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Comment Re:Sorry RSA (Score 1) 291

This is why you don't get in bed with government.

As opposed to industry that treats you so kindly the morning after when they hand you your pink slip?

Let me FTFY:

This is why you need to keep all powerful organizations in check. Business are kept in check by the government, and in turn, the government is kept in check by the people when they exercise their democratic rights.

Comment Re:Google hurting itself (Score 3, Insightful) 94

It also was overloaded with fresh-undergraduate talent. However some tasks require a substantial number of people with significant experience, yet Microsoft only rarely went after them. In at least some cases the sole reason they hired talent was to silence them (Mark Russinovich I'm looking at you) not to benefit from them.

Their search engine effort is notorious for the lack of inside experts, and the person in charge is, as best as I understand, a non-techie.

Comment Re:Only boots on the ground answer the WMD questio (Score 4, Insightful) 698

Our governments certainly lied but they did not know what Saddam had. Not until there were US/UK boots on the ground did we really know one way or the other.

Sorry, but no. Many other foreign countries had a look at the evidence and they voted "no WMD". Only US lapdogs went along (coalition of the willing), everyone else took a pass. So people were able to tell "one way or another".

Comment Re:I think... (Score 2) 425

but free from the yoke of union blackmail

GM was brought down more by bad quality cars than anything else. Sure, unions didn't help, but unions in Germany are equally strong and their car manufacturers seem to have no problem thriving.

A former manager of GM described the culture as one in which they would merrily spend $100M in an ad campaign for a new car but couldn't get themselves to spend $0.15 in a better rear light bulb which was much needed.

Instead, we have the same company with the same problems just waiting for the same conditions to happen again.

Say what? Management was replaced and contracts were heavily renegotiated and unions lost lots of power. These are big changes and GM is a new company. Still not enough commitment to quality but many of its biggest problems are gone.

Comment Re:Sophisticated? (Score 1) 122

those are exactly the sort of things frequently made from deeply undistinguished jug or box wines.

Try making sangria once from a $20 bottle of rioja, orange juice, lime juice and a touch of brandy. You'd be surprised how much you can tell the difference, even if you are not a regular wine drinker.

Comment Illiterate press (Score 3) 253

I love it how the press reports this result as if the family tree had a single root.

A family tree has two parents, four grandparents eight grandparents, etc. Out of the 2^n ancestors in the n-generation, two branches standout, one the fully male one carrying the Y chromosome and the other the fully maternal line, carrying mitochondrial DNA. There are good mathematical reasons why such lines come to be dominated by a few individuals over the centuries if not millenia yet the press makes it sound like Warren Beatty was alive 100K years ago fathering each and every one of us. As someone else pointed out, if somehow I became Will Chamberlain and happened to father 10K daughters but no male offspring, the Y chromosome line would makes it look like I ws never there though in practice I'd be the (grand) daddy of half of New York within a few generations.

Comment Re:What will researchers do next (Score 3, Funny) 453

Nobody is as cynical about scientists and scientific institutions and their desire to frighten government into giving them money than I am.

I agree, the tendency to exaggerate problems by scientists has reached the state of a crisis. Soon we won't know what to believe anymore!!

This is why I am applying for an urgent grant to study the effect of made up crises on academic research.

Comment Re:Take it from an MBA expert (Score 1) 343

Read the book will ya?

There is no reason a person cannot be both.

Of course, otherwise Mr. Mintzberg would not be a professor in an MBA program. What he claims (among many other things) is that MBA programs should take as input essentially only managers mid-career, not kids fresh out of school like they often do today.

Comment Re:Halfway through my MBA... (Score 1) 343

There is plenty of talk about efficiency, though.. but that is a necessity for a business to survive.

The problem is that most people hear efficiency and they think cost cutting. For example, while Subway was busy finding the cheapest meat substitutes to sell you as ham Quiznos moved in taking a few billion of Subways market share.

Sometimes the most efficient thing to do is to go upscale (think BMW, Apple, Rolex). In my experience, very few MBAs seem to be aware of this simple fact.

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