...even if you disagree with him. He is putting his money where his mouth is and trying something new.
Yes he is a very wealthy man who can afford to squander a big chunk of his resources. There are very many people who could well afford to expend a small portion of their resources and try nothing.
There are easily ten of thousands of "serious" socialists who spin yarns about their beautiful ideas, ideas that a couple hundred of them could try to put into practice by pooling their resources and building a new kind of community on the embers of some rural town whose heyday is long past. But they do not try.
While in bankruptcy, refusing a higher offer for the patent portfolio would open up the corporate officers to be help personally liable for failure to uphold their fiduciary duty to their creditors. In theory this can be applied to a company in less dire straits, too, but suits on this point are rare.
I do suspect the $2 valuation is a gambit to shuffle to portfolio over to a fresh new patent troll business. It is such a nonsensically low value, it would be hard to believe that it makes sense for even garbage patents.
I would like to know when Google claimed they were a perfect company, rather than a company trying to do better, that has a ways to go in spite of their efforts so far.
It should not sit well with you. This system of class action suits is a very imperfect bandaid, yet still better than open bleeding wounds, at least it seems so to me.
The overall cheaper answer might be to have a regulator who can levy fines based on reasonable legislative guidance -- you do not need millions of dollars in lawyers fees to accomplish that, assuming you trust regulators to not be "overzealous". Of course, class action law specialists might be overzealous, too, but that is apparently more acceptable because it is monied people screwing each other over by gaming the system, rather than "big guvmint".
...but this ultimately seems like more of a large scale way to store energy produced via solar or wind power than a replacement for traditional batteries.
I think that is exactly right. This is probably not something that we would put in your garage, unless you are extremely serious about disaster prep and want to go off the grid, in which case you may be flexible on the price point to achieve your goals. This is primary a medium to large scale solution for smoothing out power generations wrinkles caused by weather or daily sun cycles.
Lead-acid batteries are very good under certain conditions, like short time scales and no weight costs. The question is whether there are other technologies that are better at slightly or significantly longer times scales.
So, yeah, if you are storing electricity that you know you are using tonight, probably lead-acid is the way to go. But is it really the best way if you are saving for a cloudy day a week away? Two weeks? That is what this system is shooting for.
You just need to manage a thermal sink, i.e. a circulating relatively large volume of water, so that your compressed air and uncompressed air end up at similar temperatures.
Theirs was not a great love affair. It was regular and habitual rape. A slave can't give consent because a slave isn't free to reject. We don't allow prison inmates to "consent" to sexual relations with prison guards for the same reason.
Until the 20th century approximately every married woman was a piece of property, much like the livestock, with little or no legal recourse or protection for any physical abuse (short of being the victim of actual murder). So it was not just Sally Jennings to whom this broad brushstroke reasoning applies to, but Abigail Adams and Martha Washington and Mary Todd Lincoln, too.
Perhaps you do know enough exact specifics to come to some conclusion about Sally and Thomas, but most people do not and I do not -- I admit it. Yes, the status of slavery in the relationship makes me suspicious, but I am not coming to any firm conclusion on that basis alone.
There is a certain kind of magical fantasy that metal machines are better. Well, they are better at some things, particularly physically demanding things. But the evidence they are better at all things is lacking.
The extreme is the fantasy of creating nanobots. Well, for all practical purposes, nanobots have existed for a very long time, albeit we are only beginning to figure out how to "program" them: viruses, bacteria, archaea, fungi.
While we may make smaller and smaller machines, it is entirely possible (heck, I would say, likely) that bacteria are already hyperefficient far beyond what a man made machine will ever achieve.
At last, they will be able to walk directly toward and into the best Asian restaurant within 3 blocks, and get the last seat before the bumbling fool desperately finger-fumbling their smartphone of yesteryear. That's the vision anyway. Oh, and of course you can do your own plumbing.
"Best Asian restaurant" means what? I am afraid it will really mean the one that gives the biggest kickback to the company you are leasing your glasses software from. (Which is not to say it will be a bad restaurant, because they surely are willing to pay more if they are good enough to get repeat business. But "best" is a non-falsifiable claim.)
The last one is intriguing, but I think it will prove easier to replace doctors with software than plumbers. It is a worthy futuristic idea, I agree.
Next up: mining malware that installs a legitimate copy of McAfee antivirus on your computer.
That is funny but it is only barely a joke. I remember reading several years ago about a virus that was found to have its own anti-virus functionality -- presumably to improve/protect the performance of the infected machine so that it owner was less likely to have it wiped or tossed in the trash.
Blacks, whites, asians, hispanics are all more or less integrated in the same society, have the same school standards etc.
That is a huge assumption, right there. Maybe the differences in culture matter, even if they are also "not nice" to talk about?
So what I see is a big swindle in the underlying argument. "Oh, you liberals do not want to talk about either culture or race contributing here. So I will concede the question of culture and jump to the conclusion it absolutely has to be genetics because logic." Bullshit logic makes for bullshit conclusion.
I do not think it is difficult to prove differences between groups within the same race in terms of education outcomes, religion, gun ownership, voting patterns. No one finds it strange to say "city folk and country folk are different, for both good and ill". Nobody finds it strange to say that sub-cultures within, say, caucasians do matter for certain outcomes.
You are provably wrong. One only need crack open a math textbook or look at the Math SAT to see lots of language that is not "math".
Thank you getting so easily "triggered" and feeling the need to go for namecalling so easily -- it lets me know that you are incapable of intelligent discussion right away.
I do not doubt that loss of power is a factor, but there is a very real question of whether the business is willing to make the investments and stay the course long enough that the end result is worth the trouble. Skepticism here can be very rational.
"Proper metrics" that cannot be gamed are very expensive. It is not just the rubrics, but building a culture that works with the rubrics. If you think "proper metrics" will simply work by virtue of their awesomeness, you are definitely doomed.
They removed the French and became self-governing with a "made" nation to start with. It quickly fell apart into the hellhole it is today. This is what you would expect and is by no means an anomaly.
That Haiti failed is not a mystery. Any new nation under those circumstances would be likely to fail. It might of been a success but France and its best prospective trading partner very much wanted it to fail.
But you are not interested enough about the topic to investigate their history at all, just looking at the color of their skin is all you need to know, apparently.
Let's consider the example of Greece, literally the origin of what we assert is much of the secret sauce of Western awesomeness. Why is Greece not as prosperous as Germany or France or England? Think history and poverty and education and culture of the past and present could possibly affect the likely outcomes in the future?
Math is potentially much less culturally biased. Math as it exists is written in a specific unusual language, which is definitely not even "mainstream English-speaking American culture".
Asserting that culture and language cannot matter is very obviously wrong.
If I plunked you down in an advanced math course in Beijing along with Chinese of similar academic background to you, do you believe you would perform nearly as well as the locals? Why not? Think language and culture just might contribute to your difficulties?
Most big corporations are incorporated in Delaware, and have their actual headquarters somewhere else, e.g. Silicon Valley. In general a state court or federal court will accept jurisdiction if there is "significant" commercial presence within the region.
Obviously it has to be possible or there would not be favorite courts for, say, plaintiffs filing suits over patent violations.
If you, say, bought a widget via Amazon from a non-big business in another state, I have my doubts that things will work out for you though.
I like this one: "People have names." I would find it hard to believe that anyone has no name at all, but I can easily imagine everyone in the immediate family disagreeing what the name is.
Apparently in the Middle East, it is common to refer to someone by personal relation. So in one context I might be "Bin Muhammad" which means "We all know that Muhammed guy (not to be confused with the other 9 Muhammeds we mutually know), and this is his son". And in another context, the same person would be "Abu Hossein" which is "we all know that particular Hossein and this is his father". And, of course, this person does have a personal name, but may or may not have a "family/last" name.
And I like this one: "Ok, but the duration of one minute on the system clock will be pretty close to the duration of one minute on most other clocks." It would almost be cheating to invoke VMs, but how completely insane an OS running on a resourced starved VM can easily be underestimated. (And, asking the OS on the VM how it is doing may give complete nonsense.)
Surely there is a way to do very small betas and get useful feedback, rather than roll the dice on a big release. That Microsoft effs up is almost forgivable. That a company like Snapchat does I just do not see the excuse. Snapchat has so very little to offer its customers except convenience and user satisfaction.
While broadly disseminated memos to employees and "all hands meetings" may be officially company secrets, as a practical matter it will eventually get to the public, and any CEO who acts/believes otherwise is inviting negative scrutiny, including from the SEC.
One unix idiot... idiot because I considered him a friend, until he started bullying me in some jobs... once said: "it is so easy! Just schedule everything in UT!" What he did not grasp is: everything is scheduled in UTC. But you nevertheless want one day in the year to see your whole day as a 25h day, and the other day in the year you want to see your whole day as a 23h day...
What makes time extra difficult is that so many people assume that time is easy. And because people mistakenly assume it is easy, even very very smart people whom you would probably say are reasonably careful will get it wrong surprisingly often. Having a big brain and making a good guess is not good enough here.
It matters "only" in the sense that the difference between involuntary manslaughter and premeditated murder matters.
Parnell seems to be able to make the argument that he put more than a fair amount of work in. So in the court of law this is a purely civil affair in which a KS participant might well be able to sue to get their money back. If it were actual fraud, there would be a juicy argument for punitive damages and lawyer fees.
As it is, assuming the facts put forth by Parnell are close enough to true, even if you put in 1000 bucks, you would be an idiot to sue.
It is perhaps true that a liiiittle bit of friction helps "memory retention", but I question whether memory retention is really so important.
The real point of education is become skilled at: processing information, building conceptual schemas, and re-building those schemas to become even better with more input, etc.
To get to my real point, if I am spending more effort while reading processing the font, is that improving my ability to memorize facts at a cost of interfering with schema building in the moment? Because better retention of facts may not come for free.
And psychologists are not the people who would know how to test that. I would look to education researchers instead (which uses psychology as one of its tools, but is not the same field).
Indeed. Some people always have a knee jerk reaction to blame the unions. In most cases of these troubled companies the unions did make big concessions already, only to see 20-30% of the money the workers give up go directly into bigger C-level bonuses. So when management comes around a second or third(!) time and says "you need to give up even more, and it looks like those pensions that should already be paid for don't exist -- your fault for not giving up more earlier" it should be no surprise that an honest worker would dig in their heels. There is no real reason anymore to believe playing nice, yet again, with such overt swindlers will save the company.
Slashdot Mirror
...even if you disagree with him. He is putting his money where his mouth is and trying something new.
Yes he is a very wealthy man who can afford to squander a big chunk of his resources. There are very many people who could well afford to expend a small portion of their resources and try nothing.
There are easily ten of thousands of "serious" socialists who spin yarns about their beautiful ideas, ideas that a couple hundred of them could try to put into practice by pooling their resources and building a new kind of community on the embers of some rural town whose heyday is long past. But they do not try.
This man is trying.
Indeed.
While in bankruptcy, refusing a higher offer for the patent portfolio would open up the corporate officers to be help personally liable for failure to uphold their fiduciary duty to their creditors. In theory this can be applied to a company in less dire straits, too, but suits on this point are rare.
I do suspect the $2 valuation is a gambit to shuffle to portfolio over to a fresh new patent troll business. It is such a nonsensically low value, it would be hard to believe that it makes sense for even garbage patents.
I would like to know when Google claimed they were a perfect company, rather than a company trying to do better, that has a ways to go in spite of their efforts so far.
No doubt you can easily find a citation, right?
It should not sit well with you. This system of class action suits is a very imperfect bandaid, yet still better than open bleeding wounds, at least it seems so to me.
The overall cheaper answer might be to have a regulator who can levy fines based on reasonable legislative guidance -- you do not need millions of dollars in lawyers fees to accomplish that, assuming you trust regulators to not be "overzealous". Of course, class action law specialists might be overzealous, too, but that is apparently more acceptable because it is monied people screwing each other over by gaming the system, rather than "big guvmint".
...but this ultimately seems like more of a large scale way to store energy produced via solar or wind power than a replacement for traditional batteries.
I think that is exactly right. This is probably not something that we would put in your garage, unless you are extremely serious about disaster prep and want to go off the grid, in which case you may be flexible on the price point to achieve your goals. This is primary a medium to large scale solution for smoothing out power generations wrinkles caused by weather or daily sun cycles.
Lead-acid batteries are very good under certain conditions, like short time scales and no weight costs. The question is whether there are other technologies that are better at slightly or significantly longer times scales.
So, yeah, if you are storing electricity that you know you are using tonight, probably lead-acid is the way to go. But is it really the best way if you are saving for a cloudy day a week away? Two weeks? That is what this system is shooting for.
You just need to manage a thermal sink, i.e. a circulating relatively large volume of water, so that your compressed air and uncompressed air end up at similar temperatures.
Theirs was not a great love affair. It was regular and habitual rape. A slave can't give consent because a slave isn't free to reject. We don't allow prison inmates to "consent" to sexual relations with prison guards for the same reason.
Until the 20th century approximately every married woman was a piece of property, much like the livestock, with little or no legal recourse or protection for any physical abuse (short of being the victim of actual murder). So it was not just Sally Jennings to whom this broad brushstroke reasoning applies to, but Abigail Adams and Martha Washington and Mary Todd Lincoln, too.
Perhaps you do know enough exact specifics to come to some conclusion about Sally and Thomas, but most people do not and I do not -- I admit it. Yes, the status of slavery in the relationship makes me suspicious, but I am not coming to any firm conclusion on that basis alone.
Indeed.
There is a certain kind of magical fantasy that metal machines are better. Well, they are better at some things, particularly physically demanding things. But the evidence they are better at all things is lacking.
The extreme is the fantasy of creating nanobots. Well, for all practical purposes, nanobots have existed for a very long time, albeit we are only beginning to figure out how to "program" them: viruses, bacteria, archaea, fungi.
While we may make smaller and smaller machines, it is entirely possible (heck, I would say, likely) that bacteria are already hyperefficient far beyond what a man made machine will ever achieve.
At last, they will be able to walk directly toward and into the best Asian restaurant within 3 blocks, and get the last seat before the bumbling fool desperately finger-fumbling their smartphone of yesteryear. That's the vision anyway. Oh, and of course you can do your own plumbing.
"Best Asian restaurant" means what? I am afraid it will really mean the one that gives the biggest kickback to the company you are leasing your glasses software from. (Which is not to say it will be a bad restaurant, because they surely are willing to pay more if they are good enough to get repeat business. But "best" is a non-falsifiable claim.)
The last one is intriguing, but I think it will prove easier to replace doctors with software than plumbers. It is a worthy futuristic idea, I agree.
Next up: mining malware that installs a legitimate copy of McAfee antivirus on your computer.
That is funny but it is only barely a joke. I remember reading several years ago about a virus that was found to have its own anti-virus functionality -- presumably to improve/protect the performance of the infected machine so that it owner was less likely to have it wiped or tossed in the trash.
Blacks, whites, asians, hispanics are all more or less integrated in the same society, have the same school standards etc.
That is a huge assumption, right there. Maybe the differences in culture matter, even if they are also "not nice" to talk about?
So what I see is a big swindle in the underlying argument. "Oh, you liberals do not want to talk about either culture or race contributing here. So I will concede the question of culture and jump to the conclusion it absolutely has to be genetics because logic." Bullshit logic makes for bullshit conclusion.
I do not think it is difficult to prove differences between groups within the same race in terms of education outcomes, religion, gun ownership, voting patterns. No one finds it strange to say "city folk and country folk are different, for both good and ill". Nobody finds it strange to say that sub-cultures within, say, caucasians do matter for certain outcomes.
You are provably wrong. One only need crack open a math textbook or look at the Math SAT to see lots of language that is not "math".
Thank you getting so easily "triggered" and feeling the need to go for namecalling so easily -- it lets me know that you are incapable of intelligent discussion right away.
I do not doubt that loss of power is a factor, but there is a very real question of whether the business is willing to make the investments and stay the course long enough that the end result is worth the trouble. Skepticism here can be very rational.
"Proper metrics" that cannot be gamed are very expensive. It is not just the rubrics, but building a culture that works with the rubrics. If you think "proper metrics" will simply work by virtue of their awesomeness, you are definitely doomed.
They removed the French and became self-governing with a "made" nation to start with. It quickly fell apart into the hellhole it is today. This is what you would expect and is by no means an anomaly.
That Haiti failed is not a mystery. Any new nation under those circumstances would be likely to fail. It might of been a success but France and its best prospective trading partner very much wanted it to fail.
But you are not interested enough about the topic to investigate their history at all, just looking at the color of their skin is all you need to know, apparently.
Let's consider the example of Greece, literally the origin of what we assert is much of the secret sauce of Western awesomeness. Why is Greece not as prosperous as Germany or France or England? Think history and poverty and education and culture of the past and present could possibly affect the likely outcomes in the future?
Math is potentially much less culturally biased. Math as it exists is written in a specific unusual language, which is definitely not even "mainstream English-speaking American culture".
Asserting that culture and language cannot matter is very obviously wrong.
If I plunked you down in an advanced math course in Beijing along with Chinese of similar academic background to you, do you believe you would perform nearly as well as the locals? Why not? Think language and culture just might contribute to your difficulties?
Most big corporations are incorporated in Delaware, and have their actual headquarters somewhere else, e.g. Silicon Valley. In general a state court or federal court will accept jurisdiction if there is "significant" commercial presence within the region.
Obviously it has to be possible or there would not be favorite courts for, say, plaintiffs filing suits over patent violations.
If you, say, bought a widget via Amazon from a non-big business in another state, I have my doubts that things will work out for you though.
(IANAL, of course.)
Thank you, those are awesome.
I like this one: "People have names."
I would find it hard to believe that anyone has no name at all, but I can easily imagine everyone in the immediate family disagreeing what the name is.
Apparently in the Middle East, it is common to refer to someone by personal relation. So in one context I might be "Bin Muhammad" which means "We all know that Muhammed guy (not to be confused with the other 9 Muhammeds we mutually know), and this is his son". And in another context, the same person would be "Abu Hossein" which is "we all know that particular Hossein and this is his father". And, of course, this person does have a personal name, but may or may not have a "family/last" name.
And I like this one: "Ok, but the duration of one minute on the system clock will be pretty close to the duration of one minute on most other clocks."
It would almost be cheating to invoke VMs, but how completely insane an OS running on a resourced starved VM can easily be underestimated. (And, asking the OS on the VM how it is doing may give complete nonsense.)
Surely there is a way to do very small betas and get useful feedback, rather than roll the dice on a big release. That Microsoft effs up is almost forgivable. That a company like Snapchat does I just do not see the excuse. Snapchat has so very little to offer its customers except convenience and user satisfaction.
While broadly disseminated memos to employees and "all hands meetings" may be officially company secrets, as a practical matter it will eventually get to the public, and any CEO who acts/believes otherwise is inviting negative scrutiny, including from the SEC.
You two, rock!
Stay asleep.
One unix idiot ... idiot because I considered him a friend, until he started bullying me in some jobs ... once said: "it is so easy! Just schedule everything in UT!" What he did not grasp is: everything is scheduled in UTC. But you nevertheless want one day in the year to see your whole day as a 25h day, and the other day in the year you want to see your whole day as a 23h day ...
What makes time extra difficult is that so many people assume that time is easy. And because people mistakenly assume it is easy, even very very smart people whom you would probably say are reasonably careful will get it wrong surprisingly often. Having a big brain and making a good guess is not good enough here.
It matters "only" in the sense that the difference between involuntary manslaughter and premeditated murder matters.
Parnell seems to be able to make the argument that he put more than a fair amount of work in. So in the court of law this is a purely civil affair in which a KS participant might well be able to sue to get their money back. If it were actual fraud, there would be a juicy argument for punitive damages and lawyer fees.
As it is, assuming the facts put forth by Parnell are close enough to true, even if you put in 1000 bucks, you would be an idiot to sue.
It is perhaps true that a liiiittle bit of friction helps "memory retention", but I question whether memory retention is really so important.
The real point of education is become skilled at: processing information, building conceptual schemas, and re-building those schemas to become even better with more input, etc.
To get to my real point, if I am spending more effort while reading processing the font, is that improving my ability to memorize facts at a cost of interfering with schema building in the moment? Because better retention of facts may not come for free.
And psychologists are not the people who would know how to test that. I would look to education researchers instead (which uses psychology as one of its tools, but is not the same field).
Indeed. Some people always have a knee jerk reaction to blame the unions. In most cases of these troubled companies the unions did make big concessions already, only to see 20-30% of the money the workers give up go directly into bigger C-level bonuses. So when management comes around a second or third(!) time and says "you need to give up even more, and it looks like those pensions that should already be paid for don't exist -- your fault for not giving up more earlier" it should be no surprise that an honest worker would dig in their heels. There is no real reason anymore to believe playing nice, yet again, with such overt swindlers will save the company.