*Top* students have no problem getting full time offers. A lot of companies will extend them. It's the students that aren't stellar that can't afford to turn down offers; the top ones will have to turn some down, as they'll have more than one on the table.
And sexual reproduction also count as a form of spell checking. It allows you to introduce random errors in the DNA, and get back perfect DNA from other individuals when you reproduce. (Muller's ratchet, which to my mind sufficiently explains why we have sexual reproduction, and which I was sad to find that somebody else had thought of before me.)
No it isn't. Controlling the trade and importation of goods is in general not enforced by copyright law. If I buy 1000 DVDs and then carry them with me to another country, it has nothing to do with "copying" now does it, numbskull.
Actually, the legal pretext is that the company that produced the copy in country A is not licensed to produce copies in country B, and due to this, person P cannot legally buy a copy in country A and bring it into country B.
Since companies are legal fictions and trivially formed, it's easy to limit what's legal to just the countries you want, by just producing companies and sublicensing.
My opinion is that anything that's legally duplicated and sold in a country that follows some reasonable international law (maybe the Berne convention) should be possible to import into any other country afterward, with no additional restrictions by location allowed. Alas, that's not the case today.
So they developed a resistance to the toxin. Big whoop. They're still fish. The same species even. That's not evolution, its adaptation.
That's the same thing. Evolution is just inherited adaption, leading over major amounts of time to creation of major features. Each single step is very small, and every single step has to be adaptive
Now, if they grew legs to get out of the cave, that's evolution.
That's evolution of a major feature - as far as I know, nobody serious thinks that that happen over so few generations.
TFA said that the natives "inadvertently kick-started the evolutionary process of natural selection..." Since when is evolution and natural selection the same thing?
Natural selection and reproduction is the same thing as evolution. It's been that way since the term evolution was introduced for this concept by Charles Darwin in "The Origin of the Species".
If this is all it takes to declare evolution, then automagically adjusting sunglasses evolve every time you go from a bright to dark environment.
If sunglasses reproduced and the children of sunglasses that were in the bright environment where dark, then yes. However, since they don't reproduce, it doesn't fit.
If the new fish were either unable or unwilling to breed with the fish without the adaptation then it would be evolution in progress, but the article fails to mention.
Actually, if the new fish were either unable or unwilling to breed with the fish without the adaptation then it would be speciation in progress.
Evolution is different from speciation. Speciation happen due to evolution, but evolution don't require speciation - any change of allele frequency due to natural selection (ie, any adaption) is an example of evolution. Speciation is certainly a fantastic facet of evolution, though.
*yawn* The story was only aimed at current users of Hulu. Since one has to be in the U.S. to use Hulu it is quite clear to anyone but people trying to be intentionally dense or are just plain stupid that the "available to all" was only aimed at people who can use Hulu which means only people in the U.S.
You're clearly classifying me as "obviously stupid", since my first thought was that "Hulu has finally managed to strike some kind of international deal" when I read "Hulu [something I've never heard of] now available to all". For somebody that's not particularly into what the details of Hulu/Hulu Plus/whatever (as Hulu hasn't been available where I've been located), this is a fairly obvious interpretation.
And if you step outside the small world that is comp.sci, and into the wider world that is actual use of computers, you'll find that it's not as clear in practice as in theory. If you step into linguistics, you'll find that "correct" is whatever will result in better communication.
Or if you step into the full world of comp sci instead of a corner of it, you'll find that even there it isn't quite clear.
"Operating system" is the full stack of stuff that's commonly between programs and the hardware. This includes the libraries and other executables used as APIs. This is not clearly defined, as what is an API is not clearly defined (especially not when dealing with Unix systems.)
"Kernel" is the part of the operating system that talks directly to the hardware. This is fairly clearly defined.
A bunch of people want to make "operating system" and "kernel" be the same thing. However, both in comp.sci and in practical use they're not the same.
The common definition is that what Linux users call a "distribution" is an operating system. The kernel is but a small part of an operating system, and you can swap that (as long as you keep the same syscall interface or similar) and still consider it the same operating system.
The FreeBSD userland with a Linux kernel would feel like FreeBSD, not like a GNU/Linux system.
Debian running with a FreeBSD kernel is still Debian, not FreeBSD.
Overall, the Linux ecosystem is fairly muddled WRT these definitions, though, because that family of operating systems are so similar and the core parts of them (gnu coreutils, libc, etc) are maintained separately from the distributions.
In Ireland, where I live, it costs about $2.50 extra for a ticket for a 3D movie (assuming you've not bought the "all movies you can watch for a year" ticket), and you have to buy 3D glasses once at a cost of about $3, but can bring them later.
A bunch of us happen to like it. I preferentially select watching a movie in the theater when it's in 3D; otherwise, I'll more often wait until it is available on DVD.
I was attempting to make a linguistic joke, nothing more. I don't know enough US law to be sure about the limits; it seems like a treaty to me, but so does many of the other things treated as "executive agreement". And the overall process seems horribly corrupt:-(
BTW, saw your Firefly signature line - I also miss it. Nathan Fillion is doing a very good job in Castle, if you want to see one of the actors again.
The question comes down to whether this is a Treaty, which would require the advice and consent of 2/3rds of the Senate, or whether it's an Executive Agreement
Is it torture, or enhanced interrogation? Is that a janitor or a fixed infrastructure maintenance technician? Is it one honest word or many words to hide the truth?
"It" is clearly one word, not many, which by your own dichotomy means that it must be honest.
A friend of mine has a US citizenship by virtue of being born there, but he was born of Norwegian parents (sailors) and more or less immediately returned to Norway. The US has not participated in his education in any way. Now, he does speak English (because learning that is mandatory here), but if his parents had been from another country, he could easily have avoided learning it.
Also, this guy, who has no particular ties to the US (I don't think he's ever visited) gets to vote and could run for president. Another friend who's lived in the US for 20 years can't vote for anything. This seems an unfortunate inconsistency.
So, your argument summarizes to "this feels bad, and other somewhat analogous things feels bad, and this feels bad, so no"?
Let me also give a few examples of what reasonable arguments in the same direction could look like:
The people in question are generally not competent to vote. It takes a long while to get familiar enough with the nuances of the political system for a vote to meaningfully represent the person; the non-citizens are more likely to just be influenced by TV ads and other money driven political advertising, and giving money the ability to buy votes (directly or indirectly) is bad for the electoral system.
The interests of foreigners living here are less aligned with the overall country than citizens. They're more likely to vote against the interests of the US and in favor of their original country, and the election is to take care of the US.
The foreigners are likely to leave again, so they're unlikely to vote for what's right in the long term, taking just the short term view.
Having foreigners vote will have US citizens devalue their citizenship, and be less interested in working for the benefit of the nation.
Most foreigners can absentee vote in their own countries, having the power to vote in two places gives them double power compared to citizens, and this seems a violation of democratic principles.
Now, I"ll say that I'm overall in favor of having legal alien residents (and possibly illegal alien residents) able to vote, especially in local elections. I feel the benefit of the increased feeling of being part of the community from being allowed to vote and therefore caring more for it is enough to offset the disadvantages. The increased gov't legitimacy from "No taxation without representation" is a bonus. However, I see that it is not a clear cut is issue and a reasonable person can disagree with me - if you're going to do so, please use rational arguments.
I know a few dozen Mac owners, and of them, only one's not dual booting Windows -- and trust me, that guy's not technical enough to figure out even a simple App Store.
But my sample may be skewed because most of the people I know with Macs are trying to get work done with them.
I think there is something else skewed with your sample, really.
I am not a particular Mac zealot; I happen to know about 60 Macs, of which six are owned by somebody as their home machine, and the remainder are professional machines. These come from three different companies (one computer industry company, one magazine publisher, one film production) and to the best of my knowledge none of them dual boot or run emulated Windows or anything of that ilk - not the private machines, not the professional machines. Anything people need to get done they can get done either with native Mac software, or through the web.
I'm sure there are workflows where you need to run Windows, and so people will boot into it. There probably also are entire branches of industry where only the software available for Windows will fit their needs. But I don't think this covers a significant fraction of the Mac users, either professional or hobbyists.
I see that you mention Java developers; I don't see why they would want to run their IDE under Windows instead of on the Mac, if they generally like the Mac. Maybe something in their build environment or writing Java software that tie in with native calls on Windows?
Dietary sugar into fat and dietary fat into fat is about as simple. Sugar leads to insulin secretion which leads to storage and more sugar craving; the is especially true in the evening (lower insulin sensitivity). Fat is important in that it's more energy dense than carbohydrates; 9 kcal/gram for fat as opposed to 4 kcal/gram for sugar (roughly).
Sorry, I missed out on including the proper statements to tie all of this together.
For a growth stock - which is what Apple is - the dividends are temporarily suspended, because the shareholders believe[1] that the net present value of investing the additional capital in expansion of the business is going to lead to higher dividend stream in the future. There is a limit to how large a company can grow; when investing the money internally stops making sense, it should start paying dividends. In the tech industry, you can look at e.g. Microsoft for this happening.
[1] "Shareholders believe" is a bit misleading; most shareholders in a growth stock are often interested in that they believe that the price will raise, and don't care about dividends. However, it's the promise of future dividends that make the overall rationale work out, and it feeds back into the overall pricing in the market.
If you were offered (legitimately, and with no reason to believe the overall market price should be different than it is today) a ton of gold for $10, you'd buy it. If you were offered (legitimately, and with no reason to believe the overall market price should be different than it is today) $1,000,000,000 for your wedding band, you'd confer with your wife and then sell it. See: You simultaneously want to buy and sell gold, it's just a question of price. You buy when you think you'll sell it at a profit later, and sell when you think you get a good enough price.
The market maker does the same kind of thing in stocks. They're perfectly happy with both acquiring more and with losing some of what they have; the only idea is to sell at higher than the "real" value, and buy at lower than the "real" value.
Another familiar example of this is a bank: They'll both buy and sell any regular currency, just at different prices.
There are three benefits you get from owning stock in a company:
1. You get the right to yearly dividends, if issued: The profits of a non-growth company are distributed to the shareholders, some certain amount of money paid per share. 2. You get the right to resell the stock 3. You get the right to influence the direction of the company (usually by voting for what board of directors to have)
The idea is that the value of the stock is supposed to represent the net present value of the money stream from 1. "Net Present Value" means that amount of money you would have to have presently in some interest bearing investment in order for the future interest payments to match with the future dividend payments from the stock (more or less). As an example, at 10% interest, a dollar now is worth the same as $1.10 paid a year later, or $2.59 paid in 10 years, or $13780.61 paid in 100 years. Since the numbers grow exponentially (the number after 1000 years of 10% yearly interest has 42 zeroes), this can be rounded down to an exact number - money paid very far into the future is worthless.
There's a lot more complications to valuation, and quite a bit is random - but the above is the core of the valuation. Most people may not know about this and are only thinking about the immediate chance to resell it. Their ability to do this, however, is because in the end there are people that are interested in buying because of actual payouts, tying the value to something real.
OK, while personally I think the GP is a bit of an idiot for getting into Computer Science/Software Development with the attitude he has toward closed source software (which is, after all, by far the largest employment segment in software development)
To many, there's a difference between shrink-wrap and custom software. I personally don't have much of a problem with either - but I see Microsoft as having ethical problems in the way they act in the market, which makes me have qualms about working for them. (These problems seem to be getting smaller over time, and so are my qualms.)
I also think your criticisms are ridiculously harsh. He doesn't like the company so he didn't take the interview. It's perfectly valid. I'd never work for Walmart (ignoring the fact that they could never hope to pay me enough below the executive level to even tempt me). His beliefs about F/OSS software are important to him and he chooses not to work for a company that in many ways represents to antithesis of those beliefs. Makes sense to me.
Now I personally think that open and closed source products can and should coexist; and I will happily (and have happily) work with both. I also think that getting into software development while essentially deliberately cutting off three quarters or more of your most lucrative possible employment avenues is a little silly.
This is only if you assume he's dropping custom software development for companies; that part used to be 90% of the field (I have no recent numbers, while shrink wrap used to be less than 10%. Cutting off the 10% seems reasonable.
Second law of thermodynamics; Learn it, Live it, Love it.
When you drop an egg on the ground, the raw materials that constituted the egg are not destroyed, but the egg is no longer useful. It would require a considerable amount of energy to reconstruct the egg into a useful condition. This is called ENTROPY.
Nature stores and makes use of energy in various forms, including fossil fuels, but also in the form of minerals etc-- Using these resources improperly destroys the resource faster than it is produced.
EG, it takes nature X years to produce a large tree; Cutting it down takes only a few minutes. Once the tree is used, you don't magically get a new tree from the resources after they have been processed. Those resources have to be broken down (requires energy), recirculated in the environment (requires energy), and reconstituted as a new tree by another seedling (requires lots of energy and time.)
In the meantime, humans are greedily hunting for energy sources to exploit. the exploitation of these energy sources causes another problem; The earth can only eliminate thermal waste (biproduct of entropy) at a maximum theoretical rate- (the rate it can radiate that heat into space as IR radiation)
Right now, "Global Warming" is a 2 factor beast-- the consumption of energy resources produces a biproduct that is energy intensive to recycle by mother nature, which also has the added effect of reducing the rate at which the earth expels waste heat into space. This has the net effect of causing the earth to heat up.
Now, if we couple this with some of the proposed solutions to the energy crisis (Space based solar power, Fusion energy, etc--) we end up creating NEW problems:
Space based power: We increase the amount of energy reaching the planet, and consequently increase the baseline thermal energy production of the planet. This will cause global warming faster than you can imagine. The earth's current temperature (sans global warming effects) is the result of an equilibrium of energy in VS energy out. Fucking with that causes the equilibrium to shift, so dont do it.
Having opinions before you actually look at numbers cause errors. Don't do it.
With any normal increase of the temperature of a black body, the amount of radiation will also increase (by the fourth power of the absolute temperature; the Stefan-Boltzmann law). The average temperature of the earth is somewhere in the 13C to 15C range (according to another quick search). Taking the upper number there (since that'll require the highest absolute increase), we have 288.15K. To radiate 1/6000 extra for this, we need a temperature increase of 0.012 degrees centigrade (0.0216 Farenheight). If we postulate that we would import one hundred times as much energy as we spend today, we would require a temperature increase of 1.11 degrees centigrade to radiate it. This is the same increase as we expect the *minimum* increase from present global warming to be; the estimate is (according to Wikipedia) 1.1C to 6.4C. With this, we could take in one hundred times as much energy for the same amount of warming (disregarding any effects of forcing through water vapor.) Because water vapor roughly doubles the effect of warming, this should probably be halved; it is still a significant improvement, don't you think?
I have no idea how quickly people can imagine global warning, but I'm sure it's faster than this.
Oh, and the same problem occurs with fusion power; it adds energy. As does using fossil fuels, except that adds energy twice: Once for using it, and then through the greenhouse effect (capturing more energy from the sun).
Slashdot Mirror
*Top* students have no problem getting full time offers. A lot of companies will extend them. It's the students that aren't stellar that can't afford to turn down offers; the top ones will have to turn some down, as they'll have more than one on the table.
And sexual reproduction also count as a form of spell checking. It allows you to introduce random errors in the DNA, and get back perfect DNA from other individuals when you reproduce. (Muller's ratchet, which to my mind sufficiently explains why we have sexual reproduction, and which I was sad to find that somebody else had thought of before me.)
See other reply to grandparent.
No it isn't. Controlling the trade and importation of goods is in general not enforced by copyright law. If I buy 1000 DVDs and then carry them with me to another country, it has nothing to do with "copying" now does it, numbskull.
Actually, the legal pretext is that the company that produced the copy in country A is not licensed to produce copies in country B, and due to this, person P cannot legally buy a copy in country A and bring it into country B.
Since companies are legal fictions and trivially formed, it's easy to limit what's legal to just the countries you want, by just producing companies and sublicensing.
My opinion is that anything that's legally duplicated and sold in a country that follows some reasonable international law (maybe the Berne convention) should be possible to import into any other country afterward, with no additional restrictions by location allowed. Alas, that's not the case today.
So they developed a resistance to the toxin. Big whoop. They're still fish. The same species even. That's not evolution, its adaptation.
That's the same thing. Evolution is just inherited adaption, leading over major amounts of time to creation of major features. Each single step is very small, and every single step has to be adaptive
Now, if they grew legs to get out of the cave, that's evolution.
That's evolution of a major feature - as far as I know, nobody serious thinks that that happen over so few generations.
TFA said that the natives "inadvertently kick-started the evolutionary process of natural selection..." Since when is evolution and natural selection the same thing?
Natural selection and reproduction is the same thing as evolution. It's been that way since the term evolution was introduced for this concept by Charles Darwin in "The Origin of the Species".
If this is all it takes to declare evolution, then automagically adjusting sunglasses evolve every time you go from a bright to dark environment.
If sunglasses reproduced and the children of sunglasses that were in the bright environment where dark, then yes. However, since they don't reproduce, it doesn't fit.
If the new fish were either unable or unwilling to breed with the fish without the adaptation then it would be evolution in progress, but the article fails to mention.
Actually, if the new fish were either unable or unwilling to breed with the fish without the adaptation then it would be speciation in progress.
Evolution is different from speciation. Speciation happen due to evolution, but evolution don't require speciation - any change of allele frequency due to natural selection (ie, any adaption) is an example of evolution. Speciation is certainly a fantastic facet of evolution, though.
France has 65 million inhabitants, New Jersey has 8 million. Then, even compared to size, France is culturally much more important than New Jersey.
It's a fairly uninteresting comparison. (Oh, and I can point out New Jersey on a map, and I'm not from the US.)
*yawn* The story was only aimed at current users of Hulu. Since one has to be in the U.S. to use Hulu it is quite clear to anyone but people trying to be intentionally dense or are just plain stupid that the "available to all" was only aimed at people who can use Hulu which means only people in the U.S.
You're clearly classifying me as "obviously stupid", since my first thought was that "Hulu has finally managed to strike some kind of international deal" when I read "Hulu [something I've never heard of] now available to all". For somebody that's not particularly into what the details of Hulu/Hulu Plus/whatever (as Hulu hasn't been available where I've been located), this is a fairly obvious interpretation.
Eivind.
And if you step outside the small world that is comp.sci, and into the wider world that is actual use of computers, you'll find that it's not as clear in practice as in theory. If you step into linguistics, you'll find that "correct" is whatever will result in better communication.
Or if you step into the full world of comp sci instead of a corner of it, you'll find that even there it isn't quite clear.
"Operating system" is the full stack of stuff that's commonly between programs and the hardware. This includes the libraries and other executables used as APIs. This is not clearly defined, as what is an API is not clearly defined (especially not when dealing with Unix systems.)
"Kernel" is the part of the operating system that talks directly to the hardware. This is fairly clearly defined.
A bunch of people want to make "operating system" and "kernel" be the same thing. However, both in comp.sci and in practical use they're not the same.
The common definition is that what Linux users call a "distribution" is an operating system. The kernel is but a small part of an operating system, and you can swap that (as long as you keep the same syscall interface or similar) and still consider it the same operating system.
The FreeBSD userland with a Linux kernel would feel like FreeBSD, not like a GNU/Linux system.
Debian running with a FreeBSD kernel is still Debian, not FreeBSD.
Overall, the Linux ecosystem is fairly muddled WRT these definitions, though, because that family of operating systems are so similar and the core parts of them (gnu coreutils, libc, etc) are maintained separately from the distributions.
Eivind.
The ones I've watched have all been done using polarization technology.
'cause you're in the US.
In Ireland, where I live, it costs about $2.50 extra for a ticket for a 3D movie (assuming you've not bought the "all movies you can watch for a year" ticket), and you have to buy 3D glasses once at a cost of about $3, but can bring them later.
Eivind.
A bunch of us happen to like it. I preferentially select watching a movie in the theater when it's in 3D; otherwise, I'll more often wait until it is available on DVD.
Eivind.
I was attempting to make a linguistic joke, nothing more. I don't know enough US law to be sure about the limits; it seems like a treaty to me, but so does many of the other things treated as "executive agreement". And the overall process seems horribly corrupt :-(
BTW, saw your Firefly signature line - I also miss it. Nathan Fillion is doing a very good job in Castle, if you want to see one of the actors again.
Eivind.
The question comes down to whether this is a Treaty, which would require the advice and consent of 2/3rds of the Senate, or whether it's an Executive Agreement
Is it torture, or enhanced interrogation? Is that a janitor or a fixed infrastructure maintenance technician? Is it one honest word or many words to hide the truth?
"It" is clearly one word, not many, which by your own dichotomy means that it must be honest.
Eivind.
A friend of mine has a US citizenship by virtue of being born there, but he was born of Norwegian parents (sailors) and more or less immediately returned to Norway. The US has not participated in his education in any way. Now, he does speak English (because learning that is mandatory here), but if his parents had been from another country, he could easily have avoided learning it.
Also, this guy, who has no particular ties to the US (I don't think he's ever visited) gets to vote and could run for president. Another friend who's lived in the US for 20 years can't vote for anything. This seems an unfortunate inconsistency.
Eivind.
So, your argument summarizes to "this feels bad, and other somewhat analogous things feels bad, and this feels bad, so no"?
Let me also give a few examples of what reasonable arguments in the same direction could look like:
Now, I"ll say that I'm overall in favor of having legal alien residents (and possibly illegal alien residents) able to vote, especially in local elections. I feel the benefit of the increased feeling of being part of the community from being allowed to vote and therefore caring more for it is enough to offset the disadvantages. The increased gov't legitimacy from "No taxation without representation" is a bonus. However, I see that it is not a clear cut is issue and a reasonable person can disagree with me - if you're going to do so, please use rational arguments.
I know a few dozen Mac owners, and of them, only one's not dual booting Windows -- and trust me, that guy's not technical enough to figure out even a simple App Store.
But my sample may be skewed because most of the people I know with Macs are trying to get work done with them.
I think there is something else skewed with your sample, really.
I am not a particular Mac zealot; I happen to know about 60 Macs, of which six are owned by somebody as their home machine, and the remainder are professional machines. These come from three different companies (one computer industry company, one magazine publisher, one film production) and to the best of my knowledge none of them dual boot or run emulated Windows or anything of that ilk - not the private machines, not the professional machines. Anything people need to get done they can get done either with native Mac software, or through the web.
I'm sure there are workflows where you need to run Windows, and so people will boot into it. There probably also are entire branches of industry where only the software available for Windows will fit their needs. But I don't think this covers a significant fraction of the Mac users, either professional or hobbyists.
I see that you mention Java developers; I don't see why they would want to run their IDE under Windows instead of on the Mac, if they generally like the Mac. Maybe something in their build environment or writing Java software that tie in with native calls on Windows?
Eivind.
And then he can choose to download a pirate copy off the Internet. Films, being passive, have the analog hole; games don't.
Dietary sugar into fat and dietary fat into fat is about as simple. Sugar leads to insulin secretion which leads to storage and more sugar craving; the is especially true in the evening (lower insulin sensitivity). Fat is important in that it's more energy dense than carbohydrates; 9 kcal/gram for fat as opposed to 4 kcal/gram for sugar (roughly).
Sorry, I missed out on including the proper statements to tie all of this together.
For a growth stock - which is what Apple is - the dividends are temporarily suspended, because the shareholders believe[1] that the net present value of investing the additional capital in expansion of the business is going to lead to higher dividend stream in the future. There is a limit to how large a company can grow; when investing the money internally stops making sense, it should start paying dividends. In the tech industry, you can look at e.g. Microsoft for this happening.
[1] "Shareholders believe" is a bit misleading; most shareholders in a growth stock are often interested in that they believe that the price will raise, and don't care about dividends. However, it's the promise of future dividends that make the overall rationale work out, and it feeds back into the overall pricing in the market.
That's easily explainable by example, I think.
If you were offered (legitimately, and with no reason to believe the overall market price should be different than it is today) a ton of gold for $10, you'd buy it. If you were offered (legitimately, and with no reason to believe the overall market price should be different than it is today) $1,000,000,000 for your wedding band, you'd confer with your wife and then sell it. See: You simultaneously want to buy and sell gold, it's just a question of price. You buy when you think you'll sell it at a profit later, and sell when you think you get a good enough price.
The market maker does the same kind of thing in stocks. They're perfectly happy with both acquiring more and with losing some of what they have; the only idea is to sell at higher than the "real" value, and buy at lower than the "real" value.
Another familiar example of this is a bank: They'll both buy and sell any regular currency, just at different prices.
There are three benefits you get from owning stock in a company:
1. You get the right to yearly dividends, if issued: The profits of a non-growth company are distributed to the shareholders, some certain amount of money paid per share.
2. You get the right to resell the stock
3. You get the right to influence the direction of the company (usually by voting for what board of directors to have)
The idea is that the value of the stock is supposed to represent the net present value of the money stream from 1. "Net Present Value" means that amount of money you would have to have presently in some interest bearing investment in order for the future interest payments to match with the future dividend payments from the stock (more or less). As an example, at 10% interest, a dollar now is worth the same as $1.10 paid a year later, or $2.59 paid in 10 years, or $13780.61 paid in 100 years. Since the numbers grow exponentially (the number after 1000 years of 10% yearly interest has 42 zeroes), this can be rounded down to an exact number - money paid very far into the future is worthless.
There's a lot more complications to valuation, and quite a bit is random - but the above is the core of the valuation. Most people may not know about this and are only thinking about the immediate chance to resell it. Their ability to do this, however, is because in the end there are people that are interested in buying because of actual payouts, tying the value to something real.
OK, while personally I think the GP is a bit of an idiot for getting into Computer Science/Software Development with the attitude he has toward closed source software (which is, after all, by far the largest employment segment in software development)
To many, there's a difference between shrink-wrap and custom software. I personally don't have much of a problem with either - but I see Microsoft as having ethical problems in the way they act in the market, which makes me have qualms about working for them. (These problems seem to be getting smaller over time, and so are my qualms.)
I also think your criticisms are ridiculously harsh. He doesn't like the company so he didn't take the interview. It's perfectly valid. I'd never work for Walmart (ignoring the fact that they could never hope to pay me enough below the executive level to even tempt me). His beliefs about F/OSS software are important to him and he chooses not to work for a company that in many ways represents to antithesis of those beliefs. Makes sense to me.
Now I personally think that open and closed source products can and should coexist; and I will happily (and have happily) work with both. I also think that getting into software development while essentially deliberately cutting off three quarters or more of your most lucrative possible employment avenues is a little silly.
This is only if you assume he's dropping custom software development for companies; that part used to be 90% of the field (I have no recent numbers, while shrink wrap used to be less than 10%. Cutting off the 10% seems reasonable.
Second law of thermodynamics; Learn it, Live it, Love it.
When you drop an egg on the ground, the raw materials that constituted the egg are not destroyed, but the egg is no longer useful. It would require a considerable amount of energy to reconstruct the egg into a useful condition. This is called ENTROPY.
Nature stores and makes use of energy in various forms, including fossil fuels, but also in the form of minerals etc-- Using these resources improperly destroys the resource faster than it is produced.
EG, it takes nature X years to produce a large tree; Cutting it down takes only a few minutes. Once the tree is used, you don't magically get a new tree from the resources after they have been processed. Those resources have to be broken down (requires energy), recirculated in the environment (requires energy), and reconstituted as a new tree by another seedling (requires lots of energy and time.)
In the meantime, humans are greedily hunting for energy sources to exploit. the exploitation of these energy sources causes another problem; The earth can only eliminate thermal waste (biproduct of entropy) at a maximum theoretical rate- (the rate it can radiate that heat into space as IR radiation)
Right now, "Global Warming" is a 2 factor beast-- the consumption of energy resources produces a biproduct that is energy intensive to recycle by mother nature, which also has the added effect of reducing the rate at which the earth expels waste heat into space. This has the net effect of causing the earth to heat up.
Now, if we couple this with some of the proposed solutions to the energy crisis (Space based solar power, Fusion energy, etc--) we end up creating NEW problems:
Space based power: We increase the amount of energy reaching the planet, and consequently increase the baseline thermal energy production of the planet. This will cause global warming faster than you can imagine. The earth's current temperature (sans global warming effects) is the result of an equilibrium of energy in VS energy out. Fucking with that causes the equilibrium to shift, so dont do it.
Having opinions before you actually look at numbers cause errors. Don't do it.
According to the first website I found on the topic the amount of energy humans is used is 1/6000th of the amount that the earth gets from the sun.
With any normal increase of the temperature of a black body, the amount of radiation will also increase (by the fourth power of the absolute temperature; the Stefan-Boltzmann law). The average temperature of the earth is somewhere in the 13C to 15C range (according to another quick search). Taking the upper number there (since that'll require the highest absolute increase), we have 288.15K. To radiate 1/6000 extra for this, we need a temperature increase of 0.012 degrees centigrade (0.0216 Farenheight). If we postulate that we would import one hundred times as much energy as we spend today, we would require a temperature increase of 1.11 degrees centigrade to radiate it. This is the same increase as we expect the *minimum* increase from present global warming to be; the estimate is (according to Wikipedia) 1.1C to 6.4C. With this, we could take in one hundred times as much energy for the same amount of warming (disregarding any effects of forcing through water vapor.) Because water vapor roughly doubles the effect of warming, this should probably be halved; it is still a significant improvement, don't you think?
I have no idea how quickly people can imagine global warning, but I'm sure it's faster than this.
Oh, and the same problem occurs with fusion power; it adds energy. As does using fossil fuels, except that adds energy twice: Once for using it, and then through the greenhouse effect (capturing more energy from the sun).