I have problems with this "debunking" for many reasons. For example, one of the very first assertions it makes is that an electrical spark does not have the energy to light the paint aflame. This is borderline ridiculous: not only does the History Channel special show a tesla coil lighting a reproduction on fire while wet, but we're talking about a bolt of lighting, which is frequently in excess of fifty thousand degrees in temperature. The second thing claimed is that a spark could not jump in some arbitrary direction required by the theory, except of course that the theory does not actually demand any direction, and that sparks are not governed by directionality in any way. Besides, it's not as if this theory demands a spark at all; the most likely explanation for static ignition is the charge built up between ground and the skin's static potential moving through ionized air; the ramie cording guaranteed that that was all kept on the skin, and the frame structure was such that the charge would have been unevenly distributed towards the tail of the ship (there were in fact many eyewitness acounts of a tail glow on the ship, which many have speculated as Saint Elmo's Fire, which would be consistent with an immense ground potential charge being developed.) Whether or not the static charge caused the ignition, it's fairly transparent that the charge was there, and physical simulations suggest that the charge should have been huge.
Now, maybe it's just me, but when the History Channel has a NASA rocket fuel specialist saying that the paint is equivalent to primitive rocket fuel, and then some guy from a planetarium says "nuh-uh," I tend to believe the NASA guy. I'm not really sure where this guy gets the notion that the paint was the only fuel; it's not as if the hydrogen is expected to just sit still. The theory is not that the hydrogen didn't burn; it's just that the hydrogen wasn't the origin of the fire. When you consider that there was no oxygen in the baloon, then please explain to me how the fire started inside, without the skin burning.
I'm also interested to learn where this guy gets the 1000 times too slow number; that seems quite made up. To wit, without the cellulose base, the paint was basically a mix of iron oxide and aluminum powder in nearly equal proportions; many of us know that mix, once compressed, as thermite, and it does indeed burn very quickly when presented with a gaseous fuel source. I've seen phosphorus doped thermite burn a hundred foot line in three seconds; god only knows what it would do with hydrogen behind it, but the speeds I've seen are consistent with the thirty four second period in which the Zeppelin burned. Mind you, given the seperation between the aluminum and iron, you should be seeing about a twenty minute burn, which the paper referred to actually brings up as a point, but then dismisses, given that the hydrogen burning underneath the paint burns hot enough to ignite the paint and at a speed consistent with what's on film. Cellulose Acetate Butyrate is also quite flammable, as people which have worked in photo labs are pretty familiar with. Its ignition temperature is very low, and it will burn despite water, so the storm is effectively a non-issue.
This paper is extremely disappointing, and seems largely to be a diatribe against the other authors. It wastes huge tracts of space talking about the nature of proof, then makes a whole bunch of handwaving about rigorous analysis of the original paper's propositions. Unfortunately, that so-called rigorous analysis is anything but; you'll note that in fact none of the three principles examines are accurate, and that furthermore even were those three topics debunked the presumption of the paint as a liable source for flame is not actually damaged. Hell, one square inch of the zeppelin's skin burning would be enough to set the hydrogen off, and that's all the paper proposed; the document you've given acts as if they suggest
I had no malice or contempt towards my parent in my post, nor was I condescending.... Perhaps my tone was stern, but that's about it.
Something one often needs age to learn is that one's tone is frequently not what one intends for it to be. Arguing with the observer what the observed tone of one's own voice is is naïve.
Learning words from dictionaries works about as often as Bullwinkle pulling rabbits from his hat.
facile
1483, from M.Fr. facile "easy," from L. facilis "easy to do" and, of persons, "pliant, courteous," from facere "to do" (see factitious). Facilitate is from 1611.
facile princeps
1834, from L., lit. "easily first." An acknowledged leader or chief.
facility
c.1425, from M.Fr. facilité, from L. facilitatem, from facilis "easy" (see facile). Its sense in Eng. moved from "genteelness" to "opportunity" (1519), to "aptitude, ease" (1532). Meaning "place for doing something," which makes the word so beloved of journalists and fuzzy writers, first recorded 1872.
Please take a chemistry course. Oxygen and hydrogen don't just spontaneously form water. You have to nudge the solution over it's activation barrier before the two will react. Of course the activation barrier depends on many variables.
Whereas you are correct, your tone is utterly unwarranted. Converting hydrogen and oxygen to water can be accomplished many ways, one of which is burning, and given that essentially any planet with an atmosphere will generate lightning, it's pretty damned difficult to imagine a situation in which no water at all would be created.
As long as grandparent takes a chemistry course, you ought to consider a course in statistics.
Facile means "easily comprehended," or "presented in a pleasant form" (as opposed to a difficult form.) Exercises left to the reader are exercises for which the author could not or would not provide a facile explanation, for example.
Perhaps you meant "fallacious," given that grandparent was engaging in hasty generalization?
H2 (potential fuel panacea and, oh, what also blew the Hindenburg up)
This has been known to be false for about 15 years. If you look at a videotape of the Hindenburg fire, there's a very visible flame, especially right around when the announcer says "oh, the humanity!"
Hydrogen burns invisibly.
The History Channel has an interesting special covering this. It turns out that the problem was almost certainly the aluminum powder gel in cellulose that they used to waterproof and leakproof the canvas shell. This sounds like a good idea at first - that's basically antiperspirant - until you realize that that's also primitive rocket fuel. Any large spark would have set it off, and it would have burned like that no matter what it was full of.
It is fundamentally unprotectable. They're not stopping you from re-sequencing the genome. They're just saying that you have to pay for their copy. You can't copy the Yellow Pages either; you have to start from scratch.
Please make the distinction between copyrighting the data and copyrighting one instance of the data. I can copyright a photograph of a magnetic field, if I want to. That doesn't stop you from making one, but it does stop you from copying mine.
The only difference here is the tremendous cost and difficulty of sequencing the genome.
No. You cannot patent something you didn't create; the whole "patenting the human genome" thing is nonsense.
Celera spent the time to cateogrize and sort the reasings of thousands of human individuals into a comprehensive statistical analysis of the genome, and then sold the results.
They're no more evil than the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Close, but no cigar. Heisenberg here doesn't say it cannot be intercepted. Heisenberg says that intercepting the message changes the message; therefore with a careful encoding you cannot intercept the message without being detected.
This is a subtle but critically important difference.
The problem with global power standards is multifold.
1) There isn't one power rate which is ideal for all devices. Each power standard is a compromise.
2) The cost of replacing the existing national systems would be fantastic; the cost of replacing the dependant devices would be obscene.
3) Autos have never had a standard power; the notion that 12v is a standard is a misguided interpretation of the typical voltage of a car battery, which does not provide the electricity for a car, but rather for the starter motor. However, Geos use 10v batteries, trucks generally use 15s, and so on. At no point has that voltage been universal, and it's getting less so thanks to complex battery systems in hybrids.
which is unfortunate as that would be the obvious way to get wall current and convert it to low voltage which is apparently a NO NO.
Maybe nobody told you about transformers or capacitors? You did notice those AC supplies in the computer and those AC blocks for the laptops, right? Ever wonder what those do?
Besides, it's amperage and wattage we want to decrease, not voltage. Voltage should go up; that way less is lost to resistance. (Problematically, that requires upping the amperage, making the outlets more dangerous.)
Tesla's electrical transmitter towers aren't, unfortunately, practical past a few hundred feet, given that air is one of the best electrical insulators known (which is why it takes so large of a charge for a lightning bolt to arc to ground.) There's a reason that Edison won, despite the phenomenally higher cost of wire-based electrifaction; remember that Tesla had as much fame and popularity at the time, as well as the backing of major industrialists such as George Westinghouse and financiers such as Mellon and Carnegie.
In British English, yes. In American English, no. Data is a group plural, not a plural.
In British English, the populace want to be free. In American English, the populace wants to be free. Limeys think that a collection is a set; Yanks think it's a singular.
The interpretation of these results is fundamentally flawed. All number sequences, including "00000" (etc) are fully random. The study to which is being referred discusses the distribution of digits and digit sequences, which is a fundamentally different issue.
Pi was never thought to be random; in fact the idea that Pi is random is nonsense. However, the distribution of Pi's subsequences has long been under question, and in fact nobody has thought Pi's distribution was particularly even for quite some time.
The issue at hand is that there's no known way of addressing the characteristics of the complete sequence. We can talk about the distribution of the first N digits of Pi, but not of Pi itself. This study is just a confirmation of the expected results over the first chunk of the number.
He did a great job running Nintendo through the 90's but he's the reason they are falling so far behind
Actually, he's the reason they passed Microsoft up almost a year ago, with the drop of the GameCube to $100. Nintendo has closed the console gap with Sony to 7:1, the lowest it's been in six years.
bullshit, money has ZERO relation to fun. and games are fundamentally about fun. take a game like warioware for DS..quite the fun game, yet it didnt cost a fortune to make like GTA San AnSHITTYdreas.
WarioWare Touched cost roughly eight times what Mario Party 3 did to make, despite having roughly half as many games.
All the best intentions in the world don't make up for false statistics. Just because you don't think it takes money to make a game doesn't mean it doesn't actually take money to make a game; surprisingly, the industry has good businesspeople involved (most industries making double what hollywood does do, y'know) and would trim the fat if indeed there were fat to trim.
Besides, what does it matter what GTA cost to make? Dollar for dollar invested it's one of the most profitable games in history, obscene exceptions like Tetris aside.
He owns a tenth of the company. If the reinvestment of the money which would have been granted him makes itself back ten times over before he dies, which is virtually guaranteed, he makes a net profit.
The thing that killed the Dreamcast was the Microsoft tactic of "wait! Our console will slice bread, give you sex anytime you want, and make a lifelong companion!"
Microsoft hadn't even announced the X-Box by the time the Dreamcast's production had ceased. What you're probably (mis)remembering is the often repeated tale about how Sony killed the Dreamcast by announcing the specifications for the PlayStation 2 the day before the Dreamcast release.
Of course, anyone which remembers Nintendo doing that to Sega at the outset of the 16-bit wars should realize that that alone did not deal the death blow. Many believe the primary motivating factor in the death of the Dreamcast was the lack of software support; you will notice that it was successful for as long as it was the software dominant, and not a moment longer.
It is often repeated by game developers how good Sony has been to them, in contrast to Nintendo and Sega, and that many of said companies jumped ship specifically because of things like Nintendo's five game a year limit. By contrast, Microsoft is beginning to be as good to developers as Sony has been, and suddenly their shipping software rate is skyrocketting, despite that the platform itself is tanking.
Coincidence? You be the judge. Still, you can map the depth of Microsoft's in-the-redness directly as a correlation to their software presence by comparison with the PS2, right down to the quarter they were in the black being the only quarter their new software rate surpassed the PlayStation (mostly because of previous delayed titles clearing near-simultaneously.)
Of course, to topple a giant with the veteran name and experience of Sega, you need quite a bit more than one thing. The saturn/sega 32x debacle comes to mind, as do the early ship dates of the saturn and dreamcast (thereby making the platforms seem to have very little software.) Other missteps are available for inspection too.
Microsoft didn't exist as a console entity back then. They're no more responsible for the death of the Dreamcast than they are the 2600.
Wow... i'm impressed... when was the last time any other executive ever gave up a multi-million dollar severance package with the advice "it's best spent on something other than me"
As a 10% stockholder, chances are he will be reaping financial benefits from this action; it's nothing more than a long-term view.
That's the purpose of giving stock to board members and CEOs and so forth - it gives them a long-term interest, rather than focussing them on the bonusses associated with short-term gains.
As a computer programmer which does a variety of drugs, I find it difficult to choke down the reputation for shoddy causal coincidental reasoning that diatribes like this give us.
Here's a hint. Drugs don't make you a genius, and the people which think they understand things better on drugs are generally just overcoming personal inhibitions.
And how exactly you have gotten to the idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most powerful people in the world is beyond me. (Besides, there are far better examples; note for example that there has not been an American president which has not either been convicted of or admitted to using drugs in almost 100 years, alcohol notwithstanding, and counting alcohol none; throw tobacco into the mix and I'd be surprised if you could find two dozen in the total history of the Congress.)
George Bush wasn't president because he did boatloads of acid for the CIA, and George Bush (newer) isn't president because he snorted cocaine off of the side of a gun. Bill Clinton didn't make it to the White House on joints, and Arnold didn't make it to Governor on Roids. These people all had other things going for them.
Pot doesn't give me the ability to understand anything. It just makes me feel good, and makes my elbow and back stop hurting (thank god for proposition 215; it's not just for cheating stoners anymore.)
Stop making it sound like all drug users think drugs are a magical gateway to superior life and intelligence. Most of us know better, and you're embarrassing us.
Prior to mid-1970's, a typical "computer engineer" was wearing a necktie and lab overalls.
Uh, hardly. You should do some reading of history before making proclamations like these. The typical hardware engineer was a professor working in the California or New York college systems, both of which were largely dominated by left-wing liberals in the 1960s. Prior to the mid 1970s, computing was an esoteric enough practice that only a few hundred people could do it; therefore primadonnas were tolerated, and the suit and necktie essentially did not exist.
Look up the histories of SAIL, the Model Railroad Club or the Dreyfuss brothers' reactions to IBM's internal culture, if you'd like to see how things actually went.
Slashdot Mirror
I have problems with this "debunking" for many reasons. For example, one of the very first assertions it makes is that an electrical spark does not have the energy to light the paint aflame. This is borderline ridiculous: not only does the History Channel special show a tesla coil lighting a reproduction on fire while wet, but we're talking about a bolt of lighting, which is frequently in excess of fifty thousand degrees in temperature. The second thing claimed is that a spark could not jump in some arbitrary direction required by the theory, except of course that the theory does not actually demand any direction, and that sparks are not governed by directionality in any way. Besides, it's not as if this theory demands a spark at all; the most likely explanation for static ignition is the charge built up between ground and the skin's static potential moving through ionized air; the ramie cording guaranteed that that was all kept on the skin, and the frame structure was such that the charge would have been unevenly distributed towards the tail of the ship (there were in fact many eyewitness acounts of a tail glow on the ship, which many have speculated as Saint Elmo's Fire, which would be consistent with an immense ground potential charge being developed.) Whether or not the static charge caused the ignition, it's fairly transparent that the charge was there, and physical simulations suggest that the charge should have been huge.
Now, maybe it's just me, but when the History Channel has a NASA rocket fuel specialist saying that the paint is equivalent to primitive rocket fuel, and then some guy from a planetarium says "nuh-uh," I tend to believe the NASA guy. I'm not really sure where this guy gets the notion that the paint was the only fuel; it's not as if the hydrogen is expected to just sit still. The theory is not that the hydrogen didn't burn; it's just that the hydrogen wasn't the origin of the fire. When you consider that there was no oxygen in the baloon, then please explain to me how the fire started inside, without the skin burning.
I'm also interested to learn where this guy gets the 1000 times too slow number; that seems quite made up. To wit, without the cellulose base, the paint was basically a mix of iron oxide and aluminum powder in nearly equal proportions; many of us know that mix, once compressed, as thermite, and it does indeed burn very quickly when presented with a gaseous fuel source. I've seen phosphorus doped thermite burn a hundred foot line in three seconds; god only knows what it would do with hydrogen behind it, but the speeds I've seen are consistent with the thirty four second period in which the Zeppelin burned. Mind you, given the seperation between the aluminum and iron, you should be seeing about a twenty minute burn, which the paper referred to actually brings up as a point, but then dismisses, given that the hydrogen burning underneath the paint burns hot enough to ignite the paint and at a speed consistent with what's on film. Cellulose Acetate Butyrate is also quite flammable, as people which have worked in photo labs are pretty familiar with. Its ignition temperature is very low, and it will burn despite water, so the storm is effectively a non-issue.
This paper is extremely disappointing, and seems largely to be a diatribe against the other authors. It wastes huge tracts of space talking about the nature of proof, then makes a whole bunch of handwaving about rigorous analysis of the original paper's propositions. Unfortunately, that so-called rigorous analysis is anything but; you'll note that in fact none of the three principles examines are accurate, and that furthermore even were those three topics debunked the presumption of the paint as a liable source for flame is not actually damaged. Hell, one square inch of the zeppelin's skin burning would be enough to set the hydrogen off, and that's all the paper proposed; the document you've given acts as if they suggest
I had no malice or contempt towards my parent in my post, nor was I condescending. ... Perhaps my tone was stern, but that's about it.
Something one often needs age to learn is that one's tone is frequently not what one intends for it to be. Arguing with the observer what the observed tone of one's own voice is is naïve.
Learning words from dictionaries works about as often as Bullwinkle pulling rabbits from his hat.
facile
1483, from M.Fr. facile "easy," from L. facilis "easy to do" and, of persons, "pliant, courteous," from facere "to do" (see factitious). Facilitate is from 1611.
facile princeps
1834, from L., lit. "easily first." An acknowledged leader or chief.
facility
c.1425, from M.Fr. facilité, from L. facilitatem, from facilis "easy" (see facile). Its sense in Eng. moved from "genteelness" to "opportunity" (1519), to "aptitude, ease" (1532). Meaning "place for doing something," which makes the word so beloved of journalists and fuzzy writers, first recorded 1872.
Please take a chemistry course. Oxygen and hydrogen don't just spontaneously form water. You have to nudge the solution over it's activation barrier before the two will react. Of course the activation barrier depends on many variables.
Whereas you are correct, your tone is utterly unwarranted. Converting hydrogen and oxygen to water can be accomplished many ways, one of which is burning, and given that essentially any planet with an atmosphere will generate lightning, it's pretty damned difficult to imagine a situation in which no water at all would be created.
As long as grandparent takes a chemistry course, you ought to consider a course in statistics.
That is rather facile logic.
Facile means "easily comprehended," or "presented in a pleasant form" (as opposed to a difficult form.) Exercises left to the reader are exercises for which the author could not or would not provide a facile explanation, for example.
Perhaps you meant "fallacious," given that grandparent was engaging in hasty generalization?
H2 (potential fuel panacea and, oh, what also blew the Hindenburg up)
This has been known to be false for about 15 years. If you look at a videotape of the Hindenburg fire, there's a very visible flame, especially right around when the announcer says "oh, the humanity!"
Hydrogen burns invisibly.
The History Channel has an interesting special covering this. It turns out that the problem was almost certainly the aluminum powder gel in cellulose that they used to waterproof and leakproof the canvas shell. This sounds like a good idea at first - that's basically antiperspirant - until you realize that that's also primitive rocket fuel. Any large spark would have set it off, and it would have burned like that no matter what it was full of.
Again, we find information and data that SHOULD be in the public domain
Why should it? They spent tremendous amounts of effort and money discovering and cataloguing that data. Should the Brittanica be public domain?
You could always sequence the genome yourself; nobody's stopping you.
It is fundamentally unprotectable. They're not stopping you from re-sequencing the genome. They're just saying that you have to pay for their copy. You can't copy the Yellow Pages either; you have to start from scratch.
Please make the distinction between copyrighting the data and copyrighting one instance of the data. I can copyright a photograph of a magnetic field, if I want to. That doesn't stop you from making one, but it does stop you from copying mine.
The only difference here is the tremendous cost and difficulty of sequencing the genome.
No. You cannot patent something you didn't create; the whole "patenting the human genome" thing is nonsense.
Celera spent the time to cateogrize and sort the reasings of thousands of human individuals into a comprehensive statistical analysis of the genome, and then sold the results.
They're no more evil than the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Close, but no cigar. Heisenberg here doesn't say it cannot be intercepted. Heisenberg says that intercepting the message changes the message; therefore with a careful encoding you cannot intercept the message without being detected.
This is a subtle but critically important difference.
You know, by code he means "an encoding," not "a programming language snippet."
The problem with global power standards is multifold.
1) There isn't one power rate which is ideal for all devices. Each power standard is a compromise.
2) The cost of replacing the existing national systems would be fantastic; the cost of replacing the dependant devices would be obscene.
3) Autos have never had a standard power; the notion that 12v is a standard is a misguided interpretation of the typical voltage of a car battery, which does not provide the electricity for a car, but rather for the starter motor. However, Geos use 10v batteries, trucks generally use 15s, and so on. At no point has that voltage been universal, and it's getting less so thanks to complex battery systems in hybrids.
which is unfortunate as that would be the obvious way to get wall current and convert it to low voltage which is apparently a NO NO.
Maybe nobody told you about transformers or capacitors? You did notice those AC supplies in the computer and those AC blocks for the laptops, right? Ever wonder what those do?
Besides, it's amperage and wattage we want to decrease, not voltage. Voltage should go up; that way less is lost to resistance. (Problematically, that requires upping the amperage, making the outlets more dangerous.)
It's a lot easier to replace one hub than a building full of outlets and the devices dependant thereon.
Tesla's electrical transmitter towers aren't, unfortunately, practical past a few hundred feet, given that air is one of the best electrical insulators known (which is why it takes so large of a charge for a lightning bolt to arc to ground.) There's a reason that Edison won, despite the phenomenally higher cost of wire-based electrifaction; remember that Tesla had as much fame and popularity at the time, as well as the backing of major industrialists such as George Westinghouse and financiers such as Mellon and Carnegie.
In British English, yes. In American English, no. Data is a group plural, not a plural.
In British English, the populace want to be free. In American English, the populace wants to be free. Limeys think that a collection is a set; Yanks think it's a singular.
The interpretation of these results is fundamentally flawed. All number sequences, including "00000" (etc) are fully random. The study to which is being referred discusses the distribution of digits and digit sequences, which is a fundamentally different issue.
Pi was never thought to be random; in fact the idea that Pi is random is nonsense. However, the distribution of Pi's subsequences has long been under question, and in fact nobody has thought Pi's distribution was particularly even for quite some time.
The issue at hand is that there's no known way of addressing the characteristics of the complete sequence. We can talk about the distribution of the first N digits of Pi, but not of Pi itself. This study is just a confirmation of the expected results over the first chunk of the number.
It doesn't really say much, in effect.
He did a great job running Nintendo through the 90's but he's the reason they are falling so far behind
Actually, he's the reason they passed Microsoft up almost a year ago, with the drop of the GameCube to $100. Nintendo has closed the console gap with Sony to 7:1, the lowest it's been in six years.
Nintendo's catching up, fast, not falling behind.
bullshit, money has ZERO relation to fun. and games are fundamentally about fun. take a game like warioware for DS..quite the fun game, yet it didnt cost a fortune to make like GTA San AnSHITTYdreas.
WarioWare Touched cost roughly eight times what Mario Party 3 did to make, despite having roughly half as many games.
All the best intentions in the world don't make up for false statistics. Just because you don't think it takes money to make a game doesn't mean it doesn't actually take money to make a game; surprisingly, the industry has good businesspeople involved (most industries making double what hollywood does do, y'know) and would trim the fat if indeed there were fat to trim.
Besides, what does it matter what GTA cost to make? Dollar for dollar invested it's one of the most profitable games in history, obscene exceptions like Tetris aside.
He owns a tenth of the company. If the reinvestment of the money which would have been granted him makes itself back ten times over before he dies, which is virtually guaranteed, he makes a net profit.
It's simple business sense.
The thing that killed the Dreamcast was the Microsoft tactic of "wait! Our console will slice bread, give you sex anytime you want, and make a lifelong companion!"
Microsoft hadn't even announced the X-Box by the time the Dreamcast's production had ceased. What you're probably (mis)remembering is the often repeated tale about how Sony killed the Dreamcast by announcing the specifications for the PlayStation 2 the day before the Dreamcast release.
Of course, anyone which remembers Nintendo doing that to Sega at the outset of the 16-bit wars should realize that that alone did not deal the death blow. Many believe the primary motivating factor in the death of the Dreamcast was the lack of software support; you will notice that it was successful for as long as it was the software dominant, and not a moment longer.
It is often repeated by game developers how good Sony has been to them, in contrast to Nintendo and Sega, and that many of said companies jumped ship specifically because of things like Nintendo's five game a year limit. By contrast, Microsoft is beginning to be as good to developers as Sony has been, and suddenly their shipping software rate is skyrocketting, despite that the platform itself is tanking.
Coincidence? You be the judge. Still, you can map the depth of Microsoft's in-the-redness directly as a correlation to their software presence by comparison with the PS2, right down to the quarter they were in the black being the only quarter their new software rate surpassed the PlayStation (mostly because of previous delayed titles clearing near-simultaneously.)
Of course, to topple a giant with the veteran name and experience of Sega, you need quite a bit more than one thing. The saturn/sega 32x debacle comes to mind, as do the early ship dates of the saturn and dreamcast (thereby making the platforms seem to have very little software.) Other missteps are available for inspection too.
Microsoft didn't exist as a console entity back then. They're no more responsible for the death of the Dreamcast than they are the 2600.
Wow... i'm impressed... when was the last time any other executive ever gave up a multi-million dollar severance package with the advice "it's best spent on something other than me"
As a 10% stockholder, chances are he will be reaping financial benefits from this action; it's nothing more than a long-term view.
That's the purpose of giving stock to board members and CEOs and so forth - it gives them a long-term interest, rather than focussing them on the bonusses associated with short-term gains.
My opinion is that Nintendo's real "without this man there would be no company" person was Gumpei Yokoi.
and five franchises that sold more than five million. The Sims, Need for Speed, Madden NFL Football, FIFA, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter.
That's some good countin'.
As a computer programmer which does a variety of drugs, I find it difficult to choke down the reputation for shoddy causal coincidental reasoning that diatribes like this give us.
Here's a hint. Drugs don't make you a genius, and the people which think they understand things better on drugs are generally just overcoming personal inhibitions.
And how exactly you have gotten to the idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most powerful people in the world is beyond me. (Besides, there are far better examples; note for example that there has not been an American president which has not either been convicted of or admitted to using drugs in almost 100 years, alcohol notwithstanding, and counting alcohol none; throw tobacco into the mix and I'd be surprised if you could find two dozen in the total history of the Congress.)
George Bush wasn't president because he did boatloads of acid for the CIA, and George Bush (newer) isn't president because he snorted cocaine off of the side of a gun. Bill Clinton didn't make it to the White House on joints, and Arnold didn't make it to Governor on Roids. These people all had other things going for them.
Pot doesn't give me the ability to understand anything. It just makes me feel good, and makes my elbow and back stop hurting (thank god for proposition 215; it's not just for cheating stoners anymore.)
Stop making it sound like all drug users think drugs are a magical gateway to superior life and intelligence. Most of us know better, and you're embarrassing us.
Prior to mid-1970's, a typical "computer engineer" was wearing a necktie and lab overalls.
Uh, hardly. You should do some reading of history before making proclamations like these. The typical hardware engineer was a professor working in the California or New York college systems, both of which were largely dominated by left-wing liberals in the 1960s. Prior to the mid 1970s, computing was an esoteric enough practice that only a few hundred people could do it; therefore primadonnas were tolerated, and the suit and necktie essentially did not exist.
Look up the histories of SAIL, the Model Railroad Club or the Dreyfuss brothers' reactions to IBM's internal culture, if you'd like to see how things actually went.