After all, it seems Google bought Motorola for patents and attacking Apple and co'. I know, Google is not directly suing Apple, but the act of giving those patents to HTC constitutes to suing Apple.
Interesting response. Are you suggesting that the Soviet Union was unaware that the Mujahadeen was getting weapons and training from the U.S., or that the United States didn't know where North Korea got their MiG-15s and who was flying them? I suppose that may have been true for a time, but it's not like the jig was up as soon as intelligence reports revealed the truth.
The real benefit of the proxy wars was that the level of indirection was believed to make an all-out nuclear conflict less likely, and that large chunks of the general population could be kept in the dark, unable to wrap their heads around "why we're over there".
Isn't that because Android itself doesn't infringe but certain aspects of the Android phones or the way said manufacturer has implemented the software does infringe?
Not just Motorola - Google gave HTC the patents they bought from Palm and OpenWave too. That is interesting to say the least - I hadn't heard of this kind of arrangement before.
I don't know about cynical but it is unusual for sure - Google is showing huge amount of trust in selling what seem to be important 9 patents - HTC could in theory dump Android tomorrow for WP7 and go suing Samsung using those same patents for example. Or may be Google has some crafty term of sale that prohibits HTC from suing anyone using Android.
The other oddity is that those same patents are now off the table for any other Android OEM to use to sue Apple or Microsoft. Was HTC the weakest one and so Google felt giving them those patents was a balancing act and other vendors are having their own credible patents to not need these 9. We will never know I think.
I am wondering how much money that techcrunch gets from the facebook in oder to keep their comment system. Disqus is much better system than facebook comments.
As noted in the article the level of quality of comments is much higher with Facebook comments, plus with the comments showing up on people's Facebook stream it gives Techcrunch a huge amount of free publicity.
So I doubt they need money to convince them to use Facebook over Disqus.
I was a regular contributor to Techcrunch comments (and not a troll), but I haven't commented once since they moved to Facebook comments. And I won't.
This Techcrunch article is the first one in a week or more that I have read the comments. And I've pretty much tuned out of Techcrunch now, and moved over exclusively to HN. I used to have Techcrunch open all day, every day. Now it's gone.
So, one switch from Disqus to Facebook comments lost me - a long time reader of TC, and an active participant at TechCrunch 40 and TechCrunch 50. And they probably don't even know it.
I wasn't in love with the Disqus system, but there was one feature that was right for me, that FB comments don't have: separation from Facebook.
This (comment activity shows up in Facebook stream) is precisely why I won't be commenting on Techcrunch articles any time soon. I have no interest in advertising to my aunt and high school ex-girlfriends that I have a minute opinion about some random bit of software technology. I'm not looking for anonymity to troll, I just want to control my various internet personas. More for the sake of my "real friends" than anything else.
uh, I totally disagree with both you and the blog author that quality of comments is higher. Yes, 80% of the trolling from before needed to be eliminated, but at least there was discussion and disagreement about the topics covered.
The majority of the comments on techcrunch are now the most bland, content-free statements you could imagine ("this is good!"), and the spammers are still around, only now they get to post links to their site from an account that links back to their facebook page. victory?
Yes the quality of the comments increased, but the number of comments decreased in every article which implies less interaction. Thus if this trend goes, techcrunch might end comment less. thus loosing the free publicity that they after.
It is not Airbnb's fault, but he is just pointing out that the growth of the service will bring more shady people and currently there is no easy way to weed out those shady people.
"over the last few years data.gov has cost $8.3 million; the cloud computing initiative has cost $1.4 million; and USASpending.gov has cost $13.3 million"
As an explanation for the rust-belt as a whole that seems inaccurate; the south today is not nearly as industrialized as the northeast was in its heydey. Certainly the steel industry, one of the dominant industrial sectors, has not moved to the southeast, which has almost no steel industry; it's done a mixture of just shutting down entirely, and moving to China. The automotive industry is closer to being accurate, though I don't think the number of automotive jobs created in the southeast is actually particularly large, certainly nothing on the order of the change in Detroit's population.
It is unlikely they will ever get close to energy (oil) companies. and by the way they need to IPO so that we can know what their revenue and expenses are.
Not just any website! A website of a YCombinator funded startup. A website for a service with which most of us have accounts. A service that wasn't working because it was down, thus affecting our DATA!!
I doubt we'd post a CNN 404, but a CNN 5xx might be HNewsworthy. Especially if 4chan was to blame.
Maybe we can discuss how to startups can handle planned downtime situations?
