jonpeda

The Mathematica system makes some beautiful, informative graphs, and presumably users can make those graphs with a minimum of fuss and bother. It's technically very nice.

Yet, in the entire blog post, is there one insight that wasn't a priori obvious? Maybe the bits about migration.

I don't see the "art and science" in this analysis, I see "stamp collecting" (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford)

People donate their data to support Wolfram's closed-source, paid-license, for-profit program?

> If someone cannot grasp this, they lack either or both of the intellectual maturity

Yes, that's entirely the point! >> flummoxes people at the 9th grade level,

> There is no such as "an intuitive convention".

consistency is intuitive. inconsistency is unintuitive. That's not the same as a hypothetical complaint that a certain convention is unintuitive.

Yes, ultimately we are bound by tradition, since changing over to any system is too expensive and confusing.

Path dependence and local optima.

See also: English vs Metric units.

> this is based on the Quill v North Dakota interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution.

Note that this is a very old reading, and any modern court would likely wash that out, as everything related to human existence is considered interstate commerce by the modern court.

Are there multiple sales tax regimes operating within the span of one PO Box? Doubtful than anyone on either side will worry about that case

That's like saying "e-commerce == middleman effectively increasing the burden of any purchase and wasting resources"

> If goods are taxed more businesses raise their prices. Businesses aren't being taxed. Consumers are.

This is entirely dependent on which part of the supply chain has the fiercest competition. Sometimes consumers get the economic profit and pay cost (commodities) and sometimes the producers do (monopolies, who already charge what the market will bear)

Sales tax should go to the state where the buyer is, since the buyer is almost always the human person in the transaction. The only reason that it goes to the seller is that sellers are easier to regulate than individual buyers. With modern IT, that's not an issue anymore.

The best result that could come of this Internet/Sales Tax issue is that Sales tax is abolished in favor of income tax.

1GB was a huge gimmick, because 99.9% of people couldn't get 1GB into their accounts if they tried. They just threw the huge number out there because they knew they could handle all actual current email demand.

Colleges will most certainly welcome re-applications (transfers or post-gap-years), but the window is generally small, as elite colleges are a young-person's institution.

Where did the "socialist" and "place in life" enter this discussion?

If an invention is useless (ahead of its time) for 10 years, then you may as well keep it secret until the market is ready, and then publish.

> deserve their own patent.

What does this mean?

If A is patented, A+B is covered by A's patent AND B's patent.

The only way to avoid A is to use a non-patented yet critical invention. The inventor of A should have included any such thing as one of their patent claims.

If you want to propose a communitarian moneyless society, so that. Don't beat around the bust.

Not necessarily. NWU is a private university, and in general plenty of private companies fund research.

In some cases, the government funding issue is relevant. Not in all cases.

Still an improvement over the current situation.

> What stops them just publishing a sham product whose sole purpose is to be for sale while infringing the patent and then show a few licenses to a couple of fishing buddies?

The courts are adept at investigating those issues. For example, Enron's sham electricity sales were discovered once the files were opened.

ahem.

https://www.google.com/search?q=being+the+averagest

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averages...

> switching costs are high

Why? switching to private school is expensive. Switching from is not. In the public system, schools change every 3-5 years anyway.

" and it strikes me that private schools may be less likely to change drastically over the course of 8-12 years than a public school."

Why? public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates.

eq == ==

This is true in both infix notation and in prefix notation.

XML is far more structured than JSON.

When people complain about threading, they are thinking about shared-mutable-state threading.

Obviously we will never have single-threaded systems, they would be blocking all the time.

> Heck, they'd probably like someone to outsource their email, too.

2004 -- Was this before or after Gmail launched on April 1?

angels don't want return?

because it wasn't making enough money to merit a buyout, and the current operators got a better offer to work on Palantir projects.

Same reason my babysitting service was doing well before I got a job working on a web site, and then I shut down my babysitting service.

but then 'duplication" only happens if the source file is shared post-encryption, which is far less common than sharing pre-encryption, sync post-encryption sharing requires sharing the key as well.

This is the problem with the ad-supported walled-garden closed-system model.

My grandma can't see my stuff on G+, due to its awful usability, but if they opened up a nice API, someone could build a client app suited to audiences like the 80+ set.

> I know I would dread having to use any current kind of dating site if (God forbid) my wife predeceased me.

Huh, I know some wonderful success stories for this use case.