hardtke

I've sat in many a meeting where the Macs "steal" all of the DHCP connections and I'm stuck watching the speaker instead of following TweetDeck.

This chart is misleading with regards to the current US debt. It claims our gross government debt in 93.6% of GDP. There are two types of government debt -- debt held by the public (currently about 60% of GDP) and intergovernmental debt (the social security trust fund, medicare trust fund, highway trust fund, etc.). The latter debt can be wiped away by act of Congress -- they simply need to change the payout formula such that this debt remains as pieces of paper in a filing cabinet in West Virginia. We don't even pay interest on this debt -- we send more pieces of paper to the filing cabinet. Our real debt is not at crisis levels yet.

A perverse incentive of the current situation is that Amazon is prevented from having distribution warehouses in California even though that is where much of their stuff is shipped. How many jobs are we losing now and how much extra CO2 is getting spewed into the air because of this nonsensical tax exemption?

ESPN makes more the $4 billion from those fees. And then they get to show advertisments as well.

I should mention that one of the primary authors on the Cogent paper is a YC alum, Mike Miller, Cloudant (YC 07) Founder.

Moore's law is an observation, whereas Shannon's law is basic physics. Shannon's law dictates the maximum bandwidth over a physical communication link. Telephone wires and over-the-air solutions aren't going to cut it. The only two was to get Gigabit Ethernet to the home are optical fiber and coaxial cable. Most communities won't be able to afford fiber installations, so Netflix and other streaming sources will be 100% at the mercy of Comcast and Cablevision. The future of home entertainment is the cable companies, not Netflix.

The most important number is search advertising revenue. The entire online services division (which includes Bing) has revenues of around $2 billion per year. Google's AdWords brings in about $15 billion per year. Microsoft is nowhere close to 30% of the search market, revenue wise. For individual ad clicks Microsoft gets about as much as Google, so clearly Microsoft is not doing 30% of "real" searches (actual people looking for actual things and occasionally clicking on an ad.)

"unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material become a felony". How is it possible to implement such a law and not make YouTube a felon? The decision in the Viacom vs. Youtube said that YouTube was not guilty of copyright violations because YouTube removes content once asked to do so and makes some minimal preemptive efforts to filter copyrighted content. We need to assume that Google will prevent any changes to the law that move the fine line on which YouTube operates.

Apple spent millions of dollars promoting the concept that iPhone/iPad apps should not necessarily be free. How many times did you see a print ad where they showed a bunch of cool apps AND their prices? This 30% fee is simply a return on that investment. Paid apps don't sell on other platforms (e.g. Android) because these platforms never marketed this idea to consumers. 70% of something is better than 100% of nothing. It's the same story with iTunes -- Apple is the only company that convinced consumers to pay for music, and they charge exorbitant fees to the record labels.

Long term, the price of oil is capped by the cost of converting coal to diesel. Last I saw, this price is around $70-100 per barrel. Coal to diesel is horrible for the environment (twice the CO2 emissions of burning regular petroleum), but the unfortunate fact of life is that both China and the US (two biggest energy consumers) have essentially infinite supplies of coal (1000+ years at current production levels). The US will not enact a Carbon tax in the near future because 1/2 of Americans believe stuff that is false (CO2 does not lead to global warming). The only thing preventing large scale coals to liquids development are the huge capital costs involved and the reluctance of banks to take the risk that the price of oil will drop below the magic number ($70 per barrel).

The problem with this study is that the tested search queries are completely different than what people type into a search engine. Besides being 30% vile, real search queries are very tailored to search engines algorithms -- two to three words, maximal idf (inverse document frequency). People type in the minimum number of least commonly used terms that distinguish what they want.

Both Google and Bing use human evaluators (sometimes with domain expertise) to evaluate real queries against the search results. None of those real queries look anything like these.

Unfortunately, their hasn't been a good public release of search engine query data since the AOL fiasco.

I use tuffmail. IMAP and web support. No problems in several years. My personal tuffmail accounts works much better with my Android phone than my work gmail account. For me, it is worth $20 per year to not have my personal life available to Google or Yahoo.

Not sure you are aware, but the FTC recently wiped out the whole debt settlement industry by making it such that you can't charge upfront fees for debt settlement programs. Before that, debt settlement was one of the most lucrative verticals on the Internet.

The problem here is that for every dollar the government currently collects, they spend two. This should be reflected.