Eric P

"I just mean for Google. Mapping isn't trivial, as Apple learned, and to Facebook (with no maps of its own) that'd be worth a billion dollars, sure. But Google is already the king of maps, so what would it really gain from Waze?" - Eric P

"I'm not sure what Google gets out of acquiring it? It'd be trivially easy for Google to clone Waze's best feature (crowdsourced traffic data) for Google Maps and introduce real-time re-routing based on that data. Truthfully it'd be so easy I wonder why Google hasn't done it already. Most of the social features Google already has with Google+ location and check-in stuff. And frankly those are gimmicky and dumb for this kind of app. Otherwise what does Waze offer? The userbase? It's small compared to Google Maps and I can't see Google doing anything other than shutting down the Waze app and migrating them to Google Maps anyway. Do they have patents worth a billion dollars? Is it worth that just to keep Facebook from getting an easy entry into mapping? I'm genuinely scratching my head a bit." - Eric P

"The early US had the same problems. After a few years of futzing with the Articles of Confederation and then deciding that didn't work, the Constitution was written and the federalists slowly won out over the course of the following century, even though state loyalty continued to trump national loyalty for most of that period. I expect Europe will follow a similar course. A real EU central government and fiscal union will emerge from this mess." - Eric P

"My gut reaction is to say racism. Which I still think is more than plausible. There's a stereotype floating around the aether that black men are all dumb and lazy, and it just seems too coincidental that this is being projected onto Obama without race being a factor. But let me throw out an alternate hypothesis: they really believe it. I think this may be a case where liberals and conservatives are just speaking an entirely different language. When liberals hear someone like Sarah Palin or George W Bush talk, they sound *dumb*. They trip over words, have a relatively low vocabulary, can't recall facts. But to conservatives they sound *genuine*. They're straight talking. And they interpret it as "street smarts" which is the kind of intelligence they value most - the stuff that comes from experience. On the flip side you've got Obama. Who left to his own devices is very professorial, very verbose. He sounds like someone reading a book report in the front of a class at school. But in the..." - Eric P

"Well, if you go on Reddit and post "It's been X thousand days since Hannity promised to be waterboarded for charity and he still hasn't done it" you're almost guaranteed to hit the front page.  Back during the Bush Administration a lot of people on the left still tried to make hay out of accusing Bush of "deserting" during Vietnam, even after it got Dan Rather fired. Bush's alcoholism had a similar kind of mythical status on the left. That's all I can think of." - Eric P

"Google releases Google Notebook. Google kills Google Notebook. Google releases Google Notebook again, only calling it Google Keep this time. Does this mean in a few years we can expect Google to re-release Reader under a different name?" - Eric P

"Civil liberties questions aside, wouldn't anyone with half a brain who's up to no good already be encrypting everything they use to communicate, thus nullifying the utility of an archive? Or are people a lot dumber than I'm giving them credit for? (Don't answer that)" - Eric P

"If you squint, you can sort of see a possible path forward that doesn't involve unions: Politicians cater to the interests of the 1% because they need the money from the 1% to be a viable candidate for office. Politicians need the money because TV ads are expensive, with around 75% of the money they raise buying it. TV ads are the primary way of reaching and influencing voters, and are uniquely powerful at doing so. Maybe, just maybe, TV as we know it is going away. Cord cutters are just a tiny-but-vocal minority now, but they're the early adopters that traditionally predict what *everyone* is going to be doing ten years from now. So at the very least, TV is going to be reaching less people, and thus minimizing the advantage of a candidate with a lot of money to blow on producing and airing those ads. Meanwhile, the internet is an atomizing and commodifying *machine*, that makes everything it touches cheaper. Which opens a window for candidates to run a pure internet driven campaign..." - Eric P

"If that *was* the look of the PS4, that would instantly rank as one of the greatest things of all time." - Eric P