x256 SSD in Raid 0 configuration. Every app runs blazingly fast... except the new Google Maps, which slows the computer down to a crawl. I just ran a set of comparisons and the "new and improved" google maps load times were 3-5x slower than the old google maps.

Moreover, I have yet to find a useful feature in the new maps that is not present in the old version.

This boys and girls is how companies come to be functional retards: anyone can tell the old version is better and it is just a switch of a button away from coming back, but internal politics and committees stop this from happening... as if this wasn't enough, now the company doubles down and makes an even stupider decision: removing the previous, faster and superior version.

This phenomena has been studied by Organizational Management types. Decisions taken by committees often match those taken by a person with an 80 IQ level. In this case, that number would be generous.

To return to the old version:

1. Go to maps.google.com
2. Click on the ? icon in the lower right corner
3. Click "return to classic Google Maps"

But there doesn't seem to be a way to make it permanent.

I dislike the two-sytem status quo too.

At least show both parties are conscious and not unwilling. But I ma not sure how to avoid falsifying consent, say of a stoned person. This app probably just kicks the stone sone the road a little.

Slashdot was only Beta for a while. Google is Beta all the time.

If someone loses their employment becasue this app is misused to punish someone, is the author liable? Common carriers are generally immune to the content passed through them. ISPs are partially immune. But DRM, drug trades, underage porn without due dilligence can get them in trouble. But what about software authors?

the only reason people use Google is that it provides better search results

See my other comment above - the only reason it provides better search results is because they have more people using it, so other players can't provide a better nor cheaper product with respect to search.

That is not inherently bad as long as Google remains a monopoly by having better quality and limiting it to web search. But if they use that advantage to compete at other markets (such as advertising) not by having a better/cheaper product, but by exploiting all those users achieved through their natural monopoly, applying anti-monopoly laws makes sense.

First mover advantage plus the effect that having the majority of users can improve the quality of their results (in fact Google was *not* a first mover in the search space, but now they are entrenched). In the internet, code is law, and Google has a good amount of defining many technologies in widespread use - and more importantly, the way to learn about them.

A few weeks ago I read an analysis by a Mozilla blogger (which I can no longer find) of how, now that pagerank is less and less useful due to link farms and spammers otherwise attacking their algorithm, search quality depends largely on analysis of search terms introduced by users and the results they find interesting. This is a chicken-and-egg situation for any competitor: you can only improve your results by having more users, but they won't come if your results are not better than the market leader's. This is a natural monopoly, but one created by network effects and thus of the kind that can only be displaced by a disruptive process, not by regular competition.

And there's a similar effect for advertising - if there's a natural monopoly over the space were all users reside, then you must advertise in that platform in order to have enough eyeballs. It's the same mechanism that produced a lock-in for Facebook and Microsoft platforms back in the day - you go there not because the product is better, but because you need to interact with everyone who is doing the same.

I wonder if they've considered adding airbags to help cushion the fall, protect the rocket from water damage, and provide flotation?

TMobile provides free streaming to websites such as Pandora without counting that data as part of your data plan (see. This is being done for almost a year and no one is protesting.

At the local level [churches are] exempt from property taxes.

So they don't have to pay for street lights, sidewalk repair, police and fire protection, things like that. That's one good reason to replace property taxes with fees. (Another is to prevent property taxes from causing financial hardship for people on fixed incomes.)

Electromagnetic force created chemical bonds and the illusion of substance in normal matter. Even though normal matter is 99.9999% "empty", EM chemical bonds keeps solids and liquids from interpenetrating each other. Since dark matter doesnt seem to have EM chemical bonds, it just difuses through the general emptiness of normal matter. It just may make us feel a little heavier than were really are from just normal matter.

To get likely first use age. Another example. oldest clothing evidence is about 30K years. But lice genetics points to clothing lice evolved about 70K years ago.