jfruh

Is Fox Business replacing all the questions to Murdoch with footage of cute kitties frolicking and meowing his praises?

I agree that "a TV that gets ABC but not CBS" sounds ludicrous. But look at it another way. Isn't one of the longtime geek rallying cries about cable "I just want to pay for the channels I want, not the whole bundle?"

Plus, with the gradual move to an on-demand model for entertainment, it strikes me that "channels" as we know them (where something specific is on at any given time and you don't control that) will become meaningless. Why shouldn't we be buying content direct from the creators (or from the company that funded its creation, more accurately) rather than worry about what "channel" it's on? It seems weird to think about paying Disney directly for Disney content but that's only because we're used to paying for channels. Maybe in the future we'll have choices to buy either unlimited streaming or individual shows from the companies that make them -- and your monthly bill, taking inflation into account, will probably be roughly what you'd pay for cable today. (What, you didn't think things would get cheaper, did you?)

Ironically, since this idea is on a Tumblr blog, I find Tumblr spam a lot more annoying. I help run a fairly popular Tumblr w/4K+ followers and occasionally I see that our posts are "liked" by users with names like "freebatteriesonline"; clicking on their name doesn't even take you t a Tumblr blog, just a dodgy battery sale site. The process of reporting spam Tumblr blogs is not intuitive -- the only instructions I found on the subject were on an eHow blog, for Pete's sake, and it's not clear to me whether I'm actually reporting them for spam or just blocking them so I can't see them.

I can already embed URLs in WordPress posts with a magical technology called "hyperlinks."

And of course for comprehensive coverage when you need major medical care (cancer treatments, surgery, etc.). Part of the health care reform forbids health insurance companies from denying you care based on pre-existing conditions, from kicking off your plan when you get sick, or from imposing lifetime benefit caps.

It's also worth remembering that a pro athlete if he's lucky has a career that lasts 15 years, tops. Most play significantly less. Contrast that with the average person's working life, which usually lasts 40-50 years. So sure they make a lot per year but once they're done, they're done, since they tend not have much by way of marketable skills. Saving and investment is the smart thing to do, but it's also a difficult thing to tell a 21-year-old who suddenly has more money than he's ever seen in his life.

I'm always amused when tech types (who tend to lean libertarian) act so outraged when something they purchase doesn't correspond to costs + some "fair" markup. (People seem particularly fixated on the prices of ebooks and text messages, for some reason.) Do you want to question the basis of capitalism and the free market? I'm all for it! But if you don't, don't complain when companies charge what the market will bear. Don't hate the players, hate the game.

"If you take a 37signals-esque path you've got something that'll sell to 80% of businesses, let niche software cover the rest."

Er, has it occurred to you that the insanely convoluted world of NYC government might constitute a niche?

I think the thing that might give this some oomph is Google's newly introduced black nav bar -- for those of you who haven't gotten Google+ access, there's an alert on the bar when there's new Google+ activity, which you see whenever you hit any Google page (search, maps, images, news, etc.) so long as you're logged in with your account. It's a pretty clever way to take advantage of the fact that most people hit multiple Google pages a day, if only briefly.

<i>“MoviePass makes spur-of-the-moment movie-going as simple as choosing a film on the phone and checking in at the theater,” Spikes said in a press release. “No more waiting in line.”</i>

Ha ha, someone is under the impression that "waiting in line" is the least convenient aspect of going to the movies. (For most people, it's actually "leaving the house.")

Bulding codes that prevent tall buildings are an asset particulary if you make money from selling petroleum, as they make it difficult to build walkable neighborhoods.

"One British company, Pace, sells such boxes to American providers, who do not take advantage of the reduced energy options because of worries that the lowest energy states could disrupt service. Cable companies say customers will not tolerate the time it takes to reboot the system once the system has been shut down or put to sleep."

LOL AMERICA

Felix Salmon makes a good case that Skype's stock agreement was deliberately obfuscative:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/06/24/upgrading-s...

Basically, Skype's claim is that the point of this clause is to retain employees -- you don't get cash in your vested stock unless you still work for the company. But as Salmon points out, none of the employees actually realized this -- the clauses are bafflingly worded, and refer to external documents, to the extent that you'd need a lawyer to figure them out -- so it doesn't make any kind of sense as a retention tool. Add in the fact that this policy is pretty radically different from standard tech industry practice, where if you're vested you're vested, and it really seems like it's just a way to screw employees.

"Archaic" may not be the right word for MeeGo, but "orphan" certainly is. This is going to be the only MeeGo phone Nokia makes, as they've already announced they're switching to WP7. It may be the only MeeGo phone that anybody makes, ever. Why invest in a platform that will be abandoned in less than a year?

I believe that you're not actually allowed to make up the difference under Kickstarter's terms of service. One of the points of the system is that it's supposed to be vaguely like the original Groupon idea -- you only get paid if you get enough pledges to meet your goal. (Backers only have their credit cards charged once the project meets the dollar amount you've set.)

In practice, of course, there are ways around this. Payments all go through Amazon's system, and I believe that they enforce this rule by just making sure that none of the credit cards for backers are under the same name as the Amazon payment account. If you just get a friend to pay for the difference and then write them a check for the amount you could get away with it.

I consider myself pretty introverted but I'm also pretty conflict-averse, which means that myth #3 doesn't apply at all, at least to me -- if anything, I tend to be overly polite with people. And I know lots of introverts who are the same way.

The introvert-extrovert axis is a great tool for understanding behavior, but don't just assume that every angle of your personality arises from where you are on that spectrum.

Well, OK, but is my second thought right?

Can someone help a poor liberal arts major? I see "costs $1.3 billion to run" and I think "Apple loses $1.3b a year on the iTunes store." But reading the article and the constant Apple talk about breaking even makes me think that what they're trying to get at is "the infrastructure for the store and payments to artists and app creators costs $1.3b a year, but Apple's 30 percent cut of everything produces about $1.3b a year in revenue, so it all works out," which is a very different proposition, yes?

"We're sorry, not in the sense that we're going to undo this feature or make it opt in or actually change our behavior in the future, but in the sense that we aren't entirely pleased that people are whining about us in the media for a news cycle or two again."

You're paying $24.95 <em>per year</em> to get them in cloud. Of course, if you stop paying, you don't lose your original pirated files, but you don't get them in the high-quality versions on all your devices anymore, presumably.

Is it just me or does this post read like an Oscar acceptance speech? I mean, I get that he put in a lot of work and a lot of people helped but -- I just found it kind of off-putting. Like he won an award or something.

The comments that "Karin" is leaving on her own status updates strike me (caveat: I am not a mental health professional, though my parents both are!) as fairly classic paranoid (like, actually diagnosably paranoid) talk. Delusions of persecution via secret networks operating within complicated bureaucracies, interspersed with violent imagery, is pretty much what paranoids spend their time thinking about. 500 years ago they probably would have given you an elaborate description about all the different kinds of demons in hell; now it's all about the CIA and the Bilderberg Group or (in this case) international academia.

Anyway, long story short, my guess is that this isn't spam/CEO gaming at all, but a mentally ill human being. I'm frankly surprised there aren't a lot more Facebook/Twitter accounts like this.

I love the fact that many of the people who think that Ballmer needs to go because he's "out of touch with the times" are praying for Bill Gates to come back. Is there any evidence that Gates who hasn't worked in the industry day to day for years, would do any better?

Looks like it - it was originally "buckss". I'm not proud.

Ugh, as the submitter, I officially apologize for the typo in the headline. Jeez.

>That said, a study that includes post-bachelor degrees in the ranking would be interesting. What would be especially informative would be a combined ranking that factors the average cost of education in with the average earnings increase/decrease.

Yeah, I think the most useful comparison would be to make comparisons based on the average return for the most typical terminal degree in your field would be, or at least to give you a suite of responses based on varying degrees.

>Perhaps a masters in psychology still gets you less than a BS in mathematics, perhaps not, but it would be neat to see.

As a side note, is a BS in pure math particularly useful, beyond the fact that it's a bachelor's degree? That always struck me as one of those disciplines that would require an advanced degree to be of use. (My freshman year calculus TA, when asked by one of his students if he was going for a master's, said, "No, I'm a PHD student. The master's degree is the door prize of mathematics.")

To put it slightly more succinctly, it's not that some majors are more lucrative than others; it's that some industries are more lucrative than others. You should really figure out what kind of work you want to go into, and part of your calculus for that should be how much money you'll make, if that's important to you, and then figure out an academic path that prepares you for that. If you think of college as a black box that spits out a high-paying job at the end, then you're frankly in trouble.

I wonder to what extent studies like this have things backwards to a certain extent? It's not that an engineering degree is more lucrative than an English degree, exactly; it's that if you want to be an engineer, you major in engineering, and then you go into a more lucrative field. Does that make sense? It's not that the degree that has some major predicative power -- it's that some fields are more lucrative than others, and people who want to go into those fields choose particular majors.

I do also think that the survey is flawed in that it doesn't track post-bachelors degrees. Psychology degree holders came in at the bottom of the list, but anyone who knows even a little bit about the mental health field knows that virtually all practioners have masters degrees or PHDs. So, yeah, if you just get a BA in psychology, you probably aren't making very much, not least because you probably aren't working in the mental health field as anything other than an entry level person.

Politicians running negative attack ads generally have to indicate that they're the ones paying for the ads.

How about Middle East peace? I hope they have a bunch of guys working on that.