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Every company operating in every country is bound to that country's laws. So Google in China has to accept the Chinese government demands, and Google Maps in Israel already cooperates with security restrictions in Israel, just like Waze probably cooperates with the NSA for its Palo Alto office.

However, Waze using a dynamic map is able to provide mapping for the West Bank as well. While Google opened up its navigation app a few months ago in Israel, it has not been opened for the West Bank (possibly because of map licensing restrictions that similarly prevented opening it for Israel for so long).


These children are dead, there is nothing fake about that, and there is also nothing fake in that they are victims of a variety of factors, including Paul Hansen who manipulated their funeral images to cheat his way to an award. There were over 100,000 photos up in the competition, and prizes were awarded to photographers of 33 nationalities (with a notable absence of Israelis). Other photos bringing other stories (and maybe even the same story) from Gaza and elsewhere in the world could have won instead. The whole point of a photography contest is to identify and recognize those photographers who can skillfully identify and catch dramatic moments and angles in split second, not those who take otherwise normal pictures and edit them later.

To give some balance, the day these two brothers and their father died, there were continuous rocket attacks on Israel. At around 7pm, a rocket hit a high school in Ashkelon. A student from the school told the reporter, "We were playing soccer near the school and suddenly there were sirens, and we saw the Iron Dome rocket fire above us, and then we heard a large explosion and we realized it fell just near us. The police came and we directed them." The rocket fell on the rooftop of a nearby school building unexploded and was disarmed by the police. The IDF later released a statement saying it attacked over 50 tunnels and tens of hidden rocket launchers. The Hamas often places the rocket launchers near civilian homes for protection and this might have been the cause of the attack. The civilians, as perhaps the Hejazi family in this case too, have no real say and are sometimes forced to remain near the weapons against their will.

[1] http://www.worldpressphoto.org/content/swedish-photographer-...

[2] http://news.walla.co.il/?w=/2689/2587705 (live blog from the day of the attack, Hebrew)


Also, in this paradigm, only one thread calls refresh() at any give time (either the MonitorThread or before the thread is created, the initializer thread). This is contrary to some definitions of lock free, such as [1], "if any thread performing an operation on the data structure is suspended at any point during that operation then the other threads accessing the data structure must still be able to complete their tasks". If we kill MonitorThread, other threads accessing RSState won't be able to complete their operation.

[1] http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk/threading/non_blockin...


Quality control is essential. I have an interest in linguistics. But on the internet, some of the linguistics arguments are ridiculous. There are websites that claim that English (and all world languages) are descendant from Turkish. It is rubbish. In all types of subjects you find people with these pet theories, and they can be very prolific, putting their opinion on wikipedia or wikia or wherever, on websites, in discussions, and there can even be a following. In software, you can tell rubbish. It compiles or it does not. It has a lot of bug requests or it does not. This does not map to science. You can't run a scientific article through a compiler to tell if it is good or bad. You can't tell if a new physics theory is reputable or some science fiction. A theory may be 10 years old, and the professor who wrote it unable to respond to all the queries, "bug requests," but it is still valuable. And a prolific pseudo-science author may have little "bug requests" because no one reputable who knows something about the subject has any time to deal with his nonsense. Without effective quality control, there will be no science. The article had no real solution to the problem.


Actually, you can (run a scientific claim through a "compiler"): it's the principle of reproducibility. You should be able to repeat the steps of the researcher (whether it's an algorithm or a biology experiment...) and get the same results.

And if we're dealing with a field where there is no objective way to verify a claim, then any claim should be viewed as mere opinion (a more or less valid opinion depending on how mainstream it is). As for fields where all claims are in the realm of opinion... they're not actually part of the scientific family.


Even in natural sciences, there may be experiments that are not easily reproducible. Finding the Higgs can only be done in a long while (decade or more) with great financial investment.

Or take the 4th grade test about dinosaurs[1]. Objectively, we can't verify if the world if thousands or millions or billions of years old, and we can't verify if dinosaurs lived concurrent with humans or not. We weren't there. There is evidence, and how we interpret the evidence, and yet the test features a rather forced interpretation of the evidence. Now, numerically there may be a lot of people all over the world who prefer the fundamentalist interpretation, even if they are accredited scientists in universities. In a completely open environment, this opinion would get more weight than it deserves, a weight that does not represent its true standing among scientists who understand all the different implications of the evidence.

[1] http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/sciencetest.asp


The OA is not proposing that we do away with peer review.


That isn't clear to me, but in any case, they seem to be talking about a new type of peer review process, which is more immediate -- something akin to forking on github or editing a wiki maybe. I'm not sure.

From the article - "They argue that the current journal system slows down the publication of science research. Peer review rarely takes less than a month, and journals often ask for papers to be rewritten or new analysis undertaken, which stretches out publication for half a year or more. While quality control is necessary, thanks to the Internet, articles don’t need to be in a final form before they appear. ... “We want to go after peer review,” CEO Toni Gemayel told us."

And I am saying, quality control is essential, and yet an open internet-based process would mean a lot of people with pet theories they want to drive could game the system. I agree with the poster who wrote that you need to take into consideration the author and his caliber even in scientific journals -- the quality control problem is a problem already today really -- but the effort necessary to get an article to publication raises the quality somewhat (and in turn prestige of relevant journals).


> I agree with the poster who wrote that you need to take into consideration the author and his caliber even in scientific journals -- the quality control problem is a problem already today really -- but the effort necessary to get an article to publication raises the quality somewhat (and in turn prestige of relevant journals).

You realize that your argument is essentially "the blogosphere is not real journalism", right?


In my view, Android does slightly better routing and search. Waze has a much better UI/UX experience.

EDIT: And Waze does not do walking/public transportation directions.


There is also the endorsements, which LinkedIn can use to measure how well you know the person.


Waze won the best overall app award at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This might have raised its valuation since the Apple talks were publicized - http://www.globalmobileawards.com/winners-2013/

If they are doing due diligence now, they would need to look into the GPL source code. Waze (at least in the past) was based in part on RoadMap which is GPL - https://github.com/mkoloberdin/waze/

That was version 2-2.4. Now they are at version 3.6, so maybe they rewrote the relevant code.

As far as the R&D centers, this can't be compared, because both those companies (Snaptu, Face.com) were much smaller than Waze. Facebook may be interested in an R&D center in Israel too, and is just looking for an appropriate base on which to build it.

I guess this seems to put Facebook more on a collision course with Google, after Facebook Home.


Maybe Abby is Abby Beck, Designer Extraordinaire who makes user friendly products - http://founderdating.com/about/who-we-are-2/

On various meetup pages, Abby also describes herself as a designer.

I am sorry now I signed up to unlock my city.


I've had similar issues. People in my group asked me to stop approving FounderDating posts because they felt it was spammy. Clearly something needs to change with their tone and overall marketing because it could be a great resource for some people with project ideas!


Who do all those ManagingDirectors [sic] direct? Title inflation ahoy.


Those ManagingDirectors [sic] are not employees. I'm familiar with two of them. They are folks in the startup space, likely operating in an advisory role, probably brought on to lend credibility to the company. Or maybe they were brought on for access to their contacts.

This is as misleading as the stunt they pulled with spamming that poor guy's LinkedIn contacts. Where there is smoke, there is fire.


The point of an MVP is to control costs, to avoid spending millions of $ and precious time to develop something that no one wants. The first step in avoiding spending that much money, is to be able to quantify the costs of building an MVP.

Besides, a stealth fighter jet cannot be a MVP. Maybe you have better maneuvering technology, or targeting technology, or maybe you have teleportation technology. That would be the basis of your MVP. If it still costs above $100,000, then minimize again, and again and again.


The point of an MVP is to control costs, to avoid spending millions of $ and precious time to develop something that no one wants.

I'd argue that it's the point of the process to "control costs, avoid spending millions of $ ..."

The MVP is just a tool, a step along that path. Its "point" if there is one - is to test your product hypothesis and evaluate product/market fit at a point in time.

The first step in avoiding spending that much money, is to be able to quantify the costs of building an MVP.

You can't do that, as you know neither the definition of "minimum" nor the definition of "viable" when you first start. That's the whole point of the iterative process. You start building to the Founders' vision, and then go out and try to find customers for that. It's only when you think that you have a testable product hypothesis that you can even speculate about what an "MVP" would look like.

I think part of the problem with these discussions though, is that "MVP" has become part buzzword and part synonym for "prototype" or "alpha" or "first version". It's not necessarily the same as those things though.

Besides, a stealth fighter jet cannot be a MVP. Maybe you have better maneuvering technology, or targeting technology, or maybe you have teleportation technology. That would be the basis of your MVP.

Right, that's why I said "an idea for a new stealth fighter jet". I certainly am not proposing to build a complete jet as an MVP... I can't imagine many - if any - scenarios where that makes sense. But building an MVP of the "magic sauce" that allows you to demonstrate to the DoD that your new stealth fighter jet will be better, is probably still going to be a lot more expensive than the "cat photo sharing site" thing. All I'm really saying is that there's a broad range in how much a MVP might cost, depending on the domain and the problems you're trying to solve.


This seems to be a direct violation of Google Play policy:

"Do not send SMS, email, or other messages on behalf of the user without providing the user with the ability to confirm content and intended recipient."

https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html


Not quite. The messages aren't being sent from the device, they're being sent by Path from their own infrastructure once they've uploaded the address-book.


The policy does not make that distinction.

An app generally needs a backend and it is clear some of the policies are directed towards not the app itself but how it interacts with the backend. These same guidelines are meant to be used to stop apps such as malware games that collect contacts and send them to the backend to be used as spam email lists.


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