What oath did he break? The only oath he took was the one that all federal employees take:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

Now that money equals speech, it's imperative that it happen. It's the most straightforward way to amass enough money to "say" anything.

That's not flashy, takes resources away from more visible (to the manager's manager) tasks, and may not even pay off until after the manager has moved on to a better gig. Management's job should include a lot of things that management doesn't actually do because the incentives are structured so that there's no point in actually doing those things. (Which, of course, is a result of failures at even higher levels of management and so on...)

"Of any value" is the catch here. Eliminating the boost circuit makes the device cheaper to manufacture and offloads that cost to the operating cost for the user (which means higher profits for the manufacturer). The devices that he's talking about (remote thermometers, rain gauges, etc) probably tie him to a single manufacturer, so there's no competition anyway.

Modern day engineering of consumer devices is almost completely rooted in "value engineering". For an expected level of function, everything that isn't absolutely necessary is cut from the design (from quality of components to niceties like efficient use of batteries). The target for expected level of function is a distribution just to the outside of the warranty period.

The different chemistries are described this way because of the characteristics of the discharge curves. As you can see here, the NiMH battery (and NiCd is similar) spends most of its life at 1.2V, while the ZnMnO2 batteries have no such plateau.

Under any considerable load, both battery types will drop from 1.5V/1.4V very quickly, so measuring 1.2V across a loaded NiMH battery doesn't mean that 60% of the energy is gone. Self-discharge alone will drop most NiMH/NiCd cells to below 1.4V pretty quickly.

Not at all. That's some populist nonsense that's supposed to end bribery. It's no wonder Google had no hand in it.

What Google needs to make is a system that streamlines bribery, synergizing capitalism and Web 3.0.

That reminds me of the safety showers that we have in every lab. You know what's going to happen when you pull that loop and you know that there's no drain on the floor and it's going to make a big mess, but damn if it's not tempting...

(I have to admit that I pulled one for the fun of it and it did make a big mess as expected. Totally worth it. I don't imagine pressing the halon button would go over quite as well.)

It's like when you ask a girl if she wants to go out with you, and she says no, and so you hire a team of psychologists to help you manipulate her into saying yes.

It's not really any less creepy when ad companies do it to get you to part with your money.

That sounds like something a manager would say. My advice would be that if you ever become a manager, realize that your job is to facilitate the work of your team.

You, the manager, are not a source of revenue or productivity in your company. Your job is to help the workers who are actually doing the work be as effective as they can. If you let your ego or high salary make you think that the workers are working for your benefit, then you're not doing your job.

Making management a "step up" in the career path has probably contributed the most to ineffective management. It's an important job, but it isn't worth more to the company than the actual workers that they "manage".

It may work if you actually have another offer already lined up. Sometimes it doesn't work, so you need to be ready to take that other offer.

Threatening to leave for another job that you have lined up can get you a raise, but threatening to go start interviewing for jobs doesn't get you shit (except maybe replaced). The one exception is if you are a superstar and "start interviewing" means "gone in a week". Know your cards before you start betting!

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Bennet Hasselton waits dreaming.

Did you even read my post? I was contesting the idea that paying for service from Google gets you any different treatment than using their "free" service.

The post to which I was responding, which I explicitly quoted said:

[citation needed]

From the Terms of Service:

When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

Neither that, nor their Privacy Policy mention any exceptions for Photos if you pay for them. Where did you get this idea?

I agree that the story itself is not comparable to our lives, but the same can be said for most of the sci-fi or fantasy stories that try to address immortality. I've yet to read a book that's sole topic was discussing the philosophical dilemmas of extended life. Usually, the topic is just an aside to the main storyline (which is thankfully not as often saturated with drama as the vampire genre is).

Fiction is one of our more powerful tools for exploring philosophical concepts. For it to work, you have to create engaging worlds and characters with which to do the exploring. I'm certainly not one for the Byronic hero, but Rice's stories (which were fairly well written and I have to admit that I found them entertaining as a kid) were attempting to humanize an immortal creature so that the readers could attempt to experience a different perspective. She was exploring more than just immortality, so it makes sense that her characters aren't a perfect fit for that topic alone.

Her vampire world certainly isn't any more ridiculous than the world (or characters) of Lazarus Long or Louis Wu. Deep philosophical investigation is hard to do without contrived or ridiculous scenarios. If there's something to be learned from a work (and there isn't always one), then we shouldn't get hung up on the silly details of the story.

Anyway, it sounds like you have in mind a book that better addresses the topic. Can you share? I'm genuinely curious and I've never read enough!