Or to the rooftop mail room chute in a large office building that might contain hundreds of Amazon business customers. If you're picturing suburban doorstep delivery to un-prepared recipients, you're imagining the wrong scenario.

"Ma Bell" hasn't been a thing since 1982 when AT&T volunteered to divest itself of its regional local telcos. AT&T retained ownership of YellowPages and they remained the dominant business directory but competition in the last decade has been fierce.

*sigh* You know damn well what "Ma Bell" is shorthand for. So does everyone who read what I wrote who has an IQ above room temperature. The simple fact is, you were wrong. Not all listings were paid advertisement no matter how much you squirm and blow bullshit.
 

That's not what I took away from TFA and anyone who did should not try and run a business as it is wishful thinking. In fact it is entirely the business owner's responsibility to ensure information about his business is accurate.

If that's not what you took away from the TFA, then you're stupid beyond belief. The rest of what I quoted just confirms that - because you have no clue how hard it is to run a significant business and how much effort it takes to keep track to prevent yourself from being victimized. (Or, if you've run or are running a significant business and haven't encountered either, you should count yourself lucky for being out at the end of the bell curve. But I vote stupid based on the evidence.)

Musk strikes me as a lot of things... Carnegie and Franklin aren't among them.

He's an emerging master at PR and managing public opinion, and his fan base (very prevalent here on Slashdot) just laps it up.

Marconi already had VLF working, sort of, before Wardenclyffe was built. Marconi's R&D approach was to transmit across short distances, test and improve the hardware, then try longer distances. Over a few years, he slowly worked up from across the room to across the ocean. Less grandiose than Tesla, but more successful.

Tesla is said to have assisted in the construction of the 1913 Telefunken VLF station on Long Island, but the IRE Journal article doesn't mention him. Telefunken built a VLF antenna much the way one would be built today - a simple guyed tower resting on an insulator base, with wires spreading outward to a circle of poles. They only used 35KW, instead of Tesla's 200KW. The station communicated with a similar station in Germany.

Plus I don't think Google information can kill a place in just a few weeks.

It wasn't "just a few weeks", it was nearly a year per TFA.
 

This was discussed already and the general conclusion was the restaurant had very poor service.

Discussed by who? Where? And what was the authority of the group who held the discussion to reach such a decision? Or are you seriously asking me to decide based on your links one of which is the one that's being blamed in the first place? Not to mention, if you check the dates of the bad reviews on Yelp and Trip Advisor you find many of them are from the period when the staff had been cut in response to the business drop off. (Further proof, if needed, that whoever "discussed" this as you claim is clueless.)
 

And these aren't recent complaints, they go back to 2010.

And there are good reviews in the same period, but you fail to mention those. Not to mention you fail to adress how complaints in 2010 can lead to a sudden and massive drop off years later. And you fail to address the fact that his information *was* changed.

Etc... etc...

The Tesla Museum already exists.

Tesla did great work with AC generators and motors. Most common AC motors today still use approaches he invented. That's his legacy.

Wardenclyffe, though, is a monument to failure. From his patents, you can read how he thought it would work. He thought the ionosphere was a conductive layer. The Wardenclyffe tower was supposed to punch power through the atmosphere to that conductive layer, so that signals and maybe power could be received elsewhere.

The ionosphere does not work that way. Tesla's tower would have done nothing useful, although with 200KW at 20KHz going in, it probably could have lit up fluorescent lamps and gas tubes for some distance around. Since the location is now surrounded by a housing subdivision, rebuilding the tower and powering it up would annoy the neighbors.

While he doesn't have absolute control of any one of those industries, he's sounding more and more like a modern Andrew Carnegie, maybe with some Benjamin Franklin mixed in.

Seriously? I knew Musk's personality cult was getting bad, but this is a new low. On the philanthropic front, Musk isn't even bloody close to what either Andrew Carnegie or Benjamin Franklin left for posterity.

(Yeah, I know the Musk fan boy club will mod me down, so be it. The truth remains the truth.)

What you might not have known (but should have) is all those listings in the yellow pages were paid advertisements. The yellow page market used to be extremely competitive with numerous companies fighting for a business' 2" x 2" to full page ad.

The grandparent was talking about the One Book To Rule Them All - Ma Bell's, everyone with a phone line in a given area got one on their doorstep for free and it was the most widely used one. If you had a business line from Ma Bell, you got a one line entry (business name and phone number) in the standard type face, size, and color in one category for free. Extra categories, larger print, display ads, all these cost extra. (In areas with multiple books (a city and a county book for example), being in more than one cost extra as well.)
 

The quicker you can catch the nefarious mischief the quicker you can curtail any damage.

The point of TFA is that a business owner shouldn't have to spend time and money policing multiple sites in order to protect himself from trolls and malicious mischief. Especially because so many of them manipulate the information presented so that bad reviews predominate - which they then charge the business to clear up.
 

It's word of mouth in the internet age which is both good and bad.

From a user's perspective - it's pretty much nothing but bad. Between the tendency of people to complain more than they congratulate, deliberate manipulation by website operators, and various forms of trolling and mischief... the 'net is virtually completely unreliable.

See my 2010 paper "'Places' spam - the new front in the spam wars." As I wrote back then, "The two phases of spamming Google Places are the insertion of fake business locations and the creation of fake reviews. Both are embarrassingly easy." That hasn't changed.

Google doesn't fix this 4-year-old problem because Google makes money from bad search results. If search results take you directly to the business selling whatever it is you want, Google makes no money. If you're detoured through some Demand Media content farm, Google makes ad revenue. If you get fed up with being sent to ad-choked sites and click on a Google ad, Google makes money. Organic search that sucks is a fundamental part of Google's business model.

Technically, it's straightforward to fix this. Business data has to be checked against sources businesses can't easily manipulate, such as business credit rating companies. A business that reports fake store locations to Dun & Bradstreet or Experian will soon have a very low credit rating.

Bing or Yahoo could beat Google at search quality. They have the same spam problem, but it doesn't make them money. That's because Google has most of the third-party advertising market. Web spam on Bing drives traffic mostly to sites with Google ads, not Bing ads.

The real search engines are Google, Bing, Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia). Everybody else, including Yahoo, is a reseller. Yandex has been doing some interesting stuff lately with linkless search ranking, and Baidu just opened a Silicon Valley office.

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer announced last January that Yahoo was getting back into search. (They've been reselling Bing since 2009.) That appears to have been a bluff to get a better deal from Microsoft. There's no indication of Yahoo actually building a search engine. No relevant job ads, no data center buildout, no increased crawling by Yahoo bots, no high-profile hires, no buzz in Silicon Valley.

Bing ought to be doing better than it is, but they're reported to have management problems. Every year, there's new top management at Bing, and it doesn't help.

I'm listening to the recording of the radio communications. The drone was over 2000' altitude. At first, the cops in the helicopter aren't sure what they're seeing, and they first think it's a fast-moving aircraft in a vertical climb, over the East River. It has red and green lights, like aircraft do. They ask La Guardia ATC radar what they're seeing. ATC isn't seeing it on radar. Then they get closer and see it's a drone of some kind. In a few minutes it's over the George Washington Bridge, miles from the East River.

Once the guys who were operating them were caught, the cops are on the air discussing what to charge them with. The cops on the ground call them "tiny little toys". There's some discussion of "if it's over 1000', it's reckless". The cops aren't quite sure what to charge them with.

The FAA can certainly have them prosecuted. They were operating a drone in class B controlled airspace. That's serious, and dumb. Here's the New York City airspace chart. (Yes, there's actually a VFR corridor over the Hudson River; it's permitted to fly along the river at up to 1300' altitude. There used to be one over the East River, too, but after some jock slammed a light plane into a Manhattan apartment building by going too fast there, it was closed to VFR traffic. These drone operators didn't stay in the VFR corridor, and probably had no clue where it was anyway.)

The drone guys were lucky. LGA has two intersecting runways, 4-22 and 13-31. The one in use depends on wind direction. The approach to 13 and the departure from 31 are over where the drones were operating. LGA happened to be using 4-22 that day. If the other runway had been in use, there would have been a large plane in the area ever 45 seconds or so.

Is your claim that the airframes are reaching their service life and need to be replaced by new builds, or are you claiming that an aircraft design undergoes some sort of senility independent of remaning service life?

Please explain why, for example, a new build F-15 or F-18, with 21st century enhancements, would be in adequate to do its job today if that is your argument.

OK - I'll bite. Why not?

Is there a major war scheduled we don't want to be late for?

Is there an enemy superpower that will outstrip us militarily in a meaningful way if we don't get this plane fielded ASAP?

It was already argued that we could buy other NATO aircraft that are in production. This option is "viable" even if the U.S. Senators prefer to keep the pork at home.

And the system has been more-or-less broken for a very long time. In the mid 1980's I got back from a SSBN patrol to find waiting for me in the mail a notice from Selective Service warning me that having failed to register I was ineligible for all manner of Federal programs. (I hadn't registered because I enlisted in the Navy shortly after my 17th birthday.) Of course being on active duty or a veterans trumps Selective Service registration for eligibility, and it took a letter from my command along with a copy of my (IIRC) Page 2 to finally get them to go away.

For an organization that basically has one job, they aren't very good at it. (Even by the usual low standards applicable to government organizations.)

You're describing Core War. You can still get the source.

Any display big enough for development will draw more power than the CPU. (Although I suppose you could kludge some non-backlit e-reader into being a dev system.)