Back in 2011, I wrote a paper, "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" There, I described the social spam ecosystem, from the SEO firms to the phony account generators to the proxy sellers. I named some of the big social spammers.

Most of the same companies are still social spamming. In the paper, I mentioned "Google Plus1 Supply". They're still active. They're still selling "+1"s. Their site looks almost exactly the same as in 2011. But their prices have gone down, and their number of fake "+1"s sold has increased from 4 million to 33 million. BuyPlus1Fans.com is still up.

Where do they get the accounts? BulkAccounts.com is still up, just like they were two years ago. They're an outsourcing firm, using low wage labor to create new accounts. For an automated approach, there's JetBots, which claims to be able to create 250,000 new accounts per day on a fast connection. They offer "CAPTCHA Bypasser", which runs CAPTCHA's through OCR, and when that doesn't work, ships them to an outsourcing firm for manual recognition. Once the account is established, their "voter bots" add any desired number of stars to reviewed items.

Facebook is no better. BulkLikes.com is still up. In 2011, they charged $260 for 500 Facebook fans. Now, it's only $70 for 1000 fans.

Old-style link spamming was expensive - spammers had to set up content farms, run servers, refresh them with interesting content, and worry about their farm being blacklisted. Social spamming is cheap - Google, Facebook, and Yelp host the spam for free. Yelp tries to push back against social spam; they've sued some spammers. But Google and Facebook don't seem to be trying at all. The fact that the big spammers of two years ago are still big spammers clearly show this.

This is an awful bill from the inventor perspective. With the "loser pays" rule, trying to enforce a patent, which costs about $1 million and up, becomes even more expensive. Now, suing a big company means you may have to pay for their lawyers. Patent cases are won by patent holders about 40%to 50% of the time, so you have to risk bankruptcy to enforce a patent.

This is worse than the previous "SHIELD act" from earlier this year. That exempted three groups from the "loser pays" scheme - the original patent holder, anyone manufacturing the patented thing, and universities. This new bill doesn't have those exemptions.

Who's pushing this? The American Association of Advertising Agencies. The Consumer Electronics Association, which by now mostly represents Chinese manufacturers.

Congress has been making it harder to make money as an inventor for over two decades now. First came the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to patent inventions made with Government funding. So now you have to compete with big Government funded universities.

Then Congress took away the possibility of triple damages for willful infringement, by redefining "willful infringement" as requiring "recklessness". So worst case for the infringer is to pay what they would have paid if they licensed.

Then there was a court decision that restricted injunctions in patent cases. A patent is supposed to be the right to exclude others from doing something. But in the US, it's hard to do that. Back when injunctions were available, Kodak tried copying Polaroid's instant-film technology. Kodak lost a patent lawsuit and had to stop making the film and buy all the cameras for it back.

Then, with the "America Invents Act", Congress added more "post-grant opposition" proceedings. So now, if you try to enforce a patent, infringers can stall and harass you through those proceedings.

Most of the whining about "patent trolls" comes from people who want to copy a good idea, instead of coming up with their own.

Yep think more about keyboard, monitor, drive, speakers, etc and they start seeming a bit weird ;).

Yeah there are many other ways of "seeing" through bubbles. Like range-gated cameras/radar/sonar.

That said I suspect dolphins mostly build a picture or even 3d model of the environment based on the perceived location of the reflections.

For example, say there is someone talking right in front of you, but you can still listen and aurally locate people who are talking further away behind that person. Even if the person in front is talking loudly, as long as he's not way too loud you can still detect the position of the other talkers and know where they are in the room. And the crucial difference from simple echolocation - you're not timing the echoes to figure out the distance of the talkers - there are no echoes! And yet you know the distance and location of the talkers just from listening alone!

So I think animal (including human) echolocation is an extension of this ability. They make sounds to produce "talkers" from the resulting echoes, and then they build a picture based on where the "talkers" are.

For example if there is nobody "talking" in the room you could clap your hands (or click your tongue) and hear the location of the echoes in the room. With practice you can identify the rough shape of the room and even location of large objects.

It's not a stretch to believe that first there was hearing ability, then the hearing ability was used to accurately locate noise making enemies, prey and objects. Then animal echolocation is just causing the silent objects "make noise" so they can locate them just the way they used to locate noisy objects from the sounds they make.

I haven't investigated if this is what dolphins (or bats) really do either, but my bullshit is just as plausible right? If not more so, but I'm biased ;).

But if they do things the way I describe it becomes obvious why the bubbles and background noises aren't necessarily big problem. In fact some background noises would just let you know the shape of the background without you needing to expend time and energy to "illuminate" them with your sonar.

68% of the power in the USA is generated by fossil fuels. source It's why you can half jokingly refer to electric cars as "coal cars", since they're essentially filling up with 37% coal-derived electrons. The lithium ion batteries come with their own environmental costs during their creation, as well. The primary function of today's electric cars is to perform an "out of sight, out of mind" on your carbon footprint. Tesla's cars are toys for rich people who as kids, cleaned their room by shoving everything under their bed.

The paper doesn't suggest that putting this device on the same chip as an IC with other functions is possible. But it does indicate a promising material.

This is still at the level of "cool effect seen at microscopic level". It's not yet at "experimental device built, cycled for many cycles, here are the results", let alone "prototype demonstrated".

Of course Wikipedia editing is declining. The articles that matter were done years ago. Most new articles are on very minor subjects.

Print encyclopedias were like that as well. Writing the original Encyclopedia Brittanica was a huge job, but ongoing maintenance required only a modest staff.

Some of the decline comes from Wikia, which is a hosting services for obsessed fans. Many of the people obsessed with popular-culture trivia content are adding it to Wikia, which monetizes it with ads. Wikia doesn't have a notability requirement, so fans can add as much trivia as they like.

The market is just a casino where the players gamble vs each other often using other people's money.

When the players win big, they take their cut.
When the players lose big, they ask for a bail out (since they have lost a lot of other people's money) and get to keep whatever cuts they have been taking.

There is no wealth being created. It's just being transferred around with the "casino" taking a cut for the transfers.The fancy "products" are just different games in the casino. The fancy math is just the gambler's "bullshit" to describe his method.

All HFT does is makes the gambling faster, there's no big benefit to those outside the casino. Only to favored players and the casino.

All that talk about market efficiency is bullshit. Go add up all the costs of the market including the bailouts and cost of big failures then come tell me how efficient it really is. It's just a big casino that can't even be run 24/7.

You missed out cooperatives. Cooperatives tend to be better behaved than corporations - they tend to rip people off less. There are still bad ones of course, but they have a place in your spectrum somewhere in between Gov and a Corp.

The problem is starting a cooperative is about the same effort as starting a corporation, but the benefits to the founder are much lower. So more corporations are started than coops. Perhaps if someone can design an incentive scheme that can't be abused then more coops will be started and hopefully we'll have less ripping off going on.

Then again maybe coops are better behaved only because they self select for founders who are less greedy who then set a less greedy organization culture ;)

The whole point of all that byte-code stuff and just-in-time compilation was to keep Java programs in a sandbox where they couldn't affect the rest of the system.

FAIL.

So the energy company dude pays some engineer handsomly to toss is a little extra waste. That ineffcient algorithm is now silently generating $5million/year in *free* revenue.

No, because power usage = needing to build infrastructure. They want everyone to be as energy-efficient, because then they don't have to build power plants and upgrade lines as much.

Power companies practically throw CFLs and energy-efficient appliances at people and are constantly putting energy-conservation tips in their mailings, etc. Utilities in general are more than happy to pay for a home energy audit; my parent's gas company did a whole-house leak test and gave us all sorts of insulating widgets, paid for insulating our attic, etc. There are rebates on more efficient furnaces and water heaters, too.

Seriously - I recently found out that our power company at work gives out 10-year zero-interest loans to businesses if the new equipment provides energy savings.

Power companies should band together and offer to pay for Microsoft to have a huge team of software engineers auditing code and working on energy use and optimizing Windows and the Microsoft compilers. The payback would be incredible. Power companies could do the same thing tomorrow for Linux and BSD if they wanted.

Some of the paid PR I've seen recently has been on biographies of living persons, especially rich ones. Lots of happy talk about their charitable work and affiliations gets put in. Stuff about their career failures, lawsuits, and criminal history gets taken out. This is tougher to fight, because Wikipedia has a "biography of living persons" policy which discourages negative comments for anything short of a felony conviction. (Even after a felony conviction, sometimes.)

On the product and business side, though, pushing back against paid editing usually works.