No, you're confusing two different things. The pinwheel house cost $5925 to build. It was not part of the MIT $1K house project. Rather, it inspired the project. The goal of the MIT project is to produce designs that can be built for only $1000.
No, the reason has nothing to do with that. The actual reason they only pay 15% is that they successfully lobbied congress (and spread around lots of campaign donations) to get the government to lower their tax rates. Of course, people retroactively came up with justifications for why forms of income that mainly benefit the wealthy should be taxed at lower rates than forms of income that mainly benefit the poor and middle class. But don't mistake that for the real reason. It's nothing but a rationalization. If some other kind of income had been more important to the wealthy, they would have invented a reason to cut taxes on that instead.
The problem, at least as I understand it from reading the linked article, is that the system will be completely schizophrenic. There will be metro apps that don't support resizing or overlapping windows, and that only run in the metro environment. And there will be conventional apps that do support movable, resizeable, overlapping windows, and that only run on the desktop environment. And you have to actively switch between the two environments. If you want to have some applications of each type, both running at once, both on the screen at the same time... sorry, you're out of luck.
Maybe it will turn out that's not really correct. Maybe the two types of applications will work together nicely and share the screen without problem. But at the moment, it certainly looks like this could be the case, and that's got a lot of people worried.
What about Go?
Go is a very promising systems-programming language in the vein of C++. We fully hope and expect that Go becomes the standard back-end language at Google over the next few years. Dash is focused on client (and eventually Front-end server development). The needs there are different (flexibility vs. stability) and therefore a different programming language is warranted.
IANAL, but really, this is one of those basic principles of law: if you know someone is committing a crime, and you don't report them, then you are guilty. Maybe not of precisely the same crime they are committing (it depends where you live, what they're doing, etc.), but you are almost certainly guilty of something.
My advice: get out of there. You really don't want to be connected to this person.
It's not a courtroom defense. Objectively speaking, your brain did make you do it, but so what? Metaphysical questions about souls and free will are completely outside the realm of the law. The proper goal of the legal system is not to assign moral blame, but to promote social welfare by enforcing certain standards of conduct.
The "insanity defense" is not based on the idea that insane people are allowed to commit crimes. It's based on the idea that in some cases, it's more useful to send someone to a mental hospital than a prison. Then there's the idea of "temporary insanity", which is based on the idea that in exceptional situations, even a healthy, well meaning person cannot control their actions, so there is no social benefit to punishing them.
Could you elaborate on that? What are your reasons for thinking that? It seems to me that emergent gravity is an obvious conclusion from the holographic principle. I'm not a gravitational theorist and I don't claim to fully understand these things. But as far as I understand it, the holographic principle basically says that a really complicated theory with explicit gravity is exactly equivalent to a much simpler theory without explicit gravity. Given that, it seems obvious to conclude that the simpler theory is more fundamental, and the complex parts of the other theory are just emergent properties.
I get frustrated whenever I read someone saying this sort of thing: "Software patents aren't inherently bad. It's just that the patent office doesn't review them well and grants a lot of low quality patents." Wrong wrong wrong. The patent office could do a perfect job, and software patents would still be a monstrosity that had no business existing. Ditto for business method patents. Consider:
1. Software patents do not encourage innovation. They never have, and quite likely never will. The software industry was doing a great job of innovating before software patents were ever legalized, and all the innovation that has happened since then was in spite of software patents, not because of them.
2. Software patents do a huge amount of harm. This is slashdot, so I assume I don't need to convince anyone of that. Just look at the billions of dollars being wasted by patent lawsuits in the mobile phone industry right now.
3. Software patents simply function as a protection racket for patent lawyers. The idea that every hobbyist programmer or three person company developing iPhone apps should be required to hire a patent lawyer to make sure they aren't violating any patents is just absurd. There are literally tens of millions of people in that position. But that's exactly what the patent lawyers (and the courts) claim is true.
Perhaps some day society or the software industry will change so much that software patents actually make sense - so that, as the US constitution demands, they serve "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." But at present, they don't do that, and they have no business existing.
So I can say, "The Bible is actually a proof of Fermat's last theorem, because I'm using it to represent that," and everything is resolved?
Um... no.:)
It doesn't work that way. Words are useful precisely because we all agree on what they mean. And when everyone has agreed on what words mean, and then you use them to mean something different, you're not saying something profound. You're just confusing people by speaking a language of your own invention that sounds just like English, but actually is different.
No. What you say is completely false. Read the patent and see for yourself. (It will only take you a minute - it consists almost entirely of pictures.) You will not find any sunflower in it, any cartoon bubble, any envelope against a cloudy sky, or anything like that. What you'll find are very generic outlines of a tablet, where the front face is mostly taken up by a touch screen. And absolutely nothing else. That's the entire content of the patent. That's what this is about.
Like I said: I don't think that word means what you think it means! Or to put it differently: I just looked up the word "true" in two different dictionaries, and neither of them included a meaning that matched the way you're using the word.
The Lord of the Rings is not "true". It is a work of fiction. It may contain "realistic" or "lifelike" depictions of characters. It may reflect truths about the human condition. But the work, in and of itself, is not true.
If you want to use that word to mean something different than most people do, that's your choice. Words are just symbols, and they can mean whatever we use them to mean. Just remember that your definition doesn't match any of the ways most people use it, and if you claim that "the Bible is true", many people will object, and they're completely right to do so.
Read it. Decide what part of it (none, some, most, all) you believe
This is precisely the thing I most object to about religion: the idea that you're free to pick whatever beliefs you want. That any belief is as good as any other, and whatever you decide to believe is fine.
A belief that is not based on evidence is a belief that is probably false. Here is what you should have said: "Read it. Study the evidence related to it: how and when it was written, how it has evolved over the years, other evidence that supports or contradicts what it says. Decide what belief is best supported by the evidence." If you haven't studied the evidence, you have no business picking a belief. The only honest thing to do is to accept that you have insufficient basis for reaching a decision. And if you have studied the evidence, you are not free to go against the evidence and believe whatever you want. That is not honest either.
Hm. My signature quote seems to be oddly appropriate for this post.
Religion: Something that people believe is true (but not because it's supported by evidence)
Mythology: Something people used to believe as religion, but no one does anymore (or at least, no one you care about offending)
Fiction: Something no one ever even claimed was true
Fiction and mythology contain useful and popular cultural stories. Aesop's fables are fiction. Santa Claus is fiction (except among small children). Greco-Roman myths are mythology. Political party platforms are a strange mix of religion and logic, and the religious parts are precisely the parts that are least valuable and most harmful.
In fact, mythology is precisely what you get when you take religion and remove the most harmful aspects of it: the irrational parts that ask people to believe things without (or in spite of) evidence.
The 6-day creation account is "true" as an explanation of the moral order of the universe, no matter how long it took to make the universe. And, of course, it's "true" as a reminder of the ultimate spiritual authority.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.:)
If the world was not actually created as described in Genesis, then the account is false. It is not "true" as an explanation of anything. You may draw certain conclusions from reading that account, and those conclusions may or may not be true, but it is certainly not valid to draw those conclusions based on the false account. If they are true, it's for some other reason. They are not true because of the false account given in Genesis, and therefore that account is not a "true" explanation of why they are true.
I agree there's some judgement involved in measuring bug opportunities, but I was basically considering three factors: what sort of mistakes the language either makes impossible or catches early, verbosity (because the more code you have to write, the more mistakes you're likely to make), and readability (because the harder your code is to read, the less likely you are to spot the mistakes). I think C++ does worse than Java on all three counts. It's quite a bit more verbose, and I think most people would agree it's less readable (though this is clearly a matter of personal judgement). And there are a lot of mistakes that are possible in C++ but not in Java. It doesn't have bounds checking on arrays. (It does on STL collections, but those checks get removed if you compile with optimizations.) It has pointers, which are a huge bag of worms. (A good C++ programmer tries to avoid pointers when possible, but sometimes you can't.) It's weakly typed, allowing you to make all sorts of mistakes that would be impossible in Java. And so on.
Yes, if you know what you're doing you can work around these problems, but it takes a lot of experience and discipline. There is, so far as I know, exactly one way to do memory management well in C++, and about a hundred ways to do it badly.
Oops! Silly me for leaving out C! Thanks for catching it.
Being suitable for system programming is certainly one of Microsoft's original stated goals for C#. That's why they included the ability to manipulate pointers, call native functions, etc. I'm not saying it's a good language for the purpose, just as I'm not saying C++ is a good language for... well, much of anything.:) But you can certainly do system programming in C#, whereas it would be basically impossible in Java or Python.
People tend to lump lots of things as if they were all the same thing, but they're really completely independent:
Does the language run in a virtual machine, or is compiled down to native assembly in advance?
Is memory management done explicitly, or is there a garbage collector?
Does it allow direct access to memory (necessary for some parts of system programming)?
Does it check for common errors, such as going past the ends of arrays?
There are garbage collectors for C++. C# runs in a virtual machine, but still permits direct access to memory. STL collections in C++ check for out of bounds indices. So here is how I would categorize different languages, roughly ordered from "most native" to "most managed":
C++: Incredibly complex, lots of bug opportunities, very verbose, very fast, suitable for system programming
D: Some complex, some bug opportunities, some verbose, very fast, suitable for system programming
Objective C: Some complex, some bug opportunities, some verbose, fast, suitable for system programming
C#: Some complex, some bug opportunities, some verbose, fast, suitable for system programming
Java: Some complex, some bug opportunities, some verbose, fast, not suitable for system programming
Scala: Very complex, few bug opportunities, not at all verbose, fast, not suitable for system programming
Python: Fairly simple, some bug opportunities, not at all verbose, slow, not suitable for system programming
To be fair, there are a lot of small nations out there, and most of them don't get invaded very often. Sure, the US navy could show up and take them over, but why would they do that? They'd get a lot of bad publicity, and really, there's very little for them to gain.
According to the article, their first project will be an office park off the coast of San Francisco. It will be purely commercial - no one will live there. So everyone working there will live in the US. Guess what? You live in the US, you pay taxes in the US! So much for the perfect libertarian kingdom.
Once they start building "countries" where people actually live, things get even thornier. If you live there, what country will you be a citizen of? If you're a citizen of that tiny country that hardly any other country recognizes, good luck if you want to travel to... well, pretty much anywhere. I don't think your passport will be worth much. But if you just live there while holding citizenship in another country, then you're still subject to all that country's laws.
This is so true. Like the OP I'm nearing 40, yet it would never occur to me to ask if I'm "too old to learn" something. Learning new things is one of my very favorite parts of my job. In the last two years alone, I've learned CUDA, OpenCL, Android, and I'm now working on Python. If I had a job that never let me learn new things, I would find it maddeningly boring.
As Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
I've worked in enough environments to know how different they can be from each other. Yes, I spent a few years in a large company just like you describe. Everything was about politics. Management was incompetent, doing anything about it was impossible, trying to convince them they were making bad decisions just got you cited for your "bad attitude", and everyone's main goal was to keep their head down, protect their turf, and try to move up the ladder.
I've also worked in fantastic environments were everyone was competent, everyone respected each other, and we were all working together for common goals. If your workplace isn't like that, find another one. Don't make excuses for it or say, "That's just how things are," because that's not how things are everywhere. It took me a year and a half of being miserable before I made the decision to leave my large company, but I'm so glad I did. I now look back on those years like a bad dream from which I've since awakened.
And if you're in management, remember that you are responsible for shaping your company's culture. If everyone under you seems negative, if they're just interested in telling you things can't be done or have to be done differently, don't blame them; blame yourself. People act that way when they're in an environment that encourages them to behave that way. As a manager, you have enormous power to shape that environment. I've seen time and again how much difference a manager can make. When employees question their manager's decisions, a good manager sees this as a sign of involved employees who care about the direction of the business. A bad manager sees it as a sign of bad morale. The good manager engages the employees in responding to the criticisms, which leads to good morale. The bad manager blows them off, or worse, faults them for speaking up, which leads to genuine bad morale.
How is this different from the delivery man who phones you up on the delivery day to say, "I'll be there about 2:00?" You're getting the notification on the day of delivery, and I'm sure he's taking historical information (his own experience) into account when generating the estimate. Ok, it's a human rather than a computer, but a human brain is functionally equivalent to a computer in this situation. Simply substituting an electronic computer for a biological one does not make something patentable. The electronic computer needs to be doing something fundamentally different from what the human was doing.
For those who don't want to read the actual paper: they conclude that the average number of detectable collision events is <1.6, with a 68% confidence. Or to put it differently, the data is consistent with there not being any detectable collisions at all, and the number is certainly no more than a handful.
They should be able to say more once they get new data from the Planck satellite.
Two arbitrary lines in a 2D plane will meet with probability 1.0.
Two arbitrary planes in a 3D space will meet with probability 1.0.
Two arbitrary N-1 dimensional slices through an N dimensional space will meet with probability 1.0.
But of course, universes are not lines, planes, or anything of the sort. And the question is not, "Will two arbitrary universes collide," but rather, "What is the average number of collisions a universe will experience with the infinite other universes in the multiverse?"
Although terms like that are pretty common, they often are legally invalid. That's certainly the case in California. I once actually worked for a company that gave me two pieces of paper. One said, "Anything you have ever written in your entire life belongs to us, even if it has nothing to do with your job here." The other one said, "Regardless of that other piece of paper you just signed, California law says the company has no rights to your work unless it's closely related to your job, or you used significant company resources in creating it." This is why it's so important to get a lawyer. They'll know what rights you really have.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're confusing two different things. The pinwheel house cost $5925 to build. It was not part of the MIT $1K house project. Rather, it inspired the project. The goal of the MIT project is to produce designs that can be built for only $1000.
No, the reason has nothing to do with that. The actual reason they only pay 15% is that they successfully lobbied congress (and spread around lots of campaign donations) to get the government to lower their tax rates. Of course, people retroactively came up with justifications for why forms of income that mainly benefit the wealthy should be taxed at lower rates than forms of income that mainly benefit the poor and middle class. But don't mistake that for the real reason. It's nothing but a rationalization. If some other kind of income had been more important to the wealthy, they would have invented a reason to cut taxes on that instead.
Can someone explain to me what advantage this is supposed to have over a credit card? What problem are they trying to solve?
The problem, at least as I understand it from reading the linked article, is that the system will be completely schizophrenic. There will be metro apps that don't support resizing or overlapping windows, and that only run in the metro environment. And there will be conventional apps that do support movable, resizeable, overlapping windows, and that only run on the desktop environment. And you have to actively switch between the two environments. If you want to have some applications of each type, both running at once, both on the screen at the same time... sorry, you're out of luck.
Maybe it will turn out that's not really correct. Maybe the two types of applications will work together nicely and share the screen without problem. But at the moment, it certainly looks like this could be the case, and that's got a lot of people worried.
What about Go?
Go is a very promising systems-programming language in the vein of C++. We fully hope and expect that Go becomes the standard back-end language at Google over the next few years. Dash is focused on client (and eventually Front-end server development). The needs there are different (flexibility vs. stability) and therefore a different programming language is warranted.
IANAL, but really, this is one of those basic principles of law: if you know someone is committing a crime, and you don't report them, then you are guilty. Maybe not of precisely the same crime they are committing (it depends where you live, what they're doing, etc.), but you are almost certainly guilty of something.
My advice: get out of there. You really don't want to be connected to this person.
It's not a courtroom defense. Objectively speaking, your brain did make you do it, but so what? Metaphysical questions about souls and free will are completely outside the realm of the law. The proper goal of the legal system is not to assign moral blame, but to promote social welfare by enforcing certain standards of conduct.
The "insanity defense" is not based on the idea that insane people are allowed to commit crimes. It's based on the idea that in some cases, it's more useful to send someone to a mental hospital than a prison. Then there's the idea of "temporary insanity", which is based on the idea that in exceptional situations, even a healthy, well meaning person cannot control their actions, so there is no social benefit to punishing them.
I think gravity ISN'T entropic
Could you elaborate on that? What are your reasons for thinking that? It seems to me that emergent gravity is an obvious conclusion from the holographic principle. I'm not a gravitational theorist and I don't claim to fully understand these things. But as far as I understand it, the holographic principle basically says that a really complicated theory with explicit gravity is exactly equivalent to a much simpler theory without explicit gravity. Given that, it seems obvious to conclude that the simpler theory is more fundamental, and the complex parts of the other theory are just emergent properties.
I get frustrated whenever I read someone saying this sort of thing: "Software patents aren't inherently bad. It's just that the patent office doesn't review them well and grants a lot of low quality patents." Wrong wrong wrong. The patent office could do a perfect job, and software patents would still be a monstrosity that had no business existing. Ditto for business method patents. Consider:
1. Software patents do not encourage innovation. They never have, and quite likely never will. The software industry was doing a great job of innovating before software patents were ever legalized, and all the innovation that has happened since then was in spite of software patents, not because of them.
2. Software patents do a huge amount of harm. This is slashdot, so I assume I don't need to convince anyone of that. Just look at the billions of dollars being wasted by patent lawsuits in the mobile phone industry right now.
3. Software patents simply function as a protection racket for patent lawyers. The idea that every hobbyist programmer or three person company developing iPhone apps should be required to hire a patent lawyer to make sure they aren't violating any patents is just absurd. There are literally tens of millions of people in that position. But that's exactly what the patent lawyers (and the courts) claim is true.
Perhaps some day society or the software industry will change so much that software patents actually make sense - so that, as the US constitution demands, they serve "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." But at present, they don't do that, and they have no business existing.
So I can say, "The Bible is actually a proof of Fermat's last theorem, because I'm using it to represent that," and everything is resolved?
:)
Um... no.
It doesn't work that way. Words are useful precisely because we all agree on what they mean. And when everyone has agreed on what words mean, and then you use them to mean something different, you're not saying something profound. You're just confusing people by speaking a language of your own invention that sounds just like English, but actually is different.
No. What you say is completely false. Read the patent and see for yourself. (It will only take you a minute - it consists almost entirely of pictures.) You will not find any sunflower in it, any cartoon bubble, any envelope against a cloudy sky, or anything like that. What you'll find are very generic outlines of a tablet, where the front face is mostly taken up by a touch screen. And absolutely nothing else. That's the entire content of the patent. That's what this is about.
Like I said: I don't think that word means what you think it means! Or to put it differently: I just looked up the word "true" in two different dictionaries, and neither of them included a meaning that matched the way you're using the word.
The Lord of the Rings is not "true". It is a work of fiction. It may contain "realistic" or "lifelike" depictions of characters. It may reflect truths about the human condition. But the work, in and of itself, is not true.
If you want to use that word to mean something different than most people do, that's your choice. Words are just symbols, and they can mean whatever we use them to mean. Just remember that your definition doesn't match any of the ways most people use it, and if you claim that "the Bible is true", many people will object, and they're completely right to do so.
Read it. Decide what part of it (none, some, most, all) you believe
This is precisely the thing I most object to about religion: the idea that you're free to pick whatever beliefs you want. That any belief is as good as any other, and whatever you decide to believe is fine.
A belief that is not based on evidence is a belief that is probably false. Here is what you should have said: "Read it. Study the evidence related to it: how and when it was written, how it has evolved over the years, other evidence that supports or contradicts what it says. Decide what belief is best supported by the evidence." If you haven't studied the evidence, you have no business picking a belief. The only honest thing to do is to accept that you have insufficient basis for reaching a decision. And if you have studied the evidence, you are not free to go against the evidence and believe whatever you want. That is not honest either.
Hm. My signature quote seems to be oddly appropriate for this post.
Religion: Something that people believe is true (but not because it's supported by evidence)
Mythology: Something people used to believe as religion, but no one does anymore (or at least, no one you care about offending)
Fiction: Something no one ever even claimed was true
Fiction and mythology contain useful and popular cultural stories. Aesop's fables are fiction. Santa Claus is fiction (except among small children). Greco-Roman myths are mythology. Political party platforms are a strange mix of religion and logic, and the religious parts are precisely the parts that are least valuable and most harmful.
In fact, mythology is precisely what you get when you take religion and remove the most harmful aspects of it: the irrational parts that ask people to believe things without (or in spite of) evidence.
The 6-day creation account is "true" as an explanation of the moral order of the universe, no matter how long it took to make the universe. And, of course, it's "true" as a reminder of the ultimate spiritual authority.
I don't think that word means what you think it means. :)
If the world was not actually created as described in Genesis, then the account is false. It is not "true" as an explanation of anything. You may draw certain conclusions from reading that account, and those conclusions may or may not be true, but it is certainly not valid to draw those conclusions based on the false account. If they are true, it's for some other reason. They are not true because of the false account given in Genesis, and therefore that account is not a "true" explanation of why they are true.
I agree there's some judgement involved in measuring bug opportunities, but I was basically considering three factors: what sort of mistakes the language either makes impossible or catches early, verbosity (because the more code you have to write, the more mistakes you're likely to make), and readability (because the harder your code is to read, the less likely you are to spot the mistakes). I think C++ does worse than Java on all three counts. It's quite a bit more verbose, and I think most people would agree it's less readable (though this is clearly a matter of personal judgement). And there are a lot of mistakes that are possible in C++ but not in Java. It doesn't have bounds checking on arrays. (It does on STL collections, but those checks get removed if you compile with optimizations.) It has pointers, which are a huge bag of worms. (A good C++ programmer tries to avoid pointers when possible, but sometimes you can't.) It's weakly typed, allowing you to make all sorts of mistakes that would be impossible in Java. And so on.
Yes, if you know what you're doing you can work around these problems, but it takes a lot of experience and discipline. There is, so far as I know, exactly one way to do memory management well in C++, and about a hundred ways to do it badly.
Oops! Silly me for leaving out C! Thanks for catching it.
:) But you can certainly do system programming in C#, whereas it would be basically impossible in Java or Python.
Being suitable for system programming is certainly one of Microsoft's original stated goals for C#. That's why they included the ability to manipulate pointers, call native functions, etc. I'm not saying it's a good language for the purpose, just as I'm not saying C++ is a good language for... well, much of anything.
People tend to lump lots of things as if they were all the same thing, but they're really completely independent:
Does the language run in a virtual machine, or is compiled down to native assembly in advance?
Is memory management done explicitly, or is there a garbage collector?
Does it allow direct access to memory (necessary for some parts of system programming)?
Does it check for common errors, such as going past the ends of arrays?
There are garbage collectors for C++. C# runs in a virtual machine, but still permits direct access to memory. STL collections in C++ check for out of bounds indices. So here is how I would categorize different languages, roughly ordered from "most native" to "most managed":
C++: Incredibly complex, lots of bug opportunities, very verbose, very fast, suitable for system programming
D: Some complex, some bug opportunities, some verbose, very fast, suitable for system programming
Objective C: Some complex, some bug opportunities, some verbose, fast, suitable for system programming
C#: Some complex, some bug opportunities, some verbose, fast, suitable for system programming
Java: Some complex, some bug opportunities, some verbose, fast, not suitable for system programming
Scala: Very complex, few bug opportunities, not at all verbose, fast, not suitable for system programming
Python: Fairly simple, some bug opportunities, not at all verbose, slow, not suitable for system programming
To be fair, there are a lot of small nations out there, and most of them don't get invaded very often. Sure, the US navy could show up and take them over, but why would they do that? They'd get a lot of bad publicity, and really, there's very little for them to gain.
According to the article, their first project will be an office park off the coast of San Francisco. It will be purely commercial - no one will live there. So everyone working there will live in the US. Guess what? You live in the US, you pay taxes in the US! So much for the perfect libertarian kingdom.
Once they start building "countries" where people actually live, things get even thornier. If you live there, what country will you be a citizen of? If you're a citizen of that tiny country that hardly any other country recognizes, good luck if you want to travel to... well, pretty much anywhere. I don't think your passport will be worth much. But if you just live there while holding citizenship in another country, then you're still subject to all that country's laws.
This is so true. Like the OP I'm nearing 40, yet it would never occur to me to ask if I'm "too old to learn" something. Learning new things is one of my very favorite parts of my job. In the last two years alone, I've learned CUDA, OpenCL, Android, and I'm now working on Python. If I had a job that never let me learn new things, I would find it maddeningly boring.
As Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
I've worked in enough environments to know how different they can be from each other. Yes, I spent a few years in a large company just like you describe. Everything was about politics. Management was incompetent, doing anything about it was impossible, trying to convince them they were making bad decisions just got you cited for your "bad attitude", and everyone's main goal was to keep their head down, protect their turf, and try to move up the ladder.
I've also worked in fantastic environments were everyone was competent, everyone respected each other, and we were all working together for common goals. If your workplace isn't like that, find another one. Don't make excuses for it or say, "That's just how things are," because that's not how things are everywhere. It took me a year and a half of being miserable before I made the decision to leave my large company, but I'm so glad I did. I now look back on those years like a bad dream from which I've since awakened.
And if you're in management, remember that you are responsible for shaping your company's culture. If everyone under you seems negative, if they're just interested in telling you things can't be done or have to be done differently, don't blame them; blame yourself. People act that way when they're in an environment that encourages them to behave that way. As a manager, you have enormous power to shape that environment. I've seen time and again how much difference a manager can make. When employees question their manager's decisions, a good manager sees this as a sign of involved employees who care about the direction of the business. A bad manager sees it as a sign of bad morale. The good manager engages the employees in responding to the criticisms, which leads to good morale. The bad manager blows them off, or worse, faults them for speaking up, which leads to genuine bad morale.
How is this different from the delivery man who phones you up on the delivery day to say, "I'll be there about 2:00?" You're getting the notification on the day of delivery, and I'm sure he's taking historical information (his own experience) into account when generating the estimate. Ok, it's a human rather than a computer, but a human brain is functionally equivalent to a computer in this situation. Simply substituting an electronic computer for a biological one does not make something patentable. The electronic computer needs to be doing something fundamentally different from what the human was doing.
For those who don't want to read the actual paper: they conclude that the average number of detectable collision events is <1.6, with a 68% confidence. Or to put it differently, the data is consistent with there not being any detectable collisions at all, and the number is certainly no more than a handful.
They should be able to say more once they get new data from the Planck satellite.
Two arbitrary lines in a 2D plane will meet with probability 1.0.
Two arbitrary planes in a 3D space will meet with probability 1.0.
Two arbitrary N-1 dimensional slices through an N dimensional space will meet with probability 1.0.
But of course, universes are not lines, planes, or anything of the sort. And the question is not, "Will two arbitrary universes collide," but rather, "What is the average number of collisions a universe will experience with the infinite other universes in the multiverse?"
So what's your point?
Although terms like that are pretty common, they often are legally invalid. That's certainly the case in California. I once actually worked for a company that gave me two pieces of paper. One said, "Anything you have ever written in your entire life belongs to us, even if it has nothing to do with your job here." The other one said, "Regardless of that other piece of paper you just signed, California law says the company has no rights to your work unless it's closely related to your job, or you used significant company resources in creating it." This is why it's so important to get a lawyer. They'll know what rights you really have.