We give this right to the government to help commerce along. Honestly. It's good that Amazon can trademark "Amazon" and keep others from using it. They can spend years working on delivering great service, improving their offerings and so on, and not worry about somebody opening "Amazon Shopping" and ripping people off, destroying their good name. Imagine if you could open a "Pizza Hut" right next to an actual Pizza Hut, same colors and everything, but with even less concern for quality. As a consumer, how can you tell what's the real deal? When you tell your friends that Pizza Hut sucks, which one do you mean?

But yeah, there should be limits. Other pizza joints can have "pizza" in their name, just not "Pizza Hut." The argument is whether or not "app store" - together, not each word - counts as something you can trademark. I don't think so, there were other app stores before Apple, although not as popular. And I don't think anybody is confusing the Amazon App Store with the Apple App Store - they don't even sell the same thing. Overall, lame.

Why does that make them wrong? Apple is stupid for using a generic term for their product, then trying to trademark it. If Apple had called it something else, they could have trademarked it, and then marketed the hell out of it. Instead, they trademarked extremely common words and now they're potentially paying the price.

It was wrong for Amazon to get the 1-click patent, but I can't fault them for trying. But Amazon is still on the right side of this.

They should get massively fined, in proportion to the monetary losses they are pushing onto customers, banks and vendors. $100 per account sounds like a good start. The money should go towards getting their users' credit histories back on track, as well as additional monitoring by the credit bureaus.

They should fall out of PCI compliance, and be forced to bring their system fully up to compliance before they can charge even one more credit card. Or, they should only process pre-paid PSN cards, and leave merchant processing to the big boys who can secure the data properly.

Overall, If people who are publishing the internals of the PS3 are subject to lawsuits, fines and possible imprisonment, then it stands to reason that revealing the private information of 77 MILLION people should have similar ramifications. If Sony can just say "We're sorry, we're working on it," then Geohot should have had that option too.

I have my credit card on file with them. I bought the "Walking Dead" premier because I missed it and couldn't find it anywhere (didn't want to torrent it). So that's another way to get screwed.

It sounds like they encrypted the card numbers at least, which is why they are thinking the card numbers are safe. Annoyingly, some douchebag now has my full name, billing address, and date of birth (why does Sony need that??). Thanks, Sony, now I have to worry about some hacker trying to steal my identity, because you couldn't be bothered to encrypt a couple of database fields.

I can at least cancel my credit cards. My full identity is more valuable to identity thieves, and more damaging to me.

Not true at all. They can store the credit card number, but they have to encrypt it. The encryption keys are supposed to be stored away from the encrypted data.

If they couldn't store the CC number, you would have to enter it in every time, which I don't think is the case with PSN.

I assume they want to keep speed down for the safety of the drivers? If so, allowing traction control and ABS would help with that.

I had no idea F1 was so restrictive. Are there any racing groups that allow pretty much any modifications? Although I do get the idea of limiting the speed, and shrinking the engines over time as people start to figure out how to get more power from the same size. These efficiencies could go straight into production cars, seems like.

I didn't even realize that one of our partners was using Amazon EWS until suddenly they were down all day. Amazon is really stable historically, but it's frustrating when you're out of business and all you can do is wait and see if Amazon will fix it soon.

In the "old school" thinking, smart companies have a redundant data center somewhere, humming along and waiting to be switched on if the main data center ever goes down. "The cloud" was supposed to solve that - massive redundancy within Amazon's services were supposed to protect you from outages. Not the case, apparently, since it looks like Amazon is going to fall below their promised 99.95% uptime (4.38 hours per year downtime).

I think the answer is to have redundant cloud services online, so you could switch from Amazon to Google or DevGrid if you had issues. The problem is, there's nothing quite like Amazon right now, it's not easy to switch from Amazon to some random service. This might be the biggest argument against virtual services - lack of standardization makes it hard to move from one to another, and hard to set up backup services in case of emergency.

Auctions need an economy of scale to work at all, though. If there aren't people selling there, there's no point going there to buy. If nobody's buying anything, there's no point listing it for sale there. GrouponClone needs enough people to sell, say, 100 coupons to start, and then you can grow from there. You could just run it a little leaner, and charge the restaurant slight less. It's really easy to copy. In some areas of the country, like New York, LivingSocial has way more mindshare than Groupon does, and they started later.

There are probably hundreds of developers and business people out there that just heard about this potential IPO and said "how hard can it be to make that?" Groupon should cash in now, before they get their lunch eaten by 1000 me-too competitors.

Just because you have examples of several companies that are being valued for ridiculous amounts of money, doesn't mean they're not over-valued. Twitter is a great example - a company that has no revenue stream whatsoever, and no real plans to create one, and is valued in the billions. Maybe they'll get lucky and stumble accross a business plan and I'll look stupid, but right now I don't see it.

Groupon at least generates revenue, but the fact that they have to keep raising money is strange to me. I hope they're just trying to grow faster than they would organically. At least what Google does is really hard - a nuanced algorithm that they have to constantly tweak to fight the spammers, indexing millions of websites pretty much constantly, running on home-built software on thousands of servers accross the world. It's hard to duplicate that. Groupon has a website with a deal on it, and an email list. When the deal is done they email a spreadsheet of customers to the company. When they first did a national deal (GAP Clothing) their servers went down in flames. How long would it take 10 smart guys to recreate 90% of that business? What's the $25B for? The name?

Overall, it just feels like a bubble. The rest of the economy kind of sucks, and the investors are flush with cash that they don't know what to do with, and think Groupon is the "next big thing." I guess we'll have to wait and see how it plays out in the long term.

Heh heh - the Slashdot benchmark. I like it. Load a static 600+ comment story, drag the filter bar to "show every damn thing," then time it. Hard to game that...

I was going to say ... I almost treat my Roomba like a person. I feel bad when the floor is super-dirty, and I get mad at it when I have to stand where it's cleaning, and it makes a bee-line for my feet ... I definitely don't think it's impossible for people to have feelings toward a robot, even when they know it's fake.

Heh. I grew up in Kananga in the 80's, I probably met you. Still nostalgic about Cesna's and dirt airstrips. Beats driving.

Because using that approach, you used landmarks, updated your position on the chart, aimed as good as you could, and went for it. You'd have to account for wind speed all the time, drift of the aircraft, visibility issues, etc. This was OK when the air wasn't full of planes going 500+ mph, when you could land in random fields if you needed to, etc. And still a lot of people misjudged and ran into mountains and hills they weren't expecting.

Dead reckoning is not a reasonable way to steer a jet full of passengers, I would think. Having a backup to GPS that doesn't involve my pilot squinting out the window while clutching a map seems like a good idea to me.

What is Wikipedia's obsession about deleting things that "aren't noteworthy?" Putting aside the fact that "noteworthiness" is pretty subjective, why is there a whole system in place to purge articles? Are they running out of disk space? Is the system not scaling?

I can understand that they should probably purge spam articles, or articles about nothing that people try to put up ("Gramma Jones' Shortbread Recipe"), but why are they going to all this trouble to purge articles about real people, that did stuff? As a writer, do you have to win a Pulitzer or something to get in Wikipedia?

What idiot trusts car mechanics? "Oh, I think I'll take one of my most valuable physical possessions, that I depend on for my livelihood, take it to some guy I barely know, and have him mess around in there and fix stuff. Yeah! And even if it's something I could do myself for half the price, like an oil change, I'll still have this guy do it."

I don't cut my own hair, I don't grow my own food, and I don't run my own offsite redundant backup system, or host my own email. Partly I just don't want to, and partly I suspect that I'm probably not the best at that stuff, and I'd rather pay a little to have a professional do it. It's not foolproof, as we can see from this story, but it still seems like the better bet in the long term.