Plenty of companies never IPO, so using that as a criteria is silly. Some companies that were public, later privatize again. Did Dell become a "startup" again when it privatized in 2013?
Simple does not mean easy to automate. Sewing a pair of jeans is simple. Manufacturers have been trying to automate the job for decades, with little success so far.
Didn't the 2008/9 recession literally begin when Bush turned out the lights in the oval office and walked out the door?
No. The country had already been in recession for more than a year when Bush left office. The recession started in December of 2007, and ended in June of 2009.
Well there is a skill shortage for the rates that companies would like to pay.
My company has a hard time finding people before we even discuss salary. Once we find someone qualified, the salary offered is almost never a problem. I have seen zero evidence that there is a vast pool of qualified techs sitting on the sidelines, waiting for salaries to go up.
the number of talented people who could work as programmers but make other career choices because they do not find the salary good enough
We pay fresh grads with a BS in CS an average of $90k to start. What other career choice offers a starting salary anywhere near that for a 4 year degree?
How do you stop engineers from looking a prior art
It doesn't matter. The reason for the policy is to be able to plausibly argue in court that any patent infringement was unintentional. Whether it actually was is irrelevant.
This could also be a case where the employee, seeking to get rewarded for a patent, hid the prior art from Google.
Unlikely. Most companies FORBID engineers from searching for prior art. That is done by the legal dept, not engineering.
If you let engineers search for prior art, you open yourself up to lawsuits for intentional infringement. If you have an explicit policy against patent searches, you can always claim "Hey, we didn't know".
Also, releasing something into the public domain means abandoning all rights to it. So rather than ensuring Google can't patent it, he ensured that he has no standing to sue.
1. If a person is on food stamps, they pretty much should not have enough money to buy a smartphone with data plan to use EBT apps....?
Social programs should be designed, not to help people be poor, but to help them OUT of poverty. A used smartphone costs $20, the cost of groceries for one day. The apps can use Wifi, so no "data plan" is needed. But having a cellphone can make a big difference in a person's ability to find a job, deal with childcare, and manage their life.
Rather than prohibiting smartphones, it may make more sense to make them mandatory.
2. One argument against making social programs like food stamps easier...is that making them a PAIN IN THE ASS might help encourage folks to double down on work and education,
It is a dumb argument. By making benefits only for the "truly poor" you create a poverty trap. As people start to do a little better, they lose their benefits, pulling them back down. So the incentives are exactly backwards. For a well designed program, look at EITC. When a poor person works more, their benefits go UP, and only start to fade away when they are making enough to no longer be poor.
Don't kid yourself. Tesla is making a profit on every battery pack sold. They'd be out of business if they weren't.
Business doesn't work that way. You have development costs, capital costs, and marginal costs. In aggregate, you need to be able to cover all these costs to have a viable business, but an individual sale only has to cover the marginal costs to be profitable. So you can make plenty of profitable sales, but still go bankrupt because you aren't covering your interest and overhead. To do that, you need to find a way to price differentiate, and convince enough of your customers to pay a premium.
Actually, it doesn't make sense at all. Equifax had a profit of about $600M last year. That is about $2 per American. They can't possibly afford millions of $20k payouts. The money just isn't there.
The solution is to fix the idiotic system that allows "identity theft" by knowing a name, SSN and DOB. Equifax did not create that system, so why should they be penalized for it?
Obviously they can afford to ship those batteries at the lower price point
Why is that "obvious"? The people that pay a premium for extra capacity are subsidizing those who don't. That doesn't mean Tesla would make money on the batteries if no one paid the premium.
My wife has a Tesla with a 240 mile range instead of the 300 mile range. That was our choice. No one "cheated" us. Whether it is more cost effective for Tesla to make two different battery configurations, or to make one with a artificial limit, is their choice. Neither option is more "moral" than the other.
Expert systems are subject to "mistakes" like identifying all rainy pictures as "Tank!" because all the training pictures of tanks were taken on a rainy day.
That is a weakness of neural nets, not "expert systems". Expert systems (popular in the 1980s) and neural nets are opposite approaches. Neural nets are trained on raw data, and use machine learning to automatically extract important features. Expert systems encode knowledge and decision making of human experts, and are generally manually constructed.
Just because the United States decreed something doesn't apply to the rest of the world.
That is not what is happening here. The FBI is not going after the Russians, they are going after Facebook, an American company located in California. Can the federal government censor Facebook just because the text being censored was written by non-citizens? According to the US Constitution, they have no authority to do that.
"For more than a century". - so what you are actually saying is that this is not unprecedented at all.
No. He's saying that a century ago weather satellites didn't exist, instrumentation was more primitive, and we just don't know how big the storms were. The first time aircraft were used to monitor a hurricane before it came ashore was the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane.
Popularity matters. 1. If a language is unpopular, there may be good reasons. Examples: Ada, Modula-2. 2. Popular languages have a community of users, so you don't just get more questions on Stackoverflow, you also get more answers. 3. Popular language have more libraries, frameworks, and run on my platforms. 4. If a language is popular, you can get a job writing code in it.
Nobody is being forced to listen or believe. It really is that simple.
No, it isn't that simple. The advocates of censorship don't just want to avoid hearing the message. They also want YOU to not hear the message.
This isn't about controlling what the Russians do. It is about controlling what the American people see and hear. The Russians are just the boogeyman being used as the justification.
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of companies never IPO, so using that as a criteria is silly. Some companies that were public, later privatize again. Did Dell become a "startup" again when it privatized in 2013?
Investment banking and management consulting...
Average starting salary for an investment banker in NYC is $75k. Very few make it to the top tier.
Management consulting generally requires an MBA, which is not a 4 year degree. Average starting salary for an MBA is ... $90k.
Simple does not mean easy to automate. Sewing a pair of jeans is simple. Manufacturers have been trying to automate the job for decades, with little success so far.
Didn't the 2008/9 recession literally begin when Bush turned out the lights in the oval office and walked out the door?
No. The country had already been in recession for more than a year when Bush left office. The recession started in December of 2007, and ended in June of 2009.
Well there is a skill shortage for the rates that companies would like to pay.
My company has a hard time finding people before we even discuss salary. Once we find someone qualified, the salary offered is almost never a problem. I have seen zero evidence that there is a vast pool of qualified techs sitting on the sidelines, waiting for salaries to go up.
the number of talented people who could work as programmers but make other career choices because they do not find the salary good enough
We pay fresh grads with a BS in CS an average of $90k to start. What other career choice offers a starting salary anywhere near that for a 4 year degree?
Who knew there was a town called Richmond in Virginia?
It is the state capitol, the former capitol of the CSA, and the focal point for much of the eastern theater of the civil war. Hardly an obscure city.
Arizona is just as big as the Arabian peninsula
You should learn to read a map. AP is more than 10 times the size of Arizona.
..so, more rickshaws and fewer cars?
Electric rickshaws have been common in China for decades. There are dozens of models to choose from.
How do you stop engineers from looking a prior art
It doesn't matter. The reason for the policy is to be able to plausibly argue in court that any patent infringement was unintentional. Whether it actually was is irrelevant.
This could also be a case where the employee, seeking to get rewarded for a patent, hid the prior art from Google.
Unlikely. Most companies FORBID engineers from searching for prior art. That is done by the legal dept, not engineering.
If you let engineers search for prior art, you open yourself up to lawsuits for intentional infringement. If you have an explicit policy against patent searches, you can always claim "Hey, we didn't know".
Also, releasing something into the public domain means abandoning all rights to it. So rather than ensuring Google can't patent it, he ensured that he has no standing to sue.
1. If a person is on food stamps, they pretty much should not have enough money to buy a smartphone with data plan to use EBT apps....?
Social programs should be designed, not to help people be poor, but to help them OUT of poverty. A used smartphone costs $20, the cost of groceries for one day. The apps can use Wifi, so no "data plan" is needed. But having a cellphone can make a big difference in a person's ability to find a job, deal with childcare, and manage their life.
Rather than prohibiting smartphones, it may make more sense to make them mandatory.
2. One argument against making social programs like food stamps easier...is that making them a PAIN IN THE ASS might help encourage folks to double down on work and education,
It is a dumb argument. By making benefits only for the "truly poor" you create a poverty trap. As people start to do a little better, they lose their benefits, pulling them back down. So the incentives are exactly backwards. For a well designed program, look at EITC. When a poor person works more, their benefits go UP, and only start to fade away when they are making enough to no longer be poor.
Don't kid yourself. Tesla is making a profit on every battery pack sold. They'd be out of business if they weren't.
Business doesn't work that way. You have development costs, capital costs, and marginal costs. In aggregate, you need to be able to cover all these costs to have a viable business, but an individual sale only has to cover the marginal costs to be profitable. So you can make plenty of profitable sales, but still go bankrupt because you aren't covering your interest and overhead. To do that, you need to find a way to price differentiate, and convince enough of your customers to pay a premium.
It makes too much sense.
Actually, it doesn't make sense at all. Equifax had a profit of about $600M last year. That is about $2 per American. They can't possibly afford millions of $20k payouts. The money just isn't there.
The solution is to fix the idiotic system that allows "identity theft" by knowing a name, SSN and DOB. Equifax did not create that system, so why should they be penalized for it?
A SSN is not guaranteed to be unique
SSNs are not unique, but SSN+DOB is unique.
You car is carrying battery weight it does not need and cannot use
The unused extra capacity increases the life of the battery. So it is not useless.
Obviously they can afford to ship those batteries at the lower price point
Why is that "obvious"? The people that pay a premium for extra capacity are subsidizing those who don't. That doesn't mean Tesla would make money on the batteries if no one paid the premium.
My wife has a Tesla with a 240 mile range instead of the 300 mile range. That was our choice. No one "cheated" us. Whether it is more cost effective for Tesla to make two different battery configurations, or to make one with a artificial limit, is their choice. Neither option is more "moral" than the other.
Silicon Valley has a long history of doing skunk works, historically at Lockheed Martin
Lockheed's skunk works is in Palmdale, near Edwards AFB, east of Los Angeles. It is hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley.
One problem Amazon has is that they can't simply take down a product with fake reviews
They don't need to take down the product. They just need to take down the fake reviews.
An obvious improvement would be stop allowing reviews from people that didn't buy the product.
Expert systems are subject to "mistakes" like identifying all rainy pictures as "Tank!" because all the training pictures of tanks were taken on a rainy day.
That is a weakness of neural nets, not "expert systems". Expert systems (popular in the 1980s) and neural nets are opposite approaches. Neural nets are trained on raw data, and use machine learning to automatically extract important features. Expert systems encode knowledge and decision making of human experts, and are generally manually constructed.
Just because the United States decreed something doesn't apply to the rest of the world.
That is not what is happening here. The FBI is not going after the Russians, they are going after Facebook, an American company located in California. Can the federal government censor Facebook just because the text being censored was written by non-citizens? According to the US Constitution, they have no authority to do that.
"For more than a century". - so what you are actually saying is that this is not unprecedented at all.
No. He's saying that a century ago weather satellites didn't exist, instrumentation was more primitive, and we just don't know how big the storms were. The first time aircraft were used to monitor a hurricane before it came ashore was the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane.
Popularity matters.
1. If a language is unpopular, there may be good reasons. Examples: Ada, Modula-2.
2. Popular languages have a community of users, so you don't just get more questions on Stackoverflow, you also get more answers.
3. Popular language have more libraries, frameworks, and run on my platforms.
4. If a language is popular, you can get a job writing code in it.
But Moore's Law is not about energy use, it's about device sizing and economics.
To be fair, TFA gets it right. It is only the Slashdot summary headline that mangles Moore.
Nobody is being forced to listen or believe. It really is that simple.
No, it isn't that simple. The advocates of censorship don't just want to avoid hearing the message. They also want YOU to not hear the message.
This isn't about controlling what the Russians do. It is about controlling what the American people see and hear. The Russians are just the boogeyman being used as the justification.