lrs

What's the idea behind that "Submit a Story" uncollapsible floating tab on the left side of the page? Seems like you're obstructing a pretty important, content-dense part of the screen with something unimportant and obnoxious that doesn't even generate revenue. Please reconsider this design.

EDIT: It's come to my attention that this only appears to be an issue at 1024x768, which I'm currently using because I'm at work and my employer's computer hardware is ancient. This is probably not a problem for the typical user.

Great post - really brilliant tactical thinking, and it's always a delight to see smart moves pay off.

I feel like it should be noted that it's quite dangerous to threaten a move like this unless you're actually prepared to follow through with it if the gambit fails. If this move hadn't worked and the prospect had responded with something like "please reconsider, we believe there is still a good chance things can work out," I think it would have been disastrous for this company's credibility going forward if they had actually continued working on this prospect. Part of the reason this was a great move for them in this situation is that they were legitimately ready to cut their losses with this prospect and move on. When that's the case, even the smallest chance of jamming a sale through is pure value over their best alternative.

Assuming you're referring to Marie's scolding of Megan, I think the quote is closer to "Not every little girl gets to do what she wants - the world could not support that many ballerinas." Which is even closer to what this article is saying.

This rings painfully true.

No sarcasm; just a lot of regret and self-loathing.

It seems like the root of our disagreement is our differeing expectations for the cognitive and decisionmaking abilities of teenagers. As other posters have mentioned, there are lots of social factors at play in the college decision, and I think those factors can be far more powerful than what's necessary to lead a straight-A high school student astray.

If we pared away all of the people who were susceptible to making bad decisions based on what they're told or who are focused on the past successes of others, only the tiniest sliver of the population would remain as viable candidates for college. Maybe this is the point you're making - maybe you think we should shut down almost every university and tell everyone outside the enlightened sliver to go figure out something else to do. (Might actually not be that bad of an idea.) Or maybe you have a different view of people's cognitive abilities at age 17.

The approach that you personally took toward your college decision is, I think, pretty exceptional, and puts you toward the top of the top 1% of rational 17-year-old decisionmakers. I hesitate to condemn people as clueless and undeserving of our sympathy because they fall short of that lofty standard.

I think the OP's characterization of the decisionmaking process that leads to crippling educational debt is somewhat unfair. It's definitely driven by the parents and children who he condemns as "clueless." But I think it's important to consider that many of these "clueless" have been told their entire lives that "education is a great investment" and "graduates of prestigious universities all become successful and rich," and have never really been confronted with any reason to question these pronouncements, which have appeared consistent with their own observations and experiences. Colleges and universities don't hesitate to trot out these tropes in their recruitment literature, though I suppose it's a mark of the "clueless" that they hold educational institutions to a different standard of credibility than used car salesmen or carnival barkers.

I see a parallel to the recent mortgage crisis. Sure, fundamentally, the crisis was just huge numbers of people defaulting en-masse on their mortgages. They all made "clueless" decisions by taking on more mortgage debt than they could handle. Maybe they deserve what they get, and maybe the appropriate response is to be angry at these entitled whiners who made worse decisions than the OP. But these decisions were facilitated by lenders and securities brokers who were acting in less than good faith.

I'm inclined to view both the homeowners in the mortgage crisis and the students and families struggling with education debt right now more as victims of poor information availability and outmoded decision heuristics that fell behind the times, and less as entitled whiners.

I guess I should note that I also went to the University of Chicago (hi Jesse) and it's fairly clear by now that it was a terrible choice for me. So maybe I'm just grasping for rationalizations while desperately fleeing from the crushing psychological weight of the responsibility for that choice and the long and uninterrupted sequence of related bad choices that have more or less ruined my life.

I'll add to the chorus of voices requesting the ability to add a price constraint.

To generalize from this very good point - perhaps a future iteration should include a fully-blinged-out "Advanced" settings menu that lets you add constraints for a wide variety of dietary restrictions, including micronutrient requirements, food allergies, and various modes of vegetarianism.

Kind of a derail, but would you care to share the rationale behind the 60/20/20 macro ratio?

Whoops, my mistake - thanks for the correction.

Still baffled by how answers.com expects to get $270M of financing to buy about.com. To anyone who has ever clicked a link to either of those domains from a Google query, the headline must seem Onion-like.

Unreal. How can such an awful website have $270 million on hand, and how can they be willing to spend it on another awful website?

I am so fascinated by the idea that these people exist. I would love to read an interview with one of them.

Seems consistent with what we're seeing in this case. Very hard to imagine any VC greenlighting this sort of "it's the principle" litigation; very easy to imagine a founder doing so.

I didn't look at the claim construction order so I don't know if anything particularly remarkable happened at that stage, but based solely on the SJ order, it looks like they did get a very favorable construction in light of Ricoh v. Quantas. They were able to get all of the claims construed in such a way that their own behavior wasn't covered.

This then allowed them to deploy a very elegant (IMO) "fork" tactic. Having established, in light of the the claims and the Ricoh case, that they couldn't possibly be direct infringers, they were also able to make winning arguments based on an RPX license (unfortunately redacted) that established that none of their users could possibly be infringers.

So they were able to cement all of the legal bricks together into a solid wall that completely closed off any path to victory the Troll could have taken.

Really wish I could see the redacted language from the license agreements.