A few years back I read almost exactly the same article, but about deer hunting games. Where once gaming had been dominated by wizards and space aliens, games about deer hunting for the redneck market had come out of nowhere to be the top seller. There were just so many more rednecks than computer geeks. And the rednecks, being new to gaming, were happy to play games with extremely low production values.
This is the same thing, but with girls instead of rednecks, and social networking instead of deer hunting.
It is all a natural transition from games by computer geeks for computer geeks to games by computer geeks for anyone with disposable income.
Reading the article I had to shake my head at the complaints that "Google should do something". Do they think the phone book people should boot him out or circle his name in red too?
Google should do something. Not because of any moral or ethical obligation, but because it is good business. There are numerous examples of internet businesses that have followed the pattern: 1) Attract lots of traffic, become immensely profitable. 2) Attract enough traffic to become appealing to parasites. 3) Become so infested with parasites that your site becomes aggravating to use. 4) Lose lots of money when all your traffic starts going elsewhere. MySpace is a good example of this pattern. EBay and Facebook are well on their way. Google has a long and mostly successful history of combating page rank parasites. Google understands that in order for them to succeed in their business, they must be trusted. Not trusted in the sense "I got screwed, but it wasn't google's fault." Trusted in the sense "I use google because they seem to know the site I was trying to find even when that's not exactly what I asked for." The fact that one parasite has successfully exploited google search using this technique means that many more parasites will be following soon. Google needs figure out how to defeat this kind of parasite, or risk losing their hard earned trust.
Who is going to get his ass kicked when the cops catch him. Indonesia has the death penalty for being a jackass doesn't it?
I, for one, do consider this to be a capital crime. In the United States, where free speech is considered to be an inalienable right, it is nevertheless illegal to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. This stunt is like shouting "Fire!" in a million crowded theaters. It seems almost inevitable that when the dust clears we will find that several innocent people took this offical government warning at face value, behaved as if there were a tsunami on the way, and died as a result. By what moral, ethical, or legal argument would you consider the jackass who sent the false alarm not responsible for these deaths?
The GPL offers, if I recall correctly, three different options for meeting your obligations to distribute the source code. One of these options is to provide a website where the source code is available. One of these options is to deliver a copy of the source code on a CD bundled with your product. I don't remember what the third one was. When my employer was determining how to comply, they found delivering the source code on a CD to be the least burdensome. The reason was that when you do it that way, your obligation is fully discharged at the time you deliver the CD. When you make the source code available on a web site, the website must remain available for five years (I think) after you stop distributing.
Why is it that you are comfortable with a device that travels upwind at 3 times the wind speed, but think that one that travels downwind at 3 times the wind speed is a perpetual motion machine? Clearly, any wind powered vehicle that travels faster than the wind in ANY direction must be harvesting energy from the velocity difference between the wind and the ground, not the velocity difference between the wind and the vehicle, or it would be a perpetual motion machine.
There is a paradox at work here. In fields like software development, a person can not become productive (and therefore valuable to an employer) without on the job experience. And so there is a skill level at which people can contribute nothing, but can not advance to the next skill level without doing the job for real, which they will almost certainly screw up, costing the employer money.
Given that such a skill level exists, this is a "tragedy of the commons" scenario. It is advantageous for employers as a group to hire lots of interns, so that it is easy to enter the profession, thus increasing competition and bringing wages down. But for any one employer, there is no benefit to hiring interns, who don't do any useful work.
Perhaps you need a history course. Historically, Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco drew their countries into ruinous wars, which are very hard on corporate profits. Batista so weakened his government that it was taken over by communists who nationalized everything. Corporations hate that.
Saying that the system of government best suited to corporate profits is a fascist-leaning dictatorship is like saying Bernie Madoff will get you the best return on your investment. It is sometimes true in the short term, but in the long term it is very, very false.
The original poster seems to be missing a fundamental aspect of the way organizations hire people. Organizations do not actively examine all of the resumes that cross their desk, then cherry pick the particularly impressive ones. At most times, an organization is not hiring, and they do not look at resumes at all. Every once in a while, an organization will decide that it needs more people. Getting approval to hire someone is difficult. (At the organization I work for (which has about 2000 employees), five layers of approval, including the CEO, are needed.) Once the decision to hire someone is made, the team that is hiring has what is known as an "Open Req" (Short for requisition, perhaps?) Most organizations don't even begin looking at resumes or interviewing until there is an open req. Once there is an open req, the process speeds up signficantly. Most organizations tinker with their budgets every quarter, and what is the easiest item to remove from a budget? An open req. Because of this, most hiring managers are in a great hurry to make an offer before the req gets cancelled. They interview every reasonable candidate they can get their hands on before the end of the quarter, and hire the best of the lot.
The point is, if you aren't getting interviews, it is because either you are applying to companies that aren't hiring, or your resume is simply terrible. (If you are getting interviews but not offers, then you have different issues...)
I recommend the following: 1) Look at job postings on dice.com and craigslist. Companies post there because they are actively hiring. Submit your resume to anything that requires less than 3 years of experience. 2) Post your resume on dice.com. No employers look there, but recruiters do.
A "postage stamp" is a unit of area developed specificly for its unique marketing properties. Although many readers assume it is approximately 5 square centimeters, it can actually be anything up to 2551 square centimeters. http://www.joh-enschede.com/?page=jea.news.overview&cid=143
This law is problematic even beyond the restriction to anonymous speech. By setting specific record keeping requirements to make speech not be considered anonymous, they can label any kind of casual speech as anonymous. Then they can supress it.
Nuclear power is almost the same price as coal, under optimal conditions. But, the cost of nuclear power all occurs up-front in the form of a multi-billion dollar construction project, and the return is gradual, over 40+ years of low cost operation. If the construction project is delayed, canceled, or has cost overruns, the investors will lose their multi-billion dollar initial investment. A two year construction delay makes the difference between huge profits and a huge boondoggle. And there are many things that can cause construction to be delayed, canceled, or overrun: Bad design, changing standards, inability to get approvals, pitchfork wielding mobs, etc.
The modern nuclear power industry claims they have worked out the many snags that troubled 70s-era projects. But the only way to find out is to build one and see.
My employer does a lot of business in China, both development work and sales into the chinese market. This incident with google has really made me stop and think about whether the whole game is rigged.
Invest in China? Your technology will stolen by chinese competitors. Outcompete your chinese competitors? The local laws will be changed in their favor. Complain? Your people will be arrested. Leave? Your assets will be nationalized.
The chinese haven't done any of that stuff to my employer, as far as I know. But it is the only country we do business in where the question might even come up. It turns out that doing business in a country without the rule of law entails some serious business risks. I wonder how many executives are having this same thought, right now?
Don't conflate the issue of whether the price is fair with the issue of whether a free trial is necessary.
I will agree with you that $1 is a ridiculously low price for a software application, and someone unwilling to pay that much should just not use the app.
The problem is that when producers get paid in full every time a consumer evaluates the product and decides it is unusable, they start creating products that look just good enough to try out, but don't actually work. The revenues are the same, and the margins are better.
I simply won't pay for software until I have finished evaluating it, no matter what the price. Many times, that means that I walk away from good products that I can't get for evaluation. Too bad for them.
As a professional software developer, I understand just how much goes into creating an application. I also understand that the difference between an excellent application and a useless one can be as small as one line of code.
In my experience, software development calls for people who are both extremely competent and well rounded: They need coding skills. They need organizational skills. They need communication skills. They need to be able to take direction. They need to be able to provide direction. Most importantly, they need to be able to acquire a deep understanding of the project they are working on, so that they can build the right thing without (or in spite of) close supervision. Needless to say, real people are not perfect. You have to make do with the people available. But you are almost always better off with a small, extremely skilled workforce than a large, poorly skilled one. "Coders" are a complete waste of time. "Developers" are almost always preferable.
With that said, degree of educational attainment is only loosely correlated with ability.
The total cost of ownership of a storage device includes the purchase price, the cost of restoring/reinstalling after catastrophic drive failures, and the ongoing cost of electricity.
For a home user, the reinstall cost from a single catastrophic failure is going to outweight both the purchase price and the electricity cost. SSDs have a significantly lower catastrophic failure rate, so they cost less.
For a server, the electricity cost is going to outweigh the purchase price and the reinstall cost. SSDs use less electricity, so they cost less.
If you are confused because you are not a software developer, please don't complain about this article. Just stop reading. The question is by a developer and for developers. It obviously should have had more context so to help non-developers know that.
If you are confused because you ARE a software developer, but don't know what scrum is, or don't understand the scrum jargon, stop complaining and go read up on scrum right now. Agile and scum are part of the culture now. Whether good, bad, or ugly, they're here to stay, just like OO, client-server, and waterfall. You only make yourself sound stupid when you make comments of the variety: 'I've never used it, so it must not be imporant, but I did skim the wikipedia article and it sounds like a stupid idea.'
With that out of the way, let me say the least dysfunctional team I have ever worked on used scrum. The engineers chose to use scrum. It was not forced on us by management. The reason we chose scrum was that we'd all been around the block a few times and understood that process just gets in the way. There is no way to avoid schedules, deadlines, and status meetings altogether. But we wanted to spend as little time as possible on that stuff. We chose scrum as the least intrusive process. The manager pretty much ignored us, we did things in a way that made sense, and we got a lot of work done.
So, to answer the original poster, in your next sprint retrospective you should say '${SCRUMMASTER} has turned into a glorified spreadsheet jockey. That's not good because he used to be our most productive coder. We need to find a way to get him back in the game.' Either the team will adjust the role of scrummaster to make it work within your organization, or you're not doing scum right.
Hint: Hiring a beancounter to jockey the spreadsheets is not the right answer. I've seen that tried, and the results were not pretty. Not only did the beancounter do a bad job with the spreadsheets, but he tried to be the boss.
I know that this idea is targeted at military applications, not commercial ones, but let's just see. Just spitballing some numbers: Assume the manufacturer can afford to spend up to about $2.00/gallon on electricity to make the fuel. Gasoline has an energy capacity of about 40kWh/gallon. The manufacturer can afford to pay up to $0.05/kWh, if the process is 100% efficient.
One thing that this idea has going for it is that it can operate whenever power is available, and suspend when power is not available. So the manufacturer can probably get an extremely good deal on power.
Seems to me that it enters the range of commercial feasibility at about 25% efficiency.
A competent lawyer would have objected. I'm not saying the judge would or should sustain the objection. But the judge MIGHT have sustained the objection. Now, we'll never know. Even if the lawyer was certain that the objection would be overrruled, he should have objected just to break up the flow of this hopelessly damning testimony.
The competence of the NSA or the cadets has nothing to do with it. At the moment, the attacker simply has a huge advantage over the defender, no matter who the attacker and defender are. The defender must deploy a host of applications whose primary development goal was time to market, and security is still somewhere near the bottom of the todo list. The defender must rely on the discipline of end users with no interest or understanding of network security. The attacker can download all kinds of prepackaged exploits from the internet. The attacker only needs for a handful of those exploits to succeed. The defender can not afford to lose even once. Government networks get hacked because they are defending. I would venture to guess that the NSA can hack into Chinese and Russian government networks just as easily as they can hack into ours.
There is a flawed assumption in the study that the vehicles will last 12 years and 150,000 miles (12,500 miles/year) independent of all other variables. For example, the study assumes that a car driven 7 miles per day will last 12 years and 150,000 miles. (7 * 365 * 12 = 30660). You'd actually have to drive a car 7 miles a day for 58.7 years to go 150,000 miles. The study further assumes that a car driven 60 miles per day will also last 12 years and 150,000 miles. (60 * 365 * 12 = 262800). You'd actually have to drive a car 60 miles a day for 6.8 years to go 150,000 miles.
Using the flawed assumption, a car with an electric range of 7 miles and driven 7 miles a day appears surprisingly inexpensive, because the battery is effectively being amortized over a 58.7 year life. Correspondingly, a car with an electric range of 60 miles and driven 60 miles a day appears surprisingly costly, because the battery is amortized over only 6.8 years.
Not surprisingly, the study concludes that small batteries are better in all cases.
A more reasonable assumption would be that the battery will last the same number of years and same number of discharge cycles regardless of size. Consequently, larger batteries will last proportionately more miles (if in fact driven further each day).
The article incorrectly categorizes Edison as a lone inventor. Edison had dozens of other inventors working for him. He is sometimes credited with inventing the modern research lab. Notably, Nikola Tesla worked for Edison for a short time. I'm sure if he had spent his whole career with Edison, he'd be just as anonymous as Edison's other employees.
In my experience, even though groups are dumber than any individual member, individuals are smarter when they are in groups.
Individuals rarely challenge their own assumptions. Just having someone to listen to your ideas and ask a few pointed questions can save a huge amount of time wasted in unproductive directions.
It is when a group keeps steering you back to the same bad assumptions that it makes you dumber.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years back I read almost exactly the same article, but about deer hunting games.
Where once gaming had been dominated by wizards and space aliens, games about deer hunting for the redneck market had come out of nowhere to be the top seller. There were just so many more rednecks than computer geeks. And the rednecks, being new to gaming, were happy to play games with extremely low production values.
This is the same thing, but with girls instead of rednecks, and social networking instead of deer hunting.
It is all a natural transition from games by computer geeks for computer geeks to games by computer geeks for anyone with disposable income.
Google should do something. Not because of any moral or ethical obligation, but because it is good business. There are numerous examples of internet businesses that have followed the pattern:
1) Attract lots of traffic, become immensely profitable.
2) Attract enough traffic to become appealing to parasites.
3) Become so infested with parasites that your site becomes aggravating to use.
4) Lose lots of money when all your traffic starts going elsewhere.
MySpace is a good example of this pattern. EBay and Facebook are well on their way.
Google has a long and mostly successful history of combating page rank parasites. Google understands that in order for them to succeed in their business, they must be trusted. Not trusted in the sense "I got screwed, but it wasn't google's fault." Trusted in the sense "I use google because they seem to know the site I was trying to find even when that's not exactly what I asked for."
The fact that one parasite has successfully exploited google search using this technique means that many more parasites will be following soon. Google needs figure out how to defeat this kind of parasite, or risk losing their hard earned trust.
I, for one, do consider this to be a capital crime.
In the United States, where free speech is considered to be an inalienable right, it is nevertheless illegal to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
This stunt is like shouting "Fire!" in a million crowded theaters.
It seems almost inevitable that when the dust clears we will find that several innocent people took this offical government warning at face value, behaved as if there were a tsunami on the way, and died as a result.
By what moral, ethical, or legal argument would you consider the jackass who sent the false alarm not responsible for these deaths?
That was a car analogy. It was just a really sloppy one, because he was working under a deadline.
The GPL offers, if I recall correctly, three different options for meeting your obligations to distribute the source code.
One of these options is to provide a website where the source code is available.
One of these options is to deliver a copy of the source code on a CD bundled with your product.
I don't remember what the third one was.
When my employer was determining how to comply, they found delivering the source code on a CD to be the least burdensome. The reason was that when you do it that way, your obligation is fully discharged at the time you deliver the CD. When you make the source code available on a web site, the website must remain available for five years (I think) after you stop distributing.
Why is it that you are comfortable with a device that travels upwind at 3 times the wind speed, but think that one that travels downwind at 3 times the wind speed is a perpetual motion machine?
Clearly, any wind powered vehicle that travels faster than the wind in ANY direction must be harvesting energy from the velocity difference between the wind and the ground, not the velocity difference between the wind and the vehicle, or it would be a perpetual motion machine.
Hey! Your not allowed to just add "on Slashdot" to some widely used technique and then patent it!
There is a paradox at work here. In fields like software development, a person can not become productive (and therefore valuable to an employer) without on the job experience. And so there is a skill level at which people can contribute nothing, but can not advance to the next skill level without doing the job for real, which they will almost certainly screw up, costing the employer money.
Given that such a skill level exists, this is a "tragedy of the commons" scenario. It is advantageous for employers as a group to hire lots of interns, so that it is easy to enter the profession, thus increasing competition and bringing wages down. But for any one employer, there is no benefit to hiring interns, who don't do any useful work.
Perhaps you need a history course. Historically, Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco drew their countries into ruinous wars, which are very hard on corporate profits. Batista so weakened his government that it was taken over by communists who nationalized everything. Corporations hate that.
Saying that the system of government best suited to corporate profits is a fascist-leaning dictatorship is like saying Bernie Madoff will get you the best return on your investment. It is sometimes true in the short term, but in the long term it is very, very false.
The original poster seems to be missing a fundamental aspect of the way organizations hire people.
Organizations do not actively examine all of the resumes that cross their desk, then cherry pick the particularly impressive ones.
At most times, an organization is not hiring, and they do not look at resumes at all. Every once in a while, an organization will decide that it needs more people. Getting approval to hire someone is difficult. (At the organization I work for (which has about 2000 employees), five layers of approval, including the CEO, are needed.) Once the decision to hire someone is made, the team that is hiring has what is known as an "Open Req" (Short for requisition, perhaps?)
Most organizations don't even begin looking at resumes or interviewing until there is an open req. Once there is an open req, the process speeds up signficantly. Most organizations tinker with their budgets every quarter, and what is the easiest item to remove from a budget? An open req. Because of this, most hiring managers are in a great hurry to make an offer before the req gets cancelled. They interview every reasonable candidate they can get their hands on before the end of the quarter, and hire the best of the lot.
The point is, if you aren't getting interviews, it is because either you are applying to companies that aren't hiring, or your resume is simply terrible. (If you are getting interviews but not offers, then you have different issues...)
I recommend the following:
1) Look at job postings on dice.com and craigslist. Companies post there because they are actively hiring. Submit your resume to anything that requires less than 3 years of experience.
2) Post your resume on dice.com. No employers look there, but recruiters do.
A "postage stamp" is a unit of area developed specificly for its unique marketing properties. Although many readers assume it is approximately 5 square centimeters, it can actually be anything up to 2551 square centimeters. http://www.joh-enschede.com/?page=jea.news.overview&cid=143
This law is problematic even beyond the restriction to anonymous speech. By setting specific record keeping requirements to make speech not be considered anonymous, they can label any kind of casual speech as anonymous. Then they can supress it.
Nuclear power is almost the same price as coal, under optimal conditions.
But, the cost of nuclear power all occurs up-front in the form of a multi-billion dollar construction project, and the return is gradual, over 40+ years of low cost operation.
If the construction project is delayed, canceled, or has cost overruns, the investors will lose their multi-billion dollar initial investment. A two year construction delay makes the difference between huge profits and a huge boondoggle.
And there are many things that can cause construction to be delayed, canceled, or overrun: Bad design, changing standards, inability to get approvals, pitchfork wielding mobs, etc.
The modern nuclear power industry claims they have worked out the many snags that troubled 70s-era projects. But the only way to find out is to build one and see.
My employer does a lot of business in China, both development work and sales into the chinese market.
This incident with google has really made me stop and think about whether the whole game is rigged.
Invest in China? Your technology will stolen by chinese competitors.
Outcompete your chinese competitors? The local laws will be changed in their favor.
Complain? Your people will be arrested.
Leave? Your assets will be nationalized.
The chinese haven't done any of that stuff to my employer, as far as I know. But it is the only country we do business in where the question might even come up.
It turns out that doing business in a country without the rule of law entails some serious business risks.
I wonder how many executives are having this same thought, right now?
Don't conflate the issue of whether the price is fair with the issue of whether a free trial is necessary.
I will agree with you that $1 is a ridiculously low price for a software application, and someone unwilling to pay that much should just not use the app.
The problem is that when producers get paid in full every time a consumer evaluates the product and decides it is unusable, they start creating products that look just good enough to try out, but don't actually work. The revenues are the same, and the margins are better.
I simply won't pay for software until I have finished evaluating it, no matter what the price. Many times, that means that I walk away from good products that I can't get for evaluation. Too bad for them.
As a professional software developer, I understand just how much goes into creating an application. I also understand that the difference between an excellent application and a useless one can be as small as one line of code.
In my experience, software development calls for people who are both extremely competent and well rounded:
They need coding skills.
They need organizational skills.
They need communication skills.
They need to be able to take direction.
They need to be able to provide direction.
Most importantly, they need to be able to acquire a deep understanding of the project they are working on, so that they can build the right thing without (or in spite of) close supervision.
Needless to say, real people are not perfect. You have to make do with the people available. But you are almost always better off with a small, extremely skilled workforce than a large, poorly skilled one.
"Coders" are a complete waste of time. "Developers" are almost always preferable.
With that said, degree of educational attainment is only loosely correlated with ability.
The total cost of ownership of a storage device includes the purchase price, the cost of restoring/reinstalling after catastrophic drive failures, and the ongoing cost of electricity.
For a home user, the reinstall cost from a single catastrophic failure is going to outweight both the purchase price and the electricity cost. SSDs have a significantly lower catastrophic failure rate, so they cost less.
For a server, the electricity cost is going to outweigh the purchase price and the reinstall cost. SSDs use less electricity, so they cost less.
If you are confused because you are not a software developer, please don't complain about this article. Just stop reading. The question is by a developer and for developers. It obviously should have had more context so to help non-developers know that.
If you are confused because you ARE a software developer, but don't know what scrum is, or don't understand the scrum jargon, stop complaining and go read up on scrum right now. Agile and scum are part of the culture now. Whether good, bad, or ugly, they're here to stay, just like OO, client-server, and waterfall. You only make yourself sound stupid when you make comments of the variety: 'I've never used it, so it must not be imporant, but I did skim the wikipedia article and it sounds like a stupid idea.'
With that out of the way, let me say the least dysfunctional team I have ever worked on used scrum. The engineers chose to use scrum. It was not forced on us by management. The reason we chose scrum was that we'd all been around the block a few times and understood that process just gets in the way. There is no way to avoid schedules, deadlines, and status meetings altogether. But we wanted to spend as little time as possible on that stuff. We chose scrum as the least intrusive process. The manager pretty much ignored us, we did things in a way that made sense, and we got a lot of work done.
So, to answer the original poster, in your next sprint retrospective you should say '${SCRUMMASTER} has turned into a glorified spreadsheet jockey. That's not good because he used to be our most productive coder. We need to find a way to get him back in the game.' Either the team will adjust the role of scrummaster to make it work within your organization, or you're not doing scum right.
Hint: Hiring a beancounter to jockey the spreadsheets is not the right answer. I've seen that tried, and the results were not pretty. Not only did the beancounter do a bad job with the spreadsheets, but he tried to be the boss.
I know that this idea is targeted at military applications, not commercial ones, but let's just see.
Just spitballing some numbers:
Assume the manufacturer can afford to spend up to about $2.00/gallon on electricity to make the fuel.
Gasoline has an energy capacity of about 40kWh/gallon.
The manufacturer can afford to pay up to $0.05/kWh, if the process is 100% efficient.
One thing that this idea has going for it is that it can operate whenever power is available, and suspend when power is not available. So the manufacturer can probably get an extremely good deal on power.
Seems to me that it enters the range of commercial feasibility at about 25% efficiency.
A competent lawyer would have objected. I'm not saying the judge would or should sustain the objection. But the judge MIGHT have sustained the objection. Now, we'll never know. Even if the lawyer was certain that the objection would be overrruled, he should have objected just to break up the flow of this hopelessly damning testimony.
The competence of the NSA or the cadets has nothing to do with it. At the moment, the attacker simply has a huge advantage over the defender, no matter who the attacker and defender are. The defender must deploy a host of applications whose primary development goal was time to market, and security is still somewhere near the bottom of the todo list. The defender must rely on the discipline of end users with no interest or understanding of network security. The attacker can download all kinds of prepackaged exploits from the internet. The attacker only needs for a handful of those exploits to succeed. The defender can not afford to lose even once.
Government networks get hacked because they are defending. I would venture to guess that the NSA can hack into Chinese and Russian government networks just as easily as they can hack into ours.
There is a flawed assumption in the study that the vehicles will last 12 years and 150,000 miles (12,500 miles/year) independent of all other variables.
For example, the study assumes that a car driven 7 miles per day will last 12 years and 150,000 miles. (7 * 365 * 12 = 30660). You'd actually have to drive a car 7 miles a day for 58.7 years to go 150,000 miles.
The study further assumes that a car driven 60 miles per day will also last 12 years and 150,000 miles. (60 * 365 * 12 = 262800). You'd actually have to drive a car 60 miles a day for 6.8 years to go 150,000 miles.
Using the flawed assumption, a car with an electric range of 7 miles and driven 7 miles a day appears surprisingly inexpensive, because the battery is effectively being amortized over a 58.7 year life. Correspondingly, a car with an electric range of 60 miles and driven 60 miles a day appears surprisingly costly, because the battery is amortized over only 6.8 years.
Not surprisingly, the study concludes that small batteries are better in all cases.
A more reasonable assumption would be that the battery will last the same number of years and same number of discharge cycles regardless of size. Consequently, larger batteries will last proportionately more miles (if in fact driven further each day).
From your piles of prior art, could you please name a system that offered both "capabilities" AND "impersonation" prior to 1995?
The article incorrectly categorizes Edison as a lone inventor. Edison had dozens of other inventors working for him. He is sometimes credited with inventing the modern research lab. Notably, Nikola Tesla worked for Edison for a short time. I'm sure if he had spent his whole career with Edison, he'd be just as anonymous as Edison's other employees.
In my experience, even though groups are dumber than any individual member, individuals are smarter when they are in groups.
Individuals rarely challenge their own assumptions. Just having someone to listen to your ideas and ask a few pointed questions can save a huge amount of time wasted in unproductive directions.
It is when a group keeps steering you back to the same bad assumptions that it makes you dumber.