DoublcClick has such negative value that their servers should be blocked at firewalls, or at least "host.txt". Even if you have AdBlock, blocking them earlier saves bandwidth.

People develop lives and other interests. If you'd like to dedicate yourself to one thing, great. But you have an odd idea about the nature of liking what you do. Liking what you do is very different from wanting to do it all the time. The world is an interesting place with a lot of different things in it. Don't assume people that have other interests (Family, hobbies, houses, travel, leisure) aren't passionate about what they do, they've just realized that there's more to life than computers.

In fact, a good way to get burned out is to do exactly what I suspect you're doing. Working really long hours, and dedicating lots of your free time to software. Cut it out, and maybe you won't get burned out.

No, not at all. If you know who Mark Hurd and Safra Catz are, you will be wishing for kind, nice old Larry back.

I was in a meeting with Safra a while back. I was a fly on the wall. Then a discussion came up about engineering details. Not too relevant to business besides timelines.

She interrupted the line of thinking and said the "Little people will take care of this."

She is amazing to hear speak, she has her business acumen, some technical chops, and she has her stuff together. She is one lean, mean chainsaw. Larry is seriously tame compared to her.

And Hurd, well, he is known for slash and burn techniques that do well for shareholders (in consort with a favorable market) but usually reduce headcount in sometimes painful ways. HP has many coffins with Hurd's name on it.

Larry is going to sit in a lawn chair enjoying retirement and watch Hurd and Catz vie for total power, control and domination. I put my money on Safra. He gets to watch a cage match to see who wins the title of Larry, Turbo Version 2.0++

I think you said the words you're talking about in your anecdote. Worth and trust. Both those are earned, and can be over-valued. The developer in question shouldn't be trusted.

It does. There's a Craiglist-type feature on Bloomberg trading info terminals. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. You can message other people via the Bloomberg system if you see something you like.

There's a paid social network for rich conservatives. This is independent, not a Bloomberg thing. It's only $5/month, which is apparently enough to keep the noise level down.

There's a persistent rumor that there are special news sources for rich people. There are, but they're very narrow. There are lots of newsletters you can buy for $50 to $1000 a month that provide detailed coverage of obscure business subjects. If you really need to know what's going on with bulk carrier leasing, oil drilling equipment activity, or wafer fab capacity shortages, there's a newsletter for that. Offshore Alert, which covers offshore scams, is one of the more readable ones, and you can see the first few lines of each story for free. There are expensive newsletters devoted to security and terrorism, which give the illusion of inside information, but they tend to be marketing tools aimed at rich paranoids.

If you want to know what's going on in the world, read The Economist. After you've been reading it for a year, you'll have a good understanding of how the world works.

Actually, coffee may be part of that.

Turns out that coffee delays the build up of some chemical that makes you tired... i.e. it makes your body clock run slow, when taken in the morning.

However, if you take it late at night, before you go to bed, then the level of that chemical goes down more quickly and you'll wake up earlier the next day. Surprisingly it doesn't make it that much harder to go to sleep either, although if you're not already tolerant to coffee, all bets are off on falling asleep promptly.

Other things that affect the body clock are light, and food (big breakfasts are good for waking up early the next day, skipping breakfast = super bad).

Not without huge advances in theoretical mathematics, no.

Cryptography relies not only on the math being correct, but the implementation as well. How sure are you that Apple implemented the random number generator properly, for instance? Maybe that 128 bit key only has 64 bits of entropy because someone screwed up. 64 bits of entropy is feasible to brute-force.

Also, only RSA relies on factoring large numbers. RSA, and other public-cryptography is only used to encrypt the key. The underlying algorithm is still generally block ciphers like AES, which aren't dependent on prime numbers.

So instead of requesting access to the data, they'll request access to installing a special update to your phone that simply transmits the encryption key.

If you trust Apple to update your software, and Apple has to do whatever the government says, there's always going to be a way for the government to get your data.

The basic aerospike SSTO design goes back to the mid to late 1960s with Phil Bono's work (and a couple of his patents), and designs by the Douglas (later McDonnell-Douglas) corporation (SASSTO, ROMBUS, Pegasus, Hyperion and Ithacus). Chrysler Aerospace (IIRC) had a similar proposal for the initial Space Shuttle studies. Boeing's "Big Onion" came a bit later, after O'Neill's 1974 "Physics Today" paper kicked off the whole L5/space colony/solar powersat thing.

The designs were revived in the 1980s by Gary Hudson and Pacific-American Launch Systems (Phoenix) and later by General Dynamics (Millennium Express --disclaimer, I helped name it) as their proposal for the DC-X competition.

Yes, New Shepherd was clearly influenced by all that (as have several others, including a Japanese suborbital test vehicle). The design makes sense for a number of reasons:

• structure weight is critical for SSTO, and the closer you get to a sphere, the better your structure-weight to propellant-volume gets, hence the relatively squat shape
• the rounded-cone shape makes a great reentry vehicle, with some maneuverability (assuming asymmetric mass distribution)
• the heat-shield on the base serves to protect against engine exhaust on launch as well as reentry heating
• aerospike nozzles are inherently altitude-compensating, so potentially more efficient

Of course there are downsides to the design too, particularly in terms of integrating the design so that it's light enough for SSTO, and starting and controlling the large number of thrust chambers (usually at least 16, some designs with 24 or 32).

Of course, the respect you're seeking must be proportional to your actual skills, merit to the company, etc.

Hmmm.. this is the only statement I find questionable. Everything else I agree with. I think everyone deserves respect. The lowest level employee doesn't deserve to be yelled at for missing deadlines, or having a bug that's missed. That's basic human nature, and you're not entitled to it simply because you're more valuable, it's something all people need. I understand your position, but if the only way you can gain "respect" is through fear (fear you'll leave), that's still an indication of a sick organization.

Long term, you should still leave if everyone doesn't deserve respect, not just "valuable" people.

Exactly the feeling I got. We don't even have an Federal Internet Commission, and don't seem to need one.

We do need to have the Consumer Product Safety Commission setting safety standards for the Internet of Things. They're properly the lead agency of safety issues. That will probably happen after the first few deaths due to cloud-based control of home devices.

> They can't simply trust users to appropriately mark packets - you'd have some who simply marked everything as high priority.

Last time I heard about it, and I don't think it's changed, Microsoft Windows marks all its packets as highest possible priority.

The immediate effect of them doing that, was that all ISPs immediately started ignoring the priority classes, which made them completely useless globally.

That's like wearing shoes with golf spikes all the time.

Traction control for feet does roughly the same thing as automotive traction control for cars. The basic idea is to keep the sideways force below the break-loose point. This is the down force on the wheel times the coefficient of friction.

For car wheels, the down force is mostly constant. For a legged robot, it changes throughout the ground contact phase So the side force has to be actively controlled and changed throughout the ground contact. It's also necessary to compensate for leg angle.

Legs have an additional option. If a leg has three joints, you can adjust the angle at which the contact force is applied. This is a big win on hills.

I used to work on this stuff in the mid-1990s, but nobody was interested in building legged robots back then. It could be used for animation, but it was overkill for games. I never expected that DARPA would spend $120 million on BigDog. Robotics projects in the 1990s were tiny.