While it's true that increased competition among market makers have driven spreads down, decimalization was also a factor. For example:
http://www.sec.gov/news/testimony/052401tslu.htm
"For example, OEA estimates that, from December 2000 to March 2001, quotation spreads in securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") narrowed an average of 37%, and effective spreads narrowed 15%. An even more dramatic reduction in quotation spreads was observed in Nasdaq securities, with spreads narrowing an average of 50% following decimalization, and effective spreads narrowing almost as much."
Technically, that's an example of a rule that was passed to eliminate the middlemen's profits.
Please. Like this project was just sitting there, waiting for a media shitstorm to pop up. The knee-jerk cynicism on these threads is truly getting stupid.
The timing is almost certainly because the project's secrecy had been recently compromised by the FDA revealing a meeting with the engineering team on its public calendar.
Well, sorry to say that you're failing pretty hard at your mission then. But do keep ramping up the snarky rhetoric. It looks like I hit a nerve.
I didn't say anything about total miles; I was comparing Mercedes' single 62 mile trip against the other car's single 380+ mile trip. But if you want to bring up total miles logged, That Company In Mountain View hit 300k miles last year [1] and there are absolutely no public numbers from Mercedes. If the figure were impressive, they'd probably have released it.
But now you want to make a fuss over the LIDAR on top of That Company's car while the S Class gets by on just radar. Your earlier post quoted a Mercedes engineer saying "we have had test cars doing that, but what happens if a child steps out into the street and the radar misses it?" -- well, gosh, maybe that funny spinning thing is doing something useful. Wouldn't you want an autonomous car to use any and every available method to detect obstacles? Details indeed.
"... Mercedes-Benz announced Monday that it had successfully driven an autonomous S-Class sedan 62 miles on German city streets."
Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car, as you were trying to imply over at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6408590>.
Meanwhile, that other company's car has made the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles (at least 380 miles, in case you didn't know):
The new base map imagery was preceded by the Timelapse release last month, which used basically the same techniques on historical data. See: <http://world.time.com/timelapse/> and <http://earthengine.google.org/>. It ought to be pretty clear that both of these have been in the works for a long time.
If you seriously believe that _any_ mapping provider (including Microsoft, Nokia, or Google) hasn't been actively removing clouds from their imagery for a very, very long time, then you haven't been paying attention. No one needed MapBox to give them the idea of removing the giant patches of white obscuring everything in view.
In any case, your willingness to comment on a subject that you obviously know little about -- and then extrapolate your wrongness into a statement about the industry -- is impressive. Every sentence of your original post is wrong.
You're so absolutely and completely wrong that you're probably trolling, but:
Google implemented vector maps on Android long before Apple introduced their own maps (i.e. ~years). Likewise, 3D buildings have been available through Earth for years, and rendering them in Maps was an obvious next step. Ultimately, both Apple and Google launched 3D at right around the same time.
Last, as a sibling poster pointed out, if you think all of this was started in reaction to MapBox's work (earliest public mention I found was April 1st) and completed less than 3 months later, then that's just fucking admirable execution right there. But alas, that probably wasn't copied either.
When someone spouts big talk like "start doing things right. Since you don't know how, you have to hire someone like me and give that person lots of autonomy, but it can be done" and all they're known for (please correct me if I'm wrong here) is writing a lot of text on HN, I don't think a little snark is out of line.
I get that railing against unsympathetic targets like big corporations makes for entertaining reading, but I don't think that actually qualifies anyone for the job he was describing.
Excuse me, but given your history of writing overly verbose, self-important Grand Proclamations: I imagine the only reason someone would have to hire you is if they wanted tomes written about how they could Do Things Right while probably not getting much actual work product done in return.
First, you imply that underlying intention behind the Fiber deployment in Provo is to make surveillance a piece of cake by practically serving up data on a platter. You admit no other possibility, since this "only helps support" your thesis.
Then someone calls you on it, and you back off and say you weren't implying anything, just that [the NSA] has an interest in building up infrastructure there.
Did you even consider the possibility that both parties might be coincidentally interested in Provo for entirely different reasons?
What kind of implications could this tool possibly have for witness protection? It returns data that was explicitly entered in connection with a specific disaster, and you can only search by name. Someone who's in hiding isn't going to give out their original identity, so how exactly do you propose to use this to track them?
Did you even click through to see what this thing really does, or did you actually just assume that "Person Finder" must be some kind of magical privacy-violating anal probe and rush to type out the first paranoid, nonsensical and idiotic thing to run through your head and click post as a knee-jerk reaction?
Pure bullshit. If you seriously believe that Glass doesn't have a CPU or has under 20 minutes of battery life, your raging Apple partisanship is showing through even more than normal.
I'm willing to bet that you haven't used Glass, but don't let that stop you from desperately trying to portray it as vaporware, a PR stunt, or some kind of scheme masterminded by Satan himself on EVERY HN thread you can plausibly cram that nonsense into.
Between your recent posts about Glass and taligent's constant downplaying of Google's maps and autonomous cars, I have to wonder what makes you two work so hard at spewing blind hate for them here.
There are a number of examples floating around that make it appear as if Apple is deriving map feature types from their names. For example, a water pumping station labelled as a gas station.
Imagine one of these payloads landing on someone's head. Wolfram Alpha offers up "2.4x impulse force acting on a baseball being hit by a bat" as a comparison when you plug in "5 lbs * 30 mph".
I like the idea, but there probably needs to be more development in safety systems before anyone could reasonably consider allowing that.
> [...] and a good amount of that work can be copied for free by competitors in the absence of patent protection [...]
Really? I would guess a good amount of that work was writing millions of lines of code, electrical and circuit design, designing for manufacture, and all that stuff you actually can't copy. Patents account for much less of that real _work_.
To circle back to the beginning:
> I don't know enough to truly defend Apple's actions
You're right.
> I do see Android as basically a piece-by-piece copy of the iPhone.
Straight-up batshit absurd.
People don't give Android enough credit for its Danger heritage -- Andy Rubin's previous company -- they developed a whole line of phones with hardware keyboards, web browsers, and downloadable applications. It was also built on top of a JVM. This sounds like the first incarnation of Android (the G1), doesn't it?
The popular notion that Android was a copy of the iPhone or Blackberry is stupid and wrong. If Android was inspired by anything, it was from Andy Rubin's own past.
You keep accusing people of not understanding what patents are, but most people aren't objecting to Apple having the exclusive right to an ornamental design (even if it isn't purely ornamental). Harping on this technicality allows you to dismiss the parent poster as not knowing anything about patents as though you're some kind of expert on them, while ignoring his point.
What people object to is Apple asserting dubious patents with broad claims to block competition. Mating a general purpose computer and an algorithm to produce a "new" "machine" is a stupid loophole. Patents are supposed to be an exchange where an inventor gets a temporary monopoly while the public gets instructions for implementing a new and non-obvious "process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter". You can't seriously argue that the world needed the bounce-back, data detector, or universal search patents to figure out how to accomplish those things. Patents shouldn't cover things that are, at best, features!
You might respond by pointing to Windows Phone as an example of a mobile OS that's different and NOT getting litigated over, but that's because Apple and Microsoft have cross-licensing agreements that have been in place since the last time Apple tried to pull this look-and-feel bullshit and lost.
Since you insist on using loaded language like "Android ripped off ... Apple", what evidence do you have to back that up? Also, what makes you say that the "anti-patent movement started with [Google]"? You're aware that people have had concerns about software patents long before this, right? Take Amazon's one-click patent as an example of something that stirred up a similar amount of nerd rage. It's not propaganda, just other people arriving at a pretty reasonable conclusion and stating it.
"For example, OEA estimates that, from December 2000 to March 2001, quotation spreads in securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") narrowed an average of 37%, and effective spreads narrowed 15%. An even more dramatic reduction in quotation spreads was observed in Nasdaq securities, with spreads narrowing an average of 50% following decimalization, and effective spreads narrowing almost as much."
Technically, that's an example of a rule that was passed to eliminate the middlemen's profits.