Dante of the Inferno

If this doesn’t seem to make sense to anyone out there, it’s because it doesn’t.

The developers already have access to promotional advertising just by being in the App Store and Google Play. Furthermore, developers still have to lose 30% of their revenue to Apple or Google, especially Apple (since all apps HAVE to go through the App Store anyway – Cydia notwithstanding). Even in the Android case, it’s not like existing outside of a larger ecosystem such as Google Play or the Amazon Appstore have garnered amazing enough sales figures to warrant choosing the outsiders over the established and larger stores.

This really feels like Gamefly trying to steal away some of that 30% revenue from the Android developers. It’s like they don’t understand that retailers don’t make for attractive 3rd party partners. They’re the worst kind of middlemen here.

Yeah, I prefer Josh’s plug for it from The Vergecast:

“So what you’re saying is, every week viewers can enter the Bohn Zone with Ziggy Smalls.”

I’m not gonna lie, the new picture with everyone populating the scrolling menu looks really, really good. Stick with this one from now on, if possible.

I’ll wait it out until the exploration of space will be democratized.

Compared to what, exactly? Seeing as it’s just the cost of another chip (or even another task for the same chip), the trucking company saves 3% on overall fuel consumption over THOUSANDS OF MILES. Considering that shipping companies like UPS and DHL mandate that their drivers only make right turns for the 3-5% in fuel savings (though not time savings), this method will likely see ridiculously high demand in upgraded fleets.

And yet the stock ALWAYS spikes on the quarterly earnings, had you bothered to read a single complete sentence of mine. I’ve yet to find a pure software company that doesn’t trade sideways, but overall it seems pretty comfortable in the mid 500’s to mid 600’s. I doubt that will change any time soon in the next 3 years.

“I’ve held scores of GOOG stock for the past few years, and it has traded sideways for that entire period.”

Already, I question the reliability of your opinion, since Google has outperformed even the Wall Street estimates EVERY SINGLE QUARTER, minus the last one and that was solely because of the Motorola acquisition (and even then, it was only off from the Wall Street estimates by a couple tenths of a percent). And every time it outperforms, the stock price jumps. If your primary complaint is sideways trading year-over-year, then perhaps you shouldn’t hold a long-term position in what’s essentially a software company.

That said, the market has already factored in the initial price of the Motorola acquisition quarters ago. Any additional cost is held in check by Google’s expanding Android platform and the growing presence of Google Play. As for future hardware, that remains to be see, especially with word of Google expecting to sell multiple Nexus devices directly from Google Play. Either way, your hopes of “making mad margins on Google/Motorola phones in the next year” is delusional at best. Google has never even hinted at attempting the audacious margins that Apple enjoys, and with Apple’s tight contracts with component manufacturers, it’s doubtful that this venture will mature before 2015.

If you want stock that you can just sit on and will return growing dividends, go with Apple. If you want to actively trade your stock to make money, just buy and sell Google before and after quarterly earnings reports. I don’t know how much more growth you’re expecting from a company that already wields 98% of search, 35% of internet browsing, and 50% of global smartphones. The only integration that the DoJ or European Commission will still allow Google is horizontal integration, so year-over-year it’s going to keep moving sideways.

Even while watching series like the remake of Battlestar Galactica, I never quite understood why humans would be so fearful and hateful of the idea of a perfectly humanoid robot. Is it the idea of a being with some underlying agenda? If not, and the robot is not sentient, then there’s nothing to worry about, as it becomes a completely natural interface. If yes, then why fear a robot over a human. Humans have always had free will and countless underlying agendas, so you would simply trust the robot the same as you would a human: with a level of trust that is earned and that extends to a certain point. The same would be true if you were dealing with members of an organization. I think the only real reason a humanoid robot would scare/enrage people is because internally, things work a different way, and humanity has always been exceptionally slow to accept anything that works “differently.”

So we have a car that can also move through the air and a car that can also move through the water. I’m pretty sure the next step is to master all three media with a single vehicle.

There’s also the risk that employees may report inaccurate data."

Considering how effortless it is to lie about this data throughout the system, and since it is based on human input, I doubt the macro data will be very accurate. If IBM or the insurance companies REALLY want accurate data, they would provide digital scales/measuring devices that plug the data directly into the recording system. Of course, that would require money, which would mean less to incentivize participants with.

“Author and self-described ‘mad scientist’ Rob Flickenger”

So cool.

I’d love to see a somewhat smaller version of the tech, one that’s less Dr. Horrible and more, well, modern mad scientist.

“Hoarding” and “Archiving” are two rather similar activities, but obviously the latter has the intended purpose of future reflection. In that way, I think sites like The Verge (and to a lesser extent Engadget – form-wise) are helping to manage all this with their Timeline features. However, I don’t think this goes quite far enough. While it’s great to see how articles for a certain company or tech story unfolds, I would like to see how it relates to the larger scope of things. Case in point: SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, Anonymous, etc In essence, it becomes a macro-level History in the Making that you could then drill down to get all the nitty-gritty details. Of course, that requires massive amounts of time and manpower, but things like Google semantic searches and article tags at least help a little to make sense of the clutter (also bookmark sub/folders, lots and lots of them).

Now about that info overload problem:
Coming from someone with 80-200 tabs open at any given time, take what I have to say with a grain of salt (in my defense, I work on a lot of different projects). If you often visit news aggregate sites (like Engadget, The Verge, etc), try finding out if they have a “blacklist” or “whitelist” feature. This puts a funnel under the torrent of information, so you’ll be able to digest only what you want to. Of course, while the blacklist works better for eliminating what you know you’ll never read, the whitelist can often times exclude something new and cool that you may take interest in. Also, if you’ve taken an active interest in national and international news (and you happen to live in the US), consider listening to some NPR at the top of the hour (HEAR ME OUT FIRST). News reports themselves are rarely ever biased, so just listening to them during the first 5-7 minutes of the hour spares you from any commentary. Furthermore, while reading is an active process, simply listening is often a passive one. This makes things a lot less mentally intensive, especially since everything of consequence in the last 24 hours has already been aggregated into literally 5 minutes of downtime. It also helps that you can listen through the web, smartphone, or radio. “But why not just turn on the TV?” you may ask. Well, while reading is an active process, TV often visually distracts from the news article at hand. Having a purely audio experience allows you to minimize distraction while simultaneously giving you passive access to your relative information.

Despite popular belief, humans don’t have to know what’s going on here, there, and everywhere the very second it’s happening. Just set aside 30-60 minutes at the very end of the day to comb through your aggregates (which should be shorter thanks to RSS, blacklists, whitelists, etc), then sort from there. Also, if you feel the need to read a thread’s comments, close the tab the very second you sense a thread-jacking in progress. Few things are worse on the internet than time-thieves.

Yeah, I’d love to see The Verge switch from using Livestream, since I can’t actually listen to the podcasts live on my phone since they switched from UStream. This would make this a lot easier for fans to listen live (especially for people like me who don’t have a desk job).

Also, yes, this may finally realize the dream of Hangouts and web postings as a seamless and natural experience.

If LG and Samsung are using competing processes to mass produce these OLED TV’s, then I’ll wait for the reviews before I declare the race over for Samsung.

1. I invent a proximity sensor, that I can attach to my phone and my nike fuel band, and everytime it gets 10m away from me it vibrates.

I view the validity of your statement as more of a shortcoming in the mobile browser than anything else. Any site that wants to pull this off first and foremost CANNOT have ads. Anything that distracts from the user experience (which is the primary tactic of ads) will instantly derail the project. Thanks to some embedded HTML5 coding and some touchscreen optimization, a web magazine can function remarkably similar to an app, except without all of the popping in and out of magazine apps.

Yeah, I never buy into the “use that money on your family” argument. If you use it for purely personal use, then that’s fine, but you probably don’t need it/are too busy working to survive if your living conditions are even approaching that level of desperation. Otherwise, if you’re downloading the software for free and directly profiting from using the software, then you certainly owe Adobe’s engineers for their hard work.

Actually, if you’re just using it to mess around for purely personal silliness, then it would seem more economically justified to just pirate it. If you pirate the software and are using it professionally, then you are directly financially profiting from the hard work of Adobe engineers. However, if you haven’t made any gains from it, then Adobe’s not actually at a loss for anything. It’s not like Adobe has additional copies of CS6 on their servers, where the loss of physical disk space would be physically quantifiable.

Besides, if you mess around with it and decide that it’s not worth taking up 25-50 GB of precious SSD space, then just delete it and move on. I doubt many of those who just spent money on all of CS6 can afford the same luxury.

It was obviously a joke, counter-troll.

Torrenting now!

What’s that you say? It’s bad for a content provider to also own the content, due to the exact type of vertical integration that century-old anti-trust laws are meant to prevent?

Well, since Comcast can and does perform these shady practices, one solution would be to have more ISP’s with larger pipes to force Comcast out of hiding. That only requires that the telecommunication industry actually get in gear.

Google Fiber, anyone?

Of course, part 2 of the problem is that companies like Time Warner and Hulu are already beginning to force consumers to buy a cable subscription just to access online content at all. At that point, it’s kinda silly to have an IPTV if you have to own a cable box just to watch your shows online.

The telecommunication and television industries are just becoming a shell game in the U.S.

I believe the term is “going on sabbatical.” In which case, he won’t be doing his job at The Verge, but he’ll still be officially employed.

Well now you just HAVE to finish this. Seriously, do what you have to do, but finish this compendium.