NonMint

Anything that's either going to be taking in a large amount of relevant data (such as GPS applications) or has an installed userbase large enough to warrant inclusion in the "big names" that I specified above. It doesn't have to be major companies but there has to be enough data to make contributing to it worthwhile. It's kind of a catch-22 that is solved by either industry wide grassroots acceptance or a big name player coming in and providing the initial data.

To use my previous example, if Google dumps most or all of it's map data into this endeavor it gains a tonne of legitimacy. Otherwise your just a little fish in a big ocean of data that people are holding on to and refusing to share.

This could be very interesting but without some of the "big names" (RE: Google Maps et all) participating I'm not sure it will be more than just a few people participating in an interesting concept open content database.

The thing that will really blow your mind is are there things that are red, or a group of things that have a common appearance that our minds just label "red." And what if what if the signals that reach my brain when I view "red" are shifted one to the left on the color wheel? The gradual perception of color change would be perceived but we would be looking at different colors even though we both agree that it is "Red."

If the issue is that Apple wants 30% of all eBook sales for anything that can be viewed on the platform, that's really scummy and an abuse of standards.

If instead, they just want to make sure that if you can buy it on a Kindle/whatever and read it on the iPhone that you can also BUY it from the iPhone in the first place, not such a big deal.

There seems to be some confusion on this issue.

As always, buried under the platform hate and apologists from both sides, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.

You'd be surprised. Some users who use Linux consider themselves to be pretty adept, and I can easily see this problem being an issue for people who perceive themselves to be clever.

Think of it this way: Your professor asks you for the name of the imaginary friend that the professor's son always talks about. You have no idea what the answer could possibly be, so in your head you choose "John," a reasonably common name with a very low probability of being right. Google answers with a strong conviction in it's voice that the answer is "Mark," another common name. You have no evidence to believe that your own guess is correct, so in the face of the appearance of belief on Google's behalf, aren't you the least bit tempted to say that it's Mark and not John?

I'm really curious as to how this is different than Bing using google's search results in some form of aggregate pageranking. If we assume that some arbitrary metric of "authenticity" exists for searches and a search for mbzrxpgjys results in results in a low (<0.1%) result for authenticity, but Google suddenly declares that www.page.com is the foremost authority in mbzrxpgjys's, it stands to reason that a good page-ranking scheme would take that into account and bump it to the front of the line.

I don't think it's cheating, no where in the article does it claim that they aren't doing their own search, they are just using Google's results as part of their own search algorithm. Is that really such a crime?