Posts by Mike Powers 202 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2006
http://la.eater.com/archives/2008/08/19/yelp_wanted_dinos_pizza_victim.php
"...a quick comparison of the current page to an older version of the page...showed that they had removed multiple reviews –all positive- including one five-star review written by a larger-than-life local hot-dog reviewer who is quite legitimate and gets quoted in the LA Times no less. Not exactly a shill. Then with a little reading I learned that I am not the only one that this is happening to. It's a pattern: complain, and Yelp removes positive reviews."
"...strangely, a bad review seems to appear shortly after each phone call from a Yelp sales rep. The review that I wrote to Yelp to complain about appeared shortly after my last decline to pay..."
CEO Jeremy Stoppleman, the guy who's responsible for running the entire company, says: "There's a mathematical formula we use [to order the reviews] - I don't know it off the top of my head..."
Wait, you fucking what? It's YOUR COMPANY and you don't know how it works?
(Paris, 'coz the only thing on top of her head is her hair)
"If you had a good experience, please go write a review on Yelp" is not shilling. It's telling people that a popular review site exists so that they can go there and write a review. Jesus, don't you WANT people to know about Yelp?
If you don't know that Yelp exists, then why would you go there and write a review of ANY kind? Are people just supposed to magically learn that Yelp exists? How can the CEO of an ADVERTISING COMPANY be this stupid?
According to your attitude, you're only allowed to post a review on Yelp if you NEVER HEARD OF IT BEFORE. (Unless you're flaming the place, because negativity is always objective right?)
Oh, and I like the plan, here. It's all done verbally, so there's no evidence beyond he-said-she-said. "Will nobody rid me of this meddlesome priest?"
eBay is just recognizing that ten percent of their customers represent ninety percent of their profit. A single mid-range mass seller generates as much profit as 60% of eBay's small-user base put together. Small wonder that eBay is re-focusing on being a storefront service; that's how they make their money.
Clicking repeatedly on ads will get your AdSense account blocked. Scientologists have plenty of people with nothing to do all day but sit at a computer and click. Sounds like someone put those hands together.
Google is remarkably easy to game. You can nuke anyone on Blogspot pretty easily by posting a porn-site link in the comments and then flagging the blog. Google's software will auto-lock the blog, and then flag it for a human operator, who will review the site just as soon as his guild finishes running an instance in WoW.
It's not as though there's a "standard" for existing automobiles; I can't just take the transmission from a Ford Focus and drop it into my Honda Civic and expect everything to work. It seems that the only "standard" is the electric hook-up--and that's a matter of what country you're in.
Oh, hey, something else--what killed the EV1 was California's insistence that it not have a gasoline engine installed. If GM had put a gas generator onboard, the range and speed limitations would have been removed--indeed, that's the whole gimmick of the Volt. But no, no, can't burn gas, GREEN UBER ALLES! And so the EV1 died.
Lockheed did it back in the Sixties with the AH-56; Piasecki is doing it now with the X-49, and Sikorsky with the X2. "compound helicopters" have been a good idea for a long time.
The problem is that the USAF got all butthurt about them; "they're aircraft!", cried the blue-suiters, but since they're expected to do helo duties the USAF didn't actually WANT to operate them. (Similar to UAVs now.)
As others have said, you can fill in security holes until you're old and gray, but you can't ever keep people from clicking on FREE P0RN and WIN USD999 links. The most successful Trojan in history involved no exploits of any kind; it was entirely dependent on men wanting to see Anna Kournikova naked.
Every share of stock sold represents a little bit less control that you have. If you want to Rule With An Iron Hand Inside A Velvet Glove, then you don't go public.
Sure, you'll make less money; but the Craigslist guys are always telling us that it's not about the money...
"But Chasin points out that anyone who's running comScore software is free to remove it."
And so this sends a message back to ComScore to remove all of my data, then? They have dedicated teams of backup-miners going through every data tape line by line, making sure that if I opt out of ComScore then none of my Precious Bodily Fluids remain in their keeping?
Part-and-parcel of PAV development is advanced autopilots. The "human factor" that the elite snotheads here like to snigger about is entirely removed. You push the button for "WORK" or "GROCERY STORE" or "COMIC BOOK SHOP" and the thing takes off on its own, flies on its own, avoids other vehicles on its own, and lands on its own. It's a personal robot taxi.
"The original Blackbird was elbowed out of its job by spy satellites..."
Not really. It's more like the original Blackbird was killed off by the USAF, which didn't want civilian organisations like the CIA flying Mach 3 aircraft when the USAF's top-of-the-line fighter could only pull Mach 2. (Had the XB-70 entered service things might have been different.)
Karl: The SR-71 never took off with full tanks, and this was done on purpose. The tanks were left mostly empty to facilitate aborted takeoffs; if your plane is heavy, then it's harder to do an emergency landing. The air-refueling was standard safety procedure, not a design flaw.
Oh right, because Google exists to sell advertising. Type anything into Google these days and you get six advertising links and a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia is basically Google's bail-out; thanks to Wikipedia, Google no longer has to return relevant results. Instead they can just push ads at you--and rake in the dough.
It's really funny how everything old is new again. Remember when you could always tell a Geocities page because it had the same fonts and clip-art and layout? Now it's even more so; instead of having to write a whole web page, you can just go to Wikipedia and write a little bit into a page that will look just like every other Wikipedia page. Then go to MySpace and update your page which looks just like every other MySpace page, except that you have a background of a picture scanned from Maxim Magazine. Then go to Flickr and upload your photos into a viewer that looks just like every other viewer.
The guys who invented Geocities must be slapping their heads right now; it turns out that what users wanted all along was not MORE options, but FEWER. They don't want to think about complicated stuff like layouts and colors and sizes and linking; they want to Pres Butan To Go.
Firstly, polishing and remixing is by no means a creative effort on par with the original production. Me being able to build a structure from Lego does not mean that if Lego didn't exist I would build the structure from, e.g., dog biscuits.
Second, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by saying that the Beatles abandoned some work.
Third: Do you actually know anything about nuclear physics? There really is a lot more to it than E=MC-squared. It's not like leveling in WoW, you don't "grind" undergraduate physics texts until you "level up".
"You cannot expect compensation for your work AFTER YOU DID IT. etc. etc."
You made two different arguments in that paragraph. Pick one and stick with it.
The attitude seems to be that creative work happens at random; ideas float around in the ether, occasionally intersecting with a human brain. "There's nothing particularly special about Paul McCartney," people think, "he just got lucky and had a few good ideas. _I_ could have written those songs if I'd had those ideas." They don't see any reason to compensate people for creative work, because they don't believe that creative work is actually unique.
Sort of like Wikipedia, and other sites of that ilk. No one contributor's input is weighted more heavily than another's, because knowledge and experience are just a question of spending time on something. Anyone could be a nuclear physicist or a race-car driver or a fashion model, they just have to learn how to do it; therefore, everyone is equally qualified to discuss nuclear physics or race-car driving or fashion models.
Since my creative work is non-unique, I can't expect compensation for it; because _anyone_ could have done that. I just happened to get the idea first.
My buddy and I came up with an idea...fit a Taser on the darts, then glue the whole works to one of those indoor blimps. Sell the thing to a mall as a "Remote-Patrol Security Droid". If any teenagers start acting up you can just give them a quick zap, from the comfort of your air-conditioned Security Kiosk.
It probably would cause problems tho, because all the cute girls would end up with a gaggle of taser-armed blimps escorting them around the mall. At least it would keep the importunate boys away..."Uh, hey, what's your, like, sign?" ZARK ZARK ZARK
I've seen TV commercials for some airline or other, where some office denizen volunteers for every possible piece of business travel. He's hardly ever in the office, in fact. The last scene in the commercial, right before the corporate logo, is him smirking at the camera while he and his bit o'stuff board an airplane...
...and that's why we have the V-22. It isn't the best way to do the job; it wasn't even the best proposal! We had autogyro designs (AH-56) in the 1960s that beat the V-22's performance, didn't require extensive (and expensive) technology development, and didn't have weird flight-dynamics problems. But some general saw those rotor pods go "zoop-zoop", and that just tickled him all over, so it was the V-22 from there on out.
Although one of the things that did for the AH-56 was a minor malfunction in the weapons system that accidentally shot an anti-tank missile at a reviewing stand full of VIP's. Whoops.
You see this same evolution in any group. There are two kinds of people: Those who believe in heirarchies, and those who don't. Those who do, when presented with a heirarchy-free situation, don't know how to behave; they immediately set about creating a heirarchy. Even if they aren't at the top; in fact, they very seldom put themselves at the top. It's not about personal power; it's about a herding instinct.
"I'm Han Solo, and here's my best buddy Geek Squader."
As for the data: Good Lord, people actually pay money to have their hard drives recovered? I had a drive crash that scragged all my porn--uh, all my IMPORTANT BUSINESS FILES about a year ago, and it took me about a day to find a freeware recovery program that had me up and running, as it were, in a matter of hours.
"The technological issues of the next generation of carrier rockets have basically been solved," said Zhang Yanhe of the Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defence."
Yeah; technological issues like "how do we get our people past the background check" and "what's the best way to smuggle plans out of the lab" and "how much do we need to pay Clinton to smooth over the difficulties".
It seems to me that we're going to wind up with a music "industry" that looks a lot like the sports industry. The money paid to professionals will come from two sources: Live performance, and advertising promotion. The idea of paying money for music will be as bizarre as the idea of paying money to watch a rerun of an old football game. Meanwhile, there won't be any sort of "independent" production industry; you're either part of the gigantic Pro apparatus, or you're entirely amateur. And that won't be a bad thing; amateur sports is still a huge draw, mostly because there's an extremely low barrier to entry and it's easy to find people to do it with. However, there's almost no audience for amateur sports; it's mostly done for the love of the sport itself.
Obviously it won't be an exact parallel--for example, I'm not going to hire people to play baseball in the background while I bash the CAD machine for nine hours--but I think it's pretty close.
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