And the important corollary: look at cost of living before you negotiate a salary. If the employer isn't willing to pay you what you need for a comfortable cost of living, then run. You're obviously not valuable to them, so you'll likely be the first to be let go and you'll find it hard to get the next job after that.
It depends a bit. There's a trade for the management between salary costs and control. You can give someone a 20-50% pay cut when they move out of the bay area and they'll still have more take-home pay and a higher standard of living. It's increasingly hard for middle management to justify to senior management why they're not doing that. That said, the bay area situation is great for consultants living in places with a sane cost of living. When I was doing that, my contracting rate was lower than a salaried employee in the bay area, yet I was able to cover my cost of living and pay off my mortgage quickly if I worked two days a month. Anything beyond that built up a buffer in savings in case I wasn't able to get work for an extended period.
Buy a bread machine. It takes about 1-2 minutes to load it, wait a couple of hours and you have a loaf of bread that will last about a week and is about a quarter of the price in ingredients of an equally nice store-bought one. The bread machine has some capital costs, but mine is about 10 years old and still works fine, so it amortises well.
Note your launch cost analysis is not useful: the entire ribbon doesn't need to be put into space. The best and cheapest way to build the elevator is with a seed string.
My launch cost numbers were to LEO - GEO is a lot more expensive - and so was only ever intended as a ballpark figure. The seed string itself needs to be lifted and I'd be very surprised if you could do that for under a billion. Sufficient strength of carbon nanotubes to be self supporting (based on theoretical models - we still can't actually build them) would come in above that for launch costs.
Cotton is strong because the individual threads are imperfect and so the strength comes from the friction between the fibres. Current nanotubes have almost no friction between the fibres, so when you spin them together you end up with something that simply falls apart when you pull on one end. There are research projects to try to improve this, but claiming that it's no different from cotton or wool implies a complete failure to understand the problems.
How much would it cost to make 50 thousand miles of 3-foot, paper-thin steel?
Assuming 'paper-thin' means 1mm thick, then that's around 75,000m^3 of steel, or about 680 Gg. At current steel prices, that's about $250-600m, depending on the kind of steel. The cost of getting that amount of steel to LEO (vastly cheaper than GEO, but assume that most of the mass doesn't have to go up to GEO) at current prices (assuming the cheapest possible launch) is just under $4tn.
The real question is why you care, because steel doesn't have anything like the tensile strength required to be a tether.
My memory is that if Amazon had been happy with just books and bookish stuff they would've turned a profit much sooner. A smaller, and possibly short lived, profit...but sooner.
Profit is a pretty misleading metric. Amazon had enough income to exceed their operating expenses for quite a while. This is the intuitive definition of profit, but not what appears on a balance sheet. They were taking all of that money, using it as collateral to borrow more, and then investing all of that in growing their business. That meant that they didn't make a profit, but only because anything that would have been profit was ploughed straight back into the business. They were also very willing to shift markets. They created a cloud offering because they had to over-provision in their data centres to cope with spikes in demand and realised that they could sell some of this excess capacity. This turned out to be so lucrative that they poured all of the profits from their retail arm into expanding it for years. They did the same thing with the Kindle.
For the employer it's a win, but for consumers and staff it's not always
It actually isn't. There was a Freakonomics episode about this a few months ago. The problem is that front-of-house staff in the USA are now getting a significant proportion of their income from tips, which are a percentage of the total cost. This means that their income has gone up a lot more over the past couple of decades than that of kitchen staff, to the point where someone with a cooking qualification can still make more money waiting tables than being a chef. Even worse, it means that the income varies hugely between days, so it's trivial to find someone to work on a Friday or Saturday night, because they'll make loads of money, but restaurants often can't find people to work on Wednesday or Thursdays, because they'll make a lot less (for regular slots, you can establish a rota, but if you need cover for a sick employee then it's much harder).
There are a few things that make Uber better than a taxi company, from a customer's perspective:
They tell you up-front how much it will cost.
They handle the payment automatically.
They aren't geographically limited, so you can use the same app all over the world, not have to try to work out which taxi company is reputable when you're travelling.
Start and end points are put on the map by the customer, so there's never a 'oh, I thought you meant the other Foobar Road' issue (I've hit this in Boston, where you have several overlapping cities that have many of the same street names, so you start heading in one direction before realising that the driver thought you meant somewhere else).
The problem for Uber is that there's absolutely nothing stopping the taxi companies adopting all of these. Many will already do fixed-price trips. If you have a corporate account, they'll happily just bill the company rather than the rider. An open protocol for interfacing with their dispatcher system and allowing them to provide locations of taxis that could be dispatched and quotes would let a federated system work. Some individual taxi companies already have apps that let you provide GPS start and endpoints.
False dichotomy. 20 years ago, a typical new care contained 20 separate CPUs with software running on all of them. That number has gone up a lot since then. Car makers have a lot of experience developing software for realtime applications. Ad distribution companies don't.
You don't even have to make it public, you can make it privately owned by the person or people at the end of that mile. A few places have followed this kind of model and had the connection to the nearest back-haul link owned as part of the title on the individual houses and that include a share in the ownership of the company that owns the exchange and contracts maintenance and service provision to other ISPs. It puts the individual homeowners in a much stronger bargaining position because now an ISP that offers competitive rates and service gets a few hundred customers and loses them all at once if they provide bad service.
I know I know, "clump of cells" and all. But Progressive are incredibly blasé about life in one sense and incredibly dramatic about it in another.
There are strict legal limits on abortion, which basically boil down to 'you can't kill it if it has a brain stem'. Do you eat meat? If so, the animals that you kill are closer to an intelligent being than anything that it's legal to abort. The millions sperm that die every time that you ejaculate are also denied the ability to grow into an adult human, but you don't seem too concerned about those, yet that have precisely the same level of intelligence as an aborted zygote and each one has half of the ability to grow into an adult human. Attempting to claim some kind of moral equivalence between a collection of insentient cells and a living sentient human is insulting to anyone reading your post.
Please tell me how you plan to get rid of them in such a way that disarms criminals equally as well as it disarms law-abiding citizens
You might like to look at the UK, where owning a pistol went from something anyone might do for self defence, to something that you'd only do if you were a member of a shooting club, to something that you basically can't do, over a period of a few decades. One of the ways that this happened was by significantly increasing the penalties around the '60s for crimes where the perpetrator was armed, as well as for illegal trafficking in firearms. If carrying a gun to a crime means that, if you get caught, you'll spent 20 years in prison instead of two, then a lot of criminals will take a knife instead. If a firearm-related murder with an illegal gun leads to the seller going to prison for almost as long as the perpetrator then black marketeers find something lower risk to sell.
It's important not to forget the people who would have died if they didn't have a gun to defend themselves, even if your coworker would have had a better chance if guns were banned.
Any object will exhibit controlled flight if you apply enough controlled force to it, irrespective of whether it interacts with the surrounding medium.
Not quite true. The hardware detects a simple sequence of phonemes that might be Alexa. It then wakes up some software to try to parse the word. The data might still be shipped off to the cloud service for spurious wakeups. Names like Siri and Alexa are intentionally designed to have sequences of phonemes that don't appear commonly in English to minimise this.
I don't particularly worry about Amazon intentionally violating privacy with Alexa, but when you have something like that it's a wonderful target. The mute button is entirely software, so there are all sorts of things that an attacker can do if they compromise either an individual machine or the Amazon software update server. For example, it would be a trivial patch to make it stream the audio to a different cloud service when you press the mute button. Those thousands of people working at Amazon on Alexa also make it relatively easy to sneak someone into the company to exfiltrate user data. Even if their software is entirely bug-free, what happens when someone manages to do a dump of everything that Alexa has learned about a few million users?
Apple does a lot of Research that isn't directly product-oriented, too; a quick look at their patent portfolio will show that.
Sorry, no. It may not be tied to products that they're currently shipping, but there's a huge spectrum between initial idea and final product, and Apple has far less investment towards the idea end of the spectrum than any of their major competitors. By the time you can patent something, it's already towards the product end (and have you actually looked at the Apple patent portfolio? They patented a more efficient take-away pizza box, for example, which doesn't really tell you anything about pure research spending).
But if you think that R that is D-oriented doesn't "count", you are nothing but an intellectual effete.
It doesn't count because it's playing accounting games. The line between development and product is very blurry. Apple classifies a lot of things are R&D that other companies count as product development. This inflates Apple's R&D spending on the balance sheet, but means that you can't really compare. R&D is a pipeline and things always have to start closer to the pure research end. Most of Apple's R&D is building on pure research done by other organisations. This has changed a bit recently (particularly in machine learning), but they're still a long way behind most other big tech companies on research spending. Microsoft, until they restructured MSR a year or so ago, had the opposite problem: they were spending over $5bn/year on research and turning very little of it into products. Neither extreme is particularly healthy for a company. You need the research end to feed the pipeline, but then you need the pipeline from research to product.
Disclaimer: I work in a university and collaborate with Apple, Google, and Microsoft on several projects.
Apple spends serious coin on Research and Development; far more than their competition.
This is almost true, though the vast majority of Apple's R&D funding is firmly at the D end of the spectrum. IBM used to spend a lot more than Apple on research, though they've cut down a lot. Microsoft still does (around $5bn/year on MSR). These companies and Google (and Oracle, and so on) all throw grants at universities for research, which Apple doesn't. It wasn't until last the last few months that Apple even published any of their research.
Ripped off as in Xerox made more from the deal with Jobs than the operating costs of PARC for its entire time between founding and Xerox spinning it off? Can I sign up to be ripped off by Apple in this way too please?
In this respect, it's not really any different from stuff genetic algorithms have been doing for decades. If you have a set of executable tests that can tell if the algorithm is working correctly, then you can evolve something that will pass the tests. Of course, you have absolutely no idea how it will behave on inputs not covered by your tests.
Sometimes. Apple already has their 1 Infinite Loop building and then most of the office buildings nearby along De Anza and a few nearer the middle of town. They're pretty short on space. It makes sense for them to be building a new big building, and the cost difference between building a new boring building and a new shiny building is pretty small. This will let them move a bunch of people who need to collaborate into offices near each other, rather than having them spread across the various De Anza buildings.
From what people were saying when I was at Apple a couple of weeks ago, it's actually coming a bit too late. The company has grown faster than they expected when they started planning and so rather than being able to move everyone from De Anza into IL2, they're having to identify sets of people who need to collaborate and move them, leaving quite a few behind in De Anza. If your company is growing faster than your ability to build office space to house them, that's generally a good sign (though the insane planning permission situation in the Bay Area means that it happens there a lot more often than you'd expect).
Indeed. AR doesn't seem to trigger the same motion sickness responses as VR, because you retain all of the visual cues from the real world.
Microsoft is once again creating a product that nobody will use.
Microsoft has created a technology that anyone can use without feeling motion sick, but you think that it will lose in the marketplace to one that about 80% of people can use without feeling motion sick? That's an interesting perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
And the important corollary: look at cost of living before you negotiate a salary. If the employer isn't willing to pay you what you need for a comfortable cost of living, then run. You're obviously not valuable to them, so you'll likely be the first to be let go and you'll find it hard to get the next job after that.
It depends a bit. There's a trade for the management between salary costs and control. You can give someone a 20-50% pay cut when they move out of the bay area and they'll still have more take-home pay and a higher standard of living. It's increasingly hard for middle management to justify to senior management why they're not doing that. That said, the bay area situation is great for consultants living in places with a sane cost of living. When I was doing that, my contracting rate was lower than a salaried employee in the bay area, yet I was able to cover my cost of living and pay off my mortgage quickly if I worked two days a month. Anything beyond that built up a buffer in savings in case I wasn't able to get work for an extended period.
Buy a bread machine. It takes about 1-2 minutes to load it, wait a couple of hours and you have a loaf of bread that will last about a week and is about a quarter of the price in ingredients of an equally nice store-bought one. The bread machine has some capital costs, but mine is about 10 years old and still works fine, so it amortises well.
Note your launch cost analysis is not useful: the entire ribbon doesn't need to be put into space. The best and cheapest way to build the elevator is with a seed string.
My launch cost numbers were to LEO - GEO is a lot more expensive - and so was only ever intended as a ballpark figure. The seed string itself needs to be lifted and I'd be very surprised if you could do that for under a billion. Sufficient strength of carbon nanotubes to be self supporting (based on theoretical models - we still can't actually build them) would come in above that for launch costs.
Cotton is strong because the individual threads are imperfect and so the strength comes from the friction between the fibres. Current nanotubes have almost no friction between the fibres, so when you spin them together you end up with something that simply falls apart when you pull on one end. There are research projects to try to improve this, but claiming that it's no different from cotton or wool implies a complete failure to understand the problems.
How much would it cost to make 50 thousand miles of 3-foot, paper-thin steel?
Assuming 'paper-thin' means 1mm thick, then that's around 75,000m^3 of steel, or about 680 Gg. At current steel prices, that's about $250-600m, depending on the kind of steel. The cost of getting that amount of steel to LEO (vastly cheaper than GEO, but assume that most of the mass doesn't have to go up to GEO) at current prices (assuming the cheapest possible launch) is just under $4tn.
The real question is why you care, because steel doesn't have anything like the tensile strength required to be a tether.
My memory is that if Amazon had been happy with just books and bookish stuff they would've turned a profit much sooner. A smaller, and possibly short lived, profit...but sooner.
Profit is a pretty misleading metric. Amazon had enough income to exceed their operating expenses for quite a while. This is the intuitive definition of profit, but not what appears on a balance sheet. They were taking all of that money, using it as collateral to borrow more, and then investing all of that in growing their business. That meant that they didn't make a profit, but only because anything that would have been profit was ploughed straight back into the business. They were also very willing to shift markets. They created a cloud offering because they had to over-provision in their data centres to cope with spikes in demand and realised that they could sell some of this excess capacity. This turned out to be so lucrative that they poured all of the profits from their retail arm into expanding it for years. They did the same thing with the Kindle.
For the employer it's a win, but for consumers and staff it's not always
It actually isn't. There was a Freakonomics episode about this a few months ago. The problem is that front-of-house staff in the USA are now getting a significant proportion of their income from tips, which are a percentage of the total cost. This means that their income has gone up a lot more over the past couple of decades than that of kitchen staff, to the point where someone with a cooking qualification can still make more money waiting tables than being a chef. Even worse, it means that the income varies hugely between days, so it's trivial to find someone to work on a Friday or Saturday night, because they'll make loads of money, but restaurants often can't find people to work on Wednesday or Thursdays, because they'll make a lot less (for regular slots, you can establish a rota, but if you need cover for a sick employee then it's much harder).
The problem for Uber is that there's absolutely nothing stopping the taxi companies adopting all of these. Many will already do fixed-price trips. If you have a corporate account, they'll happily just bill the company rather than the rider. An open protocol for interfacing with their dispatcher system and allowing them to provide locations of taxis that could be dispatched and quotes would let a federated system work. Some individual taxi companies already have apps that let you provide GPS start and endpoints.
False dichotomy. 20 years ago, a typical new care contained 20 separate CPUs with software running on all of them. That number has gone up a lot since then. Car makers have a lot of experience developing software for realtime applications. Ad distribution companies don't.
You don't even have to make it public, you can make it privately owned by the person or people at the end of that mile. A few places have followed this kind of model and had the connection to the nearest back-haul link owned as part of the title on the individual houses and that include a share in the ownership of the company that owns the exchange and contracts maintenance and service provision to other ISPs. It puts the individual homeowners in a much stronger bargaining position because now an ISP that offers competitive rates and service gets a few hundred customers and loses them all at once if they provide bad service.
I know I know, "clump of cells" and all. But Progressive are incredibly blasé about life in one sense and incredibly dramatic about it in another.
There are strict legal limits on abortion, which basically boil down to 'you can't kill it if it has a brain stem'. Do you eat meat? If so, the animals that you kill are closer to an intelligent being than anything that it's legal to abort. The millions sperm that die every time that you ejaculate are also denied the ability to grow into an adult human, but you don't seem too concerned about those, yet that have precisely the same level of intelligence as an aborted zygote and each one has half of the ability to grow into an adult human. Attempting to claim some kind of moral equivalence between a collection of insentient cells and a living sentient human is insulting to anyone reading your post.
Please tell me how you plan to get rid of them in such a way that disarms criminals equally as well as it disarms law-abiding citizens
You might like to look at the UK, where owning a pistol went from something anyone might do for self defence, to something that you'd only do if you were a member of a shooting club, to something that you basically can't do, over a period of a few decades. One of the ways that this happened was by significantly increasing the penalties around the '60s for crimes where the perpetrator was armed, as well as for illegal trafficking in firearms. If carrying a gun to a crime means that, if you get caught, you'll spent 20 years in prison instead of two, then a lot of criminals will take a knife instead. If a firearm-related murder with an illegal gun leads to the seller going to prison for almost as long as the perpetrator then black marketeers find something lower risk to sell.
It's important not to forget the people who would have died if they didn't have a gun to defend themselves, even if your coworker would have had a better chance if guns were banned.
I think the Rochdale Herald said it best: Bad guys with guns get more practice complain good guys with guns
Any object will exhibit controlled flight if you apply enough controlled force to it, irrespective of whether it interacts with the surrounding medium.
Not quite true. The hardware detects a simple sequence of phonemes that might be Alexa. It then wakes up some software to try to parse the word. The data might still be shipped off to the cloud service for spurious wakeups. Names like Siri and Alexa are intentionally designed to have sequences of phonemes that don't appear commonly in English to minimise this.
I don't particularly worry about Amazon intentionally violating privacy with Alexa, but when you have something like that it's a wonderful target. The mute button is entirely software, so there are all sorts of things that an attacker can do if they compromise either an individual machine or the Amazon software update server. For example, it would be a trivial patch to make it stream the audio to a different cloud service when you press the mute button. Those thousands of people working at Amazon on Alexa also make it relatively easy to sneak someone into the company to exfiltrate user data. Even if their software is entirely bug-free, what happens when someone manages to do a dump of everything that Alexa has learned about a few million users?
Aerodynamics sez an F-117A can't fly
An F-117A flies in the same way that a brick strapped to a rocket flies. Aerodynamics has very little to do with it.
Apple does a lot of Research that isn't directly product-oriented, too; a quick look at their patent portfolio will show that.
Sorry, no. It may not be tied to products that they're currently shipping, but there's a huge spectrum between initial idea and final product, and Apple has far less investment towards the idea end of the spectrum than any of their major competitors. By the time you can patent something, it's already towards the product end (and have you actually looked at the Apple patent portfolio? They patented a more efficient take-away pizza box, for example, which doesn't really tell you anything about pure research spending).
But if you think that R that is D-oriented doesn't "count", you are nothing but an intellectual effete.
It doesn't count because it's playing accounting games. The line between development and product is very blurry. Apple classifies a lot of things are R&D that other companies count as product development. This inflates Apple's R&D spending on the balance sheet, but means that you can't really compare. R&D is a pipeline and things always have to start closer to the pure research end. Most of Apple's R&D is building on pure research done by other organisations. This has changed a bit recently (particularly in machine learning), but they're still a long way behind most other big tech companies on research spending. Microsoft, until they restructured MSR a year or so ago, had the opposite problem: they were spending over $5bn/year on research and turning very little of it into products. Neither extreme is particularly healthy for a company. You need the research end to feed the pipeline, but then you need the pipeline from research to product.
Disclaimer: I work in a university and collaborate with Apple, Google, and Microsoft on several projects.
IL1 is also a donut. Referring to the donut doesn't differentiate between IL1 and IL2.
Apple spends serious coin on Research and Development; far more than their competition.
This is almost true, though the vast majority of Apple's R&D funding is firmly at the D end of the spectrum. IBM used to spend a lot more than Apple on research, though they've cut down a lot. Microsoft still does (around $5bn/year on MSR). These companies and Google (and Oracle, and so on) all throw grants at universities for research, which Apple doesn't. It wasn't until last the last few months that Apple even published any of their research.
Ripped off as in Xerox made more from the deal with Jobs than the operating costs of PARC for its entire time between founding and Xerox spinning it off? Can I sign up to be ripped off by Apple in this way too please?
In this respect, it's not really any different from stuff genetic algorithms have been doing for decades. If you have a set of executable tests that can tell if the algorithm is working correctly, then you can evolve something that will pass the tests. Of course, you have absolutely no idea how it will behave on inputs not covered by your tests.
Sometimes. Apple already has their 1 Infinite Loop building and then most of the office buildings nearby along De Anza and a few nearer the middle of town. They're pretty short on space. It makes sense for them to be building a new big building, and the cost difference between building a new boring building and a new shiny building is pretty small. This will let them move a bunch of people who need to collaborate into offices near each other, rather than having them spread across the various De Anza buildings.
From what people were saying when I was at Apple a couple of weeks ago, it's actually coming a bit too late. The company has grown faster than they expected when they started planning and so rather than being able to move everyone from De Anza into IL2, they're having to identify sets of people who need to collaborate and move them, leaving quite a few behind in De Anza. If your company is growing faster than your ability to build office space to house them, that's generally a good sign (though the insane planning permission situation in the Bay Area means that it happens there a lot more often than you'd expect).
Hololens is not VR
Indeed. AR doesn't seem to trigger the same motion sickness responses as VR, because you retain all of the visual cues from the real world.
Microsoft is once again creating a product that nobody will use.
Microsoft has created a technology that anyone can use without feeling motion sick, but you think that it will lose in the marketplace to one that about 80% of people can use without feeling motion sick? That's an interesting perspective.