Well, he does work from home. Be a sucker and click on a link so he can have a cup of coffee.

The news here is that Elsevier has given up their unspoken tradition of non-enforcement when researchers share their own papers. It isn't clear here whether the papers in question were the pre- or post-editing versions; typically the former were considered fair game. Now that the contract is being interpreted more broadly than it had been (no matter what their actual rights were originally), it becomes even more onerous for would-be customers.

You would be far better served by installing a 40A breaker. Then you won't have to replace it again in 3 years, and you'll be code-compliant to boot. That's why you're supposed to size a breaker to be 25% more than your maximum continuous load.

The $30k EVs--at least the ones that actually sell--are far from "econoboxes". They come with all the bells and whistles of similarly priced cars, and serve the same purpose if you get one that matches your lifestyle. Buy a Chevy Volt for and you won't have range anxiety, but you'll be among drivers who go an average of 900 miles between gasoline fill-ups. Buy a Nissan Leaf (like my own), and you may have to borrow a gas car or ride with a friend once in a while, but never have to worry about oil changes.

He made an assertion that is dimensionally inconsistent by comparing a dollar amount (tax revenue) with a percentage (profit margin), so he can be safely ignored as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about or care enough to write it properly.

I'll admit that for my first five years or so, yes, I was intentionally drowning myself in work, and I loved it. I came into the organization with several skills they had been lacking, and jumped on every opportunity to apply them. Now they are training others to do those tasks as well, and I have spent the last few years learning to moderate my workload. What I got out of those hectic years, though, was the trust and respect of my colleagues and superiors.

I frequently play the role of the shielded guru, but I'm also not afraid to jump into the politics of a decision when it's necessary to get the job done. And when I say "job", I mean "project"--since I consider my job to be getting the project done regardless, not just my part of it.

I'm proactive about learning new tools and often have features ready before they're asked for (but I would never fly myself to a conference for the heck of it--they did pick some extreme examples for the paper).

Most importantly, I earned the reputation of someone who will get the job done no matter what, because I always have the right skill or contact to fill in the missing pieces.

You sound like an excellent engineer, but it takes a very adept manager to make sure all the bases are covered when everyone sticks to their job description precisely. Having members of the team who "lead from within" is a very valid way to share responsibility for a project without having to find a "star manager" who can direct everything himself. And taking the time to understand how your piece fits into the rest of the project should be part of your job no matter what your philosophy, even if your boss doesn't tell you to do it explicitly--perhaps this, in particular, is what the poster really needs to work on.

An interesting observation, though, is that this study was completed in 1999, which was some time ago. My organization has been around for much longer than that, so our corporate culture still has many of the "old ways" ingrained in it. It could be that their research is not as applicable to newer companies, but I would very surprised if there were not a significant degree of similarity.

This IEEE article is the only answer the poster needs. I read it all the way through, and it is spot on, matching my personal experience. I sometimes wondered what exactly I had done to garner such high praise from my colleagues and managers, but as it turns out I was doing all nine of their "Star Work Habits". Paraphrasing some of their findings with my experience:

Those "needless conversations" are where you can ask about other people's projects and experiences. Find out what their areas of expertise are so you can go to them when you need help, or can point others in direction--becoming a clearing-house for technical advice makes you conspicuously valuable and is a great way to gain exposure to all sorts of people and problems in your organization.

At the same time, you can also discover other opportunities. When I first joined as an intern, I quickly became part of the team by volunteering to help out on projects way above my pay grade because knew I had the skills to do them as well or better than the senior engineers. By delivering quality work on those assignments, my boss put me on the fast-track to more interesting projects and responsibilities.

More advanced forms of "communication" include knowing when to push back against your boss on requirements or schedule in order to benefit the organization in the long term, proactively stepping in to resolve conflicts among teammates, promoting others' good ideas when they are not being heard, and learning the ins and outs of the corporate culture so you can communicate effectively with other departments and managers.

It may seem like a waste of time, but you can learn a lot of valuable information by listening to the old-timers ramble on about this and that. More importantly, if you listen to their stores, they will be more willing to help you out when you need their advice.

So my immediate advice for the poster is: Get out there, chat with your coworkers at lunch or the water cooler, and don't worry too much about keeping track of how many dogs they have or where they went to vacation last year. Do ask them about technical topics or share what you are working on--it may be a more comfortable topic for them as well, and vastly more useful.

First of all, your argument is flawed because if a small inventor tried to sue a big company, if there was no cost shifting he would go bankrupt even if he won--which is why they almost never even try. Their only way to monetize a patent is by selling it.

Second, the point of this provision is to destroy the patent troll business model. Right now, when someone receives a patent troll extortion letter, they pay it because even if they know the claim is bullshit it will cost them more to prove it in court than to settle. With this provision in place, folks will be more comfortable blowing off wildly off-base infringement accusations because they know if they go to court they will get their fees paid. The trolls have no intention of taking those cases to court, and rely on fear to keep people paying, so this means there will be no more cases on the docket than before, but the trolls will get less money and society wins.

You fail to account for the fact that in most of the U.S. (outside major metropolitan areas), we have the worst of both worlds: corrupt government officials giving protected monopolies to private corporations. They have no accountability to anyone, and a profit motive to make service as poor as possible. Moving to a municipal system would fix half of this, by at least giving citizens the option to do something about terrible service/management even if they choose not to.

Type 3a firms are good--they buy patents from inventors and seek out companies who want to bring in new ideas by buying or licensing a patent.

Type 3b firms are patent trolls--they buy patents and seek out companies already using the patent in order to extort money from them.

The problem is that in many fields (like software and computer design) there are simply so many engineers working on any given problem that it is almost impossible to avoid the simultaneous/independent invention of any given idea. In that environment, telling one inventor that he has to pay someone else because they did the paperwork first is an insult to his intelligence. This is compounded by the fact that so many ideas are either a) mathematically optimal, which anyone could derive and everyone wants to use, and/or b) part of an interoperability standard where licensing constraints reduce competition, derivative works, open-source tools, etc.

Guess what, the geezers who are holding your company back now weren't much better when they were young. The really sharp ones only get sharper as they age, unless senility sets in.

The number of people killed by roads rushing toward them is remarkable given their apparent inertness. It seems like there's hardly anywhere left that a man can enjoy an afternoon stroll off a balcony without falling victim to a bloodthirsty piece of pavement.

They want to change the perception that if only we fixed AIDS and malaria, nobody would in Africa would die anymore. And probably guilt-trip the West for selling them so many used cars without decent safety features, or for inventing cars at all.

That's what they want us to do, but *after* we've done some of the leg work to actually sort the stuff. Given that so many Americans put garbage in recycling bins with utter abandon, it's really no surprise the Chinese got fed up with us.

But your caveat is insufficient to draw the claimed conclusion. An individual who is "the sort who cares for safety ratings when making purchasing decisions" is almost certain to have other factors they consider as well--I care about safety ratings, and would not buy a car with less than four stars in all categories, but that does not mean I automatically buy the cheapest such car. If you had said "the sort who cares only for safety ratings when making purchasing decisions" (for example, a parent buying a car for his teenager), it would have been logical to conclude that this person thinks "the only reason to pay more than $50k for any car would be to get a higher crash test rating", but without that exclusion, there could be many other factors to add value in his eyes.