Do you know that Facebook will have 1 shareholder with 55.8% of the voting shares?
I am pretty sure that Facebook is required to maximize the profit of all its investors, despite the fact that one investor holds a majority stake. As CEO, Zuckerberg does have a duty to all of Facebook's investors, not just his own vision...
I think, more accurately, that Zuckerberg has a duty to do what was promised in the IPO filings with the SEC. I haven't read them, so I don't know what's in there, but they could say he's planning to drive Facebook's share value to $0, and he'd have a legal obligation to try to do just that, and could be sued for trying to increase shareholder value.
Now, that would obviously be silly, but the serious point is that if the plans laid out for potential shareholders to read include a focus on maintaining user privacy, or even just a focus on long-term value over short term value, then Zuckerberg would not be obligated to monetize as hard as he can. Rather he'd be obligated to balance the competing goals in accordance with shareholder expectations (which are defined by the filings). Even if they don't contain anything like that, it's still no slam dunk that he has to do whatever he can to maximize short-term profits. Abusing users' privacy too badly will erode the user base, which will damage the company long term.
With all that said, the pattern that has been established is that Facebook takes two steps forward into user privacy abuse, then takes a half step back. Lather, rinse repeat. What I expect is for FB to continue pretty much exactly like it has, with the net effect being a gradual erosion.
I can see lots of great opportunties for combining photography with CGI. Take a bunch of still photographs (or perhaps a video) of your subject, use them to generate an accurate 3D model, then use CGI to generate the final image, free to play with lighting, depth of field, composition, etc., in post-processing.
Interesting. Google may have something similar... I've seen some references to an app for Google's employee buses. I don't live in an area where Google provides buses, so I've never looked into the details, but I should. It may be interesting.
Umm, schools are run and funded by the states, not the federal government (the topic of discussion here), and hospitals are already private businesses (some for-profit, some not-for-profit).
Perhaps you have a point, but you chose very poor examples.
The system you describe could be implemented just as well with human-operated vehicles. The presence or absence of a driver doesn't change it, though it does affect the economics a little. But even without driverless cars, we already have all the technology to do large-scale, automated vanpooling. The only question is how to build the necessary critical mass -- you have to have a significant number of people participating to provide enough options for the routing algorithms to make it really effective.
An intermediate step might be for a transit system to take a percentage of their buses, perhaps smaller buses, and make them "routeless". Eliminate standard routes and instead allow travelers to indicate their destination via a smartphone app. The phone knows where the person is and a sufficiently-capable back-end system could then dynamically produce routes on the fly, telling the travelers which way to walk and directing the bus to pick them up. It would be a hellacious optimization problem that would have to balance aggregate rider waiting time and against individual waiting time -- you want to maximize the effectiveness of the system as a whole, but without unduly inconveniencing any one person. Riders have to know that they'll always get where they're going in a reasonable amount of time or they won't use it.
But it should easily be more efficient than the common system of static routes, reducing rider waiting time, making better use of vehicle capacity and therefore reducing costs, etc. If people registered their travel requests well in advance, complete with their desired departure or arrival time, the system could also intelligently scale the number of vehicles operating. Parking unused buses rather than running them empty. And, of course, the most efficient size for a dynamically-routed vehicle would vary depending on rider usage patterns, so it would make sense to have a variety of sizes (though probably none as big as the standard city bus).
Anyway, my point is that these ideas about vehicle-sharing are feasible because of ubiquitous electronic communications technology, not because of driverless vehicle technology. Removing drivers just makes them a little more efficient.
Look at the top four states in the list: Massachusetts, Montana, North Dakota and Utah.
MA spends a lot, a little over $14K per pupil per year, as compared to CA's $9.6K. But MT and ND spend about the same as CA, and UT spends far less, at just over $6K per pupil. In fact, Utah is dead last in the 50 states in per pupil spending.
It's not about the money.
Oh, and before someone blames the immigrant population in CA, please keep in mind that other border states, especially AZ, NM and TX have similar issues.
In my case my ride to work is uphill. I said it takes me about 90 minutes each way, but the truth is that it takes me 1:45 to get to work and 1:15 to get home. In my case, though, with a couple of small exceptions, it's a long gradual slope. If yours is substantially steeper, that could be a killer. I do really enjoy the rides home, though -- there's a five-mile stretch where I can easily maintain 30+ MPH without pedaling hard.
I bike to work fairly regularly; it's 26 miles one-way. It does chew up an additional two hours each day I ride (takes about 90 minutes to ride it vs 30 minutes to drive it, one-way), but I also don't pay any money for a gym -- and if I did I probably wouldn't go much anyway. I certainly wouldn't get the amount of exercise that I do riding 150 miles per week.
Of course, that requires having both a bike and a car, so it's more about fitness and hoping the gas savings covers the bike expenses. Depending on the bike for 100% of my commuting isn't practical, sometimes I can't afford the time it takes and sometimes the weather is too bad.
I'm not sure what the point of my rambling is here except perhaps to say that you shouldn't let yourself be deterred by a 30 mile ride. If you can take the bus part way or something, that might make it easier to work up to doing the whole distance, and then maybe work up to riding the whole distance one-way (drive to work with your bike, then ride home, then the reverse the next day), until you get to where you can do the full round trip. I can do my round trip, but then I need a day to recover. Maybe by the end of the summer I can work up do riding the whole distance every day.
Interesting. Thanks. How far back do those sediment samples allow us to look? The only number I can find on the page is "hundreds of thousands of years, or even longer." So, less than a million years, it appears -- which is certainly valuable information, but doesn't allow us to say whether rapid climate change has happened before in the Earth's history, or how often, or why.
Another response to my post claimed that there is evidence of rapid sea level changes, on the order of "several meters in a decade or only a few", which could potentially counter your claim, assuming rapid sea level changes can only be a result of rapid climate change -- and assuming the claim is accurate and the evidence is solid.
It is very difficult to look at the Bush presidency - some of it including control of both houses of congress - and come away with a feeling that the Republicans represent fiscal discipline.
I don't think it's that difficult. You are just not trying.
Wow. That's about as bald an example of fact-picking as I think I've ever seen here. I'm no fan of Obama (or of Bush) -- in fact I've taken to calling them Obushma, because I really can't see much difference between them, but still... here's rest of the list from your link:
I agree that the Republicans don't represent the voice of fiscal conservatism. AFAICT there is no significant voice of fiscal conservatism in American politics today. If there were, we'd have people discussing how we're going to achieve and maintain a few hundred billion in annual surpluses, to begin paying down the debt.
never, ever have we been able to find that rate of change occurring over the course of a measly 100 years
If it had happened, would be be able to tell? Once you get further into the past than we can examine via ice cores and such, can we tell the difference between a change that took a day (i.e. massive catastrophe), or a century, or 10,000 years? My guess is that the answer is "not usually". I'd guess that there may be some cases in which we're lucky enough to have fossil records that provide sufficiently fine resolution to distinguish, but that geologic time scales being what they are, usually we just don't (and won't) have the data, so those "high-resolution" data points are sparse.
One of my favorite examples is git -- git doesn't do anything that several other distributed version control systems didn't do first, but git's primary innovation was to do it all hugely faster.
I use git (I actually use hg more, but same points apply, as they are extremely similar), and I love it, but I disagree that speed has anything to do with it. The biggest selling point, by far, is the fact that it is distributed.
As are all other distributed version control systems:-)
The fact that hg and git are faster is cool and all, but I just do not see it affecting that many users. I have worked in environments with 5-10 million lines of code running Visual Source Safe (*barf* not by choice, I swear) and not had any issues with performance.
And how much branching do you do in those other environments? That's what makes git different, the fact that it is feasible to use many branches, isolating each stream of work -- refactor, feature addition, bugfix, etc. -- switching between them at will and pulling bits and pieces into the master branch for submission upstream. It's the speed of these operations with git that makes it possible to work in an entirely different way.
Mercurial, BTW, is not fast enough to really effectively support this style of work, which is a big part of the reason I don't use it much.
The on-line Google Wallet has similarities to (and differences from) Paypal and Amazon. The NFC wallet does not. Nor is it anything like e-Gold or Flooz.
Also, at the time Google first came out, the prevailing sentiment was that search was a dead end, that there was just too much stuff out there and it was impossible for algorithms to figure out how to pick out the best pages for a query. So when everyone else was focused on building big curated directories of the Internet, Google's innovation showed that search could not only work well, it could work much better than directories.
There are times when a quantitative improvement in quality provides a qualitative difference in utility, and those are innovations. One of my favorite examples is git -- git doesn't do anything that several other distributed version control systems didn't do first, but git's primary innovation was to do it all hugely faster. So much faster that it improves productivity not just by reducing time spent waiting for the computer, but by actually changing the way people use the tool. Web search was drowning in crap results and everyone expected that as the web got bigger this problem would continue to grow, so search was doomed -- until Google showed that it wasn't, that in fact it's the most natural way for people to interact with huge volumes of dynamic data, if done well.
For that matter, Larry Page believes that Google has -- even today -- only solved about 10% of the search problem, and that there are huge opportunities for additional innovation in that space.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer. I don't work on search, or Drive. I mostly work on Google Wallet which is clearly a blatant ripoff of... er...)
Ok, as long as companies are at the same time prevented from using their funds for anything except their core business.
Nothing? No donations to charities, no funding of disaster relief efforts, no company sponsorship of community events, etc.? Google in particular does a huge amount of that kind of stuff.
no more donations to politicians
That I have no problem with.
no more company planes or ships
That's silly. What do we gain by forcing them to charter or fly commercial?
no benefits for stock owners
What benefits would those be?
Also raise capital gains taxes to the same level as income taxes.
Be careful there. You're going to hammer a lot of peoples' retirement accounts. Also, I assume you're talking about long-term capital gains rates, since I'm sure you know that short-term capital gains are already taxed as income. I think taxing long-term the same as short-term is a mistake, because it will significantly increase market volatility. I would say capital gains should be taxed on a sliding scale like income, but with rates that start lower (it should be zero at the lowest end -- those are mostly retired people) and increase more slowly, to preserve the tax benefits of holding investments longer.
A better answer is to stop trying to tax businesses and just tax people. Company profits eventually go to individuals, whether as paychecks (or other benefits) or as capital gains. Stop trying to double-dip, stop making corporations waste time and money on playing games with their income to minimize tax revenue and tax the actual people wherever they live. Simplification of the tax codes as applied to individuals would help reduce the ability to dodge there as well.
And if companies paid taxes on revenues, low-margin businesses would suddenly become completely non-viable -- or else they'd have to significantly raise their prices. And the same would happen with most of their suppliers, and their suppliers, on down the line, so the net effect would be a massive increase in prices on everyday goods and commodities. This would raise a lot of tax revenue of course... so much that the actual tax rate could probably be quite small -- which would mean that high-margin, labor-based businesses like Google would pay next to nothing!
No, taxation on revenue is nonsensical. The closest thing that makes a little bit of sense is a value-added tax -- which again approximates taxation on profits.
Slashdot Mirror
It can also penetrate fog and clouds
So it won't work very well in humid environments.
Fog and cloud are humid environments.
Do you know that Facebook will have 1 shareholder with 55.8% of the voting shares?
I am pretty sure that Facebook is required to maximize the profit of all its investors, despite the fact that one investor holds a majority stake. As CEO, Zuckerberg does have a duty to all of Facebook's investors, not just his own vision...
I think, more accurately, that Zuckerberg has a duty to do what was promised in the IPO filings with the SEC. I haven't read them, so I don't know what's in there, but they could say he's planning to drive Facebook's share value to $0, and he'd have a legal obligation to try to do just that, and could be sued for trying to increase shareholder value.
Now, that would obviously be silly, but the serious point is that if the plans laid out for potential shareholders to read include a focus on maintaining user privacy, or even just a focus on long-term value over short term value, then Zuckerberg would not be obligated to monetize as hard as he can. Rather he'd be obligated to balance the competing goals in accordance with shareholder expectations (which are defined by the filings). Even if they don't contain anything like that, it's still no slam dunk that he has to do whatever he can to maximize short-term profits. Abusing users' privacy too badly will erode the user base, which will damage the company long term.
With all that said, the pattern that has been established is that Facebook takes two steps forward into user privacy abuse, then takes a half step back. Lather, rinse repeat. What I expect is for FB to continue pretty much exactly like it has, with the net effect being a gradual erosion.
I can see lots of great opportunties for combining photography with CGI. Take a bunch of still photographs (or perhaps a video) of your subject, use them to generate an accurate 3D model, then use CGI to generate the final image, free to play with lighting, depth of field, composition, etc., in post-processing.
Baud is a measure of symbols per second, so it's meaningless unless the amount of information per symbol is defined.
In this case, it turns out that a symbol is a hexadecimal value, so the data rate is about 4 bits per second.
Interesting. Google may have something similar... I've seen some references to an app for Google's employee buses. I don't live in an area where Google provides buses, so I've never looked into the details, but I should. It may be interesting.
Let's just shut down schools, hospitals, and such
Umm, schools are run and funded by the states, not the federal government (the topic of discussion here), and hospitals are already private businesses (some for-profit, some not-for-profit).
Perhaps you have a point, but you chose very poor examples.
And my point is that NM and AZ scored much better than CA -- and pretty much always do!
The system you describe could be implemented just as well with human-operated vehicles. The presence or absence of a driver doesn't change it, though it does affect the economics a little. But even without driverless cars, we already have all the technology to do large-scale, automated vanpooling. The only question is how to build the necessary critical mass -- you have to have a significant number of people participating to provide enough options for the routing algorithms to make it really effective.
An intermediate step might be for a transit system to take a percentage of their buses, perhaps smaller buses, and make them "routeless". Eliminate standard routes and instead allow travelers to indicate their destination via a smartphone app. The phone knows where the person is and a sufficiently-capable back-end system could then dynamically produce routes on the fly, telling the travelers which way to walk and directing the bus to pick them up. It would be a hellacious optimization problem that would have to balance aggregate rider waiting time and against individual waiting time -- you want to maximize the effectiveness of the system as a whole, but without unduly inconveniencing any one person. Riders have to know that they'll always get where they're going in a reasonable amount of time or they won't use it.
But it should easily be more efficient than the common system of static routes, reducing rider waiting time, making better use of vehicle capacity and therefore reducing costs, etc. If people registered their travel requests well in advance, complete with their desired departure or arrival time, the system could also intelligently scale the number of vehicles operating. Parking unused buses rather than running them empty. And, of course, the most efficient size for a dynamically-routed vehicle would vary depending on rider usage patterns, so it would make sense to have a variety of sizes (though probably none as big as the standard city bus).
Anyway, my point is that these ideas about vehicle-sharing are feasible because of ubiquitous electronic communications technology, not because of driverless vehicle technology. Removing drivers just makes them a little more efficient.
with tests in states like California you have to look at how many students read and speak English well.
Meh. NM and AZ have similar immigrant populations.
Bah.
Look at the top four states in the list: Massachusetts, Montana, North Dakota and Utah.
MA spends a lot, a little over $14K per pupil per year, as compared to CA's $9.6K. But MT and ND spend about the same as CA, and UT spends far less, at just over $6K per pupil. In fact, Utah is dead last in the 50 states in per pupil spending.
It's not about the money.
Oh, and before someone blames the immigrant population in CA, please keep in mind that other border states, especially AZ, NM and TX have similar issues.
A friend of mine works in radiology research. He holds the same opinion.
I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Okay, if you prefer:
http://radiology.rsna.org/content/259/1/6.extract
http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/145/1/75
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/171/12/1129
http://www.propublica.org/article/scientists-cast-doubt-on-tsa-tests-of-full-body-scanners
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0267364908000708
Find me similar articles from professionals in the relevant fields and not associated with the TSA that say the opposite.
A friend of mine works in radiology research. He holds the same opinion.
In my case my ride to work is uphill. I said it takes me about 90 minutes each way, but the truth is that it takes me 1:45 to get to work and 1:15 to get home. In my case, though, with a couple of small exceptions, it's a long gradual slope. If yours is substantially steeper, that could be a killer. I do really enjoy the rides home, though -- there's a five-mile stretch where I can easily maintain 30+ MPH without pedaling hard.
I bike to work fairly regularly; it's 26 miles one-way. It does chew up an additional two hours each day I ride (takes about 90 minutes to ride it vs 30 minutes to drive it, one-way), but I also don't pay any money for a gym -- and if I did I probably wouldn't go much anyway. I certainly wouldn't get the amount of exercise that I do riding 150 miles per week.
Of course, that requires having both a bike and a car, so it's more about fitness and hoping the gas savings covers the bike expenses. Depending on the bike for 100% of my commuting isn't practical, sometimes I can't afford the time it takes and sometimes the weather is too bad.
I'm not sure what the point of my rambling is here except perhaps to say that you shouldn't let yourself be deterred by a 30 mile ride. If you can take the bus part way or something, that might make it easier to work up to doing the whole distance, and then maybe work up to riding the whole distance one-way (drive to work with your bike, then ride home, then the reverse the next day), until you get to where you can do the full round trip. I can do my round trip, but then I need a day to recover. Maybe by the end of the summer I can work up do riding the whole distance every day.
Interesting. Thanks. How far back do those sediment samples allow us to look? The only number I can find on the page is "hundreds of thousands of years, or even longer." So, less than a million years, it appears -- which is certainly valuable information, but doesn't allow us to say whether rapid climate change has happened before in the Earth's history, or how often, or why.
Another response to my post claimed that there is evidence of rapid sea level changes, on the order of "several meters in a decade or only a few", which could potentially counter your claim, assuming rapid sea level changes can only be a result of rapid climate change -- and assuming the claim is accurate and the evidence is solid.
Ah, that does make more sense than looking just at the White House.
However, I stand by my assertion that neither party represents fiscal responsibility. Somewhat different degrees of fiscal irresponsibility, perhaps.
It is very difficult to look at the Bush presidency - some of it including control of both houses of congress - and come away with a feeling that the Republicans represent fiscal discipline.
Deficits: FY 2007: $161 billion FY 2011: $1,300 billion
I don't think it's that difficult. You are just not trying.
Wow. That's about as bald an example of fact-picking as I think I've ever seen here. I'm no fan of Obama (or of Bush) -- in fact I've taken to calling them Obushma, because I really can't see much difference between them, but still... here's rest of the list from your link:
FY 2011: $1,300 billion (Obama)
FY 2010: $1,293 billion (Obama)
FY 2009: $1,413 billion (Bush)
FY 2008: $459 billion (Bush)
FY 2007: $161 billion (Bush)
I agree that the Republicans don't represent the voice of fiscal conservatism. AFAICT there is no significant voice of fiscal conservatism in American politics today. If there were, we'd have people discussing how we're going to achieve and maintain a few hundred billion in annual surpluses, to begin paying down the debt.
never, ever have we been able to find that rate of change occurring over the course of a measly 100 years
If it had happened, would be be able to tell? Once you get further into the past than we can examine via ice cores and such, can we tell the difference between a change that took a day (i.e. massive catastrophe), or a century, or 10,000 years? My guess is that the answer is "not usually". I'd guess that there may be some cases in which we're lucky enough to have fossil records that provide sufficiently fine resolution to distinguish, but that geologic time scales being what they are, usually we just don't (and won't) have the data, so those "high-resolution" data points are sparse.
One of my favorite examples is git -- git doesn't do anything that several other distributed version control systems didn't do first, but git's primary innovation was to do it all hugely faster.
I use git (I actually use hg more, but same points apply, as they are extremely similar), and I love it, but I disagree that speed has anything to do with it. The biggest selling point, by far, is the fact that it is distributed.
As are all other distributed version control systems :-)
The fact that hg and git are faster is cool and all, but I just do not see it affecting that many users. I have worked in environments with 5-10 million lines of code running Visual Source Safe (*barf* not by choice, I swear) and not had any issues with performance.
And how much branching do you do in those other environments? That's what makes git different, the fact that it is feasible to use many branches, isolating each stream of work -- refactor, feature addition, bugfix, etc. -- switching between them at will and pulling bits and pieces into the master branch for submission upstream. It's the speed of these operations with git that makes it possible to work in an entirely different way.
Mercurial, BTW, is not fast enough to really effectively support this style of work, which is a big part of the reason I don't use it much.
You do not give any indication that you are making a joke.
The on-line Google Wallet has similarities to (and differences from) Paypal and Amazon. The NFC wallet does not. Nor is it anything like e-Gold or Flooz.
Also, at the time Google first came out, the prevailing sentiment was that search was a dead end, that there was just too much stuff out there and it was impossible for algorithms to figure out how to pick out the best pages for a query. So when everyone else was focused on building big curated directories of the Internet, Google's innovation showed that search could not only work well, it could work much better than directories.
There are times when a quantitative improvement in quality provides a qualitative difference in utility, and those are innovations. One of my favorite examples is git -- git doesn't do anything that several other distributed version control systems didn't do first, but git's primary innovation was to do it all hugely faster. So much faster that it improves productivity not just by reducing time spent waiting for the computer, but by actually changing the way people use the tool. Web search was drowning in crap results and everyone expected that as the web got bigger this problem would continue to grow, so search was doomed -- until Google showed that it wasn't, that in fact it's the most natural way for people to interact with huge volumes of dynamic data, if done well.
For that matter, Larry Page believes that Google has -- even today -- only solved about 10% of the search problem, and that there are huge opportunities for additional innovation in that space.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer. I don't work on search, or Drive. I mostly work on Google Wallet which is clearly a blatant ripoff of... er...)
Ok, as long as companies are at the same time prevented from using their funds for anything except their core business.
Nothing? No donations to charities, no funding of disaster relief efforts, no company sponsorship of community events, etc.? Google in particular does a huge amount of that kind of stuff.
no more donations to politicians
That I have no problem with.
no more company planes or ships
That's silly. What do we gain by forcing them to charter or fly commercial?
no benefits for stock owners
What benefits would those be?
Also raise capital gains taxes to the same level as income taxes.
Be careful there. You're going to hammer a lot of peoples' retirement accounts. Also, I assume you're talking about long-term capital gains rates, since I'm sure you know that short-term capital gains are already taxed as income. I think taxing long-term the same as short-term is a mistake, because it will significantly increase market volatility. I would say capital gains should be taxed on a sliding scale like income, but with rates that start lower (it should be zero at the lowest end -- those are mostly retired people) and increase more slowly, to preserve the tax benefits of holding investments longer.
A better answer is to stop trying to tax businesses and just tax people. Company profits eventually go to individuals, whether as paychecks (or other benefits) or as capital gains. Stop trying to double-dip, stop making corporations waste time and money on playing games with their income to minimize tax revenue and tax the actual people wherever they live. Simplification of the tax codes as applied to individuals would help reduce the ability to dodge there as well.
And if companies paid taxes on revenues, low-margin businesses would suddenly become completely non-viable -- or else they'd have to significantly raise their prices. And the same would happen with most of their suppliers, and their suppliers, on down the line, so the net effect would be a massive increase in prices on everyday goods and commodities. This would raise a lot of tax revenue of course... so much that the actual tax rate could probably be quite small -- which would mean that high-margin, labor-based businesses like Google would pay next to nothing!
No, taxation on revenue is nonsensical. The closest thing that makes a little bit of sense is a value-added tax -- which again approximates taxation on profits.