No, I doubt, many users have left or came because of it. But he was a major developer himself. Purging him caused very strong harm to the company, its design and development teams. Input of such a person is invaluable...

I don't understand why people keep repeating this... so what? My dad is 85 and still runs his own accounting business. Some people are perfectly capable at that age, some aren't; Shearer obviously is.

Then why didn't he walk away? He ended up coming back and taking the same deal they were offering (him and everyone else). I get he has his talk show which, I would presume in his mind, is actually worthwhile compared to doing the Simpsons, so if he just wants to keep busy and have a positive impact, he'd have quit the Simpsons and just done his show. For the record, at 20 episodes, you're talking about the difference between 6 and 9 million (he accepted the $300k an episode, down from $450k). Unless you're a billionaire, you don't walk away from $6M/year for a few weeks worth of voice work.

It's not about the quantity of voices, it's about how much air time each voice gets. All of those characters are secondary, and all of them combined usually do not amount to what Homer or Bart says in any given episode. Dan Castellaneta does just as many voices, including Homer, and took the $300k deal, because no matter how much money you have or make, you don't walk away from $300k for a day or two of voice work times 22 (or so) episodes a year.

Kind of wish more programmers would read the Daily WTF.

He finally accepted the same contract as everyone else. When he realized Fox would do the show without him, suddenly $300k an episode for a few hours of voice work seemed worth not losing.

Raymond Chen

Give it up - anyone that won't accept a market based explanation of why people get the salaries they get is hopeless.

Never listen to any commentator on that topic if they seem unaware that most US oil consumption is supplied by the US and Canada.

(Incidentally, Milton Friedman correctly pointed out that the US went off the dollar standard in 1934. The system from then until the Nixon shock was 'gold standard' in name only).

Just to give some perspective, every conflict since 1945 has led people to predict that WW3 was about to break out. Also, for as long as I can remember, every conflict in the middle east has spurred predictions of Armageddon and the end of the world.

The reality is, no one actually cares enough about Syria for it to lead to WW3. It will be resolved similarly to any number of the cold war conflicts, where major powers were on both sides, but neither wanted to escalate.

It is real simple.

* If you are wasting time following another blogger that means you are being reactive.
* Instead, invest your time into creating/producing solutions which means you are being pro-active.

It is the same deal with Focus. As Steve Job's used to say "The secret to staying focused is to say no." Every minute you waste reading someone else's blog, waste watching TV, waste gaming, etc., means the competition just gained an advantage over you.

I spend 5 minutes / day reading /. and Reddit spread throughout the day. Any more then ~5 minutes is time wasted that could be spend more efficiently building your business, helping people, networking, etc.

Google probably doesn't care, but those researchers were engaged in click fraud. If I were an advertiser, and I paid for 600,000 ads that only got shown to robots, I would be pissed. That's a lot of money right there.

OTOH, Google is allowing advertisers to target males in their employment ads, which is illegal under the Civil Rights Act. It's no different than if someone said "I want you to show this employment ads, but only to whites." If you say, "sure, no problem," then you're culpable too.

But of course that won't stop someone with a spreadsheet & a mission from finding a correlation & implying a sinister causation.

And they should certainly have an easy time at it too. Women not getting offers for high-paying jobs because that would take room from shoe ads is pretty much a defining example of structural sexism, and you writing it yet not noticing anything problematic with it that of unconscious sexism.