thespin

Costs >> Benefits

I would guess because he developed his solution while at work and his employment terms require all inventions are assigned to the company. Hence it's not his to license.

How do people in the Netherlands feel about the notion of "common carrier"?

http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/wp/citi/citinoam11.html

Is common carrier a useful concept for society?

What do you think?

Yes. I think some of the other publishers are more egregious than Elsevier. Everything is bundled together as you say and access is monopolised that way.

But things have to start somewhere. Maybe it's only with Elsevier and maybe it with Maths faculty and only with the journals they publish in. But the whole system is so despicable in light of today's technology and publishing costs that once it's brought to light how much better things could be, I think change will come fairly quick.

Didn't at least one library try threatening a publisher that the univerity's faculty would no longer publish in that publisher's journals if fees were not made reasonable?

Is that a viable strategy?

If there was a generic utpclient/utpserver pair of applications that I could use to proxy non-uTP applications, as there is with CCP, I'd try using uTP/LEDBAT. But to my knowledge, there isn't.

Mathematics Departments are going to be the heros in lowering the costs to access scholarly journals, in all disciplines.

It has to start somewhere.

Low cost, online education, which is a popular topic here on HN, is a neat idea. But to really make it worthwhile, the student needs full access to all academic journals.

For that to happen, the paywalls have to come down.

I'll stick with CurveCP, thanks. It works, it has the added "perk" of encryption, and it's not tied to a single application, like uTP.

Then again, if you tie something into an application that hundreds of thousands of people already use, like uTP is tied into a popular bittorrent client, you can then claim "Hundreds of thousands of people are using it, to carry major traffic."

Bert, you forgot epigenetics, specifically methylation.

Or maybe that was intentional, since technically this is "code" that is passed outside of DNA.

But it forms a significant and mysterious part of the "final program". Not to be ignored.

I'm willing to bet this problem doesn't end with Yahoo. How many CEO's do you think have resumes that contain false data?

CEO's, older, experienced CEO's, only expose their resumes to a very limited scope of reviewers. I'd suggest that the scrutiny (fact-checking) that their resume gets is not quite the same as, say, a developer applying to a large IT company. Whether the demand for a factually accurate resume from a potential CEO is greater, less than or the same as your average developer is left as a question for the reader.

Here the person leading the search embellished her own credentials.

Perhaps when selecting a CEO, there are "more important things" than the checking the accuracy of his/her resume.

But then you could also argue finding false information on a resume might just have some informative value of its own.

The public almost never gets to see a CEO's resume. I mean the actual document, not some blurb that comes out of the communications department.

What does your last paragraph have to do with the clause you excerpted? This clause appears to have nothing to do with the company suing you. It appears to deal with the reverse.

When you mentioned "people who use lawsuits as a normative way to do business" and one-sided contract terms drafted by "armies of lawyers with nothing better to do" I thought of Apple, and some other IT companies.

Then to my surprise I noticed you are an iOS developer.

Not sure what to think.

If you see a clause in an agreement you don't like, it makes little sense to get angry, just politely ask them to remove it.

Do you think Dragon's Den does this?

Imagine if every reality TV actor had to agree to give a portion of their future earnings to the network, in the event they become very successful.

The question is, if you ask ABC to delete this provision, is it a deal-breaker?

Some will just blindly agree to it, no doubt.

I'm at the circus graveyard right now and there is no headstone for Morty Smith! I would post a picture but "I'm going old school" and left my phone at home. ;)

You gotta love this guy's story. It's really well done.

Now, suspend your disbelief for just one more moment... maybe Nate is actually sending us all a cleverly delivered message: If you invest in Facebook you are a sucker. Or if you don't invest you're a sucker. Or maybe it's some other message. Choose your own interpretation.

But you can be sure that almost every element in that story is there for a reason. The choices of PT Barnum, Honest Abe, and Facebook, and of course refused patent applications, were not arbitrary. Suckers, honesty, researching connections between people, lack of any protectable intellectual property, etc.

Just really well done.

Isn't it "slow" because it dates back to the practice of flying cargos of checks across the country to be cleared by other banks? For each check, that process could take up to a few days to complete. Hence the applicable time periods for clearance.

Not sure about Dwolla, but if banks can acquire (or develop, though that seems unlikely) a payment method that is easier to use that the ones we currently have, and thereby it increases consumer spending, I would take that seriously.

Why would banks promote banking via smartphones and iPads as they do? Seems like that would be opening customers up to considerable insecurity and a host of potential technological glitches.

Maybe it's because those devices are so easy to use they stimulate customers to use bank services more liberally and frequently.

Not to mention reducing the costs of providing face to face customer service.

If others can replicate what the author did, then it might rise to the level of "exhaustively researched".

If you are a Comcast customer, try to replicate the experiment yourself. See if you get the same results.

"Set Top Box" == Black Box.

No doubt we'll soon see one for live video (Skype).

If Lincoln was as honest and ethical as history tells us he was, I doubt he would support a guy like Zuckerberg, and certain other backers of FB with whom FB users are not so familiar.

Gotta love the way this is written. Well done.

As for the story, it appears President Lincoln understood the sensibility of decentralisation. Each town manages its own Gazette. The townsfolk have a personal relationship with the person in charge of managing the information.

From the end user's perspective this idea still seems as sensible today as it was then. And it's no more difficult to achieve.

In the meantime, send all your personal details to Facebook and their advertiser clients for analysis. You might be missing out on important products and services if you don't!

To understand why MySpace was designed like it was, perhaps it's helpful to look at the man behind the orginal MySpace: it's the guy behind Demand Media.

They own the domain name registrar eNom and Google SEO operations like eHow.

His idea is to churn out millions of pages of primarily machine-generated "content".

Very little human input is required.

This is enough to fool the search engine that it's what people want. Because the generated pages reflect what the search data says people are searching for.

But as anyone who has opened one of these pages knows, it has a certain "feel" to it. It vacuous. It's cheap.

It's also effective.

He earns a few pennies by having gotten you to look at the page, and once that's done, it matters little what you do or what you think next. Mission accomplished. In the aggregate, this design makes him money.

If you understand how a company like eNom makes money it also arguably fits with this sort of mass production idea.

It may be that MySpace was designed around the idea of mass production of "user-generated" pages. As a sort of fly trap to catch web surfers and searchers, similar to the way eHow or eNom would. Get users to help generate the pages. Not much input is needed. Just a little.

This is just how I see it. I could be wrong.

True, especially the part about the need for great writing.

Unfortunately, re: your first point, that's a large audience, one which advertisers are happy to target. And I'm not sure good journalism was ever relevant to those with short attention spans or who don't read. However those folks have always been relevant to advertisers.

Advertisers are not going to save good journalism. Maybe good writers must do it, and maybe only for the love of writing.

Cost of distribution: zilch.

I have had a special love for music all my life.

But I sometimes wish I did not know what I now know about the Recording Industry in America and how they do "business".

I simply do not see music the same way.

These people are disgusting. They are a taint on something that should be pure. They are like drug pushers, and music is the drug.

Even if they paid my "salary" as an artist, I could not sleep well knowing what they do. I need to read that quote from Jagger again to remind myself musicians, despite supporting the RIAA, do recognise music is more than an "industry".

The RIAA's short-lived empire will someday fall. And music lovers in the future will look back and realise that, like those who loved music before there was an "industry", they are much better off than we were.

I'm a Journalist Trying To Come To Grips With Technology That Is Making My Profession Irrelevant

I use them constantly but almost always BRE. And I'm still discovering new tricks using only BRE. I guess I'm too dumb to use anything more clever. I'll never be a Larry Wall. I still feel I have more to learn just on the level of BRE. I still think there are more hidden gems.

A lot of developers seem to have a serious disdain for anything that might be construed as the "lowest common denominator". I don't get it.

Somehow I find a tremendous versatility in the LCD. It works in so many environments. I can rely on it to work, no matter what the size of the input.

But then, if you go buy a book on RE, what do you get? An explanantion of the most ridiculously complex and difficult to maintain RE. As if the author is just showing off.

Mastery of the basics is too boring I guess. Too simple.

I'll bet he was referring to code he wrote himself. It's slightly more complicated (pun intended) when it's someone else's code you are negating.

Nope. Quite the contrary. I was trying to avoid bringing the strange sentiment to which you are referring to the fore. Mere mention of those initials causes an adverse reaction in a lot of developers and admins. I voluntarily use his software every day. Not perfect (nothing is) but the best there is available. I find his code to be wonderfully lucid if I read it slowly and carefully. My opinion.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. What I meant was that I would have expected you to have looked at CCP and evaluated it for your purposes, as you did with RED.

I'm surprised he doesn't mention CurveCP. He's taken ideas from that author before (e.g. netstrings, which you'll find in the .torrent file format).

TCP does suck. If you try to use it for lots of short lived connections. And that pretty much sums up how it's being used nowadays, most the time.

For single, long term connections, TCP is fine.

You should read this guy's story. Read his settlement. You might observe that the companies he was reporting on were far more deceptive than he was. He was but a pawn in their game. You might even conclude he was more or less the fall guy for some of the fraudulent individuals running those companies, who, if I'm not mistaken are still active in the industry and probably still taking on investments. Or you might not. It's worth reading anyways, as we make our way through another bubble.

"rise to the top"?

I think you mean protecting his position at the top from "executives". Some of who may have little skill to offer the company (as someone above said, age is a factor) but are who are quite adept at maneuvering their way into higher salaries and greater powers of decision-making.

You're right. Too cynical. I took it out. But remember we don't know who the executive is. He/she may have been even worse than Zuckerberg on the ethical scale. I don't doubt there are some very creepy "executives" working at Facebook.

"Facebook was not intended to be a company."

I'm still not sure it is a company. What exactly does FB produce? It's main asset is your personal information. Which of course it does not own.

FB users produce everything, and hand it over for free to the "funethical" crew of FB "engineers" to play with. As Zuckerberg would say, "Dumb fucks."

HN needs more Adobe bashing.