"...the scammers took control of the companies and then obtained legitimate CUSIP numbers and stock trading symbols that were then used to push the worthless stock on unsuspecting investors...."
Hi, I have a stock to sell you. It's for a company that may appear to have been founded in 1975, but there is no history, no financial statements, no background, no product, and nothing really to back up what I'm telling you the stock is worth. How many shares would you like? But it has a legitimate stock trading symbol!
Seriously, this is only a tiny step away from selling the Brooklyn Bridge or land in Florida. If someone is so stupid that they would invest their cash in such a company with no research, I'd say they deserve to lose that money. If a hedge fund or something is stupid enough to invest in such a fund, that manager should lose his job at least, and the reputation of the fund should suffer by public announcement of their stupidity.
Really people, what part of 'caveat emptor' is too complicated to understand?
I don't recall this sort of ire by the outraged 'information wants to be free' community when Obama refused (and continues to refuse) access to :
- Obama/Dunham marriage license - Not released (if one exists) - Obama/Dunham divorce - Released but incomplete (by independent investigators) - Obama Sr. INS file - Released - Noelani Kindergarten records - Records lost - Soetoro/Dunham marriage license - Not released - Anna Soetoro/Dunham passport records - Released, but key years are missing - Soetoro adoption records - Not released - Fransiskus Assisi School School application - Released (by independent investigators) - Punahou School application - Missing - Punahou School records - Not released - Noelani 3rd Grade records - Not released - Soetoro/Dunham divorce - Released (by independent investigators) - Selective Service Registration - Released (by independent investigators) - Under suspicion - Social Security Numbers - Released (by independent investigators) - Under suspicion - Occidental College records - Not released - Financial Aid Records - Not released - Passport - Not released and records scrubbed clean by Obama's terrorism and intelligence adviser - Columbia College records - Not released - Columbia thesis - "Soviet Nuclear Disarmament" - Not released - Harvard College records - Not released - Harvard Law Review articles - None - Illinois Bar Records - Not released - Baptism certificate - None - Medical records - Not released - Illinois State Senate records - None - Illinois State Senate schedule - Lost - Law practice client list - Not released - University of Chicago scholarly articles - None - White House Visitors list - Incomplete to the point of worthless - The Blagojevich Interview - judge denies access to the FBI report - The Osama bin Laden photos - sealed by Obama
And last but not least:
- Original, vault copy birth certificate - Not released (lawyersâ(TM) defense fees greater than $2,900,000.. a REAL birth certificate is $15) - Certification of Live Birth - Released - Suspected Counterfeit - Certificate of Live Birth - Released - Suspected Counterfeit - Amended Certification of Live Birth - Released - Suspected Counterfeit
I know I didn't anticipate it, but one of the unforseen benefits of a "no monthly fee" game is that they can do this - flat-out BAN players who exploit the game, or who ignore repeated warnings.
Anet has made a significant effort to warn people about names like Penishead or FloppyTitLover as inappropriate, giving them 72 hours to think about it when they don't change.
And they've aggressively suspended accounts for people shouting 'faggot' over general chat.
Now they flat-out ban people that are obviously exploiting the game.
I don't care if it's dull as checkers, I'm going to buy their next expansion just to show me support for this behavior.
What I find particularly pathetic is that people are having so much trouble over this. "But there's no stated POLICY that I couldn't name my toon 'D1cksm0ker'!" and "They didn't rez me, so I got angry and called them a faggot on chat, so what, free speech!" If you sincerely have trouble understanding appropriate conduct and inappropriate conduct in these obvious circumstances, either your parents failed or you're starting to believe the internet libertarian lawyer brigade who assert that if it isn't specifically prohibited, it's practically mandatory.
Personally, I prefer a world in which there ARE social norms like saying please and thank you, and not calling someone a "cocksucker" just because they play better than I do in pvp. I don't find the behavior boundaries that hard to conform to, nor do most people.
The government only taxes people to pay its bills.
The government stops giving people/companies money, tax breaks, subsidies, loan guarantees, etc. So no money needs flow out from government unless they are buying something.
The sad thing is that this is an absolutely crazy, radical idea.
So wait, you're saying 30 years of legislation and technology driven with the express purpose of preventing the transfer of something (in this case, books, movies, and music) from the hands of one person to another without corporate benefit has had the result of....making it hard to transfer something from the hands of one person to another?
Just because one of the pair of hands is cold and dead doesn't change the situation at all for corporate lawyers. That's pretty much how their souls are all the time.
IIRC my understanding is that what was printed was the LOWER receiver. The upper receiver - which is also "the gun" legally AFAIK - is the part that has the chamber, etc that's going to be the critical part to the function of a gun.
So no, at least with my understanding of the plastics available for 3d printing, nobody's actually going to making a "gun" with a 3d printer. The MINIMUM breach pressure (.22 rimfire handgun cartridge, barely more than a bb gun) is 21000 psi or about 1500 bar. Real guns start at 40-50,000 psi or 3000-3500 bar (most sporting handgun/rifle cartridges).
OK yes, it would be possible to build a "gun" with a thick enough barrel that it might withstand the pressures, but it would be more akin to a wooden cannon, and I wouldn't want to be near it for the 2nd or 3rd firings...
Anyone know more about the plastics in the printers?
But then "someone printed parts that could be attached to a gun" isn't a very exciting headline, I understand.
"...It contrasts pretty vividly with the way we worked in the first half of the 20th century...."
Well, yeah - the outlook on where technology would take us - rarely even considered before the 20th century (or the latter decades of the 19th) has always had its dystopians, but indeed was largely optimistic.
When your life was nasty and brutish and little different than that of your ancestors 300 years before, technology solved a TON of your basic discomforts - health, food, housing, communication, travel, etc - all were very low-hanging fruit and relatively small tech solutions made great improvements in quality of life.
However, the global catastrophe of the World Wars (100 million dead), the resulting Cold War and danger of global annihilation for nearly 50 years, as well as ever-higher expectations of what life "should be like"* climbing faster than technology could provide, means that the latter half of the 20th century was largely overshadowed by the dangers presented by that same technology.
*reading primary sources in medieval literature suggests that sleeping in an insect-free bed, having your teeth for most of your life, not being starving, and at least half your children surviving to adulthood were all pretty critical to "being happy"...even for the "1%". Compare this to 21st century American "poor" who battle obesity, most have air-conditioning, cable tv, and at least one car.
When it costs the same as bus fare, the experience is much like, well, a bus.
The fact was that air travel used to be extraordinarily expensive. IIRC a Washington-Cleveland ticket was around $100 in the new, cheap "coach" class...which is like $900 today.
Now I can get that flight for $100 2012 dollars.
I guess my comment to the writer is that if he wants to travel comfortably, then he needs to pay for first class flights which have surprisingly not changed much over time (aside from inflation). Of course, most people think those are stupid expensive.
"I wish that all of mankind would give up it's warlike ways and the Earth would become a society of pacifists. That way, I could take it over with a butter knife."
At first I thought you were being serious, then I realized you were being sarcastic.
In reality, according to half of our electorate (or at least the vocal minority of that half), it could be rephrased (seriously, not sarcastically): When this sort of data is being gathered by companies it's evil, when it's being done by the government that's just fine....which is a statement that just made Jefferson explode in his grave.
I don't think that anyone - private or public - gathering this data is benign.
OF COURSE a Mars mission shouldn't be American led, regardless of who's funding it, who's launching it, and whose technology is making it happen. Making it American-led might make someone else feel less important.
After all (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/charles-bolden-nasas-fore_n_637854.html) NASAs foremost mission "...Is To Improve Relations With Muslim World..."
Many of the posts I read here are missing the point. Many seem to argue histrionically that it's not 'fair' to force people into false binary categories, it's not "just", it's archaic, etc.
The point is this: do you ever want women to win or not? Women's athletics were created because of the simple (oh-so-politically-incorrect!) fact that men outperform women in MOST athletics. They are stronger, faster, can throw further, jump higher, etc. It's just physiology. So womens athletics was created as a category so they could compete against their peers.
Now we have edge-cases in determining who is what gender, and we're forced to defend the arbitrary segregation of women into a lower-performing category of their own.
The simple fact is this: - have everyone compete together, and women will pretty much never win most athletic events. - let people declare their own gender (a creation of the politically-correct modern age in which 'everybody's choice is valid'), and again, women will pretty much never win most athletic events. The obvious exploitabilty of this system, coupled with the fact that cheating where possible is endemic to modern top-level competitions like the Olympics, should be self-evident. - set a test that declares who is female (and thus can compete in the 'easier' category), everyone else is male: the result is that there will ALWAYS be some boundary-cases that indeterminate or go around the test (through biological variation, or deliberate cheating). Some "women" will through their biology get declared "Men" and be unable to compete successfully. Some "men" will likewise get certified as "women" and dominate their field for a while.
Those are your choices. Personally, I love that reality doesn't bow to political correctness, there's no 'legislating away' this conundrum.
FWIW I *don't* see the point in gender-split categories like mens and womens table-tennis or chess. There doesn't seem to be any reason for the division except inertia.
Ironically, the Air Force has desperately tried to kill the A10 repeatedly since the 1980s. It's neither fast, nor an air-air fighter, nor particularly 'glamorous'.
Their complaints are always on other grounds, of course, but that's the root of it.
Unfortunately for the Air Force, the A10 works (outstandingly; it's perhaps the best ground-attack fighter ever built), has universal support outside the Air Force, and is iconic to the militarily-ignorant public.
Actually, no, you're entirely mistaken. From Brian Youse, one of the ACTUAL founders of MMP: (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/9253202#9253202)
"...MMP began in 1994 when we released Backblast, an ASL fanzine, and was comprised of four AH ASL playtesters and a guy who had some layout skills. Avalon Hill had made the decision that ASL was "dead" and we wanted to keep seeing some new scenarios, etc.
Curt didn't become involved until sometime around the end of 1995 when he was also attempting to buy the rights for ASL from Avalon Hill. We had been working with AH by then on the restarted ASL and Avalon Hill didn't want to sell the rights (read: they thought geez, we can fleece this guy, lets ask for the moon!) but wanted him involved (name value, something the Dott's - the owners of AH - did recognize, having put Tom Clancy on the AH Board of Directors somewhere around then as well). So, to make a long story short, AH told Curt about us, we met, he joined the company, and its been that way since then..."
So essentially Curt, having an interest in ASL, bought his way into MMP. So *no* management/business experience at all. But lots of cash, and interest.
He may have all the superficial characteristics of an entrepreneur, but the difference ends up being what you mean by the word "lead". TL;DR: enthusiasm may win a game. It doesn't build a business.
A pitcher LEADS a team through his performance. Perhaps even through his attitude. He doesn't manage the team, he doesn't recruit talent, he doesn't set salaries, he doesn't run practices.
To have a successful business, you CANNOT lead simply through your own performance - you have to do all those other things successfully. Or, recognizing your own shortcomings, hire the right people to do them. That's where the software-development company failed.
KoA is a decent game; in fact, I'd say it's quite a good game. But building a new-IP AAA title in a software world of Bethesda, Rockstar Games, Blizzard, etc is no small challenge; it's probably only an order of magnitude down from assuming one could just 'step into' the major-brand automobile manufacturing industry. Burning through your capital unsustainably is almost the most-likely result.
So ultimately, Schilling was very much like *most* entrepreneurs in every way but one. He had a good idea, enthusiasm, charisma, and willingness to work hard, but also found that ballooning that idea into a company that could make it work was beyond his skill set.
The only exception is that he started with piles of $$, when most entrepreneurs don't get that far, or only get that far with hard, hard work.
Let's quote from the OP: "...I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. Iâ(TM)ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasnâ(TM)t changed.
Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears arenâ(TM)t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers arenâ(TM)t going to melt by 2035. And itâ(TM)s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the âoeMedieval Warm Periodâ or âoeMedieval Optimum,â an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to âoeglobalâ warming is weaker than tenuous...."
I find his methodology and approach persuasive.
The only question I have is that historically, we've seen 'pulses' of temperature/CO2 spiking about (roughly) every 100,000 yrs for about the last million years. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg) The last one was about 120,000 yrs ago, and we're in a similar climbing spike right now. I haven't heard anything about what causes these spikes, nor what mechanism offsets them. It stands to reason that this pattern would continue, which would suggest that today's warming is systemic and cyclical WITHOUT human input.
Slashdot Mirror
"...the scammers took control of the companies and then obtained legitimate CUSIP numbers and stock trading symbols that were then used to push the worthless stock on unsuspecting investors...."
Hi, I have a stock to sell you. It's for a company that may appear to have been founded in 1975, but there is no history, no financial statements, no background, no product, and nothing really to back up what I'm telling you the stock is worth. How many shares would you like? But it has a legitimate stock trading symbol!
Seriously, this is only a tiny step away from selling the Brooklyn Bridge or land in Florida. If someone is so stupid that they would invest their cash in such a company with no research, I'd say they deserve to lose that money. If a hedge fund or something is stupid enough to invest in such a fund, that manager should lose his job at least, and the reputation of the fund should suffer by public announcement of their stupidity.
Really people, what part of 'caveat emptor' is too complicated to understand?
I don't recall this sort of ire by the outraged 'information wants to be free' community when Obama refused (and continues to refuse) access to :
- Obama/Dunham marriage license - Not released (if one exists)
- Obama/Dunham divorce - Released but incomplete (by independent investigators)
- Obama Sr. INS file - Released
- Noelani Kindergarten records - Records lost
- Soetoro/Dunham marriage license - Not released
- Anna Soetoro/Dunham passport records - Released, but key years are missing
- Soetoro adoption records - Not released
- Fransiskus Assisi School School application - Released (by independent investigators)
- Punahou School application - Missing
- Punahou School records - Not released
- Noelani 3rd Grade records - Not released
- Soetoro/Dunham divorce - Released (by independent investigators)
- Selective Service Registration - Released (by independent investigators) - Under suspicion
- Social Security Numbers - Released (by independent investigators) - Under suspicion
- Occidental College records - Not released
- Financial Aid Records - Not released
- Passport - Not released and records scrubbed clean by Obama's terrorism and intelligence adviser
- Columbia College records - Not released
- Columbia thesis - "Soviet Nuclear Disarmament" - Not released
- Harvard College records - Not released
- Harvard Law Review articles - None
- Illinois Bar Records - Not released
- Baptism certificate - None
- Medical records - Not released
- Illinois State Senate records - None
- Illinois State Senate schedule - Lost
- Law practice client list - Not released
- University of Chicago scholarly articles - None
- White House Visitors list - Incomplete to the point of worthless
- The Blagojevich Interview - judge denies access to the FBI report
- The Osama bin Laden photos - sealed by Obama
And last but not least:
- Original, vault copy birth certificate - Not released (lawyersâ(TM) defense fees greater than $2,900,000 .. a REAL birth certificate is $15)
- Certification of Live Birth - Released - Suspected Counterfeit
- Certificate of Live Birth - Released - Suspected Counterfeit
- Amended Certification of Live Birth - Released - Suspected Counterfeit
Instead of re-summarizing what the candidates say, I'm going to resummarize all the slashdotter summaries:
Obama fan: Obama nailed it every time, Romney was completely full of disingenuous shit.
Romney fan: Romney nailed it every time, Obama was completely full of disingenuous shit.
Everyone else: wow, they're both completely full of crap.
I know I didn't anticipate it, but one of the unforseen benefits of a "no monthly fee" game is that they can do this - flat-out BAN players who exploit the game, or who ignore repeated warnings.
Anet has made a significant effort to warn people about names like Penishead or FloppyTitLover as inappropriate, giving them 72 hours to think about it when they don't change.
And they've aggressively suspended accounts for people shouting 'faggot' over general chat.
Now they flat-out ban people that are obviously exploiting the game.
I don't care if it's dull as checkers, I'm going to buy their next expansion just to show me support for this behavior.
What I find particularly pathetic is that people are having so much trouble over this. "But there's no stated POLICY that I couldn't name my toon 'D1cksm0ker'!" and
"They didn't rez me, so I got angry and called them a faggot on chat, so what, free speech!"
If you sincerely have trouble understanding appropriate conduct and inappropriate conduct in these obvious circumstances, either your parents failed or you're starting to believe the internet libertarian lawyer brigade who assert that if it isn't specifically prohibited, it's practically mandatory.
Personally, I prefer a world in which there ARE social norms like saying please and thank you, and not calling someone a "cocksucker" just because they play better than I do in pvp. I don't find the behavior boundaries that hard to conform to, nor do most people.
Or, make it even simpler.
The government only taxes people to pay its bills.
The government stops giving people/companies money, tax breaks, subsidies, loan guarantees, etc. So no money needs flow out from government unless they are buying something.
The sad thing is that this is an absolutely crazy, radical idea.
So wait, you're saying 30 years of legislation and technology driven with the express purpose of preventing the transfer of something (in this case, books, movies, and music) from the hands of one person to another without corporate benefit has had the result of....making it hard to transfer something from the hands of one person to another?
Just because one of the pair of hands is cold and dead doesn't change the situation at all for corporate lawyers. That's pretty much how their souls are all the time.
IIRC my understanding is that what was printed was the LOWER receiver.
The upper receiver - which is also "the gun" legally AFAIK - is the part that has the chamber, etc that's going to be the critical part to the function of a gun.
So no, at least with my understanding of the plastics available for 3d printing, nobody's actually going to making a "gun" with a 3d printer. The MINIMUM breach pressure (.22 rimfire handgun cartridge, barely more than a bb gun) is 21000 psi or about 1500 bar. Real guns start at 40-50,000 psi or 3000-3500 bar (most sporting handgun/rifle cartridges).
OK yes, it would be possible to build a "gun" with a thick enough barrel that it might withstand the pressures, but it would be more akin to a wooden cannon, and I wouldn't want to be near it for the 2nd or 3rd firings...
Anyone know more about the plastics in the printers?
But then "someone printed parts that could be attached to a gun" isn't a very exciting headline, I understand.
This has to be the fourth or fifth time I've heard that MS is "about" to stop supporting XP.
What does this one actually mean? (What's different from all the previous "end of support life" announcements?)
"...It contrasts pretty vividly with the way we worked in the first half of the 20th century...."
Well, yeah - the outlook on where technology would take us - rarely even considered before the 20th century (or the latter decades of the 19th) has always had its dystopians, but indeed was largely optimistic.
When your life was nasty and brutish and little different than that of your ancestors 300 years before, technology solved a TON of your basic discomforts - health, food, housing, communication, travel, etc - all were very low-hanging fruit and relatively small tech solutions made great improvements in quality of life.
However, the global catastrophe of the World Wars (100 million dead), the resulting Cold War and danger of global annihilation for nearly 50 years, as well as ever-higher expectations of what life "should be like"* climbing faster than technology could provide, means that the latter half of the 20th century was largely overshadowed by the dangers presented by that same technology.
*reading primary sources in medieval literature suggests that sleeping in an insect-free bed, having your teeth for most of your life, not being starving, and at least half your children surviving to adulthood were all pretty critical to "being happy"...even for the "1%". Compare this to 21st century American "poor" who battle obesity, most have air-conditioning, cable tv, and at least one car.
When it costs the same as bus fare, the experience is much like, well, a bus.
The fact was that air travel used to be extraordinarily expensive. IIRC a Washington-Cleveland ticket was around $100 in the new, cheap "coach" class...which is like $900 today.
Now I can get that flight for $100 2012 dollars.
I guess my comment to the writer is that if he wants to travel comfortably, then he needs to pay for first class flights which have surprisingly not changed much over time (aside from inflation). Of course, most people think those are stupid expensive.
Have you tried many recent titles?
30 hours of gameplay is common, sometimes less if they can rely on "online matchmaking" to supply gameplay they couldn't be bothered to.
"I wish that all of mankind would give up it's warlike ways and the Earth would become a society of pacifists. That way, I could take it over with a butter knife."
-Dogbert.
So let me see if I understand:
Copyright violation helped people resist the rightful government of the time?
Oh THAT'S going to be helpful in the discussion about the need to reduce/limit copyright. /tinfoil hat
At a high enough dosage, dihydrogen monoxide's a killer too.
Indeed, much has changed.
I hope you're all happy who you voted for!
That would be great, but my ipad only has 16gig of RAM, not nearly enough to handle that sort of data flow.
At first I thought you were being serious, then I realized you were being sarcastic.
In reality, according to half of our electorate (or at least the vocal minority of that half), it could be rephrased (seriously, not sarcastically): When this sort of data is being gathered by companies it's evil, when it's being done by the government that's just fine. ...which is a statement that just made Jefferson explode in his grave.
I don't think that anyone - private or public - gathering this data is benign.
If that's not a red flag screaming "challenge" to Anonymous, I'm not sure what is.
OF COURSE a Mars mission shouldn't be American led, regardless of who's funding it, who's launching it, and whose technology is making it happen. Making it American-led might make someone else feel less important.
After all (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/charles-bolden-nasas-fore_n_637854.html) NASAs foremost mission "...Is To Improve Relations With Muslim World..."
Many of the posts I read here are missing the point.
Many seem to argue histrionically that it's not 'fair' to force people into false binary categories, it's not "just", it's archaic, etc.
The point is this: do you ever want women to win or not?
Women's athletics were created because of the simple (oh-so-politically-incorrect!) fact that men outperform women in MOST athletics. They are stronger, faster, can throw further, jump higher, etc. It's just physiology.
So womens athletics was created as a category so they could compete against their peers.
Now we have edge-cases in determining who is what gender, and we're forced to defend the arbitrary segregation of women into a lower-performing category of their own.
The simple fact is this:
- have everyone compete together, and women will pretty much never win most athletic events.
- let people declare their own gender (a creation of the politically-correct modern age in which 'everybody's choice is valid'), and again, women will pretty much never win most athletic events. The obvious exploitabilty of this system, coupled with the fact that cheating where possible is endemic to modern top-level competitions like the Olympics, should be self-evident.
- set a test that declares who is female (and thus can compete in the 'easier' category), everyone else is male: the result is that there will ALWAYS be some boundary-cases that indeterminate or go around the test (through biological variation, or deliberate cheating). Some "women" will through their biology get declared "Men" and be unable to compete successfully. Some "men" will likewise get certified as "women" and dominate their field for a while.
Those are your choices. Personally, I love that reality doesn't bow to political correctness, there's no 'legislating away' this conundrum.
FWIW I *don't* see the point in gender-split categories like mens and womens table-tennis or chess. There doesn't seem to be any reason for the division except inertia.
Not to mention 50% of the time is given to commercials, and half of what's left is inane crap about how Michael Phelps really liked to swim as a kid.
Ironically, the Air Force has desperately tried to kill the A10 repeatedly since the 1980s. It's neither fast, nor an air-air fighter, nor particularly 'glamorous'.
Their complaints are always on other grounds, of course, but that's the root of it.
In fact, their pressure to kill this ugly, effective plane has climbed to the point that they're conducting internal witch-hunts to purge (and presumably punish) anyone in their ranks that disagrees. http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/alerts/national-security/ns-a10-20030604.html
Unfortunately for the Air Force, the A10 works (outstandingly; it's perhaps the best ground-attack fighter ever built), has universal support outside the Air Force, and is iconic to the militarily-ignorant public.
Actually, no, you're entirely mistaken. From Brian Youse, one of the ACTUAL founders of MMP: (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/9253202#9253202)
"...MMP began in 1994 when we released Backblast, an ASL fanzine, and was comprised of four AH ASL playtesters and a guy who had some layout skills. Avalon Hill had made the decision that ASL was "dead" and we wanted to keep seeing some new scenarios, etc.
Curt didn't become involved until sometime around the end of 1995 when he was also attempting to buy the rights for ASL from Avalon Hill. We had been working with AH by then on the restarted ASL and Avalon Hill didn't want to sell the rights (read: they thought geez, we can fleece this guy, lets ask for the moon!) but wanted him involved (name value, something the Dott's - the owners of AH - did recognize, having put Tom Clancy on the AH Board of Directors somewhere around then as well). So, to make a long story short, AH told Curt about us, we met, he joined the company, and its been that way since then..."
So essentially Curt, having an interest in ASL, bought his way into MMP.
So *no* management/business experience at all. But lots of cash, and interest.
He may have all the superficial characteristics of an entrepreneur, but the difference ends up being what you mean by the word "lead". TL;DR: enthusiasm may win a game. It doesn't build a business.
A pitcher LEADS a team through his performance. Perhaps even through his attitude. He doesn't manage the team, he doesn't recruit talent, he doesn't set salaries, he doesn't run practices.
To have a successful business, you CANNOT lead simply through your own performance - you have to do all those other things successfully. Or, recognizing your own shortcomings, hire the right people to do them. That's where the software-development company failed.
KoA is a decent game; in fact, I'd say it's quite a good game. But building a new-IP AAA title in a software world of Bethesda, Rockstar Games, Blizzard, etc is no small challenge; it's probably only an order of magnitude down from assuming one could just 'step into' the major-brand automobile manufacturing industry. Burning through your capital unsustainably is almost the most-likely result.
So ultimately, Schilling was very much like *most* entrepreneurs in every way but one. He had a good idea, enthusiasm, charisma, and willingness to work hard, but also found that ballooning that idea into a company that could make it work was beyond his skill set.
The only exception is that he started with piles of $$, when most entrepreneurs don't get that far, or only get that far with hard, hard work.
Let's quote from the OP:
"...I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. Iâ(TM)ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasnâ(TM)t changed.
Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears arenâ(TM)t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers arenâ(TM)t going to melt by 2035. And itâ(TM)s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the âoeMedieval Warm Periodâ or âoeMedieval Optimum,â an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to âoeglobalâ warming is weaker than tenuous...."
I find his methodology and approach persuasive.
The only question I have is that historically, we've seen 'pulses' of temperature/CO2 spiking about (roughly) every 100,000 yrs for about the last million years. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg) The last one was about 120,000 yrs ago, and we're in a similar climbing spike right now.
I haven't heard anything about what causes these spikes, nor what mechanism offsets them. It stands to reason that this pattern would continue, which would suggest that today's warming is systemic and cyclical WITHOUT human input.