They don't? Maybe you are reading the results wrong? Could it be that the poll group were self selecting? Maybe their users tend to be on the younger side, as older folks don’t tend to like those types of sites as much.
The stats can mean anything you want them to mean if you haven’t normalized the data.
Electric cars (the ones you can get right now) are terrible when it is really cold or really hot.
Horse shit. I own a Miev, and the range is not significantly affected by heat or cold. Running the heater does affect the range, but I can heat the car from shore power before leaving, and that significantly reduces the impact on the range. Make no mistake, if I drive with the heat and AC off, then the range is barely affected by sub zero weather (we had lots of that in upstate NY this year, and I drive the car to work and back every day). A much bigger impact on range comes from driving habits: staying back a little further and using the regen braking instead of the brake pedal, coasting up to red lights instead of maintaining the speed limit until the last second and then braking. If I drive "right" it will increase the range by 20%-30%. extreme cold, by contrast, only affects the range about 5%.
The difference between the 60kWh and 85kWh Tesla Model S cash price is $10,000 or $400/kWh so I'm not sure about the article's conclusion that the battery costs $300/kWh.
The P85 also has 4 wheel drive instead of rear wheel drive. The P85+ is an additional $10k, and roughly doubles the size of the motors from the P85. I think $7,500 for the additional battery, and $2,500 for the additional motor and drive train components is actually overestimating the cost of the battery.
I think that Toyota hydrogen fuel cell is far more practical and cleaner (because electric batteries are charged with coal fire plant electricity made 500+ miles away from where it is used).
How exactly do you think they get the hydrogen??? They use electricity by way of electrolysis. This is a hideously inefficient process. Not to mention the complete lack of a hydrogen infrastructure, and the hazards of compressed gases. Hydrogen is dumb. It was when it was conceived, and still is. a Hydrocarbon fuel cell might be a good idea, but you would still get significant greenhouse gases out of it. Better still would be.. wait for it... electric batteries or super-caps. Uses the existing infrastructure, the ultimate source of the energy can be swapped for whatever the hooch-du-jour is without the end user ever even knowing or caring. On vehicle storage was the only real limitation, and thanks to portable electronics, the research into making good batteries got done in spite of the powers-that-be wanting to kill electric cars at any cost. Now that the energy density of batteries is getting competitive, and the cost is coming down thanks to economy of scale, we are seeing the tipping point where gasoline vehicles go from a trillion dollar industry to a niche market. In 20 years, gasoline vehicles will be manufactured and purchased for very specific markets, and everything else will be electric.
People continue to buy gas cars because these issues are still not addressed in cars they could potentially afford.
No, people continue to buy gas cars precisely because they don't know how to make rational financial choices. I was in Mitsubishi dealership getting service on my car, and there was a young couple in there with a sales guy doing the math on a couple of options. The sales guy was trying to push the electric model (as I assume they have been told to), but the young couple was under the impression that electricity cost $1 per kilowatt hour, and accused the sales guy of lying to them when he tried to correct them. On top of that, the young couple assumed that electrics would have higher maintenance costs (because of the battery, I think). These folks claimed they couldn't afford the $350 per month for the electric car. When I left, they were finalizing a *lease* on an SUV for $250 per month. If these idiots had done their homework, they could have gotten the electric for effectively the same per month cost, and after 5 years they would have owned the electric with a very low monthly cost. Instead, they leased an SUV, and in 4 years they will have absolutely nothing, and be back right where they are now. Americans (with some exceptions) are stupid.
Americans don't know from total cost of ownership. 50% of Americans are behind on one or more bills. They're only concerned about surviving to the next paycheck.
But they're already there. The maps site says there are a lot of internet services. All but two are "too expensive", but the map site doesn't rate service by cost, just availability.
By that measure, there is 100% gigabit coverage in the united states by virtue of the fact that all you have to do is run your own fiber (or pay someone to do it) to the nearest backbone location, and the owner of that blockhouse will be happy to jack you in (for a gigantic monthly fee). Where there is money, it can and will be done. The only question is how much money.
The point of the FCC regulations is that there should be broadband access for *all* Americans, not just the ones that can afford to lay out $1M in upfront costs and $10k / month... Sites like the broadband finder sites are there for one of two reasons: A political entity trying to demonstrate that they are in fact getting the broadband that they were elected / appointed to create, or by industry leaders wishing to demonstrate why there is no need for further regulation / and or that industry regulation is being met.
I've used that same site, and according to it, there are 7 providers in my area. Of those, two are 4G wireless at $5 / gigabyte, my bill last month would have been $935. 2 are DSL which meet the old definition of broadband at 1.8 Mbit. 1 is Time Warner that offers up to 75 Mbit, but has only ever been able to get 50 working where I am. 1 is Verizon Fios, which cant seem to figure out where my house is (those people are idiots). They would be great for my needs, but cant figure out how to get the signal from their fiber (that runs less than 30 feet from my house), to my house. and 1 is a provider that services a county 20 miles away, The county I live in has over 4,000 residents per sq mile, and I am in one of the more densely populated parts of the county.
The FCC needs to change their measure of availability to include cost / GB, uptime, and cost per Gb. They should only be allowed to say that an area has coverage if it has 99% uptime, 10 Mb, and costs less than $100 / month. reasonable usage (which in this age has to include about 2 hours of netflix / day). I would say that 150GB is not unreasonable usage per month.
I wouldn't consider someone who wrote code like that a "superstar". He sounds more like a cowboy coder who couldn't give a shit about code maintenance after he moved on to something else. I would have complained about his shitty naming and if management was too scared to fix such a massive fuckup then you're better off working elsewhere.
Welcome to the world of startups...
People often put up with some god awful shit in exchange for equity...
People who are offended by their supervisors sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace can always just quit and go find a different employer... they are free to boycott the company... they are *not* free to to use legal recourse to force such clearly immature persons into behaving as they believe they ought to./
There is a world of difference between an employer / subordinate relationship and a company / consumer relationship. People almost universally have to work to survive. That makes a job a necessary fact of life, not a luxury. Purchasing a fungible good from a specific company is an option. If a company is behaving in a way that makes consumers not want to do business with them, then the market will sort it out. When employers behave that way, it can ruin peoples lives. That is why equal opportunity is the law in spite of the fact that it often directly contradicts the second amendment. You have the right to say or do anything you want. You don’t have the right to force people (through any means) to experience it.
This guy is just spouting off, but nobody is being forced to pay any attention to him. Should he be challenged in court, the court will find on his side because he is not coercing anyone into reading what he is writing. It is the same principle that gives him the right to go to a public place and make obscene statements. So long as he is not targeting an individual, he is free to say what he wishes (might get beat up depending what he says, but he is within his rights to say it). That same behaviour in front of a bunch of employee would get him fired (or arrested).
You have just described nearly every politician of consequence. The problem is not that the politicians will lie about anything and everything to get elected, The problem is that the electorate practically demands that their leaders have a bunch of qualities that are contrary to good leadership and good science (Such as always knowing what to do, overwhelming confidence, ability to make snap decisions). These are absolutely opposite of what a good leader should have, and yet, these are the criteria that the average person uses to select their leaders. The simple reality of the matter is that the general population has no business selecting a leader. By allowing them to do so, we endanger our own future. Its the same reason we don't let just anybody fly an airplane. Almost no-one could do it safely without lots of training, but that wouldn't stop every Joe Sixpack from trying it if they could.
But if you are unable to watch them then democracy itself becomes no more than a marketing exercise.
democracy has never been anything other than a marketing exercise. The moment government comes into being, it is used by those with the power to control those without. The cynic in me suspects that government has no other purpose.
This is only true if your talking about relatively simple tasks. When you have a large, complex software project, often using several different components and languages, yes it's as much art as science. It isn't all just quicksort vs insertion sort and data structures and the like. You learn tricks, and you use them. And sometimes they're language-specific.
I have to agree with the GP on this. There is a process to be followed when designing software. Those "tricks" are the worst kinds of crap you see in modern software. The more clever a piece of code is, the worse it is. That is because all code eventually has to be read and understood by someone, usually doing maintenance, and often under severe time pressure. The more clever your code is, the harder it is for that other person to glean what they need to know from it. In general, it is extremely rare that performance needs outweigh maintenance needs, and your clever tricks are costing the company more than they are saving. That effectively amounts to you failing to provide the best value for your salary that you can.
Before I ever use any programming structure that is abnormal or uncommon, the first question is: Is there a common way to do this, and if so, why am I not using it? Early in my career, the answer to those questions were: yes and because I didn’t know the common way existed. Later in my career, Most times I ask that question, I switch to the common way of doing things.
True, you may not need an EE degree. But if you can't draw a K-map and cover glitch cases, just as one example, then you are not qualified to develop programmable logic. While the FPGAs and micros come with a lot built-in, you still have to understand circuit principles when designing the surrounding support components and proper interfacing of signals, ratings, timing specs, etc. We need to understand power consumption in components to best manage it from software. So typically, the requisite skills are taught in EE, computer engineering, or something closely related. Kudos if a CS program teaches that, but I'm not sure if that is consistent.
Exactly. Just because you know enough VHDL to program an FPGA to do what you want does not make you qualified to do so. Mostly any bright programmer could build FPGA or ASIC designs, but where you need the actual Engineering background is in avoiding the gotchas that get many amateurs. Simple things like trying to implement a divider as combinational logic, or skipping a ground plane to reduce the cost of your system. Sometimes you can get away with it, sometimes not. Knowing what the symptoms of inadequate grounding looks like can save you mountains of debugging time. Another amateur mistake is not having bypass caps on all of your supply pins. This can cause intermittent failures that are a royal pain to debug. Probably the biggest killer is not understanding the limitations of I/O on common uControllers. Trying to pull half an amp from a 20mA pin, or trying to use a simple voltage divider circuit on an input pin that has an internal pull resistor. Electrical Engineering is all about the details, and a non EE will take longer to "discover" the details than an EE will.
Maybe that means that their is room for a new kickstart.
You invest and get x amount of the company per dollar.
So you put in say $100 into a "Kickstarter" and you get.01% of the company.
The venture fails and you get write it off on your taxes.
It becomes Facebook and you get to retire.
Except that scheme runs afoul of a whole host of rules, and will get you in hot water with the SEC (possibly including jail time)
That very concept has a name: "Initial Public Offering", and the rules surrounding it are complex enough that most companies hire a brokerage house to handle the details.
I grew up as the only conservative in a family of upper middle class liberals. It always infuriated me that poor people were constantly getting free stuff, and I bought in to the whole poor people are lazy mentality. Once I graduated, I found myself working in a company that employs a great deal of the bottom of society. (I started there myself thanks to the collapse in '01). I was lucky enough to have a good family watching out for me, and I didn't stay on the bottom long, but I've been there. As a result of my experiences, I have moved much farther left on the spectrum, but I will note a few things here that need to be said.
First, I find far more lazy people in the middle classes than on the bottom or the top. Those on the top work hard because they are driven (this is what gets them to the top). Those on the bottom work hard because they have to in order to survive. They often have no hope, and no future because we have built the system in this country to virtually guarantee their continued failure. Those in the middle have the breathing room to be lazy, and some of them are. Unions historically protect all of their employees equally, which is mostly taken advantage of by the lazy members (definitely not the majority of union members, but a noticeable minority). It is this enabling power of unions that pisses people off about them. Unions need to stop protecting lazy workers. This is critical to their continued support from the rest of society. Unions have to take steps to ensure that their lazy members are compensated equitably to the effort they put in. A stupid lazy union member should not get paid the same as a motivated intelligent union member when all other factors are equal. That trait of unions is pretty much the only real reason anyone is opposed to unions in the first place. All other reasons are essentially window dressing around the real issue.
We need to stop giving money to the poor. They don't need money. What they need is a systematic, comprehensive, plan for how to get them off the bottom. The single biggest factor keeping poor people poor, is the responsibility for children. As noted, often times, a parent finds themselves as the sole caregiver for children, and they are consequently trapped, as the responsibilities of childrearing often conflict with the responsibilities that employers would place upon employees (such as reliable attendance, and schedule flexibility). The simplest solution to the problem would be to do away with welfare and unemployment benefits entirely and replace them with guaranteed services for their dependents such as 50 hours of weekly daycare, Free medical services for dependents, Three daily meals for dependents. All of those services combined would be cheaper than welfare and would provide far more benefit to society. Individuals, when freed from many of the responsibilities of dependent care, would be far more able to work the kinds of schedules that employers want/need. Being only financially responsible for themselves would allow them to choose better paths for their own career advancement (including continuing education), that would otherwise be impossible to manage while being primary caregiver.
Mind you I am not proposing making these options available only to the poor, I am proposing that society provide that level of service for all its citizens as a way to level the playing field for all parties. In the end, it will only help the next generation, when they don't have to grow up seeing their parent(s) trapped in poverty with no hope of escape, and no obvious way that the children can avoid the same fate.
I doubt any one person has full knowledge of how a computer works. I have a reasonably good grasp of most of the software layers, and a fairly good idea of how the hardware abstraction works, but reading about the pentium division bug makes it clear that an undergraduate math degree is not enough to understand the inner workings of the CPU. I understand the performance difference between wifi B and N, but I don't know the protocol details. SSD drives are magic to me. I would guess that full knowledge of how a computer works would require advanced degrees in CS, a couple different maths, and electrical engineering, at the very least.
A much better place to start would be with a computer engineering degree. It is ultimately geared towards building embedded systems from the ground up, which requires a rather complete understanding of how the entire machine works. The most important part is not knowing all of the details, but knowing the overall principles, and how to find out the details when you need them. Everything you need to write the software is in the component spec sheets, and with a BSCE, you will learn how to build the hardware (and by extension how it works). The only missing piece of the puzzle would be a chemistry or microelectronics degree so that you would understand the chem involved in making the silicon.
Given my educational background, and a short amount of time to bone up, I could speak to just about any part of a computer systems design from the basic silicon to hard drives to LCD / CRT displays to wireless networking card hadrware. On the software side, I can explain just about every working part of a basic operating system, all the way to high level algorithms, advanced compiler design and multi-threaded/multiprocessor/networked systems design.
I'm not a particular fan of Tesla (Tesla Motors, at least -- Nikolai was seemingly a pretty cool customer), but it's not in the same market as Uber or Facebook.
That is because you failed to accurately calculate the risk/reward for Tesla. It is an understandable error, as accurately calculating risk/reward is anything but simple, and requires a very deep understanding of a company, its investors, and its market. It is complicated enough that often, even a companies officers don't understand all of the nuances. Thanks to chaos theory, one of those little details can bankrupt a company, or launch it into the stratosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
The stats, on the other hand, don't lie.
They don't? Maybe you are reading the results wrong? Could it be that the poll group were self selecting? Maybe their users tend to be on the younger side, as older folks don’t tend to like those types of sites as much.
The stats can mean anything you want them to mean if you haven’t normalized the data.
I think most people are perfectly capable of managing their finances and making informed choices
35% of americans are behind on bills
Kind of puts an end to that theory.
Electric cars (the ones you can get right now) are terrible when it is really cold or really hot.
Horse shit. I own a Miev, and the range is not significantly affected by heat or cold. Running the heater does affect the range, but I can heat the car from shore power before leaving, and that significantly reduces the impact on the range. Make no mistake, if I drive with the heat and AC off, then the range is barely affected by sub zero weather (we had lots of that in upstate NY this year, and I drive the car to work and back every day). A much bigger impact on range comes from driving habits: staying back a little further and using the regen braking instead of the brake pedal, coasting up to red lights instead of maintaining the speed limit until the last second and then braking. If I drive "right" it will increase the range by 20%-30%. extreme cold, by contrast, only affects the range about 5%.
The difference between the 60kWh and 85kWh Tesla Model S cash price is $10,000 or $400/kWh so I'm not sure about the article's conclusion that the battery costs $300/kWh.
The P85 also has 4 wheel drive instead of rear wheel drive. The P85+ is an additional $10k, and roughly doubles the size of the motors from the P85. I think $7,500 for the additional battery, and $2,500 for the additional motor and drive train components is actually overestimating the cost of the battery.
I think that Toyota hydrogen fuel cell is far more practical and cleaner (because electric batteries are charged with coal fire plant electricity made 500+ miles away from where it is used).
How exactly do you think they get the hydrogen??? They use electricity by way of electrolysis. This is a hideously inefficient process. Not to mention the complete lack of a hydrogen infrastructure, and the hazards of compressed gases. Hydrogen is dumb. It was when it was conceived, and still is. a Hydrocarbon fuel cell might be a good idea, but you would still get significant greenhouse gases out of it. Better still would be.. wait for it... electric batteries or super-caps. Uses the existing infrastructure, the ultimate source of the energy can be swapped for whatever the hooch-du-jour is without the end user ever even knowing or caring. On vehicle storage was the only real limitation, and thanks to portable electronics, the research into making good batteries got done in spite of the powers-that-be wanting to kill electric cars at any cost. Now that the energy density of batteries is getting competitive, and the cost is coming down thanks to economy of scale, we are seeing the tipping point where gasoline vehicles go from a trillion dollar industry to a niche market. In 20 years, gasoline vehicles will be manufactured and purchased for very specific markets, and everything else will be electric.
People continue to buy gas cars because these issues are still not addressed in cars they could potentially afford.
No, people continue to buy gas cars precisely because they don't know how to make rational financial choices. I was in Mitsubishi dealership getting service on my car, and there was a young couple in there with a sales guy doing the math on a couple of options. The sales guy was trying to push the electric model (as I assume they have been told to), but the young couple was under the impression that electricity cost $1 per kilowatt hour, and accused the sales guy of lying to them when he tried to correct them. On top of that, the young couple assumed that electrics would have higher maintenance costs (because of the battery, I think). These folks claimed they couldn't afford the $350 per month for the electric car. When I left, they were finalizing a *lease* on an SUV for $250 per month. If these idiots had done their homework, they could have gotten the electric for effectively the same per month cost, and after 5 years they would have owned the electric with a very low monthly cost. Instead, they leased an SUV, and in 4 years they will have absolutely nothing, and be back right where they are now. Americans (with some exceptions) are stupid.
It's total cost of ownership that matters:
Americans don't know from total cost of ownership. 50% of Americans are behind on one or more bills. They're only concerned about surviving to the next paycheck.
an open-source program to automatically detect automatically generated papers.
Just wait till I bust out my Trace Buster Buster.
But they're already there. The maps site says there are a lot of internet services. All but two are "too expensive", but the map site doesn't rate service by cost, just availability.
By that measure, there is 100% gigabit coverage in the united states by virtue of the fact that all you have to do is run your own fiber (or pay someone to do it) to the nearest backbone location, and the owner of that blockhouse will be happy to jack you in (for a gigantic monthly fee). Where there is money, it can and will be done. The only question is how much money.
The point of the FCC regulations is that there should be broadband access for *all* Americans, not just the ones that can afford to lay out $1M in upfront costs and $10k / month... Sites like the broadband finder sites are there for one of two reasons: A political entity trying to demonstrate that they are in fact getting the broadband that they were elected / appointed to create, or by industry leaders wishing to demonstrate why there is no need for further regulation / and or that industry regulation is being met.
I've used that same site, and according to it, there are 7 providers in my area. Of those, two are 4G wireless at $5 / gigabyte, my bill last month would have been $935. 2 are DSL which meet the old definition of broadband at 1.8 Mbit. 1 is Time Warner that offers up to 75 Mbit, but has only ever been able to get 50 working where I am. 1 is Verizon Fios, which cant seem to figure out where my house is (those people are idiots). They would be great for my needs, but cant figure out how to get the signal from their fiber (that runs less than 30 feet from my house), to my house. and 1 is a provider that services a county 20 miles away, The county I live in has over 4,000 residents per sq mile, and I am in one of the more densely populated parts of the county.
The FCC needs to change their measure of availability to include cost / GB, uptime, and cost per Gb. They should only be allowed to say that an area has coverage if it has 99% uptime, 10 Mb, and costs less than $100 / month. reasonable usage (which in this age has to include about 2 hours of netflix / day). I would say that 150GB is not unreasonable usage per month.
I wouldn't consider someone who wrote code like that a "superstar". He sounds more like a cowboy coder who couldn't give a shit about code maintenance after he moved on to something else. I would have complained about his shitty naming and if management was too scared to fix such a massive fuckup then you're better off working elsewhere.
Welcome to the world of startups...
People often put up with some god awful shit in exchange for equity...
People who are offended by their supervisors sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace can always just quit and go find a different employer... they are free to boycott the company... they are *not* free to to use legal recourse to force such clearly immature persons into behaving as they believe they ought to./
There is a world of difference between an employer / subordinate relationship and a company / consumer relationship. People almost universally have to work to survive. That makes a job a necessary fact of life, not a luxury. Purchasing a fungible good from a specific company is an option. If a company is behaving in a way that makes consumers not want to do business with them, then the market will sort it out. When employers behave that way, it can ruin peoples lives. That is why equal opportunity is the law in spite of the fact that it often directly contradicts the second amendment. You have the right to say or do anything you want. You don’t have the right to force people (through any means) to experience it.
This guy is just spouting off, but nobody is being forced to pay any attention to him. Should he be challenged in court, the court will find on his side because he is not coercing anyone into reading what he is writing. It is the same principle that gives him the right to go to a public place and make obscene statements. So long as he is not targeting an individual, he is free to say what he wishes (might get beat up depending what he says, but he is within his rights to say it). That same behaviour in front of a bunch of employee would get him fired (or arrested).
You have just described nearly every politician of consequence. The problem is not that the politicians will lie about anything and everything to get elected, The problem is that the electorate practically demands that their leaders have a bunch of qualities that are contrary to good leadership and good science (Such as always knowing what to do, overwhelming confidence, ability to make snap decisions). These are absolutely opposite of what a good leader should have, and yet, these are the criteria that the average person uses to select their leaders. The simple reality of the matter is that the general population has no business selecting a leader. By allowing them to do so, we endanger our own future. Its the same reason we don't let just anybody fly an airplane. Almost no-one could do it safely without lots of training, but that wouldn't stop every Joe Sixpack from trying it if they could.
Blackberry: Filling a niche that doesnt exist since 2005!
But if you are unable to watch them then democracy itself becomes no more than a marketing exercise.
democracy has never been anything other than a marketing exercise. The moment government comes into being, it is used by those with the power to control those without. The cynic in me suspects that government has no other purpose.
This is only true if your talking about relatively simple tasks. When you have a large, complex software project, often using several different components and languages, yes it's as much art as science. It isn't all just quicksort vs insertion sort and data structures and the like. You learn tricks, and you use them. And sometimes they're language-specific.
I have to agree with the GP on this. There is a process to be followed when designing software. Those "tricks" are the worst kinds of crap you see in modern software. The more clever a piece of code is, the worse it is. That is because all code eventually has to be read and understood by someone, usually doing maintenance, and often under severe time pressure. The more clever your code is, the harder it is for that other person to glean what they need to know from it. In general, it is extremely rare that performance needs outweigh maintenance needs, and your clever tricks are costing the company more than they are saving. That effectively amounts to you failing to provide the best value for your salary that you can.
Before I ever use any programming structure that is abnormal or uncommon, the first question is: Is there a common way to do this, and if so, why am I not using it? Early in my career, the answer to those questions were: yes and because I didn’t know the common way existed. Later in my career, Most times I ask that question, I switch to the common way of doing things.
True, you may not need an EE degree. But if you can't draw a K-map and cover glitch cases, just as one example, then you are not qualified to develop programmable logic. While the FPGAs and micros come with a lot built-in, you still have to understand circuit principles when designing the surrounding support components and proper interfacing of signals, ratings, timing specs, etc. We need to understand power consumption in components to best manage it from software. So typically, the requisite skills are taught in EE, computer engineering, or something closely related. Kudos if a CS program teaches that, but I'm not sure if that is consistent.
Exactly. Just because you know enough VHDL to program an FPGA to do what you want does not make you qualified to do so. Mostly any bright programmer could build FPGA or ASIC designs, but where you need the actual Engineering background is in avoiding the gotchas that get many amateurs. Simple things like trying to implement a divider as combinational logic, or skipping a ground plane to reduce the cost of your system. Sometimes you can get away with it, sometimes not. Knowing what the symptoms of inadequate grounding looks like can save you mountains of debugging time. Another amateur mistake is not having bypass caps on all of your supply pins. This can cause intermittent failures that are a royal pain to debug. Probably the biggest killer is not understanding the limitations of I/O on common uControllers. Trying to pull half an amp from a 20mA pin, or trying to use a simple voltage divider circuit on an input pin that has an internal pull resistor. Electrical Engineering is all about the details, and a non EE will take longer to "discover" the details than an EE will.
there are a lot of companies that like sticking it to Microsoft.
Gee, I wonder why.
Apple is just ... Apple.
Apple: the 800 Lb niche player...
They can join BlackBerry in the "any day now, we'll be on top!" movement.
The difference between microsoft and blackberry is:
Microsoft is hoping for a better tomorrow
Blackberry is still hoping yesterday will get better.
Maybe that means that their is room for a new kickstart. You invest and get x amount of the company per dollar. So you put in say $100 into a "Kickstarter" and you get .01% of the company.
The venture fails and you get write it off on your taxes.
It becomes Facebook and you get to retire.
Except that scheme runs afoul of a whole host of rules, and will get you in hot water with the SEC (possibly including jail time)
That very concept has a name: "Initial Public Offering", and the rules surrounding it are complex enough that most companies hire a brokerage house to handle the details.
If they work, they'll be banned, if not, they will sell them at the TSA's airport duty free souvenir shop.
Why can't it be both? The TSA aint too bright...
If I had mod points, I'd have modded you up.
I grew up as the only conservative in a family of upper middle class liberals. It always infuriated me that poor people were constantly getting free stuff, and I bought in to the whole poor people are lazy mentality. Once I graduated, I found myself working in a company that employs a great deal of the bottom of society. (I started there myself thanks to the collapse in '01). I was lucky enough to have a good family watching out for me, and I didn't stay on the bottom long, but I've been there. As a result of my experiences, I have moved much farther left on the spectrum, but I will note a few things here that need to be said.
First, I find far more lazy people in the middle classes than on the bottom or the top. Those on the top work hard because they are driven (this is what gets them to the top). Those on the bottom work hard because they have to in order to survive. They often have no hope, and no future because we have built the system in this country to virtually guarantee their continued failure. Those in the middle have the breathing room to be lazy, and some of them are. Unions historically protect all of their employees equally, which is mostly taken advantage of by the lazy members (definitely not the majority of union members, but a noticeable minority). It is this enabling power of unions that pisses people off about them. Unions need to stop protecting lazy workers. This is critical to their continued support from the rest of society. Unions have to take steps to ensure that their lazy members are compensated equitably to the effort they put in. A stupid lazy union member should not get paid the same as a motivated intelligent union member when all other factors are equal. That trait of unions is pretty much the only real reason anyone is opposed to unions in the first place. All other reasons are essentially window dressing around the real issue.
We need to stop giving money to the poor. They don't need money. What they need is a systematic, comprehensive, plan for how to get them off the bottom. The single biggest factor keeping poor people poor, is the responsibility for children. As noted, often times, a parent finds themselves as the sole caregiver for children, and they are consequently trapped, as the responsibilities of childrearing often conflict with the responsibilities that employers would place upon employees (such as reliable attendance, and schedule flexibility). The simplest solution to the problem would be to do away with welfare and unemployment benefits entirely and replace them with guaranteed services for their dependents such as 50 hours of weekly daycare, Free medical services for dependents, Three daily meals for dependents. All of those services combined would be cheaper than welfare and would provide far more benefit to society. Individuals, when freed from many of the responsibilities of dependent care, would be far more able to work the kinds of schedules that employers want/need. Being only financially responsible for themselves would allow them to choose better paths for their own career advancement (including continuing education), that would otherwise be impossible to manage while being primary caregiver.
Mind you I am not proposing making these options available only to the poor, I am proposing that society provide that level of service for all its citizens as a way to level the playing field for all parties. In the end, it will only help the next generation, when they don't have to grow up seeing their parent(s) trapped in poverty with no hope of escape, and no obvious way that the children can avoid the same fate.
Bill Nye and I both have something in common that you dont:
When we make a statement we put our name to it.
Coward
I doubt any one person has full knowledge of how a computer works. I have a reasonably good grasp of most of the software layers, and a fairly good idea of how the hardware abstraction works, but reading about the pentium division bug makes it clear that an undergraduate math degree is not enough to understand the inner workings of the CPU. I understand the performance difference between wifi B and N, but I don't know the protocol details. SSD drives are magic to me. I would guess that full knowledge of how a computer works would require advanced degrees in CS, a couple different maths, and electrical engineering, at the very least.
A much better place to start would be with a computer engineering degree. It is ultimately geared towards building embedded systems from the ground up, which requires a rather complete understanding of how the entire machine works. The most important part is not knowing all of the details, but knowing the overall principles, and how to find out the details when you need them. Everything you need to write the software is in the component spec sheets, and with a BSCE, you will learn how to build the hardware (and by extension how it works). The only missing piece of the puzzle would be a chemistry or microelectronics degree so that you would understand the chem involved in making the silicon.
Given my educational background, and a short amount of time to bone up, I could speak to just about any part of a computer systems design from the basic silicon to hard drives to LCD / CRT displays to wireless networking card hadrware. On the software side, I can explain just about every working part of a basic operating system, all the way to high level algorithms, advanced compiler design and multi-threaded/multiprocessor/networked systems design.
I'm not a particular fan of Tesla (Tesla Motors, at least -- Nikolai was seemingly a pretty cool customer), but it's not in the same market as Uber or Facebook.
That is because you failed to accurately calculate the risk/reward for Tesla. It is an understandable error, as accurately calculating risk/reward is anything but simple, and requires a very deep understanding of a company, its investors, and its market. It is complicated enough that often, even a companies officers don't understand all of the nuances. Thanks to chaos theory, one of those little details can bankrupt a company, or launch it into the stratosphere.