edmccaffrey

Without endorsing either of the two opinions, your analogies are invalid because they are examples of the above logical fallacy. You cannot compare using something in a manner that violates a person's right to not be maimed or killed with something that does not voilate the highest universal human rights.

He will probably be convicted for hiding assets, though.

You don't need to be "on Facebook" to use their hypothetical micropayment system. Non-members can be shown a simplified sign-up page, like they would see if another company became the de-facto micropayment processor.

You don't get to redefine words to support your personal opinion, and still have a valid argument.

The fact that one will usually lose money with that site does not change the fact that the winner is the person willing to spend the most money.

"I would point out that they sometimes run 'special' auctions where the 'auction' price is free, and all you pay is the bid price. In that case there is 0 ability to 'win'; it's straight-up gambling."

If there is no cost of entry then it isn't a gamble, because a gamble requires you to risk money. Quit inventing definitions to support your defeated argument.

"I'm not sure what metric you would prefer, but if you feel it's dumb and not gambling, I would invite you to try it. Me? I'll be over here, not trying it. I can work the math. But feel free to let us know how it goes."

That is a red herring. Correctly pointing out the fact that it is not a gamble, does not mean that I think it is a wise use of my money. Do not use such intellectually dishonest tactics to try to change the subject from your failed argument to one that I did not address.

You are conflating the inability to control the price with the inability to control the outcome.

Even though people can try to use bidding strategies, it is not a game of chance.

Keep this terrible blog far, far away, please.

If I were doing something like this, I would assign new glyphs to each letter (as not to break the image of a fantasy world), and then encode the whole thing with a one-time pad. Doing so can give you all sorts of weird-looking words that have actual value.

Does anyone know how many unique glyphs there are in his book? For that matter, how many are there--including both uppercase and lowercase--in French (I don't know how many accented characters there are)?

And if there are still too many to be such an arrangement, it is possible that each letter was assigned multiple sets (a set being uppercase and lowercase) of glyphs and picking a random number between 0 and twice the total number of letters in French, counting accented letters as unique letters (manually picking the proper case).

I'm not saying that he did this, but it's what I would do.

For that reason a search company may want to acquire them either before they get too big and expensive, or to prevent a competitor from performing an instant catch-up in this market by buying instead of developing.

Therefore, I was wondering what the market cap was of Wolfram Research, since they aren't exactly a small, pre-profit startup.

This isn't a complaint about a lack of data, since that can be updated after the preview feedback allows them to adjust the more important technology; I just enjoyed the irony of it having no information about Wolfram Alpha LLC, and only providing some useless web traffic stats for wolfram.com when asked about Wolfram Research.

I wanted to search for something during the downtime, and I didn't go to Yahoo--I waited. They definitely lost revenue, but it is a ridiculous, baseless claim that everyone went somewhere else during the downtime. You have absolutely no data to make any such claim.

Furthermore, your calculated cost of an engineer's time is simplistic and inaccurate. It doesn't count the lost revenues from delaying the release of their work, and the reduced value of that money by gaining a lower time value for it (getting money earlier means more time to multiply it through investments and reinvestments).

And, even worse, you are comparing the DAILY costs of developer time (which you grossly underestimated) to something that happens, maybe, once or twice per decade.

It could cost them many millions--maybe even hundreds of millions or more--per year to implement such a policy.

That's why these mistakes happen--it is cheaper to fix the rare screw-up than to waste too much time checking everything, except for very few circumstances.