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Comment Re: Apologizing for the Catalyst (Score 1) 452

If you read

Management has to be aware of that and set rules to start with. If there is an issue with AMA, it is that users live in a fantasy world where anything really means anything, and admins never explained that in the real world it does not. you would understand this is what was said. I the management was competent, if they understood their users, they could manage them better. No one is making excuses for anyone, managements or mods or end users. It was predictable that the users would throw a temper tantrum, and competent management would have mitigated the effects of that temper tantrum. As it was subr were shut down for a day, which caused an interruption. They were not shut down for longer because children need attention and cannot actually mount a real revolt, so the real damage was minimal. Management knows this, so will continue to do whatever it wants, it has just learned the lesson that I mentioned above. That it has to scaffold and spend a bit more time stoking egos, which is what the press release says it will do.

Comment Re: Simple fix for ride-sharing/uber (Score 1) 90

It would be incredibly easy to hack. A third party message board of people needing a ride. It would also cut uber out of the loop as third party drivers would just pick people up. The problem with uber is it is purely a race to the bottom.

What would give uber some credibility is huge insurance policy that is in effect anytime an uber driver is logged in, and that uber drivers help fund based on number hours logged in. And wifi cameras in the car.And a list of drivers who cannot respond to certain customers. This is simple.

Comment Re: Apologizing for the Catalyst (Score 1) 452

Honestly it is not managing the expectations of the users. The reddit user base is young and has unreasonable expectations. I am not saying this out of spite, just droppin knowledge as we used to say when I was young and had unreasonable expectations.

Look at /. Many years ago when everyone was around 30 or much younger. Recall the book that was published.

Many of the users on reddit are teens, some even in high school. Kids do not like rules or others messing with their toys. Of course the admins also are young, just like /. In the begining. Management has to be aware of that and set rules to start with. If there is an issue with AMA, it is that users live in a fantasy world where anything really means anything, and admins never explained that in the real world it does not.

Comment Re:The short answer is nothing (Score 1) 108

Domain names are a limited resource, somewhat analogous to real estate in that there are areas that are popular and areas that are not. So right now everyone wants to live in Hong Kong and everyone thinks they have a right to do so for the same price it costs them to live wherever they are now.

With domain this makes sense because there is no real issues like with real estate. There is no one who is going to have to move to another country instead of staying close to their family, so there is no push for rent controls or bans on foreign ownership. So the actual issue of a domain name is purely a matter of arbitrary convenience.

This becomes more so as we expand the TLDs. And more so, as in this case, where the owner is just casually using a domain. It is no so much a matter of millions of dollars of good will, but of exploiting the resource period. I would also say that you do not buy a domain so much as rent it. This is why I suggest to my clients that they rent/buy the domain for the longest time possible.

I think this is question is a result of either a high level of paranoia or the realization by the poster that domain name squatting is not the business it used to be. If this is a typosquatted domain, and it is a primary email address, then get another email address. If it a serious domain, get some content on it.

Comment Re:But the best way to deliver that ... (Score 1) 110

I think we all appreciate that this person went to b-school and therefore is well trained in using buzz words and maximizing quarterly profits, but Google works because unlike most other dot coms, it does deliver products to generate a profit, not just data that one day may be used for a profit.

At the time when Google was on the rise, web browsers began to let user manage 'cookies'. This was a new concept to everyone back then, but web companies were learning to use cookies to track users, and end users were learning to turn them off to protect privacy. Companies like 2o7, which thought they could win by obfuscating their domain name, were driven into oblivion by companies like Google who were making a much fairer trade. Google provided a service for data collection, that first service being the search App, and in return they got user data which could be used to build an ad service business.

To be honest Google search now sucks and any actual consumer products are too expensive to provide any value. Like MS, google end user products are only affordable because the manufacturers take a hit on profits. This is why Apple has only a small share of the mobile phone market, but most of the profits.

So at the end of the day, all Google has is the apps. And the killer app, google docs, has not been updated in a long time. Maps has credible competitors. Bing under new owners could be a player, which it wasn't with MS because it was just a small cog in huge machine. Google can be forgiven because it provides descent products for no cost, even if those products are crappy. It is like broadcast TV. People will watch it, and maybe buy some of the stuff in the ads, because what else is there to do?

But Google without apps, with only search, is going to be highly vulnerable. At some point someone is going to figure a way to compete with Google, and if all Google has to back up ads is search, they are going to be easy pickings.

Comment Re: Altough I agree (Score 1) 61

MS is the grandaddy of the computer phone like device, having supported the enhanced phone since at least 2000. These devices have never sold, well, and presumably never made any significant profit. If MS did not quit the market after the KIN, nothing will stop them. Especially now that they have created an OS designed to make their users suffer. Windows 10 appears to continue the notion that in the not too distant future every person will be on a tablet, not on what we consider a computer today. And it makes sense because most of the world are going is going to be using a phone with a screen less than 10" as a computer in the near future. If MS alienates it's traditional high volume user base, and is not able to get a phone out, then where is the money going to come from? Not from the few respectability users that need MS products to run specialty verticle market applications.

Comment Re:The project known as F-35 (Score 2, Insightful) 843

In the US these military projects are the primary method for conservatives to get pork into their district. No conservative is going to vote against wasting money on useless weapon systems. To be honest, not all of the money is wasted. Some of this money goes into basic research that results in actually useful technology that helps the US in long term competitiveness. Some of it keeps important firms from bankruptcy, firms we need for national security. But I think this could be done much more efficiently through well overseen civilian programs. To be further honest the pork here is bipartisan. While almost every states in the union get some of the money, most of it appears to go to Texas and California.And of course the executives a Lockheed-Martin are not going to continue the bribes to congress if they is no longer a program. And the jobs at the pentagon are going to be lost if there is no longer a jobs program to manage.

Comment Re:Refill (Score 1) 189

I used to refill cartridges. It was no big deal. Now I just buy refurbished cartridges.

In any case, won't the store take catridges, even if you don't sign up? Sure you won't get paid, but why is that an issue.

if the question is how to get rich by recycling cartridges, that answer is to get a warehouse and postpaid return envelopes. Refill then yourself, list them on ebay, and watch the buck roll in.

Comment it would be pretty to think so (Score 4, Insightful) 70

I suspect the primary reason for this is to maintain high ad prices by not charging advertisers for useless click. For instance, if I were to post this response on a mobile platform, I would first have to close the ad tab at the bottom so I could click the submit button. Sometimes instead of closing the ad, I click it. If the advertiser is getting charged per click, and google were the provider, this would generate revenue for Google while providing negative value for the advertiser, as it would tend to make me dislike the advertiser. This would tend to push ad rates down, which still would not compensate for the negative end user impression.

Comment Re: Try it for yourself!n (Score 2) 818

To put in madly, June 2015 is when U.S. Conservative Chechens have come home to roost from a hand hugely overplayed. ACA subsidies have not only been held as valid regalutory measures, but required by the legislation. And now the confederate flag. The error in the logic is that most state houses do not fly other enemy flags. The only enemy flag some fly is the confederate flag. And instead of just keeping it on the down low, they made sure it was always in the face of everyone as a symbol of how whites are still fighting against the blacks or the Mexicans to whoever wanted to take over our country and rape our women. Both of these are strategic losses as a result of overconfidence. And it is a loss because the flag is no longer about heritage, which was a valid argument. The bigots have kept it at such a high profile, that it has lost its dignity. To be clear, a Deep South person, so oI see that some do see a heritage and history, but that has been destroyed by the boots. So as soon as NC builds a Hilter memorial and outs a nazi flag on it, we can talk.

Comment before the 'bad science' complaints (Score 3, Insightful) 163

This change has nothing to do with health or whether one additive is more deadly than another additive. For all we know the new formulations are going to be more deadly to humans. I can't imagine that Trix can said to actually nutritional for any human person, although Trix Yogurt used to be one of the less offensive brands of yogurt like food stuff. This change has to do with market differentiation and convincing parents to pay a premium for name brand product that kids will eat. Now, if we are talking nutrition, I would say a mug of steel cut oatmeal with raisins is a good minimally processed food, that is cheap and nutritional to boot. But this was not my breakfast a little tyke because no one made me breakfast. There was dry cereal and a cup of milk and it was up to be to put it together. I ate corn chex mostly, which still has one of the shortest ingredient labels in the business, and BHT is the only thing that is suspect.

Comment Why don't the boys play too (Score 1) 490

The way that I read this is that their are boy toys and girl toys and must make the girls learn to play with boys toys, because that is the real world, but we can't make the boys play with girl,toys.

That is really wrong because we should be tracing 'girl' skills. Learning and hacking cooking, for instance, teaching important skills. Learning to sew is much better at teaching hand eye coordination than video games. It is easier to teach if you pander to the boys, but doing so does not make one a good stem teacher.

Comment Re:Give it some hints ... (Score 1) 424

you can give Google hints, you can do whatever, but two things are always going to work against you when you do non-mainstream or very narrow searches. First, google builds results by popularity. Therefore if something is not popular google is not going to have a good way to figure out which to put first. Second, the people pay a lot of money for SEO. When one wants a result that is not a certain basketball players penis, it is going to hard to get the results. Third, even if one is looking for the aforementioned item, google is under a lot of pressure to scrub results. While it does a good job on this in some ways, the SEO people are going to push bad results in front of good. What is basically going on here is that Google is broken. When I put in a search with few real results, what I get are link farms. When I put in a popular search, I still get a good number of link farms. When I am looking for obscure techincal items, I get links to sites that have every permutation of every word in such a way that it looks like there is real content there, which fools google into thinking it is a real site. Google is trying to add second and third order connections, but the reality is that the search has been as broken as alta vista for the past several years. And no, outside of a human curated search for certain disciplines, there is not credible substitute. Google has eaten all the search money, and there is no real research to fix it.

Comment Re:Obligatory reading (Score 5, Insightful) 419

this is an engineering problem, and incompetent people should have nothing to say about it. One of the primary ways that we can identify incompetence is when someone say if we would have done this then the problem would have been solved. Engineering problems are complex, especially in space travel, and there is no way to know that, for example, a nuclear power source designed for a soft landing would have survived a hard landing. That is, in fact, the engineering problem on which the mistake was made after all.

To answer this specific engineering problem, plutonium is simply too dangerous and costly to use in space. The reason is that plutonium is actually very safe to humans except when breathed in as small particles, such as what might be generated when a launch vehicles catastrophically explodes on launch. In this case, the small particles will tend to be inhaled by animals, pass through the lungs, and pretty permanently become part of the body. The plutonium will then go though the 24,000 half life, which means over the lifespan of the contaminated human almost no Pu will decay. It will radiate and cause health issue for a lifetime.

Again, this is an engineering problem with very smart people working it. All engineering problem result in an engineering solution, and an engineering solution is always a compromise between competing factors, some technical, some emotional.

In hind sight it is always easy to poo poo an engineering solution. People who do nothing but push paper, like the readers or forbes, are the most likely candidate is simply say 'why did we do this'. They can ask that question because they have never created a practical device in their lives, therefore never have been part of the engineering process and therefore have never understood that the result is always a less than perfect but usually quite acceptable solution.

While the nuclear power proponents want us to believe that nuclear power is the solution to everything, history tells us otherwise. Even though nuclear power is very mature technology, there is little private funding for it. In the US Nuclear power plants are not being build because bankers know there is no profit in it, and government should no more subsidize a nuclear power plant than a coal fired plant. Both are mature enough to stand on their own.

Nuclear power cannot stand on it's own because it cannot generate enough profit. For instance, BP generates enough profits so that when the Deep Horizon rig failed it could cover the 13 billion dollar clean up. Fukushima is going to cost 10 times that much to clean up. Who is going to pay for that. They taxpayer. The US taxpayer for contamination that reaches US land and water. It is true that the readers of Forbes loves to make profits at taxpayer expense, but I don't think that it is a good idea. It is only free if you are not the one impacted.

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