... the oldest profession.

Irony is seeing you use a _google_ search to defend google in a diversity contest... (dons tinfoil hat)

Randomly pick a device in your house, and use the mac address, serial number, or part number (if it is sufficiently long) as your password. Then you don't have to memorize anything, and you can honestly claim that you do not know the password...

'cause that's a different kind of movie... "brown chicken brown cow!"

Intrepid hacker discovers a way to intercept drones mid-flight and redirect. Takes food and leaves random garbage. All is chop suey until one day he intercepts a drone carying a kilo of cocane and wants to report it to the cops... but can't cause he'd have to admit to the hacking and theft.

Hollywood gold right there!

I don't think I'd go so far as to call the GP racist, and I can see the point GP is trying to make. I live in an area that is predominately white... and by predominately white... I mean like 99.9% or something like that. During a brief time I was entrusted to do the hiring interviews for my department. I only interviewed one black person and one woman. I ended up hiring them both because they both seemed to have the skills we needed. The guy I hired ended up not really being able to handle the work, and was let go. The woman I hired ended up leaving for a more challenging (and presumably better paying) company. From the outside you could say that the company was racist because we didn't have any black developers, or that we didn't have any women developers... but the truth is much more complex: Our sample size for non-white non-male programmers is too small to be statistically significant, and within the sample size we had one under-qualified, and one over-qualified. We actually hired both, and both left the company for perfectly normal reasons, bringing the development staff back to an all-male all-white mix.(not a mix really)

So when the GP asks about the ratio of available talent, I get the sentiment... although with a company the size of FB or Google and with a local diversity like Kalifornia's, you'd think the statistical significance of those numbers would mean more, which is why people are a bit outraged about it.

The person in the corner office does take more risk, I agree. But that person is also compensated in the job for said risk.

Employees of a startup also take risk, but they get very little in the way of compensation for it. Employees risk showing up to work at any time and finding the doors locked. They risk their pensions and retirement money vanishing, They risk being terminated at any time because V.C. didn't come through and the company can't make payroll, and they risk shitty insurance packages. All this for pay that is no better than anywhere else in the industry.

I worked for a startup for over a year, and during that time I had all of the above mentioned issues. The final straw for me was when the newly hired lead developer (who lived 80 miles from the office when he hired on) convinced the CEO to move all development to a satellite office 60 miles closer to his home (making my commute change from 7 miles to 65 miles)... all under the promise that it would be temporary. I quit 6 months later.

My point is that employees of small and startup companies take big risks too(I had a $3000 deductible on my families health insurance). If a company has a goal of making a bitchin' product, and at the same time has a goal to get acquired, I have no beef. I'm saying that there needs to be some goal more noble than getting bought up so the big cheese can live off buy-out cheese while ex-employees live off gov'ment cheese.

I've got nothing but love for people who don't want a "smart home", and I respect anybody who wants the peace and quiet that comes with it. For myself though, I want a smart home that doesn't rat me out to every advertiser, as well as the cops. Google does both.

Think about this: a nest costs $200 according to the literature at my local hardware store, amazon.com shows about the same price. For that kind of scratch, I SHOULD be keeping my privacy.

There is plenty wrong with _just_ wanting to get acquired. Many times, acquisition is predatory, in the sense that a bigger company wants your tech, but not your people. So you stand on the backs of hard working people until you get your golden parachute, and leave them with nothing but unemployment when you go. Even if that ISN'T the case, if your goal is to be acquired, you make a product that is good enough to get you acquired, rather than building a product great enough to make your company a household name. You have perfectly illustrated one of the biggest problems in startup culture today... namely, sell out and coast because your name was the one on the door of the corner office.

... how about a company that has a more lofty goal than "getting acquired" for once?

Cite your sources.

The bitch of it is... I'm totally allergic to great white attacks.

So we need to develop an ultrabright nuke that will melt all of the particles into a thin film of plastic that can be collected... or allowed to sink to the bottom dragging all aquatic forms of life with it... oh.... I guess not.

Diesel is made from the sludge left over from refining oil... makes you wonder why it costs more than regular doesn't it?

While I totally agree with this, I think it misses the point.

Assuming that plastic is provided for free (cities or landfills are already pulling plastic out via a separation step) then enough energy can be *recovered* from the plastic to power the recovery process with a net gain. The goal is not energy independence... it's prevention of non-biodegradable items making it into the landfill.

There was a story a few months ago about an MIT project to float a collector out into the ocean to pick up plastic... maybe these two teams should get together.