The one thing that always gets my goat - as an ex lecturer - is that hardly any employees looks as your college marks after the first job. It is all about "who you worked for" - which says pretty much nothing (because it would be "who you got to give you a job", not about how good you are).

Just because someone has got a drivers licence doesn't mean they can drive an F1 or Champ car - why does anyone think that someone who who has a college degree is going to be at home with cutting code in a distributed HA environment.

I can tell you, without exception, everybody that came out of our university course with marks of 80/100 or above was smokin hot. If you looked at those marks even 10 years into their career you would see they are still a reflection of how good they are. Google's grabbing of PhD's is similar to looking at the marks and picking the top students. If you pick someone who has scraped though, you're probably going to get a lemon, but if you take the pick of the litter - you get stars without having to groom them yourself.

It takes 10000 hours to be an expert at anything. Your contact hours in college may be as little as 2500... If you just give people on the job training - it costs your business lost productivity while the mentor helps out for, lets say, the first 2500 hours, so 62 weeks of Full Time Equivalent work for a grad... lets say that comes out to $50k to make it easy. Now lets just say we have about 28k of lost productivity from the mentor. That is a $78k undergrad degree that the business has just funded (and the employee can walk away with that). Now you can top that with things like 'health plans', 'insurance', and 'opportunity cost'. Opportunity cost is the big thing, because that $78k might have been a few fully competent employee which could bring the business in more money. .. hence the existence or tertiary education....

Depending on how much your mentor is paid, you are probably looking at an expense similar to the cost of a college degree (if you add equipment, taxes, opportunity cost, two sets of wages etc). It just that you are getting business to wear the expense - and then the employee walks away with the benefit. Great if you are the employee.... crap if you are the business!

I think the Billy the Borg icon needs a replacement.
I think it would be better to have an animated gif of Ballmer going buck wild on stage

WOOOOOOOOO! YEEEEEAHHHH!!!

The world is whiteanting away his empire.

Rupert - stop going on a money grab. You make money from the advertising in newspapers - and the "cost" of the newspapers is the cost of covering raw materials, printing, distribution costs and a small slice for the seller.

You really make your money out of the ads. What you are really bitching about is Google taking some of your advertising share - because you can Google a story and jump off to millions of sites and blogs.

Of course the way to prevent this is to provide quality content. But Newscorp's second line of business is wholesale news provision (al la Reuters). Of course, every blogger, tweeter and facebook poster is working against you.

You are under attack from every side. So all you do is try to protect you empire, rather than recognising the empire is changing.

It is all about social networking now. You own press has been saying this. I am doing it now. Jump on in - you have brilliant people in your IT departments, you have brilliant people in your Business Development units... use them. Build something special. Build the nest generation of news. God knows you have the money to do it - an in doing it you'll help your grandkids grandkids be as wealthy as you are.

I had the pleasure of cycling for about 4 hours with on of the editors from a large Murdoch owned newspaper back in 2000.

He asked me where the internet was heading, and how they could leverage it to provide content, and get the readers involved. I also highlighted problems like the sourcing of press releases as articles and the conflicting information they will find in other sources. Opportunities also would present themselves like geolocated and profiled advertising. To their credit, they have persued much of this. The problem is that Google is their competition. I can find anything I want, for free, quicker, crowdsourced, discussed in forums and critiqued. The only service newspapers now offer is a stream of aggregation - and that puts them in direct competition with search engines.

This has been a perfect storm for Murdoch. He has concernrated media, driving variety out of the the market, and opening doors for players of new technology to enter into a niche and then expand to take his business.

His papers will evaporate. Unfortunately, with it will go the newsagencies, delivery routes and old paper advertising industry that went with it. The biggest danger Rupert faces is Apple Tablet - if you can read on that, and it works well - newpapers are in for a world of pain.

Okay then... it's a lime. Now go take a running jump.

As I understand it, current thinking is that light bends because of gravity, and this is how distant planets and other distant objects are found.

Could it be that it is, instead, is just light being pulled or pushed against something that is being observed, rather than an observation of the gravity that the body has?
The next effect is the same I guess.