sethg

87 ms·

361.
by sethg 16y ago
High-end Nokia phones have a local-search client that competes with Google Maps. The front end for people using regular browsers is here: http://maps.ovi.com/
362.
by sethg 16y ago
Yes, if you make your product selectively crappy in order to undermine competition , it’s an antitrust problem. Microsoft making Windows not run on DR-DOS is an antitrust problem. Microsoft making Windows fail at multiuser security is no
363.
by sethg 16y ago
No law, as far as I am aware, forbids a monopoly from producing a crappy product . Antitrust law comes into play when a competitor offers a less-crappy product and the monopoly tries to drive the competitor out of business.
364.
by sethg 16y ago
In my experience, the path from “engineer recognizes that queries X, Y, and Z return crap search results” to “search engine improves its performance with queries X, Y, and Z without creating more crap somewhere else ” is more difficult tha
365.
by sethg 16y ago
But if Google shuts those domains out, then the content farmers can just pick up new ones. Furthermore, Google would need to have some sort of process for determining which domains are content-farm spam before shutting them out. As with
366.
by sethg 16y ago
“Enterprise” software, as a rule, has horrible user interfaces. The people who buy this kind of stuff are three layers of management removed from the people who actually use it, the software is often customized, and quality of user experie
367.
by sethg 16y ago
Maybe “computer operator” was considered a secretarial role? Note that once upon a time a “computer” was a person who did computations, often a woman with a BA in math. ENIAC’s programmers were women ( http://www.columbia.edu/acis/histor
368.
by sethg 16y ago
Actually, a corporation is an entity empowered by law to do certain things (e.g., shield its owners from personal liability) that a mere aggregation of people cannot do. The Supreme Court majority in the Citizens United case missed this
369.
by sethg 16y ago
I think the fundamental problem is that running for national office in the US is extremely expensive¹, so anyone who wants the job and is not independently wealthy has to spend a lot of time fund-raising. Even if the fund-raising does not
370.
by sethg 16y ago
I know that the Pol Pot regime considered people with glasses to be enemies of the state, but have any other dictatorships done the same thing?
371.
by sethg 16y ago
The relevant patents on Lego® bricks expired decades ago, and you would think clone bricks would have flooded the market by now. And yet Legos still sell—even the sets that aren’t licensed brands. My experience with Mega Blocks, cheaper b
372.
by sethg 16y ago
It’s not a perfect indicator, but it is what the economists would call “a revealed preference”. I understand that people can have all sorts of reasons for remaining in an unhappy marriage, but I would expect that all other factors being eq
373.
by sethg 16y ago
When both parts of the family are aggressively working towards acquiring more, the softness of a family gets lost. There is less emotional dependence, less of one person doing one thing, and more of two people who have a lot of potential t
374.
by sethg 16y ago
I think this is just one example of the difference between European and American feminism. Feminist movements in the USA, the country where “all men are created equal”, have been most successful where they fought for formal equality betwee
375.
by sethg 16y ago
If I recall correctly, the status-quo-ante estate tax is 55% of everything over $1M. So a $3.5M estate would be $2.125M after taxes. (Note that the Obama Administration is willing to support a $3.5M exemption, but that’s not enough for th
376.
by sethg 16y ago
According to the article, Google is not recognizing a list as a breadcrumb trail, which is a shame, because that is the Semantically Correct way to list breadcrumbs. I suppose the next best thing would be to have a CSS rule .breadcrumb-
377.
by sethg 16y ago
Correct, and correct. My apologies.
378.
by sethg 16y ago
When I try asking for directions to other countries, I get a “kayak across the Pacific Ocean” step for China, but everything else just gets a “we could not calculate directions...” response.
379.
by sethg 16y ago
At the very least, they should give directions to a place that sells kayaks before leading you into the ocean.
380.
by sethg 16y ago
Could the multiple-kinds-of-contacts issue be handled if social-networking sites explicitly allowed one user to have multiple handles? E.g., a user could be “Bess Smith” to her family members, “B. J. Smith” to her college friends, and “Eli
381.
by sethg 16y ago
Some friends of mine had posted, on Facebook, the results of some online autism-spectrum awareness test they had taken—or rather, the test app had posted their results and a link to its own page. So I followed the link, and the first thing
382.
by sethg 16y ago
The boundaries of a bargaining unit are set by the location of work and the job classification. These are obviously fuzzy categories and sometimes the National Labor Relations Board has to step in and decide which subset of workers gets to
383.
by sethg 16y ago
Airlines tend to be unionized because fifty years ago, every major industry in the US was unionized. The large-scale shifts in the American economy in the 1970s and 1980s (less manufacturing, more services) accompanied changes in law, re
384.
by sethg 16y ago
Disability issues aside, why does the professor have standing to sue in this issue?
385.
by sethg 16y ago
Yeah... my impression is that there are plenty of ethnic Chinese abroad in small businesses and the professions. I’m not convinced that you have to have lots of people in your ethnic group becoming C-level executives before your diaspora i
386.
by sethg 16y ago
I thought The DaVinci Code was an execrable book, but I once read slush for a small-press SF/fantasy anthology, and most of the stuff that came over the transom made Dan Brown look like Shakespeare.
387.
by sethg 16y ago
“There are two industries which call their customers ‘users’...”
388.
by sethg 16y ago
When comparing offers or negotiating a raise, how do people translate between a salary and a salary-plus-bonus? When my company got acquired, my base salary didn’t go up, but now I get a performance-based bonus; both my individual performa
389.
by sethg 16y ago
I like this one better than the OP, because the front page gets straight to the point: “Hi. I'm Susan. My superpower is getting things done. It's an exceedingly rare and critical superpower. I battle the agent of chaos. I overdeliver. I del
390.
by sethg 16y ago
Just about anything I might post under a pseudonym, or otherwise shielded, could be connected with my real-world identity if enough people try hard enough. So I’d rather make everything open, and think before I say something I might regr

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