salvadors

A lot depends on what they do with the companies they acquire.

Lots of people were afraid of what would happen to BookDepository post-sale, but pretty much none of that has happened. (I'm particularly grateful that free worldwide shipping didn't disappear!)

Of course, Amazon's purchase of IMDB took place several years before Wikipedia even existed.

The collections on Goodreads are generally more comprehensive than those on Amazon. I've added over 750 books on Goodreads, but fewer than 10% of those were purchased through Amazon.

Maybe my reading habits are just weird, but I've found the recommendations from Goodreads to be fairly bad. (Assuming you're talking about the personal recommendations engine, that is — I find their per-title "Similar Books" to be much more useful.)

Have they said that they're going to merge those?

I'm hopeful that if they integrate the reviews at all (and I'm not sure they will — I suspect there's a different plan here), it'll be solely in the Goodreads→Amazon direction.

Amazon have a fairly good history of letting the companies they acquire stay fairly autonomous and independent.

They actually don't prioritise the English version — they simply prioritise the version that the highest number of users have read/rated/reviewed. Sometimes this causes unexpected issues the other way round, such as with old English children's books by authors like Enid Blyton that these days are much more popular in Indonesia.

What are some of the problems you have with the interface? I've certainly got some issues with it, but they're mostly at at the small niggle level, rather than completely off-putting level.

On my Estonian tax return last year, I had to declare overseas income too, and was impressed that it even did the exchange rate calculations at the relevant dates for me.

If you actually need to know, rather than that just being an example: you don't. You used to have to fill in a form on arrival, but even that was abolished a year or so ago.

To verify that there's no foul play, there would also need to be a way to check that the code on github is what is actually running on the site...

The central promise of Open Source is not that you can get workarounds for bugs — it's that you are free to fix any bug yourself (or pay someone else to). Lots of non-free projects have great support too, but when you fall through those cracks there's nothing you can do about it. Open Source gives you a much better promise instead.

Assuming that a "proper" Open Source project is one with an active community and commitments to long term development and growth etc., is detrimental to simply getting code out there that people can use. There's often an assumption that even if you're releasing code under a Free/Open license you must want to almost run it like a startup, paying close attention to the needs of your "customers" etc.

But there's a whole other side, where you simply take code you're probably never going to do anything more with ever again, but rather than just letting it die, you set it free for other people to do something with it if they like.

One of the core Freedoms is the freedom to adapt existing code in whatever way you like. If something I've written can have some of its innards repurposed into something someone else needs, and save them a day or two of development in the meantime, then that's every bit as valid as if I create a black-box library that tens of thousands of people use (and expect new features from on an ongoing basis).

IME there is woefully insufficient attention paid to the first of these approaches.

You pretty much never want a space at the start of your search query though, so you could DTRT based on whether there's preceding text there or not.

I presume you mean the ”how the technology takes over most employment” part, rather than either of the dystopias (one poorly masquerading as a utopia) that are presented as a resulting false dichotomy?

That's sort-of similar (though even weirder than) French[1], where, where you sometimes count in twenties instead of tens. So instead of sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one, it's (the equivalent of) sixty-nine, sixty-ten, sixty-eleven. And eighty is really four-twenties, so ninety-five is four-twenties-and-fifteen, etc.

Of course, English used to be like this too — thus "three score years and ten". And many languages still retain non-decimalised words for eleven and twelve (and sometimes powers of them, like a gross or mass.)

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[1] Well, French French. Swiss French and Belgian French are much more sensible.

Except that if you really meant the second case, you'd use a colon, not a comma.

What if there was a competitor to Best Buy, where everything was free, but only if you took your shoes off when entering?

[And no, I'm not saying that that's a true analogy either — I'm just exploring what makes this one right or wrong, and where you think the insanity lies]

Yes. For an example, compare the underlying XML of http://globestroller.com/maps/US_48.svg with the original at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Blank_US_...

In the original the states already had IDs (except, for some reason, Virginia), so it was simply a matter of moving the inline styling to a CSS section at the top.

The CSS can also be in a different file, which could be dynamically generated for different users if you wanted to build a simple "make a pretty map of which states you've visisted" app.

Surely it's relatively easy to convert SVG to, say, .jpg on the fly, though, no? </handwave>

I'm not sure if I'm missing something in the question, but SVG plays very nicely with CSS. I frequently download SVG map files from Wikipedia, add new, more suitable, IDs to the relevant <path> elements, and then add a CSS section at the top for shading individual countries or regions or whatever.

The complex part is usually simply working out which country/region/whatever corresponds to which <path> in the first place; but this is a complaint more about the quality of the markup of the underlying SVG of an average map on Wikipedia, than about SVG itself.

Even if that were shown to be a much more effective way to reach these goals?

Lots of purely civil cases revolve around exactly that. If we have a contract that says I'll do some work for you and then you'll pay me for it, but then you subsequently don't pay me, then I'm in exactly the scenario you describe. But then I have to sue you for the money in civil court — I can't get you sent to prison for it.

The landlord and tenant relationship is another example, where courts in many jurisdictions will simply strike out many types of clause, whether they were entered into knowingly/willing or not.

> This is why you don't negotiate for things like gas, clothes, and milk.

Gas and milk, sure. But lots of people still buy clothes from places where haggling is acceptable.

No; waiting 9 weeks to get it.

And as I read much more when I'm on holiday, and one of the reasons I bought a Kindle in the first place was so I didn't have to carry dozens of books on such a trip, I'm very glad that they were willing to ship it to not only a different address, but a different country.

> Unfortunately, the cost of fraud, waste and loss is passed on to honest consumers in the form of overall higher prices.

In Amazon's case it's also possible to argue that the cost of fraud, waste and loss is passed on to honest consumers in the form of overall lower prices.

Customer service policies like this are a significant part of what allowed Amazon to grow to be the company it is today, and Amazon has used that power (some would say abused it), to drive prices lower than they would otherwise have been on many items.

> Especially when that convenience means having an item re-shipped to a different address that I never used before,

I'm personally very glad that they allow this, having had to had a broken Kindle replaced whilst on holiday in a different country.

There are public policy reasons why a simple majority shouldn't be able to do whatever they like. It would be much harder to ever raise any investment if it were trivial for a majority to simply take everything for themselves and never pass anything back to the investors.

In such a scenario you end up with a boilerplate contract that any right-thinking investor will insist on, just to protect themselves in such a scenario.

Basically, company law has simply declared that those clauses are there by default.

I suspect this is because he's already written several other posts (linked at the bottom) with the thermostat example, so is trying a different example here, in the hope that people might pay more attention this time.

Couldn't _replicate_ in a weekend, or couldn't have _created_ in a weekend (including conceiving of it in the first place)?

Any fast typist could retype any of the great works of literature in a weekend. That's not the same as being able to write them.