I posted a comment on Horace’s useful post: “@Walt French Yes, goog destroyed the value proposition of many competitors. As a developer, we consider the use of Google Maps, but after reading the TOS and understanding their throughput based terms, we moved elsewhere. Interestingly and for many years, they never enforced the terms. Many websites simply ignored the terms and used Google Maps as much as necessary for display, routing and geocoding. That changed a few years ago when Google began somewhat throttling users. It is doing something similar with “Google Apps” – email and online documents. The free version is gone along with ActiveSync support (this certainly says something about the state of Microsoft).

This is familiar territory for those who keep an eye on the tech behemoths. Microsoft was very effective at killing off competitors, or as Peter Hoddie famously put it “knifing the baby”.

Finally, goog has used their streetview data collection scheme to collect an enormous amount of data, including controversially wifi snooping. Their cars and other data/media/network collection vehicles provide a freedom of movement vis a vis tom-tom and navteq.

Apple’s interesting opportunity, IMHO, is to feed user generated/contributed information (media, reviews, fixes, fun) back to Open Street Map (OSM) and begin to make their enormous iOS data pile available to developers.

A long shot, but a powerful way to change the game yet again.”

Ed Lopez:

Back in the 1990s, when about half the states’ voters slapped term limits on their state legislators, the idea was to rein in government spending and decrease the growth of government. Instead, spending per capita increased in those states relative to states without term limits. See this empirical paper, this survey article, or this book this book for details.

These results are counterintuitive insofar as we put stock in the intended mechanism, which was simple: As legislators spend more time in office, they tend to vote for more government spending – so if legislators are required by law to spend less time in office, they’ll spend less money.

“Hey Mister”.

I like to check check tire pressure weekly.

One tire required attention today. I inserted 4 quarters and added 4 pounds of pressure to the driver side front tire. While replacing the air hose, I heard a woman shout “Hey Mister”. “The Mobil station up the street has free air”.

With that suggestion, she drove off.

I am thankful for the many blessings that arrive in my life daily. 🙂

Chris Bryant:

The lighting revolution is disrupting incumbents, such as Philips, Siemens-owned Osram and General Electric, which previously had an effective oligopoly in traditional lamps and lighting components, with a combined market share of more than 60 per cent.

The long lifespan of LEDs – up to 50 times more than an incandescent bulb – is a threat to the replacement market, which is a big source of the incumbents’ revenues.

To differing extents, they are therefore investing in new technologies, moving downstream into lighting systems (luminaires) and cutting manufacturing capacity in inefficient lighting.

In the short term, this is eroding profits and triggering job cuts as manufacturing LEDs requires different skills and is less labour intensive than making traditional lamps.

Quentin Peel:

For a woman who is seen around the world as a disciplinarian, given to lecturing her European partners on the dangers of drowning in debt, the most surprising thing about Angela Merkel is her irrepressible sense of humour. It is hardly something you would expect from the chancellor of Germany when she greets you at the door of her office with a businesslike handshake and marches you smartly to a plain working table, boasting no more than a pot of coffee to serve to her guests.

The former scientist – daughter of a Protestant clergyman, brought up under communist rule in East Germany, who now dominates not only the domestic politics of her reunited homeland but also the interminable crisis-management of the EU – is cool and controlled. She thinks carefully before answering questions, and weighs all her words.

In countries such as Greece, Portugal and Spain in southern Europe, where drastic austerity measures are blamed on the German chancellor, she has been lampooned by furious demonstrators as a jackbooted Nazi. Yet in northern Europe she is respected in many countries – including neighbouring France – above their own domestic politicians, according to a recent survey.

Chana Joffe-Walt:

“They pay attention to so much detail,” he said. “I never saw a Lego piece … that couldn’t go together with another one.”

Lego goes to great lengths to make its pieces really, really well, says David Robertson, who is working on a book about Lego.

Inside every Lego brick, there are three numbers, which identify exactly which mold the brick came from and what position it was in in that mold. That way, if there’s a bad brick somewhere, the company can go back and fix the mold.

Michael Cameron:

The growth of big data and availability of APIs is providing exciting new opportunities for making sense of travel data, even for a fledgling start-up like Rome2rio.

Airfares fluctuate wildly, but do follow certain obvious trends; longer flights cost more, and some airlines are more expensive per mile flown than others.

We recently started an internal project aiming to model approximate/typical air fares for the flight itineraries assembled by our system. Our aim was to use this model to improve the accuracy of our multi-modal routing engine. However, in the process we generated some interesting data worth sharing with the industry.

We modeled airfares using some simple parameters. To do this, we examined the economy class airfares displayed by Rome2rio to users over the past 4 months, totalling some 1,780,832 price points. We grouped the airfares by distance and selected the 20th percentile fare for each distance (where 20% of fares are less, and 80% are more), to produce the following graph:

Fabius Maximus:

9-11 changed the course of a great nation, turning America decisively toward the dark side. Massive internal surveillance, militarization of police, endless war, hatred of Islam., torture, lifetime detention without trial, incessant propaganda, and a stream of fake terror plots (created by the government).

We pay for this with larger deficits, loss of global leadership, and corruption of our people (eg, jingoism, bloodlust). We see celebrate these things, the death of the America-that-once-was, by applauding the film “Zero Dark Thirty”.

Welcome to The New America! Brought to you by al Qaeda and the US government, with the willing assistance of the US people.

Slashdot.org:

Last week, you asked questions of Eugene Kaspersky; below, find his answers on a range of topics, from the relationship of malware makers to malware hunters, to Kasperky Labs’ relationship to the Putin government, as well as whitelisting vs. signature-based detection, Internet ID schemes, and the SCADA-specific operating system Kaspersky is working on. Spoiler: There are a lot of interesting facts here, as well as some teases.

Dave Winer. Well worth reading.