If all you back on Kickstarter are pipe-dream impossible products, then, yeah - 5:95 could be your success rate.
I've done about 4 of these things, one returned 1/2 of my money with a promise to try to return the other half, another delivered me a crappy product that didn't work even close to as advertised, and the other two delivered early product as promised.
The VC that invested in our spinoff said they hope for 1/20 winners, 15/20 craters (zero ROI), and about 4/20 also-rans that return investment, but not in any exciting timeframe or multiple. Our spinoff was apparently an also-ran, after about 8 years the VCs restructured the company and returned $0.01 to each of the initial round shareholders, some of these guys had put in hundreds of thousands in cash - but the VCs also ran a bank and they loaned the company money until the estimated value of the enterprise matched the level of debt - in the restructuring, the bank got their debt paid off, and the original investors got $0.01 not per share, but in total. Thank you Delaware laws of incorporation.
So, now, imagine this scenario with the company based in a country with a UBI program.
How many workers could "hang with" the company while it got it's act together because they weren't going to be out on the street, starving, if they did so?
The tech exists today to disturb any site under the ocean - maybe not delicately explore or salvage, but we can disturb the hell out of anything, anywhere in the ocean, and send live video back while it's happening.
Hell, sounds like a great strategy... I'll pay all my taxes starting in 2100, you can even accrue penalties and interest if you like, just let me continue about my business unimpeded in the meantime. I promise, I'm good for the balloon payment.
People also seem to forget how quickly governments lose control of secrets they try to keep. If something is buried in a vault and forgotten, then it stays secret, but if something like a backdoor is accessed on a regular basis by a large number of people (say >10) - no matter how well vetted and trained and threatened with execution for breach - eventually, much sooner than later in most cases, someone will leak the secret.
I think making bitcoin illegal is tantamount to making ideas illegal.
It may need regulation, public education about what it is and is not, you don't want people getting defrauded by common perception. But, if people want to pay money (an imaginary construct itself ever since moving off the gold standard) for a imaginary construct/concept, why should that ever be made illegal?
In Longboat Key, Florida it was Arvida and similar developers who rolled up 14 miles of beach (99.5% of the island) and made it private. It went from virtually open - park anywhere you like along the 14 miles of road down to a couple of access points with about 14 TOTAL parking spots for the entire island, most of those on the extreme north end - during a period from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s.
Slowly, ever so slowly, they are prying open more public access points, I think they're up to about 50 parking spots now, but it's still multiple miles between them - with a solid wall of condominiums in-between. Mostly empty condos, I might add - owned by people who are rarely present. A dream for property tax income, really sucky if you want to access the beach and don't own a boat.
And ultrasonics just got added to the sweep checklist.
Probably rolling out continuous monitoring equipment as we speak to embassies around the world - if they're on their game they had the equipment in-place before they published this story; it would take about an hour to rig up a device like this from a 555 timer, couple of resistors and capacitors, a power transistor or two, and a big horn tweeter - surely there are copycats around the world doing just that right now with intent to deafen whomever it is they think they want to.
$35B/year - and this: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai... says there are just under 1B air passengers per year - saying that the pilot is costing each and every passenger ~$30 in salary, $3 in training and $1 in additional fuel costs - per trip.
Sorry, that just isn't happening, especially on SouthWest and the other small jets.
The submarine hunter aircraft fly regular missions over all of North Florida - like I'd see one three or four times a week out my window over 100 miles away (inland) from the base where they are stationed.
We can assume it's training, since there aren't many submarine to hunt in the lakes and rivers around there.
Came here to say this... somehow they just never captured market appeal - something about reduced capacity AND increased cost vs standard batteries was a big thing.
40 years ago, it was unheard of for a cat to live beyond 10 years, today 20 is not too unusual - and that's down to diet.
We have an outside cat, she had a series of shots when she was about a year old, same time she was "fixed" - that was in 2006, and she's still looking healthy.
And "dog years" being 7x "human years" is also starting to see some dogs reaching "150" in "dog years".
I have never bought a "properly wired" home - a "properly wired" home, by my definition for the past 20 years, would have cat 6 (5 in the earlier days) distribution throughout with a central patch panel, or two.
Other people may prefer co-ax for cable TV, but the balance is shifting my way - might reach parity in another 5 years or so.
+1 - I used the existing coax cable in a home I had as a WiFi repeater (really more of a waveguide). Reception was weak in a back bedroom, but there were cable drops in there as well as beside the router (hot spot), so I stripped little stub antennas and attached them to the in-wall cable, boosted reception in the back room from flaky/marginal to pretty stable - cost: near zero, installation time about 10 minutes, ongoing expenses: none.
A whopping 16% of Google employment ads request a PhD, but what is the actual hiring rate? Are 16% of new hires PhDs? Also, what's the retention rate - when a PhD is hired, do they stick around for 20 years, or are they out in 2?
Where I work, interns do not generally lower the overall need for experienced headcount, usually slightly the opposite.
Not that having interns is a net-negative for the company, they stretch us to do things we otherwise wouldn't, but for every hour of essential work that an intern takes on, it seems that two hours are spent training them or checking the work before allowing it to be used.
Here's a better thought: find non-engineering work for these engineers.
Training 800,000 engineers annually is over-saturating the market, at least for design type engineering work.
If these graduates can work in sales (tech marketing), support, maintenance, hands-on roles with technology in the field, then, sure, they might need more than 800,000 per year. If these 800,000 kids all think that they're going to be working to design skyscrapers, bridges, next generation digital hardware, etc. then they've missed the essence of design work: one good engineer works to design things that are made, sold, maintained and recycled many many times, by _other_ job descriptions.
Slashdot Mirror
If all you back on Kickstarter are pipe-dream impossible products, then, yeah - 5:95 could be your success rate.
I've done about 4 of these things, one returned 1/2 of my money with a promise to try to return the other half, another delivered me a crappy product that didn't work even close to as advertised, and the other two delivered early product as promised.
The VC that invested in our spinoff said they hope for 1/20 winners, 15/20 craters (zero ROI), and about 4/20 also-rans that return investment, but not in any exciting timeframe or multiple. Our spinoff was apparently an also-ran, after about 8 years the VCs restructured the company and returned $0.01 to each of the initial round shareholders, some of these guys had put in hundreds of thousands in cash - but the VCs also ran a bank and they loaned the company money until the estimated value of the enterprise matched the level of debt - in the restructuring, the bank got their debt paid off, and the original investors got $0.01 not per share, but in total. Thank you Delaware laws of incorporation.
So, now, imagine this scenario with the company based in a country with a UBI program.
How many workers could "hang with" the company while it got it's act together because they weren't going to be out on the street, starving, if they did so?
The tech exists today to disturb any site under the ocean - maybe not delicately explore or salvage, but we can disturb the hell out of anything, anywhere in the ocean, and send live video back while it's happening.
Hell, sounds like a great strategy... I'll pay all my taxes starting in 2100, you can even accrue penalties and interest if you like, just let me continue about my business unimpeded in the meantime. I promise, I'm good for the balloon payment.
People also seem to forget how quickly governments lose control of secrets they try to keep. If something is buried in a vault and forgotten, then it stays secret, but if something like a backdoor is accessed on a regular basis by a large number of people (say >10) - no matter how well vetted and trained and threatened with execution for breach - eventually, much sooner than later in most cases, someone will leak the secret.
Watching an animated 6502 emulator run a program is cool and entertaining too...
I think making bitcoin illegal is tantamount to making ideas illegal.
It may need regulation, public education about what it is and is not, you don't want people getting defrauded by common perception. But, if people want to pay money (an imaginary construct itself ever since moving off the gold standard) for a imaginary construct/concept, why should that ever be made illegal?
But you could actually eat your tulip bulbs (or plant them and get a flower) no matter what their price in Guilders.
When Bitcoin goes away, it will leave the way it came in: nothing but imagination.
In Longboat Key, Florida it was Arvida and similar developers who rolled up 14 miles of beach (99.5% of the island) and made it private. It went from virtually open - park anywhere you like along the 14 miles of road down to a couple of access points with about 14 TOTAL parking spots for the entire island, most of those on the extreme north end - during a period from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s.
Slowly, ever so slowly, they are prying open more public access points, I think they're up to about 50 parking spots now, but it's still multiple miles between them - with a solid wall of condominiums in-between. Mostly empty condos, I might add - owned by people who are rarely present. A dream for property tax income, really sucky if you want to access the beach and don't own a boat.
Or, just a rogue Cuban with their own agenda, access and means.
Depends on the transformer, power levels, and housing - but, yeah, most wouldn't be that loud. Still could happen by accident.
Burglar alarm motion detectors based on ultrasonics in the 1980s were bordering on these kind of damaging levels of sound pressure.
And ultrasonics just got added to the sweep checklist.
Probably rolling out continuous monitoring equipment as we speak to embassies around the world - if they're on their game they had the equipment in-place before they published this story; it would take about an hour to rig up a device like this from a 555 timer, couple of resistors and capacitors, a power transistor or two, and a big horn tweeter - surely there are copycats around the world doing just that right now with intent to deafen whomever it is they think they want to.
$35B/year - and this: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai... says there are just under 1B air passengers per year - saying that the pilot is costing each and every passenger ~$30 in salary, $3 in training and $1 in additional fuel costs - per trip.
Sorry, that just isn't happening, especially on SouthWest and the other small jets.
The submarine hunter aircraft fly regular missions over all of North Florida - like I'd see one three or four times a week out my window over 100 miles away (inland) from the base where they are stationed.
We can assume it's training, since there aren't many submarine to hunt in the lakes and rivers around there.
Came here to say this... somehow they just never captured market appeal - something about reduced capacity AND increased cost vs standard batteries was a big thing.
40 years ago, it was unheard of for a cat to live beyond 10 years, today 20 is not too unusual - and that's down to diet.
We have an outside cat, she had a series of shots when she was about a year old, same time she was "fixed" - that was in 2006, and she's still looking healthy.
And "dog years" being 7x "human years" is also starting to see some dogs reaching "150" in "dog years".
We outsource to Canadians, eh? Same timezone, very polite, and they don't seem to puff their resume as much as their US counterparts.
Garbage in, Garbage out.
This seems more like self fulfilling research, like:
There are fewer atheists in church congregations than down at the local pub.
There are fewer tone deaf people in musical careers than working at the train yards.
People coming off of trans-Atlantic flights travel by air more often than people coming off of a city bus.
and, for the win:
People who take jobs that pay nothing also accept lower paying jobs later on in their career.
Put all those hypotheses in your pipe and smoke 'em, good odds you'll get a confirmation every time.
I have never bought a "properly wired" home - a "properly wired" home, by my definition for the past 20 years, would have cat 6 (5 in the earlier days) distribution throughout with a central patch panel, or two.
Other people may prefer co-ax for cable TV, but the balance is shifting my way - might reach parity in another 5 years or so.
+1 - I used the existing coax cable in a home I had as a WiFi repeater (really more of a waveguide). Reception was weak in a back bedroom, but there were cable drops in there as well as beside the router (hot spot), so I stripped little stub antennas and attached them to the in-wall cable, boosted reception in the back room from flaky/marginal to pretty stable - cost: near zero, installation time about 10 minutes, ongoing expenses: none.
A whopping 16% of Google employment ads request a PhD, but what is the actual hiring rate? Are 16% of new hires PhDs? Also, what's the retention rate - when a PhD is hired, do they stick around for 20 years, or are they out in 2?
Where I work, interns do not generally lower the overall need for experienced headcount, usually slightly the opposite.
Not that having interns is a net-negative for the company, they stretch us to do things we otherwise wouldn't, but for every hour of essential work that an intern takes on, it seems that two hours are spent training them or checking the work before allowing it to be used.
Here's a better thought: find non-engineering work for these engineers.
Training 800,000 engineers annually is over-saturating the market, at least for design type engineering work.
If these graduates can work in sales (tech marketing), support, maintenance, hands-on roles with technology in the field, then, sure, they might need more than 800,000 per year. If these 800,000 kids all think that they're going to be working to design skyscrapers, bridges, next generation digital hardware, etc. then they've missed the essence of design work: one good engineer works to design things that are made, sold, maintained and recycled many many times, by _other_ job descriptions.