alexandros

"A witty saying proves nothing" - Voltaire

Look, this saying is by Bill Gates, should have been made in the last 30 years, it returns three pages of results, and yet none of them are mentioning a source. Some are referencing each other, and some are also including the '640k should be enough for anyone' legend. Yes, it's not 100%, but the indications are not good. The ultimate counterargument of course would be a source.

Can't locate a source for this on google. I'm calling urban legend.

Thankfully in academia things are very relaxed. I just thought of a friend who has this problem and then I realised I know at least 2-3 people in office jobs who have similar issues. I'm in the UK btw.

One thing that just struck me, is that google/gmail will not be banned from workplace computers as often as fb/twitter have been. This alone will be a significant advantage.

Just to make a factual correction, Greece has not 7, but close to 11m population. I expect the economist to get these things right.

I find the Android Scripting Environment to be quite cool: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

And it offers quite a few languages to play with, including Python, JRuby and Javascript (via Rhino).

Now if it would only have a better development environment...

"You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure." ...which is owned by a single company. The bigger twitter becomes, the more this worries me.

Some observations:

[tang ⇔ gnat] are not only the ROT13 of each other, but also the inverse of each other. It seems these two properties coincide in this pair only.

I'm also surprised that the longest pair is [nowhere ⇔ abjurer] at 7 letters, with [terra ⇔ green] being second with 5.

As one of the organisers, I can say the abbreviated name was chosen as a bit of an inside joke ('in' being the REST community). We certainly did not mean to offend anyone nor do I think there is any reason for anyone to be offended, but I guess others may see this differently.

I think a crucial reason this worked is that there was a measurable objective, the value of which was universally understandable. Find software bugs. This is how they measured and selected the initial team, and this is how the team itself could prove its effectiveness in a management-compatible, objective manner and therefore defend its existence. Finding other areas where this could work is an interesting excercise.

The competitor may have done them great good, too. I find pissed-off-ness can be a great motivator at times.

If they're using Adsense, it must be worth it to them. In other words, they believe they are paying a fair price for the value they extract. The ones who believe they can do better try alternative approaches, such as direct contact with advertisers, among others. So why complain? AFAICT, Google does not discriminate in favour of adsense-using websites.

because it (re-)introduces a social element to the exchange. It may not be for everything and everyone, but it would give me a sense of enjoyment to exchange e.g. some computer-repair services for something else I need in my neighborhood. Nevermind that I would get to actually interact with the people around me. Definitely a feature not inherent in money.

That bit and the spirituality angle indeed was unsettling but I posted this here maily because of the 'service/goods bartering' angle which seemed like a cool hack.

"Is it a friend to the fourth estate, on which democracy depends, or an enemy?"

Just.. wow. Suddenly changing the business landscape for an industry(hastening the change, really) becomes a political issue?

I wish Arrington had enough credibility so that I could stand behind him on this without second thought. Having been burned by him in the last.fm case (still no apology), my second thought while reading this was "arrington starting drama again". The first was of course "this is excellent journalism". I wish I didn't have to be conflicted in such a seemingly clear-cut case.

this is the artist's page about the idea: http://www.minkyu.co.uk/Site/Product/Entries/2009/4/20_Foldi...

if you scroll down enough, you'll see an image of the fuse popping out of the little handle.

nitpick: Janus Friis is Danish

I don't think anyone got what I meant (which means I should express myself more clearly). If a person who deifies nature is putting forward a theory on how our 'mistreating nature' may lead to the collapse of our civilisation, then I get suspicious, merely because 'he would say that, wouldn't he?'.

"[The author] is active in the contemporary nature spirituality movement"

While the concept seems interesting, this line made me seriously doubt the credibility of the author. I will wait for a few more comments before attempting to read again.

In capitalism people are supposed to have choice. I'm not American either, but from reading HN for a while I gather that this does not hold for ISPs in many areas of the US. So basically what they have in those cases is a state-granted fiefdom.

And the solution of course is not to have the state run it. It's to introduce competition.

Being Greek, what I despise is being framed as one half of the world's 'mortal enemy pairs' that facebook is helping fix. For one thing, we haven't fought a direct war with Turkey for nearly 90 years. Having cultural animosity between two nations is one thing, being paraded as an example of 'warring tribes' on a worldwide forum is quite another. I fear this initiative crystalises stereotypes rather than helping break them down.

what about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux ?

Apparently it was (is?) a legal requirement to use ActiveX

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/07/activex-law-in-kor...

perhaps this will help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29#Atom_compar...

but the most important, for me, is that Atom is a group effort under the IETF rather than an ad-hoc spec in one person's head. All other benefits are the result of that.

I guess it's in vain to ask people to stop calling feeds 'RSS' when there's a better format we should all be standardising around...

I guess it would be nicer to have four options and the choice to click all applicable, and then have a combination results view. I guess we have to work with what we have.

Fair point. Nothing I can do about it though. In any case, the interesting bit is the correlation between the other roles.

This came up today on a journalism blog I follow. http://fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/2009/10/triumph-of-hope...

What worries me with 'growth over revenue' is that they are presented as a tradeoff. The implication is that they are essentially operating a loss leader to trap users in and then they will degrade the free produt to extract revenues. As a twitter user, this makes me look to the exits.