How Video Copyright Went Insane →
An in-depth look at the state of current telecommunications copyright laws related to the cable and Internet industries, namely Cartoon Network v. Cablevision.
Photo from the Space Shuttle Endeavor flyby of NASA Ames Research Center and Moffet Air Field this morning.
Raw video from the Space Shuttle Endeavor flyby of NASA Ames Research Center and Moffet Air Field this morning. The last day of summer, the last flight of a space shuttle. Sad times.
We ought to help one another by our advice, and yet more by our good example.
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Want More Productive Workers? Adjust Your Thermostat →
Wow. How temperature affects mood, productivity, and interpersonal relationships. Interesting stuff.
Google Autocomplete: The Internet Where You Are →
It seems obvious that autocomplete search results are influenced by where you are searching from, but the results presented here for each letter of the alphabet are interesting.
Bing It On - Bing versus Google →
Clever marketing tactic by the Bing team - putting their results directly against Google's. Go check it out. Might change your mind about your default search engine.
The Acqui-hire Scourge: Whatever Happened to Failure in Silicon Valley? →
Allowing entrepreneurs — and their investors — to save face by saying they were "acquired" instead of failing is nice, but it's a bit like the pre-schools where everyone wins a trophy for showing up.
A tester's job is to preserve uncertainty when everyone around us is certain.
— Michael Bolton (paraphrased by Eric Jacobson)
The Ineluctable Middlemen →
Airlines are wonderful generators of profit—for everyone except themselves. Even in good times their margins are as thin as a boarding pass, and in recent years they have more often lost money. Averaged over the past four decades, the net profit margin of the world's airlines, taken together, has been a measly 0.1%. By contrast, other bits of the travel business that depend on the airlines—such as aircraft-makers, travel agents, airports, caterers and maintenance firms—have done very nicely.
Among these are the giant computer companies that do reservations for airlines, who receive almost double the airlines' net profits in fees every year.