Because you can measure hot air balloon leaks by looking for helium?

That's what I've always done, grown each business slowly, organically. I've since learned that there are two types of companies that work well - tiny ones that basically provide the owner with a job, and larger ones run by a management team.

    What I did for far too long was deal with payroll, unemployment taxes, health insurance, sick leave, etc for two employees. That was a mistake. I should have chosen to either stick with just me and a part time helper, or make the jump to six or eight employees. That jump requires a leap of faith, some investment and a marketing campaign. Not making that leap meant that the business was dependent on one or two long -term employees who occasionally get sick, leave the company, etc.

Be tiny for a while until you figure out what you're doing. That may mean doing your business and a day job for a little while until the business provides you with a full-time income. Once it pays you $60,000 / year, then decide to either stay at that level or increase revenue by 500% quickly. Especially after the changes in the last six years, being an employer takes a lot of time and effort. Make it worthwhile. Do a POC by working it by yourself first, though.

The paper isn't mis-using religious concepts or entities or terminology for secular and negative purposes, it's using vulgar terms instead of more polite ones. People keep f******* mistaking the two concepts.

I did some work with the publishing industry back in the 80s, and one of the projects had some portrait-mode 200dpi monitors for editing. Absolutely wonderful things; we're only now starting to get that kind of resolution again.

As it was, I found it annoying enough to go from 1152x900 in 1992 down to 640x400 in 1993, and didn't get as good a monitor on my main work machine until maybe 2009 or 2010. (There were laptops with 1280 or more pixels before then, but we didn't have them; our Corporate IT department always preferred to get hardware with more color depth instead of more pixels, thinking for instance that 640x480 with 16-bit color was better than 800x600 with 8-bit color. Nope.)

Yes, it's much nicer to read portrait-mode documents on a portrait-mode or at least square display, not on landscape. It's especially the case for PDF files in multi-column formats where you otherwise have to scroll up and down and up and down to read the things.

But that's not a friendly shape for a laptop, unfortunately. I'd probably be ok with a tiltable display to get 4x3 or 16x9-10 portrait mode, though it seems manufacturers assume you're going to be using displays to watch movies on so the default position is landscape.

Isn't the most common scenario for these enterprises where the programmer's customers grow beyond his ability to support just by himself?

So he starts adding people to handle the portions that he cannot, efficiently, handle himself.

If you're going into this wondering what the "ratio of senior programmers to intermediate and junior programmers" should be then I think you've skipped too many steps.

The same with "different tools and/or languages". The 2nd programmer uses exactly what the 1st programmer uses. The idea is to provide support for the founder so he can focus on what he is good at.

You might want to find out whether you can tilt them by 90.

I always thought it's odd that monitors are wider than they are tall. Isn't it far more convenient to use them, well, like we used to use paper?

Why should an AI have to think about all the things us meatbags have to think about that aren't relevant to it?

Because if it can't model a meatbag, why would it be able to model an electron (so can't do physics), an industrial robot (so can't program them), a car (can't control vehicles), abstract entities (can't do logic or math) or anything else for that matter?

Imagination is not optional for intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to build mental models and manipulate them.

AIs don't have parents (well, not in the traditional sense anyway) and so won't have a human-like childhood experience to reflect upon,

Any entity that comes to a new setting will require a period of acclimatization. Whether you call this "childhood" or not is irrelevant.

nor should they have to worry about whether that lump is cancerous, or whether they have to go into work tomorrow, or if that dish had too much salt in it.

Computers break down and require resources - more than human bodies, in fact - thus work enters the picture.

The book also presents a very interesting hypothesis that resolves the Fermi Paradox.

A hypothesis that falls apart when you start wondering how beings who embrace such logic ever built a society to begin with, and then avoided wiping each other out with nuclear weapons. Also, I can't help but think what happens if any set of species forms an alliance or even casual contact - attacking any warns all the others. So while we can't rule out a psychotic species causing havoc, it would be a weird aberration at worst.

Frankly, I find it much more likely that we simply happen to be amongst the first civilizations to develop. Universe is not that old, elements took time to manufacture, life took time to get from first whatever-they-were to us, and Earth has a lot of things going for it specifically.

If I were in Academia, I'd be looking for the slightest excuse to cite this paper at every opportunity!

Sounds like it. Apple and 5 publishers tried to raise the price of new "e-books from the $9.99 price that Amazon had made standard".

So why does Amazon get to set the price, and not Apple or the publishers?

This is so simple I'm amazed you got voted up. Fundamental market mechanics is that sellers try to raise the price, buyers try to lower the price. Everything from someone haggling over an item at a flea market to a multi-billion dollar corporate buyout operates this way. Both buyer and seller are acting in their own interests. However, the counterbalance to sellers having the power to raise the price is that if they raise it too much, buyers can go to a different seller to get the same or similar item. That natural balance between sellers trying to get as high a price as they can without driving buyers to competitors is what sets the market price.

Apple and the publishers were sellers who tried to raise the price. If they'd arrived at that price individually, then there's no problem. But they colluded to set it at that price, which is absolutely illegal since it breaks this fundamental market mechanic.

Amazon was a seller who tried to lower the price. That's not a problem since it benefits the buyer. It's just like a store deciding to hold a sale. (There's an anti-trust argument that Amazon shouldn't be selling ebooks at a loss, using profits from other markets to undercut competitors in the ebook market. But that wasn't the focus of this particular case, and its disingenuous to try to argue Apple and the publishers aren't guilty because of this. Both can be illegal. If Amazon's ebook pricing is driving competitors to bankruptcy, then that's a separate issue that needs to be decided in a separate case.)

In truth, the retarded are just punted back a few dozen meters. Provided they're educable in the most basic sense, they can be trained to be normal; and, once normal, they can use the training to become hyper-intelligent.

This seems highly unlikely. You are in essence claiming physical deficiencies in brain structure will simply disappear with enough training. This in turn implies that anyone who has such a handicap is merely too lazy to overcome it. Do you have any evidence?

onLoad=(yourscrewed)

No script tag there.

How about if I enter scrscriptipt? When you remove "script" from the middle, you end up with - script.

Removing stuff will pretty much never work. You have to htmlencode the output.

> searching the whole site, I was unable to find a single example of a successful "assembly." Not good after "a year of operation."

I saw two of four projects were turning a profit, which would mean paying dividends to contributors.

Even if you're going to pick a common word, it is another mistake to pick a word that has a commonly understood meaning specific to that industry. If the had picked any random word, such as Donkey, they could defend a trademark for Donkey programming or Donkey software. Can't quite claim a trademark for assembly programming - assembly programming has been around for decades.