You can pick up various forms of flash for less. They have the benefit of being smaller, and potentially less likely to fail (less moving parts). You can grab a 512MB chip for about $25 retail now, so I'd imagine something integrated to the board would be cheaper, slightly both because you're buying in bulk with less middlemen, and because you wont need some of the stuff that retail package provides (software, manual, etc).
The board they're using has both CF, IDE and USB. I suspect they'll be moving to CF unless they can get their own board designed cheaply enough to warrant moving to an integrated Flash chip. The board they've picked has video display hardware and sound hardware. Assuming they don't have future plans for those parts, they could shave off a few dollars by excluding them.
If you're an engineer practicing on behalf of a single company, you're entitled to an "industrial exemption," at least in the state laws I've read. EEs working for Motorola don't need to be a PE. The company takes the liability, not the engineer. Businesses actively make a decision to place time to market over correctness, over "security." Forcing liability on people engaged in development is stupid and causes inevitable friction between the developer and the business who's hired him and ten others. If you don't agree that the software is secure... well, if you're lucky you'll be transferred to another department. The only thing that personal liability solves is how to enact liability without killing off companies immediately. This way, they'll last for five years before nobody wants to work in the field.
Furthermore, what happens when a company simply decides to ship a product against your will? Without the power to approve or disapprove a product, liability is a win-lose situation that never flips.
There's a number of possibilities, ranging from someone forging the initial email to jackpeace@comcast.net not being jack thompson, aka john b thompson attorney at law.
Interestingly enough, the company that made Lemmings was what we now know as Rockstar North (formerly DMA Design). Ever since inception they've been promoting violence and an Orwellian authoritarian lifestyle that goes against those most American principles I hold dear: Life, Liberty and Apple Pie.
Naturally, one can find Jack's phone number on Jack's own site! How can you discuss something like this when linking to the opposing viewpoint is an incitement to harass?
I'm also not entirely convinced that the vgcats conversation wasn't some prank call done through email.
Ironically, this is the same guy who made it possible for us to run ANYTHING on the DS at all! I suspect this was motivated by a disdain for unethical uses of his original software, that allows one to run both commercial games and "homebrewn" demos. This nonsense about signatures doesn't really solve the problem. So some guy signs his code; do you trust him?
If anything, this demonstrates the in-viability of the passMe mechanism and flashable firmwares.
You're acting as though shareholders never squabble amongst themselves. The worker coop idea is interesting within the knowledge worker domain, but there's always the battle between returning profits and investing them for the future. If anything, it simply magnifies this shareholder dispute between growth and returns on investment.
Furthermore, how do you divide up ownership of the profits? Are those not allowed? Do we simply allocate by hours spent on the job, or must we engage in a squabble about who's time is more valuable, who's smarter, who contributed more to paying startup costs, who has seniority, and who's more efficient? How do you organize and lead that cooperative? Do the workers have the right to leave the company and liscence the work they contributed to?
Unless some couple can actually give birth to more boys than girls genetically (ie the expected outcome naturally favors boys) then there's no way for the population to really change in that direction.
The "i feel like a genius" puzzle answer is that half the population stops at one girl, half has one boy and continues on.
G =.5 B =.5
The next step is to consider the half the population left. Half of that half has one boy and continues and half has one girl and stops.
G =.5 +.25 B =.5 +.25
Each time, half the population goes on to distribute their genes equally between boys and girls. So unless there is some natural selection that says perhaps "families with more boys will survive longer to reproduce" then the genetic predisposition will remain at 1:1. Not very insightful. As somebody smarter than I said, "For every problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong."
Which only goes to prove that PCIe was not a limiting factor behind 3d graphics technology. Especially when you're cramming half a gigabyte of RAM on the board.
Assume that the workers should own the means of production. Unions promote the status quo, without actually reaching that ideal. The good news is that the cost of starting up your own company and making games can be incredibly low. Every year several people leave EA and all the other big players to start their own company. This form of socialization I think works much better in the end than a union, who's interests are promoting their own existance and resisting changes to industry practices. What the industry needs more of is cheaper, faster and more equal access to consumers. Coming from a fairly socialist/communistic viewpoint, capitalism and entrepeneurship appear to maximize the social value.
Companies like EA have become large through vertical integration; they have developed retail channels to sell their products in, and it's not easy to get shelf space without EA or someone like EA. The internet helps solve the problem, as Valve is discovering. Whether we end up with a surplus of internet distribution methods for games or whether we get one or two is up to Valve, gamers, and the employees out there with the motivation to do what they want to do for THEMSELVES.
This could be the best thing that happened to the internet. With no more Eurotrash suggesting how inferior the American government is and practicing their english skills by denouncing George Bush on random forums, we'll have that much more time to spend inventing things for Europeans to liberalize. It's a win win situation!
The panel of scientists, huh? Let's see, I can become a laywer and have some billable hour rate of 300 dollars for a company after a couple years of law school. Or I can become a doctor, and make even more, for a lot more school. (not trying to compare or belittle either profession here). Or I can become a scientist, and make a meager research assistant's wage. Let's be real about the market here. One chemist might cost you the same as five in China, but I deeply suspect that research assistants make about the same wage. If you want to motivate people into the field, convince them its a FEASIBLE endevor; raise wages! Scholarships are interesting, but I'd rather see Congress put that money to use employing students in fields of their endevor if anything. Paying people to be scientists will be more useful than paying them to become one. Jobless scientists can just as easily get into law school as anyone else;)
America is in no danger of losing it's competitive advantage to China, however. Academic progress requires freedom of communication and a number of personal liberties. When you're worried about how a distributed voting system for embedded processor communications might be percieved politically now and in ten years, there's definately an inhibiting factor in research. Economically, the american system very much favors startups and entrepenuers compared to most of the rest of the world. Japan is ruled by the keiretsu, large conglomerates glued together by a Life Insurance company. China is theoretically a communist country, although we've seen significant shifts in intriguing directions. India is struggling with it's own poverty and population crisis, but if you were scared you could simply begin easing citizenship for Indian engineers, programmers and scientists and India would be starved for engineers again.
Recap: if you want more scientists, find ways to help them make more money. Pay your research assistants more. Offer entrepenuership classes for engineers and scientists. Relax the consulting constraints on professors at academic institutions. The war on ignorance and poverty begins at home.
Too bad Ubuntu's servers are taking a beating right now. Update manager is crying in pain because half of the repositories I had listed aren't responding anymore.
Which is why, combined with the inevitable release mistakes, I usually wait a week or two before upgrading. As nifty as open betas are, they arent likely to expose the same hardware and package combo problems as I use. But once it's "released" there almost has to be somebody using Ubuntu in a similar manner to myself. So I wait for all the Day 1 bugs to appear, and watch them get workarounds and fixes. Then I upgrade;).
If the crazy ass instructor/composer/genius my high school orchestra director brought in is reliable, then actually, it's quite accurate. Said crazy-man claimed the Tango was invented in Central and South America as a form of dance between the male laborers that migrated to earn money to send home. Massive influx of men but no women lead to: two men to Tango!
Remember, the man is totally crazy. I believe this is actually a requirement in the handbook of teaching music theory in two hour lectures to high school students in your time off from composing and conducting pieces with a professional orchestra.
Firstly, I specifically outlied in the VERY FIRST sentence that there was an economic definition that is different from practical implementations.
Secondly, as I understand it, when a monopoly gives something away for free, presumed to be a subset of "below cost," it only makes business sense if they can raise the prices once the competitors are gone. If a product is on the market for x dollars, and they lose x dollars per sale on monopoly enforcing discount, then they need at least as many sales at y + x, where y is the cost to manufacture. But wait a minute; at price x there was plenty of competition that needed to be eliminated. Now we have an even bigger incentive, which should generate MORE competition. The more important question, is when we have a natural monopoly, where one company is capable of producing a good or service far cheaper than actual and potential competitors. Nobel winning economists have suggested that state regulated monopolies are better because they're easier to reverse.
That doesn't mean I don't support antitrust laws; coersive monopolies do indeed hurt consumers. I think the particular business you have in mind could have been cured by simple enforcement of business practice laws already on the book. Netscape didn't die because Microsoft gave their software away. They died because they couldn't sell their server anymore. You could just as easily blame Apache as MSFT on that. MSFT, however, has been engaged in numourous sharp business tactics, and broken existing fair laws on a number of occasions. I suppose we could repeal the antitrust laws, but I'd rather start by removing the US federally granted monopolies, like baseball and mail. Japan is in the process of breaking up their mail monopoly, in part because it has grown to be one of the largest companies in the world (some ten trillion in assets).
Economically, maybe. Practically, no. Dumping laws are aimed at foreign producers. Microsoft, being a company developing software in America, probably can't be hit for importing product cheaper than its domestic competitors can (a common metric for dumping laws). Dumping laws are protectionist and rob consumers of value. Unfortunately, I've yet to see a consumer lobbyist group in Washington.
After browsing his weblog searching for the gritty details, it appears that he has secured himself a corner office. Partly, I suspect the article is driven by the hate for an office that doesn't allow its workers to use cubicle tools such as the CD Player or the iPod. When he gets let go from this company, I'd be interested to see the conclusions made. I can see it now: 'Companies that force employees in front of computers all day are the problem!'
A company goes out of their way to contact you, an off schedule graduate, and tells you about their opportunity. I'm not saying that you're stupid, or that I've had any better luck. But their opportunity is very likely to be a losing propisition. They're trying to cut costs, and the biggest cost in software is you.
The signs of a company trying to manage your costs: * Actively recruiting warm bodies from non-selective colleges * Assembling a workforce of ninjas, where was designed from the ground up to be more efficient, and the workforce is not eight people or less. * They're looking for ninjas, but only in the metro area. If you really need Ninjas, recruiting costs are irrelevant. * Hiring a computer engineers to work on databases. Regional, since sometimes the difference between computer engineering and comp sci is the science courses you take, and sometimes the overlap is minimal. But if you took like VLSI 2, you're probably in the minimal overlap case. * The company is seeking fresh graduates to write software in a domain they have zero exposure to (nuclear power).
Again, I'm not saying that the author is stupid, just not motivated. Now that I reflect upon the location (Pittsburg) and field (nuclear engineering), I understand that it might be difficult to pick these features out. Bettis Atomic Laboratory sounds like a pretty rocksolid place to a student; they're badass defense contractors with the Navy's ear. They built the fucking nuclear carrier, and the nuclear sub. Clearly at sometime, somewhere, they were Smart and Knew How To Get Things Done (probably when they were owned by Westinghouse).
That doesn't mean its a great place to work. Your first clue should be the fucking maze of cubicles. Contrary to the author's opinion, cubicles don't destroy the office. They're just easier for the emergent behaviors of a company to demonstrate themselves with. If you're following your boss on what seems to be an arbitrary set of directions to your new cubicle, there might be something wrong.
Your second clue should be the project details; they flew me up there to discuss implementing a database for a carrier manual. Does that sound like something an awesome start-up would do? No. Why? Dumb fucking idea. You think the guy in charge of fixing shit wants to look up how to fix the bildge pump on a shitty ruggedized computer that barely fits within the holds of the ship? I don't, and the same guy, or possibly some other guy, is now responsible for that computer (and dozens more) when something inevitably fails. Shit, can't repair the boat till the boat computer's back online. That money's better spent on a pump that breaks down less, or is simpler to repair. In this manner, defense contracting sucks ass. Good ideas don't count unless a general somewhere agrees.
Personally, I'm hoping to skip the first-job-sucks step, but it just might be a requirement for getting that to that second-job-that-doesn't-suck.
The camera in the article is a geniune, point and click, carry it with you camera, not a webcam. It also has four megapixels, compared to 680k pixels. Finally, the wireless capability is built into the camera, instead of an optional PCMCIA card (or however its spelled). What you've got is a webcam, and what they're boating about is a camera intended for photography without the hassle of firewire cords, changing out storage devices, or erasing pictures you've already taken.
That's a pretty useful idea, actually. I've heard a guy suggest that the reason the famous picture of Clinton and Lewinsky hug was on an analog picture is not because that nobody thought it was important, it was that they took the picture, and didnt think it was important enough to keep once their picture capacities were full. I don't know if wireless would solve the problem, assuming that superiour technologies quickly become popular amongst white house photographers. I would imagine in that case that the spectrum allocated to 802.11 would disintegrate.
Nintendo is probably the first of the large vocal companies who figured out how to deal with rentals and used games. For a long time, they were very upset with the american practice of game rentals. Apparently in their home country of Japan rentals and resale are illegal (without permission, presumably). A very nice priviledge, but it certainly draws much ire from the consumers who discover that they're being denied a second-hand market. Nintendo of Japan's wrath was such that they sued Blockbuster, denouncing the practice as unhealthy to the game market (technically, their legal recourse was only reguarding copying of instruction manuals). They've since made up and become good friends, much in the same way that movie companies now tolerate rental stores because they comprise a heavy section of demand for their product. A couple companies have even released rental only versions of their software! I can't recall whether Nintendo themselves has engaged in the practice, although I do recall a Clayfighters game getting such treatment.
Nintendo has come to the realization that the best strategy against the second hand market was to make games that people want to keep. Most single player games outlast any interest the owner has in the game. Eventually, you've collected all the shines, beaten the final boss and found all the secret endings. Nintendo tries to add multiplayer to every game, whether it makes sense (Metriod Prime) or not (Pikmin 2). The other tactic they've taken is their Player's Choice games. Once demand falls off for a game, lower the price to 20 dollars. This pretty much destroys the used game market margins for the games in the list. For all I know, Best Buy could be trying to get their suppliers (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) to extract more cheap titles by threatening to sell used games. The test run would then be a method of verifying their estimated profits on the endevor. The used game market becomes a form of blackmail whenever wholesale channels can't meet asking price.
So basically, Nintendo's strategy is to trot out Miyamato to talk about innovation and quality, while quietly fighting the second hand market with every available resource. Whether they succeed on either front is an individual opinion.
Or maybe they should find a way to create them for less money than they intend to sell them for, so you dont create structural friction in the market begging for a solution (reimportation). Those hand crank radios and flashlights apparently sell for very cheap in the third world, but cost you like six times as much in the States. If selling at 100 dollars was profitable, then there wouldn't be a need to enforce some awful price restrictions, and even more people benefit from your amazing product.
And it certainly wasn't the appeasement loving Central European's fault when hitler gassed the Jews.
About the only thing you've said that I agree with is that the means of change lie in the hands of the people. Pretending you can gift a culture of democracy and human rights onto some nation is a bit naive. These things must be fought for by the people who will eventually have to protect it from the likes of Mugabe and other violent men. Every child on the playground understands that you can't rely on the teacher's watchful eye to protect and liberate you, and it appears that world politics is no different.
Slashdot Mirror
You can pick up various forms of flash for less. They have the benefit of being smaller, and potentially less likely to fail (less moving parts). You can grab a 512MB chip for about $25 retail now, so I'd imagine something integrated to the board would be cheaper, slightly both because you're buying in bulk with less middlemen, and because you wont need some of the stuff that retail package provides (software, manual, etc).
The board they're using has both CF, IDE and USB. I suspect they'll be moving to CF unless they can get their own board designed cheaply enough to warrant moving to an integrated Flash chip. The board they've picked has video display hardware and sound hardware. Assuming they don't have future plans for those parts, they could shave off a few dollars by excluding them.
Ever wondered where those "Protein Shakes" in the GNC come from?
If you're an engineer practicing on behalf of a single company, you're entitled to an "industrial exemption," at least in the state laws I've read. EEs working for Motorola don't need to be a PE. The company takes the liability, not the engineer. Businesses actively make a decision to place time to market over correctness, over "security." Forcing liability on people engaged in development is stupid and causes inevitable friction between the developer and the business who's hired him and ten others. If you don't agree that the software is secure... well, if you're lucky you'll be transferred to another department. The only thing that personal liability solves is how to enact liability without killing off companies immediately. This way, they'll last for five years before nobody wants to work in the field.
Furthermore, what happens when a company simply decides to ship a product against your will? Without the power to approve or disapprove a product, liability is a win-lose situation that never flips.
There's a number of possibilities, ranging from someone forging the initial email to jackpeace@comcast.net not being jack thompson, aka john b thompson attorney at law.
Interestingly enough, the company that made Lemmings was what we now know as Rockstar North (formerly DMA Design). Ever since inception they've been promoting violence and an Orwellian authoritarian lifestyle that goes against those most American principles I hold dear: Life, Liberty and Apple Pie.
Naturally, one can find Jack's phone number on Jack's own site! How can you discuss something like this when linking to the opposing viewpoint is an incitement to harass?
I'm also not entirely convinced that the vgcats conversation wasn't some prank call done through email.
Ironically, this is the same guy who made it possible for us to run ANYTHING on the DS at all! I suspect this was motivated by a disdain for unethical uses of his original software, that allows one to run both commercial games and "homebrewn" demos. This nonsense about signatures doesn't really solve the problem. So some guy signs his code; do you trust him?
If anything, this demonstrates the in-viability of the passMe mechanism and flashable firmwares.
You're acting as though shareholders never squabble amongst themselves. The worker coop idea is interesting within the knowledge worker domain, but there's always the battle between returning profits and investing them for the future. If anything, it simply magnifies this shareholder dispute between growth and returns on investment.
Furthermore, how do you divide up ownership of the profits? Are those not allowed? Do we simply allocate by hours spent on the job, or must we engage in a squabble about who's time is more valuable, who's smarter, who contributed more to paying startup costs, who has seniority, and who's more efficient? How do you organize and lead that cooperative? Do the workers have the right to leave the company and liscence the work they contributed to?
Unless some couple can actually give birth to more boys than girls genetically (ie the expected outcome naturally favors boys) then there's no way for the population to really change in that direction.
.5 .5
.5 + .25 .5 + .25
The "i feel like a genius" puzzle answer is that half the population stops at one girl, half has one boy and continues on.
G =
B =
The next step is to consider the half the population left. Half of that half has one boy and continues and half has one girl and stops.
G =
B =
Each time, half the population goes on to distribute their genes equally between boys and girls. So unless there is some natural selection that says perhaps "families with more boys will survive longer to reproduce" then the genetic predisposition will remain at 1:1. Not very insightful. As somebody smarter than I said, "For every problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong."
Yessir, you are a silly european. Tonto was probably an Indian in the lone ranger, and Toto was a little dog in the Wizard of Oz.
Which only goes to prove that PCIe was not a limiting factor behind 3d graphics technology. Especially when you're cramming half a gigabyte of RAM on the board.
Assume that the workers should own the means of production. Unions promote the status quo, without actually reaching that ideal. The good news is that the cost of starting up your own company and making games can be incredibly low. Every year several people leave EA and all the other big players to start their own company. This form of socialization I think works much better in the end than a union, who's interests are promoting their own existance and resisting changes to industry practices. What the industry needs more of is cheaper, faster and more equal access to consumers. Coming from a fairly socialist/communistic viewpoint, capitalism and entrepeneurship appear to maximize the social value.
Companies like EA have become large through vertical integration; they have developed retail channels to sell their products in, and it's not easy to get shelf space without EA or someone like EA. The internet helps solve the problem, as Valve is discovering. Whether we end up with a surplus of internet distribution methods for games or whether we get one or two is up to Valve, gamers, and the employees out there with the motivation to do what they want to do for THEMSELVES.
"Many of my best friends are people who's "chemistry" I'm sure I would never match to."
Which is precicely why you're just friends. =)
This could be the best thing that happened to the internet. With no more Eurotrash suggesting how inferior the American government is and practicing their english skills by denouncing George Bush on random forums, we'll have that much more time to spend inventing things for Europeans to liberalize. It's a win win situation!
The panel of scientists, huh? Let's see, I can become a laywer and have some billable hour rate of 300 dollars for a company after a couple years of law school. Or I can become a doctor, and make even more, for a lot more school. (not trying to compare or belittle either profession here). Or I can become a scientist, and make a meager research assistant's wage. Let's be real about the market here. One chemist might cost you the same as five in China, but I deeply suspect that research assistants make about the same wage. If you want to motivate people into the field, convince them its a FEASIBLE endevor; raise wages! Scholarships are interesting, but I'd rather see Congress put that money to use employing students in fields of their endevor if anything. Paying people to be scientists will be more useful than paying them to become one. Jobless scientists can just as easily get into law school as anyone else ;)
America is in no danger of losing it's competitive advantage to China, however. Academic progress requires freedom of communication and a number of personal liberties. When you're worried about how a distributed voting system for embedded processor communications might be percieved politically now and in ten years, there's definately an inhibiting factor in research. Economically, the american system very much favors startups and entrepenuers compared to most of the rest of the world. Japan is ruled by the keiretsu, large conglomerates glued together by a Life Insurance company. China is theoretically a communist country, although we've seen significant shifts in intriguing directions. India is struggling with it's own poverty and population crisis, but if you were scared you could simply begin easing citizenship for Indian engineers, programmers and scientists and India would be starved for engineers again.
Recap: if you want more scientists, find ways to help them make more money. Pay your research assistants more. Offer entrepenuership classes for engineers and scientists. Relax the consulting constraints on professors at academic institutions. The war on ignorance and poverty begins at home.
Which is why, combined with the inevitable release mistakes, I usually wait a week or two before upgrading. As nifty as open betas are, they arent likely to expose the same hardware and package combo problems as I use. But once it's "released" there almost has to be somebody using Ubuntu in a similar manner to myself. So I wait for all the Day 1 bugs to appear, and watch them get workarounds and fixes. Then I upgrade
If the crazy ass instructor/composer/genius my high school orchestra director brought in is reliable, then actually, it's quite accurate. Said crazy-man claimed the Tango was invented in Central and South America as a form of dance between the male laborers that migrated to earn money to send home. Massive influx of men but no women lead to: two men to Tango!
Remember, the man is totally crazy. I believe this is actually a requirement in the handbook of teaching music theory in two hour lectures to high school students in your time off from composing and conducting pieces with a professional orchestra.
Firstly, I specifically outlied in the VERY FIRST sentence that there was an economic definition that is different from practical implementations.
Secondly, as I understand it, when a monopoly gives something away for free, presumed to be a subset of "below cost," it only makes business sense if they can raise the prices once the competitors are gone. If a product is on the market for x dollars, and they lose x dollars per sale on monopoly enforcing discount, then they need at least as many sales at y + x, where y is the cost to manufacture. But wait a minute; at price x there was plenty of competition that needed to be eliminated. Now we have an even bigger incentive, which should generate MORE competition. The more important question, is when we have a natural monopoly, where one company is capable of producing a good or service far cheaper than actual and potential competitors. Nobel winning economists have suggested that state regulated monopolies are better because they're easier to reverse.
That doesn't mean I don't support antitrust laws; coersive monopolies do indeed hurt consumers. I think the particular business you have in mind could have been cured by simple enforcement of business practice laws already on the book. Netscape didn't die because Microsoft gave their software away. They died because they couldn't sell their server anymore. You could just as easily blame Apache as MSFT on that. MSFT, however, has been engaged in numourous sharp business tactics, and broken existing fair laws on a number of occasions. I suppose we could repeal the antitrust laws, but I'd rather start by removing the US federally granted monopolies, like baseball and mail. Japan is in the process of breaking up their mail monopoly, in part because it has grown to be one of the largest companies in the world (some ten trillion in assets).
Economically, maybe. Practically, no. Dumping laws are aimed at foreign producers. Microsoft, being a company developing software in America, probably can't be hit for importing product cheaper than its domestic competitors can (a common metric for dumping laws). Dumping laws are protectionist and rob consumers of value. Unfortunately, I've yet to see a consumer lobbyist group in Washington.
After browsing his weblog searching for the gritty details, it appears that he has secured himself a corner office. Partly, I suspect the article is driven by the hate for an office that doesn't allow its workers to use cubicle tools such as the CD Player or the iPod. When he gets let go from this company, I'd be interested to see the conclusions made. I can see it now: 'Companies that force employees in front of computers all day are the problem!'
A company goes out of their way to contact you, an off schedule graduate, and tells you about their opportunity. I'm not saying that you're stupid, or that I've had any better luck. But their opportunity is very likely to be a losing propisition. They're trying to cut costs, and the biggest cost in software is you.
The signs of a company trying to manage your costs:
* Actively recruiting warm bodies from non-selective colleges
* Assembling a workforce of ninjas, where was designed from the ground up to be more efficient, and the workforce is not eight people or less.
* They're looking for ninjas, but only in the metro area. If you really need Ninjas, recruiting costs are irrelevant.
* Hiring a computer engineers to work on databases. Regional, since sometimes the difference
between computer engineering and comp sci is the science courses you take, and sometimes the overlap is minimal. But if you took like VLSI 2, you're probably in the minimal overlap case.
* The company is seeking fresh graduates to write software in a domain they have zero exposure to (nuclear power).
Again, I'm not saying that the author is stupid, just not motivated. Now that I reflect upon the location (Pittsburg) and field (nuclear engineering), I understand that it might be difficult to pick these features out. Bettis Atomic Laboratory sounds like a pretty rocksolid place to a student; they're badass defense contractors with the Navy's ear. They built the fucking nuclear carrier, and the nuclear sub. Clearly at sometime, somewhere, they were Smart and Knew How To Get Things Done (probably when they were owned by Westinghouse).
That doesn't mean its a great place to work. Your first clue should be the fucking maze of cubicles. Contrary to the author's opinion, cubicles don't destroy the office. They're just easier for the emergent behaviors of a company to demonstrate themselves with. If you're following your boss on what seems to be an arbitrary set of directions to your new cubicle, there might be something wrong.
Your second clue should be the project details; they flew me up there to discuss implementing a database for a carrier manual. Does that sound like something an awesome start-up would do? No. Why? Dumb fucking idea. You think the guy in charge of fixing shit wants to look up how to fix the bildge pump on a shitty ruggedized computer that barely fits within the holds of the ship? I don't, and the same guy, or possibly some other guy, is now responsible for that computer (and dozens more) when something inevitably fails. Shit, can't repair the boat till the boat computer's back online. That money's better spent on a pump that breaks down less, or is simpler to repair. In this manner, defense contracting sucks ass. Good ideas don't count unless a general somewhere agrees.
Personally, I'm hoping to skip the first-job-sucks step, but it just might be a requirement for getting that to that second-job-that-doesn't-suck.
The camera in the article is a geniune, point and click, carry it with you camera, not a webcam. It also has four megapixels, compared to 680k pixels. Finally, the wireless capability is built into the camera, instead of an optional PCMCIA card (or however its spelled). What you've got is a webcam, and what they're boating about is a camera intended for photography without the hassle of firewire cords, changing out storage devices, or erasing pictures you've already taken.
That's a pretty useful idea, actually. I've heard a guy suggest that the reason the famous picture of Clinton and Lewinsky hug was on an analog picture is not because that nobody thought it was important, it was that they took the picture, and didnt think it was important enough to keep once their picture capacities were full. I don't know if wireless would solve the problem, assuming that superiour technologies quickly become popular amongst white house photographers. I would imagine in that case that the spectrum allocated to 802.11 would disintegrate.
Nintendo is probably the first of the large vocal companies who figured out how to deal with rentals and used games. For a long time, they were very upset with the american practice of game rentals. Apparently in their home country of Japan rentals and resale are illegal (without permission, presumably). A very nice priviledge, but it certainly draws much ire from the consumers who discover that they're being denied a second-hand market. Nintendo of Japan's wrath was such that they sued Blockbuster, denouncing the practice as unhealthy to the game market (technically, their legal recourse was only reguarding copying of instruction manuals). They've since made up and become good friends, much in the same way that movie companies now tolerate rental stores because they comprise a heavy section of demand for their product. A couple companies have even released rental only versions of their software! I can't recall whether Nintendo themselves has engaged in the practice, although I do recall a Clayfighters game getting such treatment.
Nintendo has come to the realization that the best strategy against the second hand market was to make games that people want to keep. Most single player games outlast any interest the owner has in the game. Eventually, you've collected all the shines, beaten the final boss and found all the secret endings. Nintendo tries to add multiplayer to every game, whether it makes sense (Metriod Prime) or not (Pikmin 2). The other tactic they've taken is their Player's Choice games. Once demand falls off for a game, lower the price to 20 dollars. This pretty much destroys the used game market margins for the games in the list. For all I know, Best Buy could be trying to get their suppliers (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) to extract more cheap titles by threatening to sell used games. The test run would then be a method of verifying their estimated profits on the endevor. The used game market becomes a form of blackmail whenever wholesale channels can't meet asking price.
So basically, Nintendo's strategy is to trot out Miyamato to talk about innovation and quality, while quietly fighting the second hand market with every available resource. Whether they succeed on either front is an individual opinion.
Or maybe they should find a way to create them for less money than they intend to sell them for, so you dont create structural friction in the market begging for a solution (reimportation). Those hand crank radios and flashlights apparently sell for very cheap in the third world, but cost you like six times as much in the States. If selling at 100 dollars was profitable, then there wouldn't be a need to enforce some awful price restrictions, and even more people benefit from your amazing product.
And it certainly wasn't the appeasement loving Central European's fault when hitler gassed the Jews.
About the only thing you've said that I agree with is that the means of change lie in the hands of the people. Pretending you can gift a culture of democracy and human rights onto some nation is a bit naive. These things must be fought for by the people who will eventually have to protect it from the likes of Mugabe and other violent men. Every child on the playground understands that you can't rely on the teacher's watchful eye to protect and liberate you, and it appears that world politics is no different.