Smear campaigns are, in fact, standard. Swift boat veterans, Birthers, Abortion doctors as baby killers, comparing homosexuals to pedophiles are all examples of exactly this sort of behavior on the right. Similar…
You may disapprove of these tactics, but they are more or less standard. Applying labels to one's political opponents is a huge part of politics. I fail to see what is particularly sick about this tactic. The new…
Sadly, I don't think there's any way to make the public really care about this. For one thing, it's a sufficiently rare pain in the ass that virtually no one worries about what the latest nonsense from the TSA is on a…
Well yes, if the users don't want the product then nothing else matters, but I don't see what that has to do with innovation. I have no problem with your argument that Google+ will need to be useful in some sense to be…
Innovation isn't the only thing that leads to success, not by a long shot. Polish, ease of use, a large feature set, security, and any number of other factors can have just as big an impact on users as innovation.…
If your criteria for failure is that the company is more interested in making money than you, personally, then there isn't a successful product on the face of the earth. Of course Google is trying to use Google+ to make…
The iPod wasn't the first mp3 player. Facebook wasn't the first social networking site. Google wasn't the first search engine. Windows/Mac/Unix weren't the first operating systems. Taking ideas from competitors and…
Why would it be surprising to see him on there? Dogfooding is a good idea, but in this case, there's nothing stopping someone from using both Facebook and Google+. He'd be foolish to not be on Google+, how else is he…
In general, a shop that wanted to make very much money off of interns would have to have them work on new code(any sizable code base is going to take a while to get up to speed on), and/or hire only excellent students…
I don't think that's necessarily any better. Ever played Telephone?
This may be true, but it doesn't really address the point of the article. The argument is that modern games could take a lesson from text adventure games in engaging the players' imaginations.
Worse, honestly, the value of your wasted time is almost certainly higher than that of the person on the other end of the call.
It's not necessarily a matter of them being cheap, good developers are hard to find, and the only people who can tell the difference are/were good developers themselves. This is doubly true with security. There is no…
That's not the point. It's possible what he did should be protected by fair use. It's also possible that it shouldn't be and that he owed money. The point is, there was never a trial to decide it one way or another, he…
I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly stuff that's going to go over most readers' heads. The efficiency of a new device like this is pretty much the most important information about it. At 0.4% efficiency, this is currently…
Of course Google can't read minds, that does not mean they should ignore information that they have when deciding which results to show or what order to show them in. Sufficient data to provide a better filter for a…
I cannot see a problem here. Who exactly is being hurt by the "filter bubble"? The end user is fine - they are more likely to see results they are actually interested in. If a user doesn't trust a source and won't click…
Any filter at all will result in a "Filter Bubble" as defined here (except, I suppose, returning a randomly sorted list of all sites on the internet). Whether the filter is personalized or not doesn't change that fact.…
Smear campaigns are, in fact, standard. Swift boat veterans, Birthers, Abortion doctors as baby killers, comparing homosexuals to pedophiles are all examples of exactly this sort of behavior on the right. Similar…
You may disapprove of these tactics, but they are more or less standard. Applying labels to one's political opponents is a huge part of politics. I fail to see what is particularly sick about this tactic. The new…
Sadly, I don't think there's any way to make the public really care about this. For one thing, it's a sufficiently rare pain in the ass that virtually no one worries about what the latest nonsense from the TSA is on a…
Well yes, if the users don't want the product then nothing else matters, but I don't see what that has to do with innovation. I have no problem with your argument that Google+ will need to be useful in some sense to be…
Innovation isn't the only thing that leads to success, not by a long shot. Polish, ease of use, a large feature set, security, and any number of other factors can have just as big an impact on users as innovation.…
If your criteria for failure is that the company is more interested in making money than you, personally, then there isn't a successful product on the face of the earth. Of course Google is trying to use Google+ to make…
The iPod wasn't the first mp3 player. Facebook wasn't the first social networking site. Google wasn't the first search engine. Windows/Mac/Unix weren't the first operating systems. Taking ideas from competitors and…
Why would it be surprising to see him on there? Dogfooding is a good idea, but in this case, there's nothing stopping someone from using both Facebook and Google+. He'd be foolish to not be on Google+, how else is he…
In general, a shop that wanted to make very much money off of interns would have to have them work on new code(any sizable code base is going to take a while to get up to speed on), and/or hire only excellent students…
I don't think that's necessarily any better. Ever played Telephone?
This may be true, but it doesn't really address the point of the article. The argument is that modern games could take a lesson from text adventure games in engaging the players' imaginations.
Worse, honestly, the value of your wasted time is almost certainly higher than that of the person on the other end of the call.
It's not necessarily a matter of them being cheap, good developers are hard to find, and the only people who can tell the difference are/were good developers themselves. This is doubly true with security. There is no…
That's not the point. It's possible what he did should be protected by fair use. It's also possible that it shouldn't be and that he owed money. The point is, there was never a trial to decide it one way or another, he…
I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly stuff that's going to go over most readers' heads. The efficiency of a new device like this is pretty much the most important information about it. At 0.4% efficiency, this is currently…
Of course Google can't read minds, that does not mean they should ignore information that they have when deciding which results to show or what order to show them in. Sufficient data to provide a better filter for a…
I cannot see a problem here. Who exactly is being hurt by the "filter bubble"? The end user is fine - they are more likely to see results they are actually interested in. If a user doesn't trust a source and won't click…
Any filter at all will result in a "Filter Bubble" as defined here (except, I suppose, returning a randomly sorted list of all sites on the internet). Whether the filter is personalized or not doesn't change that fact.…