My own version of the preferred policy would be that publicly funded research should be patentable, but the patent royalties must be plowed back into research (not e.g. personal enrichment of the professors).
I think in many cases allowing universities to patent things produces a nice synergy between research and commercialization, which absent patents would result in a lot more use of trade secrets to try to accomplish the same effect. For example, Stanford invented a bunch of early synthesizer hardware; Yamaha licensed it and commercialized it; the royalties from those patents have supported continued research at Stanford's CCRMA. Without patents to help mediate that transaction, you'd have one of: 1) CCRMA tries to build its own synth and get into the hardware business themselves; 2) CCRMA keeps the methods secret and tries to sell them to a synth manufacturer; 3) Yamaha uses them for free, getting a windfall while CCRMA doesn't get anything. I don't think any of those situations would be better.
I don't see anything wrong with some of Marvell's profits from commercializing the invention going back to fund the researchers who invented it. What benefit to the public does it serve to let Marvell keep all the profits?
I was also surprised by that, but looks like it's mechanically computed based on T-bill rates. The full opinion is here (pdf).
The opinion cites (on p. 47) 28 U.S. 1961, which says:
interest shall be calculated from the date of the entry of the judgment, at a rate equal to the weekly average 1-year constant maturity Treasury yield, as published by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, for the calendar week preceding the date of the judgment
Another good situation can be if some people in upper management have recently moved from a company whose IT infrastructure was totally borked, to a new one where stuff actually works. That can lead to some genuine appreciation of how good things are, at least until the novelty wears off. Kind of like if you move from a building where the HVAC system is shit, to one where it keeps temperature and doesn't smell like mold, people will have glowing comments about how great the HVAC is in the new building... at least for a few months.
That's not really the courts' decision to make, though. Congress authorized the President to freeze transfers to certain individuals. The President designated some of them here. Therefore the law prohibits transferring money to these specific individuals. It does not ban transferring money to the government of Russia, only to some of its specific politicians, in their individual capacity.
Now it's possible that Russia is so corrupt that there's no meaningful difference between Putin's money and the government's money. But if Congress and/or the President believe that and want to prohibit the transfer of money to Russia as a whole, not only to certain Russian individuals, they need to make that decision and enact that law.
I see it as basically advertising. ISPs agree to "alert[] users to legal alternatives", i.e. to send them junk mail promoting some streaming services.
Not really a huge win for the "groups representing content creators", but an agreement that ISPs will send free junk mail advertising your stuff is probably better than nothing. It's also at least targeted towards people who care about films/music/whatever, some subset of whom might actually be potential customers.
I think the problem is that almost no Uber drivers actually have valid commercial insurance at all, not that they lack documentation of it. And Uber contends that making them pay for it would make the service unviable.
Uber drivers presumably do have personal vehicle insurance, but a photo of that wouldn't be sufficient. Personal insurance policies typically explicitly exclude incidents that arose when operating the vehicle for pay, so they wouldn't cover a crash that happened during a trip booked via Uber. For that, you need commercial insurance.
For example if you have a Python project, but it has an example web demo, and the web frontend for the demo uses jQuery, suddenly you have a giant pile of JavaScript code in your repository. So much of it that GitHub often identifies the project as JS, even though it's really a Python project that just has a JS library buried in the examples/ directory.
Of course in some ideal world you wouldn't have third-party library dependencies actually checked into your repository. But it's common to include any JS libraries your HTML documentation/demos/etc. need, because that lets the HTML be viewable and work correctly straight out of the repository (including offline).
I'm a bit skeptical, but the existing stuff is so bad that I might look. Google would have to actively spend many person-years of engineering effort to produce a system as bad as Blackboard.
Isn't "performing the service you accepted money to perform" a pretty basic level of liability? Can I accept a contract to write some C++ code for you, but if you don't buy insurance from me, sometimes I just deliver your code to some other guy instead, and fuck you if you want redress?
I am pretty sure the average 40 year old still needs to work for a living, even in tech. The proportion of people who are wealthy enough to do their own thing by age 40 is very low.
If it were a very small company and that were the culture, I'd be wary. But 300 people is reasonably big. Can you get an impression of whether the limo-and-clubbing type activities are something everyone participates in? It's quite possible that, despite being a high-profile part of the "company culture", it's only a smallish subset of people who actually go to those events, not all 300 employees. In that case it might not be a big issue, you'd just join the other people who don't go.
If you're going to unbundle them (no idea if this is a good idea, but say you already decided that), it makes sense to make the already-installed one be the reviews/etc. thing, and the new app be the check-in thing. You can probably get existing Foursquare users to install a new check-in app, because that's the functionality they came for in the first place. But if you kept check-in in the existing app and created a new reviews app as a Yelp competitor, it'd be harder to get any installs.
Hence it makes sense to move the thing people actually want out of the existing app, though that initially seems counterintuitive.
Yeah, this is pretty clearly marketing. This is basically an "artist's rendition" of what the interior of such a space vehicle would look like. Needless to say, how to do interior design of the cabin is not really the biggest obstacle in the way of this vehicle existing.
Actually I think it might not even be marketing for their space arm, but cross-over marketing for their commercial airliner arm. Boeing has been rolling out their new "Sky interior" concept on new and refurbished planes, and there's a big branding push to make it have a positive/modern/advanced image in travelers' minds. Tying it in with some futuristic space-shuttle concept whose interior looks remarkably like the 787's interior could be part of that strategy.
I doubt any lawyer signed off on some of the "smoking gun" emails that have surfaced. At the very least a good lawyer would advise you not to put it a demand to form a wage-fixing cartel in writing.
It looks like Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was the main point person on their side. This story has excerpts from a good number of the emails.
However it appears Jobs was the instigator. Schmidt appears not to have attempted to organize a no-poaching pact, but instead just agreed to one when Jobs, in kind of angry language, demanded one. Not sure if that makes a legal difference, but Jobs's actions certainly come across as worse, since they were a more deliberate attempt to create a cartel, while Schmidt seems to have played a more passive role in agreeing to the cartel's formation.
From some of the emails linked above, Meg Whitman of eBay also appears to be on the initiating side, though, calling Schmidt to complain about Google recruiter practices. Unlike Jobs she seems to have had slightly more good sense in not phrasing this quite as blatantly as a demand, but merely a complaint.
If by "rich" you mean people with a few million, then yes, most live boring suburban lives. If you mean people with billions, the situation is considerably different.
I agree it's uncommon in large companies. I think it's something you only tend to find in companies that are kind of the personal fiefdom of a strongly opinionated person who is much bigger into risk-taking than a professional management would be. For example Rupert Murdoch makes some decisions with his business empire that a professional group of managers would probably not risk, because he has extra-corporate goals (like promoting certain political agendas) and a bit of a belief in his own untouchability.
I think that can work in some circumstances, but it also makes it possible for a company to basically serve up some managers as scapegoats, having them personally take the fall for something that the company nonetheless benefits from.
How to keep a company, which is a kind of amorphous organism, in line, is a pretty complex problem. I'd personally favor somewhat more structural solutions, like antitrust law with real teeth and regulators with real oversight, over jailing executives. The criminal-responsibility aspect tends to make it very high-stakes, which is sometimes good (scares managers away from certain courses of action), but also introduces a high degree of variability and risk of error (wrong person gets jailed) or even ways to avoid it entirely (decisions never made by a single person you can pin it on).
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My own version of the preferred policy would be that publicly funded research should be patentable, but the patent royalties must be plowed back into research (not e.g. personal enrichment of the professors).
I think in many cases allowing universities to patent things produces a nice synergy between research and commercialization, which absent patents would result in a lot more use of trade secrets to try to accomplish the same effect. For example, Stanford invented a bunch of early synthesizer hardware; Yamaha licensed it and commercialized it; the royalties from those patents have supported continued research at Stanford's CCRMA. Without patents to help mediate that transaction, you'd have one of: 1) CCRMA tries to build its own synth and get into the hardware business themselves; 2) CCRMA keeps the methods secret and tries to sell them to a synth manufacturer; 3) Yamaha uses them for free, getting a windfall while CCRMA doesn't get anything. I don't think any of those situations would be better.
I don't see anything wrong with some of Marvell's profits from commercializing the invention going back to fund the researchers who invented it. What benefit to the public does it serve to let Marvell keep all the profits?
I was also surprised by that, but looks like it's mechanically computed based on T-bill rates. The full opinion is here (pdf).
The opinion cites (on p. 47) 28 U.S. 1961, which says:
And the 1-year T-bill rate is indeed somewhere around that.
Another good situation can be if some people in upper management have recently moved from a company whose IT infrastructure was totally borked, to a new one where stuff actually works. That can lead to some genuine appreciation of how good things are, at least until the novelty wears off. Kind of like if you move from a building where the HVAC system is shit, to one where it keeps temperature and doesn't smell like mold, people will have glowing comments about how great the HVAC is in the new building... at least for a few months.
I miss the old Soviet days, when it was the reverse.
That's not really the courts' decision to make, though. Congress authorized the President to freeze transfers to certain individuals. The President designated some of them here. Therefore the law prohibits transferring money to these specific individuals. It does not ban transferring money to the government of Russia, only to some of its specific politicians, in their individual capacity.
Now it's possible that Russia is so corrupt that there's no meaningful difference between Putin's money and the government's money. But if Congress and/or the President believe that and want to prohibit the transfer of money to Russia as a whole, not only to certain Russian individuals, they need to make that decision and enact that law.
I see it as basically advertising. ISPs agree to "alert[] users to legal alternatives", i.e. to send them junk mail promoting some streaming services.
Not really a huge win for the "groups representing content creators", but an agreement that ISPs will send free junk mail advertising your stuff is probably better than nothing. It's also at least targeted towards people who care about films/music/whatever, some subset of whom might actually be potential customers.
angry ... left political party ... politicians backed the idea of the city council switching to Linux
I think the problem is that almost no Uber drivers actually have valid commercial insurance at all, not that they lack documentation of it. And Uber contends that making them pay for it would make the service unviable.
Uber drivers presumably do have personal vehicle insurance, but a photo of that wouldn't be sufficient. Personal insurance policies typically explicitly exclude incidents that arose when operating the vehicle for pay, so they wouldn't cover a crash that happened during a trip booked via Uber. For that, you need commercial insurance.
There is no advantage at all to doing it, is the problem. Solving nonexistent problems is something nerds love to do, but it isn't that helpful.
Using a git submodule just to throw in jquery.min.js is a bit overkill. Especially since it has no real advantages besides fixing GitHub's statistics.
For example if you have a Python project, but it has an example web demo, and the web frontend for the demo uses jQuery, suddenly you have a giant pile of JavaScript code in your repository. So much of it that GitHub often identifies the project as JS, even though it's really a Python project that just has a JS library buried in the examples/ directory.
Of course in some ideal world you wouldn't have third-party library dependencies actually checked into your repository. But it's common to include any JS libraries your HTML documentation/demos/etc. need, because that lets the HTML be viewable and work correctly straight out of the repository (including offline).
I'm a bit skeptical, but the existing stuff is so bad that I might look. Google would have to actively spend many person-years of engineering effort to produce a system as bad as Blackboard.
Isn't "performing the service you accepted money to perform" a pretty basic level of liability? Can I accept a contract to write some C++ code for you, but if you don't buy insurance from me, sometimes I just deliver your code to some other guy instead, and fuck you if you want redress?
I am pretty sure the average 40 year old still needs to work for a living, even in tech. The proportion of people who are wealthy enough to do their own thing by age 40 is very low.
It'll eventually get a "real" name. This is the temporary IUPAC systematic name.
If it were a very small company and that were the culture, I'd be wary. But 300 people is reasonably big. Can you get an impression of whether the limo-and-clubbing type activities are something everyone participates in? It's quite possible that, despite being a high-profile part of the "company culture", it's only a smallish subset of people who actually go to those events, not all 300 employees. In that case it might not be a big issue, you'd just join the other people who don't go.
If you're going to unbundle them (no idea if this is a good idea, but say you already decided that), it makes sense to make the already-installed one be the reviews/etc. thing, and the new app be the check-in thing. You can probably get existing Foursquare users to install a new check-in app, because that's the functionality they came for in the first place. But if you kept check-in in the existing app and created a new reviews app as a Yelp competitor, it'd be harder to get any installs.
Hence it makes sense to move the thing people actually want out of the existing app, though that initially seems counterintuitive.
Seems sensible to me. Replacing coal plants with nuclear has a lot of other benefits, too.
Yeah, this is pretty clearly marketing. This is basically an "artist's rendition" of what the interior of such a space vehicle would look like. Needless to say, how to do interior design of the cabin is not really the biggest obstacle in the way of this vehicle existing.
Actually I think it might not even be marketing for their space arm, but cross-over marketing for their commercial airliner arm. Boeing has been rolling out their new "Sky interior" concept on new and refurbished planes, and there's a big branding push to make it have a positive/modern/advanced image in travelers' minds. Tying it in with some futuristic space-shuttle concept whose interior looks remarkably like the 787's interior could be part of that strategy.
I doubt any lawyer signed off on some of the "smoking gun" emails that have surfaced. At the very least a good lawyer would advise you not to put it a demand to form a wage-fixing cartel in writing.
It looks like Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was the main point person on their side. This story has excerpts from a good number of the emails.
However it appears Jobs was the instigator. Schmidt appears not to have attempted to organize a no-poaching pact, but instead just agreed to one when Jobs, in kind of angry language, demanded one. Not sure if that makes a legal difference, but Jobs's actions certainly come across as worse, since they were a more deliberate attempt to create a cartel, while Schmidt seems to have played a more passive role in agreeing to the cartel's formation.
From some of the emails linked above, Meg Whitman of eBay also appears to be on the initiating side, though, calling Schmidt to complain about Google recruiter practices. Unlike Jobs she seems to have had slightly more good sense in not phrasing this quite as blatantly as a demand, but merely a complaint.
If by "rich" you mean people with a few million, then yes, most live boring suburban lives. If you mean people with billions, the situation is considerably different.
I agree it's uncommon in large companies. I think it's something you only tend to find in companies that are kind of the personal fiefdom of a strongly opinionated person who is much bigger into risk-taking than a professional management would be. For example Rupert Murdoch makes some decisions with his business empire that a professional group of managers would probably not risk, because he has extra-corporate goals (like promoting certain political agendas) and a bit of a belief in his own untouchability.
I think that can work in some circumstances, but it also makes it possible for a company to basically serve up some managers as scapegoats, having them personally take the fall for something that the company nonetheless benefits from.
How to keep a company, which is a kind of amorphous organism, in line, is a pretty complex problem. I'd personally favor somewhat more structural solutions, like antitrust law with real teeth and regulators with real oversight, over jailing executives. The criminal-responsibility aspect tends to make it very high-stakes, which is sometimes good (scares managers away from certain courses of action), but also introduces a high degree of variability and risk of error (wrong person gets jailed) or even ways to avoid it entirely (decisions never made by a single person you can pin it on).