No - I'm saying that you can do your own controlled experiment. Or is a simple experiment that takes 5 minutes to complete beyond your ability?
You can even repeat it multiple times.
You know, that's the scientific method - repeatable experiments, not the "show me a citation on the web or it ain't so" whining you've descended to.
If you read the Foundation Trilogy, you'll find a particularly apt section, where history researchers try to claim that doing research "in the great library" is the only proper way, and that research "in the field" is over-rated. Think of it - you've become a punch-line in an old sci-fi, like so many who refuse to think any more.
Are you crippled? Do it yourself. Get a dog. Have it look in a floor-to-ceiling mirror. It will recognize that the other dog is "self", and not respond to it, just as it will recognize that your reflection is not "you". Have another dog, a cat, or another animal enter the room from behind. The first dog will recognize that the other dog is not "in the mirror", but actually behind it. It clearly can differentiate between "self" and "other", as well as recognizing that the reflection is of itself, and not "other".
It's not that scientists hate dogs - but scientists can be incredibly blind to the obvious and stick to their preconceptions the same as any religious belief. Just like all those fundies who claim that same-sex relationships are unnatural and don't happen in nature - they must have never seen a dog hump their leg - or the reality - they are blind to the facts because the facts don't agree with their pre-conceptions.
Funny how an immature puppy beats out an immature human in your "self-awareness" test, isn't it? The reason for this is simple - dogs develop self-awareness more rapidly than humans because it's more essential to their survival early on. They learn VERY quickly not to hurt each other too much in play, because otherwise only 1 (at best) would survive from each litter. So they know not just "self", but to a certain extent, that "other" is another "self".
From observations of bullying and abusive/dominant behaviour, from schoolyards, to the workplace, the home, etc., it's obvious that some humans never learn that. There's a biological basis for this. Since there was less need for self-control as infants (what's a one-year-old going to do - gum you to death?) genes for self-control, as well as recognizing the difference between "self" and "other" at a young age, were not preferentially selected for. In their place, we have the much less effective social control of older (childhood and up) humans.
There are a few reasons why we don't do such research.
1. If we DID the research and found that the animals we eat are too much like us, we'd have to reconsider...
2. People who don't believe animals have a sense of humour or much self-awareness take it as self-evident.
3. People who already know otherwise from personal experience take it as self-evident.
It's possible that a lot of it is caused by "contamination" from contact with humans - and that even humans wouldn't be self-aware without extensive "contamination" by other humans. The only experiment that could have tested the latter (the 50 infants who were fed but never hugged or talked to) all died - failure to thrive.
There's some evidence that most, if not all, humans weren't all that self-aware until about 6000 BC. Who knows - maybe WE picked it up from being stimulated by our contacts with wolves 8k to 10k years ago. Outlandish? Perhaps... but it makes more sense than that we were fully self-aware for over 100,000 years and only developed enough empathy and awareness of "self" vs "other" to realize that slavery is wrong in the last hundred years.
The other conclusion - that socialization is a one-way street from humans to other animals - is incredibly egotistical, and easily demonstrated as bogus by observations that animals that have never had contact with humans have complex social structures (and also that human social conventions and structures tend to rapidly degenerate under stress, or that masses can be easily persuaded to believe and do things that, in retrospect, are mass insanity).
Absolutely! One of my dogs learned how to open the sliding glass patio doors by himself. So, not that it's (*^%$#!!! COLD, I lock the door.
Next thing I know, I hear a loud slamming noise coming from the kitchen. He's getting my attention by banging the kitchen cabinet doors open and closed, and stops when he hears me walking toward the kitchen - and the two dogs are standing in the middle of the kitchen looking at me like "hey stupid, open the door!"
They knew they weren't allowed barking, they couldn't open the door themselves any more, so they developed another way to communicate what they wanted, and I guess you could say they "trained me."
If we refuse to admit it's possible, we'll never recognize it when it happens.
No, you're being irrational. When a dog can recognize that the reflection of another dog is NOT the other dog, but just the reflection, they've successfully discriminated between the appearance of something and the actual thing - same as they recognize that their own reflection is not them, just a reflection.
To be able to recognize the difference, they have to be aware of "self" and "other."
BTW - the mirror test has since been debunked because it doesn't even work with human infants:-)
Never said that the squirrel was aware that it was inserting characters into the text stream - just that it was aware that it bugged me.
Dogs and cats pass the mirror test just fine. They know the difference, and they know its them and not some other dogs' image, since if it's a strange dog, they'll turn around to attack.
They also know the diff. between the TV and an image in a mirror, so you might want to rethink all that m- your so-called "science" is decades out of date.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, all humour is the diversion of cruel impulses to less destructive behaviour. Your joke is perceived as funny by that same reasoning.
The joke is either "on the listener" or on a 3rd party, or the teller is themselves the butt of the joke.
Even our actions to a "good joke" - the baring of our teeth in laughter - are an aggressive challenge to apes and many other animals.
Their reaction would be "Oh but were too sophisticated now to include slapstick as humour - get back to your black and white silent movies, you ignorant clod!"
Or "Tsk, tsk, you're just anthropomorphizing their behaviour..."
Of course, they have no research data to back up their claim that animals don't have a sense of humour, but "that's obvious", just like it was "obvious" that the earth is flat and the center of the universe.
Re:Yet another piece of junk science ...
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The Science of Humor
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When's the last time you saw an animal do something just for fun? From squirrels teasing dogs (they do it in the wild all the time, and I used to have a pet squirrel that would jump on my Newfie's tail, then his head, then hop back to my shoulder or go running around my legs at the knee, just to tease him.
Sure, the dog could have just waited until the squirrel stopped and then killed him, but he never did.
Same squirrel - I'd be typing away, and every once in a while he'd quickly hop on the keyboard to insert a few extra characters. Then he'd stand there and look at me, and I'd poke him lightly in the nose trying to get him to understand "don't do that!" He understood - he also understood that he could get away with it.
The more intelligent birds do it too. Get yourself a pet crow - crows also are tool-makers, as are several other animals, so it's not surprising to see that they can also be intentionally funny. Humour, even slapstick, is the way we deal with aggressive impulses less destructively. All humour has an element of meanness in it, from teasing to outright "nasty show" stuff.
Yet another piece of junk science ...
on
The Science of Humor
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· Score: 4, Interesting
yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom
The reason we don't see it so much in the animal kingdom is two-fold:
1. We're lousy observers, bringing our presumptions with us;
2. There's fewer opportunities.
To make the claim that it's rare or even non-existent (in other words, you don't even know) with zero proof (and something that's contradicted by observation of animals at play or interactions of animals and their owners) is just plain junk.
Oh lookie - someone all defensive because the truth hurts.
Not-so-fun fact - I was helping an engineering firm at a public works job site, and part of the work was connecting the drainage to an interceptor with the public system.
They had to dig 16 feet, and figured that they'd make a nice big wide hole, no chance of caving in. Me, I'm no engineer, but I told them "No - you need to make a trench box." They pooh-poohed the idea, but since it was a union site, when I mentioned it to the foreman, he agreed, and a trench box was built, even though "it wasn't needed."
And we all watched (and heard) as, while the plumber was at the bottom of the box, those "extra-wide sides" caved in. The trench box saved his life.
Normally, it wouldn't have been needed, but anyone SHOULD have noticed that this portion of the site was fill, it was lower than the rest of the site, and that the accumulation of ground water would render it extremely unstable. There were certainly enough engineers (including geo-engineers - there was a lot of pile-driving done based on the geo-engineering reports).
The soil engineers had never tested it, b/c it wasn't where the buildings themselves were going. But anyone who saw the total lack of mature trees in that portion could have figured it out in a few seconds.
So no, engineering is not a science - not when someone with ZERO engineering training gets it right, and the engineers totally miss it. Like too many experts, not only couldn't they see the forest for the trees - they couldn't see the lack of a forest for the lack of a tree. But to someone who likes nature, and likes the occasional walk in the woods... it was obvious. No need for a study. No need for samples.
But of course, I wouldn't expect a mere engineer to understand that.
Engineering is still not a science. In one experiment, they asked a group of engineers to determine how much a pile of earth could be undercut before it collapsed - NONE of them were within 50% of the subsequent result.
Being off by a factor of at least 50% is NOT "reproducible science." We're simply not there yet, and probably won't be for another 100 years..
Second would be encouraging technical schools, stuff where businesses are screaming they can't find employees.
"Second would be encouraging technical schools, stuff where businesses are screaming they can't find employees at low, low wages and no, no benefits."
There, FTFY. (and broke it for the 99%).
Want to really fix it? The answer is the same as what's making the Chinese government uneasy, and is touched on in TFA - workers who are organized. That "dirty" word - unions.
In the long run, business needs them too - because without workers who earn a living wage, there's fewer consumers for their goods. Of course, business needs to get back to thinking beyond next week and beyond tomorrow's stock price (which will only happen when we force a minimum hold time for stock by taxing all stock trades, the same as any other sale of a taxable item).
Everything about such a system is inefficient, and that's why engineers have a hard time dealing with it. They are trained to eliminate inefficiency
I nominate this as BS post of the day.
Just look at anything that breaks because it's wrongfully engineered (example - over-engineered in one area, under-engineered in another).
Or, to take software (since this is slashdot), most of what's produced today. And yesterday. And last year. And 10 years ago. And 20 years ago. Bloat, bloat bloat bloat... hey - it's not a feature, it's a bug. The more lines of code, the more places for you to have errors. The most bug-free line of code is the line of code that isn't written.
Why do developers ignore this? Ask any psychologist.
1. You're going to need a lot of extra right-of-way for your low-2-high-speed train to loop back - unless you then bring it to a complete stop, and backtrack - covering 4x the distance (2x each way), and needed to accelerate twice instead of once, so 2x the energy, and the people are delayed by 4x to get off at the destination of the slow-speed train, more than eliminating any time saved in getting on.
2. If you make the stops too close together, you might as well just connect them directly with the train that actually stops.
3. If you make them far apart enough for this to be practical, then each slow-speed train has to carry a lot more people - making it in effect another high-speed train that might as well just stop, because it's a lot cheaper to buy 1 and maintain 1 high-speed train than it is 5 or 6 to service the same route.
4. The high-speed train has to stop for maintenance and cleaning anyway (or is it just going to keep getting dirtier and dirtier as time goes on until it becomes a moving trash heap)?
Can the robots smell the inmates toking up after lights out and report it?... to the guards who are toking up because now they don't have to make rounds as often?
The problem is that the people who think they're good liars are lying to themselves. So when called out on a lie, they don't understand how YOU can DARE have the UNMITIGATED GALL to imply that they're lying - even when you catch them red-handed!
They know they're lying, but THE FORCE (of of being able to ignore cognitive dissonance) IS STRONG with them.
And of course, they're so used to lying that they expect everyone else to.
Why? Because these sort of "contests" have huge down-sides, and most people don't even think about it.
There alternatives to getting involved with VCs at the initial development stage. People should consider them. If you only have a concept, w/o even a fake demo to show what sort of idea you have, then you're not at the stage to go look for funding except from angels - or to self-fund.
Let's rephrase the proposition:
"You will give me 6% ownership, and joint ownership of your IP. You will come to work at location $X for 3 months along with the rest of your team, for what works out to be less than the minimum wage, no overtime, no benefits. In return, if you produce something that I can use to sucker money out of others, you will give over more equity in return for continuing to work for less than the minimum wage for as long as it takes. By the time it's ready for launch, you will own almost zero equity, I'll have made hundreds of thousands in fees and "points" as well as in selling off the equity I get in each of the investment rounds, and if you get run over by a car, too bad... read your agreement, b/c it has clauses related to non-performance on your part (you might want to look up the word "forfeiture":-).
Does this sound like a good deal to you, in return for what amounts to a "lottery ticket?" This is just one step up from those "I have this great idea - all YOU have to do is develop it and we'll be rich!" I don't know how many times I've heard that one.
In the end, the product can be a huge hit, and you can still end up with nothing - not even rights to your own IP - and you can even be forced out. It happened to Steve Jobs, it can certainly happen to you.
We don't hear about the failures because people don't want to talk about them. Once you've been through a few of them, you get to know the game. I got my first exposure to this back in 1995. "Hey, we've only lost $25 million so far... another $x million and we'll get to market"... so the VCs kept milking it, getting more money from investors who don't understand sunk costs, and eventually, both the startup and the spin-off went bankrupt - and for a multiple of that $25 million. In the meantime, the VCs got their money back multiple times, just in fees and selling their "equity points" (they can sell their shares at any time, YOU can't, usually not until 1 year after launch).
I was lucky - I wasn't a partner or investor, so I was getting a regular salary instead of working for equity points, so I was able to leave when things became toxic, long before they went under. Others weren't so fortunate...
In case you missed it, Microsoft involvement with linux is not history... the linux kernel team has accepted patches from Microsoft for the 3.0 kernel - so this certainly isn't "just something OLD Suse did". Microsoft made the most changes to the linux 3.0 kernel:-)
And of course FreeBSD (and by extension, the others, since they do tend to share) has a ton of code from Apple, as well as code the devs were paid to write by Apple.
Some zealots would say that such cooperation is anathema, but the kernel devs obviously take a more pragmatic approach. For them, there's gnu/hurd, "under development" for more than 25 years - which needs to use drivers from linux (from linux 2.0 as of this summer - talk about dead!), and run in a vm (usually atop linux), blah blah blah but not do any real work.
I read it, and anyone who doesn't have at least a partially built prototype is going to lose out against someone else competing who does.
So use your head for more than a hat-rack and try to UNDERSTAND what I wrote instead of being intentionally obtuse, mkay? This is a business competition as much as it is a technical competition.
You submit a proposal for $20k seed money and you have an idea, a 3-page plan, a few powerpoint slides. I submit a video of a working prototype, along with future milestones that need to be hit, a list of technical challenges that have ALREADY been met (past performance is a better indicator of future performance than "oh we have a plan"), and the funding that will be needed for each milestone.
If we set both ideas as being of equal merit, yours will lose.
Also, you fail to consider what happens if it doesn't get beyond the 3-month stage. Who owns the IP? Not you exclusively any more - you sold it. So any great ideas that you may have come up with, they're free to patent, copyright, use, whatever.
It was $150 million, not $150k:-) Now, if these people were saying that they were putting $20 million instead of $20k into the kitty for 10 projects, it would be more realistic - you'd get real teams with solid experience looking at it, and at least kicking the tires.
This has nothing to do with any sort of "FOSS zealotry" (hint - look at my current.sig), and everything to do with the deal having major suckage for what is a paltry investment. Hint - the company managing this contest will make more than all the people combined - so why not just run similar events?
I doubt the likes of Zuckerberg fail to sleep at night because Microsoft has a 6% share in his company or whatever. He's still done pretty well out the deal no?
Microsoft paid $240 million, not $20k. And that was for a 1.5% stake, not 6%.
Also, in these situations, they almost always lose control of their business. The fact is that when you go looking for real funding, the investors are going to want equity in return - and since you've established that your business has a total potential valuation of only $334k or so, based on 6% for $20k, you lose control when you get an additional ($334k/2-$20k already burned) or $147k - which also has to go to growing the business, not towards any 6-figure salaries for you and anyone else you're working with, to get it to the point where the next round of investors will come in.
And when you're looking for actually transforming your product into an SKU that can be sold, even if all of a sudden your business is worth 10x as much, you're going to have to give up most of that just to cover the initial costs of production, packaging, marketing, etc. Profits? If there are any, since your backers own 95-99% of the business by then, you won't be seeing much, if any. And that's if you succeed - not very likely at all.
Better way: Get your product to the point where it can actually be shopped around as something ready to go to the target market. This means having a finished product, having actual sales!!!! (not just "oh, they tried it and they like it so we think others will buy it" blue-sky thinking), and a plan for rolling it out. THEN you're in a position to look for an investor or 2, or maybe a manufacturing/distribution equity partner, and not give away the store.
If that's what you want, then fine... but if your company is already worth $400k (and not a "well, when we're finished this code, it will be worth $400k"), why aren't you out there looking for first round investors for serious money instead of seed money? Because you know that when you need more money, you're going to have to either show an increase in the business's worth (to issue new shares) or give up equity (to sell current shares). Of course, you can also just issue new shares without having increased the business' worth, but then you're just diluting existing shares value - something current shareholders will scream at you for doing.
Not sure what that means, but the title alone will make many future customers trust you more.
Slashdot Mirror
No - I'm saying that you can do your own controlled experiment. Or is a simple experiment that takes 5 minutes to complete beyond your ability?
You can even repeat it multiple times.
You know, that's the scientific method - repeatable experiments, not the "show me a citation on the web or it ain't so" whining you've descended to.
If you read the Foundation Trilogy, you'll find a particularly apt section, where history researchers try to claim that doing research "in the great library" is the only proper way, and that research "in the field" is over-rated. Think of it - you've become a punch-line in an old sci-fi, like so many who refuse to think any more.
It's not that scientists hate dogs - but scientists can be incredibly blind to the obvious and stick to their preconceptions the same as any religious belief. Just like all those fundies who claim that same-sex relationships are unnatural and don't happen in nature - they must have never seen a dog hump their leg - or the reality - they are blind to the facts because the facts don't agree with their pre-conceptions.
Funny how an immature puppy beats out an immature human in your "self-awareness" test, isn't it? The reason for this is simple - dogs develop self-awareness more rapidly than humans because it's more essential to their survival early on. They learn VERY quickly not to hurt each other too much in play, because otherwise only 1 (at best) would survive from each litter. So they know not just "self", but to a certain extent, that "other" is another "self".
From observations of bullying and abusive/dominant behaviour, from schoolyards, to the workplace, the home, etc., it's obvious that some humans never learn that. There's a biological basis for this. Since there was less need for self-control as infants (what's a one-year-old going to do - gum you to death?) genes for self-control, as well as recognizing the difference between "self" and "other" at a young age, were not preferentially selected for. In their place, we have the much less effective social control of older (childhood and up) humans.
There are a few reasons why we don't do such research.
1. If we DID the research and found that the animals we eat are too much like us, we'd have to reconsider ...
2. People who don't believe animals have a sense of humour or much self-awareness take it as self-evident.
3. People who already know otherwise from personal experience take it as self-evident.
It's possible that a lot of it is caused by "contamination" from contact with humans - and that even humans wouldn't be self-aware without extensive "contamination" by other humans. The only experiment that could have tested the latter (the 50 infants who were fed but never hugged or talked to) all died - failure to thrive.
There's some evidence that most, if not all, humans weren't all that self-aware until about 6000 BC. Who knows - maybe WE picked it up from being stimulated by our contacts with wolves 8k to 10k years ago. Outlandish? Perhaps ... but it makes more sense than that we were fully self-aware for over 100,000 years and only developed enough empathy and awareness of "self" vs "other" to realize that slavery is wrong in the last hundred years.
The other conclusion - that socialization is a one-way street from humans to other animals - is incredibly egotistical, and easily demonstrated as bogus by observations that animals that have never had contact with humans have complex social structures (and also that human social conventions and structures tend to rapidly degenerate under stress, or that masses can be easily persuaded to believe and do things that, in retrospect, are mass insanity).
Next thing I know, I hear a loud slamming noise coming from the kitchen. He's getting my attention by banging the kitchen cabinet doors open and closed, and stops when he hears me walking toward the kitchen - and the two dogs are standing in the middle of the kitchen looking at me like "hey stupid, open the door!"
They knew they weren't allowed barking, they couldn't open the door themselves any more, so they developed another way to communicate what they wanted, and I guess you could say they "trained me."
If we refuse to admit it's possible, we'll never recognize it when it happens.
The big problem here is that some people want to limit what is funny to what is funny "to them" - not to others, and not to other species.
The also want to limit other species ability to feel emotions based on them not being "intelligent enough."
Animals demonstrate more empathy than they do ...
To be able to recognize the difference, they have to be aware of "self" and "other."
BTW - the mirror test has since been debunked because it doesn't even work with human infants :-)
Dogs and cats pass the mirror test just fine. They know the difference, and they know its them and not some other dogs' image, since if it's a strange dog, they'll turn around to attack.
They also know the diff. between the TV and an image in a mirror, so you might want to rethink all that m- your so-called "science" is decades out of date.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, all humour is the diversion of cruel impulses to less destructive behaviour. Your joke is perceived as funny by that same reasoning.
The joke is either "on the listener" or on a 3rd party, or the teller is themselves the butt of the joke.
Even our actions to a "good joke" - the baring of our teeth in laughter - are an aggressive challenge to apes and many other animals.
Their reaction would be "Oh but were too sophisticated now to include slapstick as humour - get back to your black and white silent movies, you ignorant clod!"
Or "Tsk, tsk, you're just anthropomorphizing their behaviour ..."
Of course, they have no research data to back up their claim that animals don't have a sense of humour, but "that's obvious", just like it was "obvious" that the earth is flat and the center of the universe.
When's the last time you saw an animal do something just for fun? From squirrels teasing dogs (they do it in the wild all the time, and I used to have a pet squirrel that would jump on my Newfie's tail, then his head, then hop back to my shoulder or go running around my legs at the knee, just to tease him.
Sure, the dog could have just waited until the squirrel stopped and then killed him, but he never did.
Same squirrel - I'd be typing away, and every once in a while he'd quickly hop on the keyboard to insert a few extra characters. Then he'd stand there and look at me, and I'd poke him lightly in the nose trying to get him to understand "don't do that!" He understood - he also understood that he could get away with it.
The more intelligent birds do it too. Get yourself a pet crow - crows also are tool-makers, as are several other animals, so it's not surprising to see that they can also be intentionally funny. Humour, even slapstick, is the way we deal with aggressive impulses less destructively. All humour has an element of meanness in it, from teasing to outright "nasty show" stuff.
The reason we don't see it so much in the animal kingdom is two-fold:
1. We're lousy observers, bringing our presumptions with us;
2. There's fewer opportunities.
To make the claim that it's rare or even non-existent (in other words, you don't even know) with zero proof (and something that's contradicted by observation of animals at play or interactions of animals and their owners) is just plain junk.
Oh lookie - someone all defensive because the truth hurts.
Not-so-fun fact - I was helping an engineering firm at a public works job site, and part of the work was connecting the drainage to an interceptor with the public system.
They had to dig 16 feet, and figured that they'd make a nice big wide hole, no chance of caving in. Me, I'm no engineer, but I told them "No - you need to make a trench box." They pooh-poohed the idea, but since it was a union site, when I mentioned it to the foreman, he agreed, and a trench box was built, even though "it wasn't needed."
And we all watched (and heard) as, while the plumber was at the bottom of the box, those "extra-wide sides" caved in. The trench box saved his life.
Normally, it wouldn't have been needed, but anyone SHOULD have noticed that this portion of the site was fill, it was lower than the rest of the site, and that the accumulation of ground water would render it extremely unstable. There were certainly enough engineers (including geo-engineers - there was a lot of pile-driving done based on the geo-engineering reports).
The soil engineers had never tested it, b/c it wasn't where the buildings themselves were going. But anyone who saw the total lack of mature trees in that portion could have figured it out in a few seconds.
So no, engineering is not a science - not when someone with ZERO engineering training gets it right, and the engineers totally miss it. Like too many experts, not only couldn't they see the forest for the trees - they couldn't see the lack of a forest for the lack of a tree. But to someone who likes nature, and likes the occasional walk in the woods ... it was obvious. No need for a study. No need for samples.
But of course, I wouldn't expect a mere engineer to understand that.
Being off by a factor of at least 50% is NOT "reproducible science." We're simply not there yet, and probably won't be for another 100 years..
"Second would be encouraging technical schools, stuff where businesses are screaming they can't find employees at low, low wages and no, no benefits."
There, FTFY. (and broke it for the 99%).
Want to really fix it? The answer is the same as what's making the Chinese government uneasy, and is touched on in TFA - workers who are organized. That "dirty" word - unions.
In the long run, business needs them too - because without workers who earn a living wage, there's fewer consumers for their goods. Of course, business needs to get back to thinking beyond next week and beyond tomorrow's stock price (which will only happen when we force a minimum hold time for stock by taxing all stock trades, the same as any other sale of a taxable item).
I nominate this as BS post of the day.
Just look at anything that breaks because it's wrongfully engineered (example - over-engineered in one area, under-engineered in another).
Or, to take software (since this is slashdot), most of what's produced today. And yesterday. And last year. And 10 years ago. And 20 years ago. Bloat, bloat bloat bloat ... hey - it's not a feature, it's a bug. The more lines of code, the more places for you to have errors. The most bug-free line of code is the line of code that isn't written.
Why do developers ignore this? Ask any psychologist.
1. You're going to need a lot of extra right-of-way for your low-2-high-speed train to loop back - unless you then bring it to a complete stop, and backtrack - covering 4x the distance (2x each way), and needed to accelerate twice instead of once, so 2x the energy, and the people are delayed by 4x to get off at the destination of the slow-speed train, more than eliminating any time saved in getting on.
2. If you make the stops too close together, you might as well just connect them directly with the train that actually stops.
3. If you make them far apart enough for this to be practical, then each slow-speed train has to carry a lot more people - making it in effect another high-speed train that might as well just stop, because it's a lot cheaper to buy 1 and maintain 1 high-speed train than it is 5 or 6 to service the same route.
4. The high-speed train has to stop for maintenance and cleaning anyway (or is it just going to keep getting dirtier and dirtier as time goes on until it becomes a moving trash heap)?
Can the robots smell the inmates toking up after lights out and report it? ... to the guards who are toking up because now they don't have to make rounds as often?
The problem is that the people who think they're good liars are lying to themselves. So when called out on a lie, they don't understand how YOU can DARE have the UNMITIGATED GALL to imply that they're lying - even when you catch them red-handed!
They know they're lying, but THE FORCE (of of being able to ignore cognitive dissonance) IS STRONG with them.
And of course, they're so used to lying that they expect everyone else to.
Why? Because these sort of "contests" have huge down-sides, and most people don't even think about it.
There alternatives to getting involved with VCs at the initial development stage. People should consider them. If you only have a concept, w/o even a fake demo to show what sort of idea you have, then you're not at the stage to go look for funding except from angels - or to self-fund.
Let's rephrase the proposition:
"You will give me 6% ownership, and joint ownership of your IP. You will come to work at location $X for 3 months along with the rest of your team, for what works out to be less than the minimum wage, no overtime, no benefits. In return, if you produce something that I can use to sucker money out of others, you will give over more equity in return for continuing to work for less than the minimum wage for as long as it takes. By the time it's ready for launch, you will own almost zero equity, I'll have made hundreds of thousands in fees and "points" as well as in selling off the equity I get in each of the investment rounds, and if you get run over by a car, too bad ... read your agreement, b/c it has clauses related to non-performance on your part (you might want to look up the word "forfeiture" :-).
Does this sound like a good deal to you, in return for what amounts to a "lottery ticket?" This is just one step up from those "I have this great idea - all YOU have to do is develop it and we'll be rich!" I don't know how many times I've heard that one.
In the end, the product can be a huge hit, and you can still end up with nothing - not even rights to your own IP - and you can even be forced out. It happened to Steve Jobs, it can certainly happen to you.
We don't hear about the failures because people don't want to talk about them. Once you've been through a few of them, you get to know the game. I got my first exposure to this back in 1995. "Hey, we've only lost $25 million so far ... another $x million and we'll get to market" ... so the VCs kept milking it, getting more money from investors who don't understand sunk costs, and eventually, both the startup and the spin-off went bankrupt - and for a multiple of that $25 million. In the meantime, the VCs got their money back multiple times, just in fees and selling their "equity points" (they can sell their shares at any time, YOU can't, usually not until 1 year after launch).
I was lucky - I wasn't a partner or investor, so I was getting a regular salary instead of working for equity points, so I was able to leave when things became toxic, long before they went under. Others weren't so fortunate ...
In case you missed it, Microsoft involvement with linux is not history ... the linux kernel team has accepted patches from Microsoft for the 3.0 kernel - so this certainly isn't "just something OLD Suse did". Microsoft made the most changes to the linux 3.0 kernel :-)
And of course FreeBSD (and by extension, the others, since they do tend to share) has a ton of code from Apple, as well as code the devs were paid to write by Apple.
Some zealots would say that such cooperation is anathema, but the kernel devs obviously take a more pragmatic approach. For them, there's gnu/hurd, "under development" for more than 25 years - which needs to use drivers from linux (from linux 2.0 as of this summer - talk about dead!), and run in a vm (usually atop linux), blah blah blah but not do any real work.
Yes, and YC is just as crappy. I checked them out, and I'm amazed at how much cheaper everyone sells themselves out compared to 15-20 years ago.
I read it, and anyone who doesn't have at least a partially built prototype is going to lose out against someone else competing who does.
So use your head for more than a hat-rack and try to UNDERSTAND what I wrote instead of being intentionally obtuse, mkay? This is a business competition as much as it is a technical competition.
You submit a proposal for $20k seed money and you have an idea, a 3-page plan, a few powerpoint slides. I submit a video of a working prototype, along with future milestones that need to be hit, a list of technical challenges that have ALREADY been met (past performance is a better indicator of future performance than "oh we have a plan"), and the funding that will be needed for each milestone.
If we set both ideas as being of equal merit, yours will lose.
Also, you fail to consider what happens if it doesn't get beyond the 3-month stage. Who owns the IP? Not you exclusively any more - you sold it. So any great ideas that you may have come up with, they're free to patent, copyright, use, whatever.
It was $150 million, not $150k :-) Now, if these people were saying that they were putting $20 million instead of $20k into the kitty for 10 projects, it would be more realistic - you'd get real teams with solid experience looking at it, and at least kicking the tires.
This has nothing to do with any sort of "FOSS zealotry" (hint - look at my current .sig), and everything to do with the deal having major suckage for what is a paltry investment. Hint - the company managing this contest will make more than all the people combined - so why not just run similar events?
Microsoft paid $240 million, not $20k. And that was for a 1.5% stake, not 6%.
Also, in these situations, they almost always lose control of their business. The fact is that when you go looking for real funding, the investors are going to want equity in return - and since you've established that your business has a total potential valuation of only $334k or so, based on 6% for $20k, you lose control when you get an additional ($334k/2-$20k already burned) or $147k - which also has to go to growing the business, not towards any 6-figure salaries for you and anyone else you're working with, to get it to the point where the next round of investors will come in.
And when you're looking for actually transforming your product into an SKU that can be sold, even if all of a sudden your business is worth 10x as much, you're going to have to give up most of that just to cover the initial costs of production, packaging, marketing, etc. Profits? If there are any, since your backers own 95-99% of the business by then, you won't be seeing much, if any. And that's if you succeed - not very likely at all.
Better way: Get your product to the point where it can actually be shopped around as something ready to go to the target market. This means having a finished product, having actual sales!!!! (not just "oh, they tried it and they like it so we think others will buy it" blue-sky thinking), and a plan for rolling it out. THEN you're in a position to look for an investor or 2, or maybe a manufacturing/distribution equity partner, and not give away the store.
If that's what you want, then fine ... but if your company is already worth $400k (and not a "well, when we're finished this code, it will be worth $400k"), why aren't you out there looking for first round investors for serious money instead of seed money? Because you know that when you need more money, you're going to have to either show an increase in the business's worth (to issue new shares) or give up equity (to sell current shares). Of course, you can also just issue new shares without having increased the business' worth, but then you're just diluting existing shares value - something current shareholders will scream at you for doing.
Must ... Resist ...