Dude, RTFA. It clearly explains how he uses relativity clouds to achieve these feets.

Um, citation needed.

Yes, there are drugs that can prevent you from forming long-term memories such as in painful hospital situations (many people may experience these when getting a tooth removed). However, there's no such thing as deleting memories this way. When you retrieve a memory, you don't do anything to diminish the long-term memory, so it's ridiculous to suggest that talking about an experience while on memory-inhibitors will somehow erase those memories.

I have a feeling it might be something like this as well. I also almost guarantee that Google sticks some falsities in their images to catch people who might try to represent them as their own. Though I imagine they'd be more subtle than this . . . but who knows.

Umm.... Apparently you're living back in the early twentieth century. The US has been a service-based economy for quite some time. From wikipedia:

GDP by sector - agriculture: (1.2%), industry: (21.9%), services: (76.9%) (2009 est.)

Get involved in some of the competitions here: http://community.topcoder.com/tc

Start with old competitions to practice on. Even if you never actually compete in any of the real time competitions, you can have a lot of fun with these type of problems and competing against former coders (it scores you based on several criteria). More importantly, this is ideal stuff to buff up your interview skills. If you get good at the topcoder problems, you'll do great in any interview coding.

This is already the case. Most banks give some percent in cash, some percent in restricted stock units (RSUs) that vest over 1-3 years typically. The percent given in cash decreases as the size of the bonus increases. And this was also the case before all this mess, albeit a little less-so. Though claw-back provisions on these RSUs are new, but are being done and do make sense.

They received bonuses that had previously been guaranteed. Think about it in sports terms. A great quarterback may receive a multi-million multi-year contract. Just because he starts to play terribly later on doesn't mean he wasn't considered the best talent when the contract was signed. Nor could anyone have necessarily predicted his future failures (at least not with any certainty).

The problem is that hedge funds can't pick up the slack. Yes, they can pick up some, which is why prop-trading is being done away with in banks. However, many of the activities that banks do, just do not scale down and remain profitable in smaller-sized chunks. Arguably, hedge funds have already picked up nearly all that they can, since they are already much less regulated than banks and therefore have significant competitive advantages. Furthermore, as the MF Global scandal made clear, there is actual value in banks that are big enough to be well-trusted.

The difference is that a successful surgery doesn't directly generate more money for a hospital than a failed surgery. In the long run, yes, a successful surgeon brings in more business to a hospital, so yes they get paid long-term salaries that reflect that. However, for investment bankers, the more successful they are, the more money they bring in immediately. This lends itself to short-term incentive pay far better than in most businesses.

In addition to that, finance is a highly cyclical business. With bonuses, you can simply pay everyone less in bad years. If bonuses were disallowed, you'd be stuck paying high salaries without the resources to fund them, and shareholders would instead take the hit. (And yes, salaries would be high, because there's a lot of money floating around and a lot of competition for who's going to get it, so the best talent will absolutely demand high pay.)

That's not to say we don't need more provisions to more closely align those incentives to long-term success in addition to short-term success. But removing bonuses entirely doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Actually, I think more professions could benefit from incentive-based pay. Teaching, for example.

More to the point . . .

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/no-wall-street-bonuses-arent-destroying-the-economy/248093/

Perhaps in your line of work. In mine, this is not atypical. Though yes, in general, interviews should mirror the expected working condition as much as practical.

Boy, that's some crazy dedication to science . . . or maybe just crazy.

Ha. What "real work" environment do you work in where every project has an unchanging set of clearly-written requirements listed from day 1?

This all sounds really good . . . except for the fact that unemployment is significantly higher in most of Europe than it is here. So why do we have more jobs here? Could it be because we work harder individually?

Exactly. And not only that, but the lack of privacy. 90% of stuff you'd want siri to do is just too awkward/intimate to do in public. It's good for drivers, but not much else.

No matter how good Siri might be (and I have some doubts, but it does look cool), it's not going to be revolutionary simply due to this lack of privacy.