Okay, so first, in order to make this work you'd have to outspend Google. I mean, for Microsoft and pals (you know, anybody who can afford to spend a billion+ dollars to topple Google), search is a nice business that they want; but for Google it's their core business (well, it's what powers their core business). You'd need someone else willing to bet their company (or someone who dwarfs Google, maybe GE or BP wants a search engine really bad?), because the stakes will be that high for Google. At the first sign of a strategy like this working, Google simply shows up with a bigger check. You think it would be easy for people to lure Google away with a million dollar check? How easy would it be to convince them to stay with a two million dollar check?

Second, Google has lobbying muscle now. Assuming this is legal, it might not be soon. They'll probably outlaw it in an amendment to the next Puppies for Orphanages Act that comes through. "It's not Evil, it's Democracy!"

This strategy would have worked great before the IPO.

I don't see why you're so worried about cooling... it's fireproof.

We see dishonesty from head hunters all the time. Personally I'd much rather if there was a mistake on your resume as we have it in front of us, that you point it out.

Absolutely. It's well known that most of these guys are human garbage, including the ones we work with. I would never fault you for correcting something a headhunter said about you, and if it was unflattering I would respect you more for being honest. I'm not going to lie, the best case scenario is that we never find out at all, but it will be much worse for you if it comes to light and you weren't honest about it, no matter what your recruiter did.

Best to just fess up, but some managers are idiots so play it by ear.

Guess it's time to kick a few dollars over to the EFF

Clearly that's doing a lot of good.

"This is the same reason why people don't like Lisp hackers." Thus, it becomes a real Paul Graham article.

I agree. Amazon is losing sales on this too, so it's not like they're just screwing the little guy. They're putting their money where their mouth is.

With Google Sherpa they could map the moon!

Twitter was going to have problems scaling no matter what they chose. Because of the highly personalized nature of the site, the low ratio of reads to writes, and the way the app encourages you to make small updates constantly, most of the strategies you'd use to increase throughput just don't work and you wind up at "how do we make the app just run faster?" Moving to a faster language is a great way to do that, and something they were probably going to do eventually on the back-end no matter what they started with.

Most sites don't have Twitter's problems. We serve millions of Ruby/Rails-backed pages every day, and we're overall relatively happy with our platform of choice. We even use it in a couple Twitter-esque apps that work just fine, but we don't see near the traffic they do. Rails has its problems, and there are a lot of things it could do better, but it's a good choice for a generic "getting things done quickly on the web" language+framework, and I'm certainly in no hurry to go back to Perl or PHP.

You can pay a number of companies to politely listen to your problems, suggests ways to work around them, and maybe even fix them eventually if you give them enough money. Microsoft and Apple follow roughly the same model.

Because Linux exists for free in the wild, people seem to think that the customer service hug box does too. By and large, if you're not willing to make yourself useful, you still have to pay for that. This is not a significantly worse situation than non-"hobbyist" OSs.

Nothing gets on my nerves more than unskippable DVD chapters. It's bad enough that the stupid MPAA/FBI warning is pretty much always unable to be skipped, but lots of DVDs actually stick commercials and previews at the beginning that you can't skip over either.

On the other hand, if I pirate the film, I can have it in less than a half hour (less than the time it takes to run to the video store), the movie is never out of stock, I can watch it as many times as I want (making it superior to "on demand"), and all of that annoying crap is removed.

I only buy a movie on DVD if I really, really like it.

Linux just doesn't love critics who won't roll up their sleeves and fix things.

Ideas are cheap.

They probably thought the cameras were stealing their souls.

I worked at Best Buy back in college and we used to tell people the cheap boxes we advertised in the paper were out of stock if they weren't gonna buy the service plan all the time. We'd do it even if there was a whole row of boxes sitting right in front of them. The first time I saw it, I was amazed, and I'm sure Best Buy would never admit it, but we used to be instructed to do it by management on a regular basis.

3-5 years away? Am I right?

If only I lived 3-5 years from now...

No! No! No!

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

(Both to the movie itself, and the star.)