chamanbuga

Satellite imagery is not available, yet HD photos are available in Street View? Doesn't make sense too much.

The caliphate series was so well done. I instantly became a fan of Rukmini Callimachi. Then RCMP released that Abu Huzaifa's story was fabricated. It took NYT 2 years to admit their mistake and return their reward. The podcast was not amended nor was there any press release from Callimachi about this. This is when I ended my NYT subscription.

I still view NYT as excellent journalism, but with such questionable practices, that I am comfortable working around their pay wall instead of supporting them.

As usual, Pakistan makes another stupid attempt to reel in US technology companies under their control. These attempts aren't coming out of left field, rather are inspired by China, India, Austria, and a few other European powers.

As I've told my Pakistani counterparts, this attempt is amusing at the least and ignorable at the worst. They have no merit to make these demands. Of course, technology companies do not want to lose the 85 million customer base, but they realize Pakistan has more to loose than gain by putting a blanket ban on these platforms. They realize any ban would be reversed under public pressure.

I'll share what I told Amin-ul-Haque (who doesn't know the difference between right-click and left-click): Pakistan's play should be to determine impact to GDP associated with these platform companies (past, present, & future). It should use that to make a case for these companies to open product-development led offices in Pakistan, not just sales that we have today. Over a span of 10 years, Pakistan needs to gain this knowledge and begin innovating their own products and infrastructure. Eventually, when sufficient infrastructure has been built and cloned over to Pakistan, it should then ban these platform companies and drive traffic through their home-grown solutions.

Ultimately, this will allow: 1. Talent to develop and thrive in Pakistan. There's a lot of talent there already, but it's either leaving, working on small problems, or just part of the problem. There is a small pool of incredible research happening there, but unfortunately it is motivated by the need to get out. 2. Increase tax revenue and the technology sector's contribution margin to GDP 3. Output better products that solve Pakistani problems instead of band-aiding US technology to fit into their existing broken ecosystem.

I understand this is a controversial opinion. This is most likely not the right path, but the thinking is along the right direction.

A lot of people think that the primary motivation is to muzzle free speech. Yes, there are absolutely cases of investigative journalist who have been silenced. But for every 1 case of silencing free speech there are 100s of the fringe right spreading misinformation about religion, government, and foreign powers to the masses there.

This problem will not be solved by US technology companies. Solving these problems do not pay bills, they are just decent PR, which again, most of these companies are not interested in since it doesn't impact the bottom line.

This is surprising, I didn't know Alexa was capable of this. Whenever I say "Alexa, add milk, eggs, bread, & laundry detergent to my shopping list" it shows up as one long sentence in a single entry.

Paying for knowledge isn't FOMO. Would it still be considered FOMO if $7B were spent on Business & Productivity books?

My lawyer has been quoting this "may soon be allowed to work" for more than 3 years. My wife & I have given up on it. She's resigned to volunteering & working on hobbies. Considering how split the government is over these matters I doubt we'll see any reform in the next 5 years.

I'm with you on reforming patents. But how do you protects companies from copy cats? iPhone is released and some hardware manufacturer makes the exact same shell running Symbian instead. I'm not talking about copying the OS, but the hardware form factor. They represent a brand image as well.

But isn't it true for a certain segment of the population. People are searching on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, etc... These social search results have more credibility and relevance to me than vanilla results on search engines. If I use FB connect Bing does a good job of displaying results from my friends. We're still a farcry away from a unified search engine of all this data because rightfully each of these technologies want to own and monetize this data.

It's amusing watching Americans boast about working past the norm 9-5 hours and calling the rest of the world lazy. My response, "What are you proud about? After working twice as hard, you have the same quality of life as friends in Canada, and statistically speaking you'll drop dead sooner because of stress."

That always wipes the smug grin of their faces.

What's wrong with 9-5? Can't you be passionate about what you work on, excel in you career, yet stick to dedicating ~50% of your time awake to your job?

Awesome. WebSockets is the perfect technology for this scenario. Do you find WebSockets traverses NATs and firewalls as the RFC promises or it has limitations?

I imagine you folks don't use HTTP (hanging GETs) to synchronize data, right?

woa not an easy game. Sweet idea!

Sure it can. They can use WinRT Background Transfer to sync content in the background.

Source: http://bit.ly/JVfaeK

IMO, the most interesting slide is # 17. Advertisers spent 25% of their budget on print media even only 7% of the consumers time was spent on the print media.

UI is really cool! Learned some stuff I didn't know, for instance, Pandora still profitable? The source sited for Mint isn't very credible but kudos for including it. Finally, IMO, your footer can be incorporated in the header without being intrusive.

Very cool!

Here here! Dentist? Where are you seeing commercials of dentists? I've never come across those, and I practically live at theaters.

Interesting. To summarize, the article is arguing that if you pay for a service, you shouldn't be shown ads. What about your monthly cable subscription? What about Hulu? Even as a Hulu Plus member you are subjected to ads. Ads are simply another revenue model for parent company, in this case Microsoft, and for the channel, in this case the app.

> Most of these are problems with any large company, not Amazon per se.

Agreed! We won't get Amazon or any of these large corporations to change by boycotting their services (w/ no success). Instead we need to push for tech savy people to make it high up in Washington and European Union so that they protect customer interests instead of granting corporations all the power.

A lot of it. The stack ranking system (the one the article mentioned is old), the fact that people are reading the Vanity Fair article secretively, etc... Most of this article is trying to paint an immensely negative picture that simply isn't true.

So... this article simply isn't true.

Honestly, none

The UI is horrendous. Especially if you attempt to use it without a video camera.

So eloquently yet so powerful