DavidAdams

I think the "saddest" headline is a little tongue-in-cheek and refers to the fact that they're missed connections, so it's a case of people getting "this close" to finding love, but having it elude them.

Nobody will know whether spending all that dough on House of Cards will have been a good move or not for many months at the earliest.

A lot of HR has to do with legal compliance, so generally HR systems are country-specific.

9kjbo711fglm6sl@jetable.org

A motorcycle helmet is a hybrid of hard and soft. Hard shell, soft impact absorption. I agree with the other poster. The best phone case is a hybrid. Check out the Switcheasy Tones.

Stay tuned. I'm working on getting a benefits and HR startup off the ground right now. I can't tell you how heartening it was to read this article, because we want to solve a lot of these problems, and I'm glad to know that there are other people who think the state of the industry is as dismal as I think it is. If there's anyone out there who would like to be a part of a company that's going to bring HR into the 21st century, let me know. We're in San Francisco, and we just closed a substantial seed round. Edit: Email me at 9kjbo711fglm6sl@jetable.org

I actually worked for Open Market briefly back in 1998. Don't blame me, though. Open Market acquired my company, ShopSite, but they were already on a downward trajectory by that time, and I left to start another company before the year was out.

But I can report that the company was quite proud of its shopping cart patent, and its patent portfolio in general, largely because they felt that it protected them and established them as a major player in the nascent but growing e-commerce market. There was a sense, though, even then, that the patent was pure bullshit. I never heard any contemplation of using the patent offensively, and from what I can recall there was a feeling that if that were to happen, the same thing would happen to Open Market that happened to this patent troll. That is to say, that it wouldn't stand up.

Indeed, this is a good cautionary tale as to the havoc that "defensive" patents can wreak once they get into the hands of trolls.

One of the reasons that many developing countries such as Mexico have a hard time developing a robust economy and a strong middle class is precisely because their wealth is concentrated in an oligopoly made up of a handful of powerful families who wield vast political and economic power. You'll see this all across Latin America, and in most other parts of the world.

Also, as you can see from the Russian billionaires on the list, many influential people have made vast fortunes when state-owned monopolies were "privatized" and became privately-owned monopolies.

As the other commenter said, it would actually be pretty dumb to cancel a conference that's already bought and paid for, unless it's for pure CYA PR reasons. I used to work in the meetings and events industry and I can confidently say that the organizers of the AIG conference at the St Regis probably never imagined that it would turn into a PR debacle, because that kind of event is absolutely ordinary. They would not have considered it extravagant at all.

Consider this: you're having a conference for multimillionaire corporate executives and top performers. People who usually work in different locations are coming in to meet together and perhaps bring their spouses for some hobnobbing, strategy talks, and teambuilding exercises. Where do you think they're going to stay? The Motel 6? When you're paying someone a high six figure salary plus bonuses, is it really a scandal to pay $300 for a hotel room?

And by the way, if the rooms "can cost $1000 per night" and you rent out two hundred rooms for your event, if you ended up paying more than $300 per room, you should fire your meeting planner.

I'm currently hiring developers, and I also hate recruiters, for the reasons you outline. I was interested to learn about your flat $25K fee in the comments here, and I can tell you that I'd be unlikely to pay it. I have other ways to find developers that aren't so expensive.

If I'd bothered to sign up after reading "It's free to get started" then learned later about the hefty fee, I'd be disappointed at best. Since I didn't sign up, I don't know how much bait there is before the switch, but if you talk about the fee right away after the signup I guess it's sort of okay, since you didn't waste much of my time but you did receive my contact information under false pretenses.

I'll be interested to see how many takers you get at that fee level.

To me, the fact that these expertly-created hoaxes on Wikipedia have eventually been discovered is a testament to the strength of the Wikipedia model. It's certain that there are still weaknesses, as have been outlined in other comments on this story, but if we were to be given a crystal ball to verify all of recorded human history, we'd surely find that a staggering amount of it is wholly false winners-write-the-history-books nonsense.

What's more interesting about this article is the staggering, agressive ignorance displayed by the commenters on the India Times website. If you're interested in a dose of outrage to get your blood boiling, give them a read.

The formatting of the navigation widget is messed up on Chrome/Mac. It overlaps the page text. I'll also second the earlier comment that the default bootstrap theme is pretty plain. I know you're probably focused on functionality right now, but spending a few dollars on a Wrap Bootstrap theme would make your beta more appealing to your audience.

That quote was written specifically to make you feel uncomfortable. Older people love to quote it, because we all have a catalog of things that we'd love to go back and relive more fully, or do right the first time, or not do at all. The cruel irony of it all is that you probably don't know how you're wasting your youth until you look back on it in retrospect and facepalm. Sorry.

People always bring up this "marketing" canard. Apple has been doing the same kind of (pretty good) marketing for almost its entire existence, even during its darkest days when its marketshare was small and shrinking. Marketing didn't compel people to buy Macs in the mid 90s, and it's not compelling people to buy iPhones now.

It's actually quite simple, and any student of the tech industry should be able to follow along. When the iPhone was initially released, it was unambiguously, head and shoulders above any other smartphone. Just way better. And in contrast to Apple tradition, they priced the iPhone at a level that made it impossible for new entrants to compete on price in a meaningful way, due to the nature of carrier subsidies.

So people flocked to it, even people who wouldn't buy a Mac in a million years. The software and hardware of the iPhone had great integration and typical, good Apple build quality. So in other words, a great head start on a very hot industry segment. Then they started a robust developer ecosystem, and a lot of small developers made an unexpectedly large amount of money selling cheap apps that iPhone users snapped up because they were cheap, and the economy of scale made it work, and made Apple an unexpectedly huge amount of money from its app store take. Suddenly, just like Microsoft before them, Apple was in control of a bonanza platform.

Quality product + good price + industry head start + robust and lucrative developer platform = dominant market position.

And like Microsoft before them, Apple has let the power go to its head. And of course Apple has a long history of control-freakiness and closed platform tendencies anyway. But just as decades of Windows being just unimaginably shitty didn't knock Microsoft off its PC perch, even as alternatives to the iPhone flourish, Apple keeps a strong lead because of natural inertial and platform lock-in forces. In my opinion, Apple's doing a good job of shooting themselves in the foot at every opportunity, but just like hapless Microsoft, it will take years for them to successfully piss away their lead.

The point is that the creation of that high-resolution image of Everest is a noteworthy technological achievement, and most people have never seen such a high quality photograph of our planet's highest mountain before.

It looks great on a big screen, though. So I guess the title should be renamed beautiful site that looks great on a big monitor but cramped on a little one.

I remember I wanted to buy Zaxxon for the Colecovision, and it was $59.99. This was in 1983. It seems that the top games are always $60. Of course, $60 in 1983 dollars is $140 in 2012 dollars. That's a lot of money for a faux-3D sidescroller!

That should say, "before most people were even aware of the internet, and who would go on to use the internet having never even known that Usenet existed." Back in '94, I think that most internet users used Usenet to some extent, but certainly "most people" in the world had never heard of Usenet, and never would, and still haven't.

I had some houseguests visiting from The Netherlands last night. I have never encountered louder talkers, even when we visited a nearby historic church and there was a rehearsal going on. I got a kick out of it, because I'm a notorious loud talker and my friends always give me a hard time about it.

Alas, the blowback was swift, and the Republicans caved: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121117/16492521084/that-w...

The link was to the SF craigslist jobs page. I think they meant go on Craigslist and apply for another job there, rather than work for the Craigslist outfit itself.

For those unfamiliar with Maddox, he is a blogger whose public persona is in fact an over-the-top professional pompous ass. So your observation is spot on, but he does it on purpose.

I agree that "unique problem" probably isn't a good enough descriptor, but there's no such thing as something that's "legally" a startup or not. Now, there are regulations that define a "small business" based on number of employees or revenue, so you can say that you can be "legally" a small business. But startup is another animal. I personally prefer Steve Blank's definition.

Thanks for mentioning this. When I was reading this essay, my first thought was, "an essay that's seeking to define what a startup is that doesn't at least acknowledge Steve Blank's by-now-well-known definition just stumbled off the starting line."

Free copyediting: You've got a "grocer's apostrophe" on your more info page: photo's --> photos

http://www.maily.com/Learn-More http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Superfluous_apostrop...

It has to find and validate the model, but that's an amorphous goalpost. Startups stop being startups retroactively. They could look back a the recent past and say, "that point in time was when we finally validated the business model that we're now kicking ass on, that's when we stopped being a startup and became a fast-growing company."

The most successful game developer I know was half way through a masters degree in English when he dropped out to dedicate himself to being a game addict. But he went on to co-found a couple of game companies and now works at Blizzard. Another testimonial for studying English!

The word for a "civil squabble" involving 2000 people is "riot." I'd be interested to know what sparked it.

I think that zwieback was implying that Steve was kind of a dick, and that he might have just been dickish to his kids. Truth is, though, that kids love their parents and benefit from their attentions, even if they are jerks.

I'll chime in here to say that indeed we don't treat our brightest minds quite well. For one, by trying to let no child be left behind, and raise average test scores, our schools are spending most of their time trying to raise the bottom half to the standard. Kids who can easily pass the tests are left to languish. And I mean this literally. My son has been relegated to the corner of the classroom to spend hours poking around in the meager classroom library while the teacher worked intensively with the laggards. Programs for "gifted" kids are unpopular with parents because they seem "elitist" so schools have to go to crazy lengths to obfuscate them and make them as low-profile as possible. You're unlikely to even hear the term "gifted" in a school nowadays. They have to use euphemisms like Early Learning Program. Even in high schools where it finally becomes politically workable to sort the smarter kids into AP classes, the "best" schools use those classes and the bright students as a factory farm of AP credits earned, which raise the rankings of their school system, and make it easier to justify continued budget increases. So rather than encouraging critical thinking, writing, and creativity, they're teaching to the test.

I actually agree with many of the facts that the article lays out. I actually don't think that there's much point in getting heartburn about the US's standing in the ratings, because a lot of the ratings are probably useless or easily-gamed metrics. And it's critically important for US interests that we make it easy for the world's best and brightest to continue to immigrate. The big problem with the article is that, as other readers point out, it's a self-defeating argument. The reason that our poor education outcomes don't matter is that we import the top performers from other countries? Well, it's a good thing that we import the top performers (in a selfish way of seeing things). But that's beside the point.

I think that one of the factors contributing to our education challenges is that we have a large and diverse population, but we also have naive notions of what equality means, and we too often think that correlation equals causation. Going to college correlates with success later in life. That's because smarter, harder-working kids tend to go to college. It does not mean that sending dumb lazy kids to college you'll make them successful. If you send dumb kids to college, you end up with dumb kids with no college degree and $40,000 in student loan debt the incurred before they dropped out. I'm using the term "dumb" to make a point, but the truth is that there's nothing wrong with not being cut out for the academic life. In fact, if you are prepared in childhood to be determined, hard-working, and creative, you can become a very successful person without having ever been an academic type. I spent three years doing carpentry, and I got to know a lot of tradespeople who did important things, enjoyed their work, and lived comfortable middle class lives, and sent their kids to college. But we're allergic to the idea that people are cut out for different kinds of life purpose because some people are more academically oriented than others.