I work in the technology space, where we're heavily investing in R&D. And we don't own a thing - it's all open source, apache software.

Fundamentally I think people are realizing that owning IP is a short-term strategy for many businesses. If the value you provide is entirely locked up in your IP - and not in your customer service and skills, eventually someone is going to come along with a cheaper or free version of your IP. Then your only advantage is the lock-in you already have.

In the long term, companies have to function based on their ability to support their customers - not just throw IP at them. This is especially true in software.

Oh go for it. I don't work there anymore. I'm not exactly sure what that has to do with my post though.

Well, about $2B in cash, no debt, one of the biggest patent portfolios on mobile tech, global datacenter presence, direct links and relationships with over 150 carriers, a manufacturing chain, and still around 60 million customers - and a brand, while presently negative, that is internationally known. At $9 a share from Fairfax, they could do nothing but shut down the company, sell the assets, and make money.

That being said, I have a BB10 device, and I honestly believe they have a quality product. Their problems are more about marketing, advertising, and un-fucking their relationships with various companies and carriers (they obviously pissed in Netflix's wheaties, since they refuse to release a BB10 app, whereas Netflix will put their software on just about anything). Yes, the company was poorly managed these past 5-6 years, but they're not "worthless". They've managed to piss off the carriers and some developers. That's most of the problem.

To sell more power chips. Nothing to see here, please move along.

This is actually my overriding issue with new TVs. I'm sitting on my 8+ year old tv until this changes or it breaks.

I have a receiver. I have an htpc or several machines I can use to do that (wdtv, ps3, etc). I have a nice audio set up that I'm happy with.

I want a dumb, high-quality screen. I don't have the room (design wise, not physically) for a projector. I just want a 50-70", 120-240hz LED screen (or, if I'm lucky, OLED once they come down in price). I don't want built in speakers. I don't want a "smart" tv with wifi/youtube/lan/etc.

Stop packing so much crap into every tv out there. Just give me a high-quality panel. Hell, I'm starting to look at some large-format monitors instead of a tv.

The moral argument is a bullshit argument and you know it. If the US actually cared, they would have been in Rwanda. Or another half dozen countries over the past few decades. The US is happy to sit by and watch full blown genocide at massive scales if there is no strategic reason for being there.

Plus, the US is not the world police, regardless of the propaganda. Honestly, I was in the States last week and was kind of amazed that the military commercials are all about how you're "protecting the world's interests". Not American interests. Not self defense. There's not even any vague shallow attempt at sounding like a defense force.

But let's be clear: it is a defense force. Defense force for American corporate interests abroad.

ActiveMQ, Ant, Avro, Cassandra, Derby, Geronimo, HBase, Hive, Hadoop, JMeter, Lucene, Maven, Pig, Solr, Subversion, Thrift, Tomcat, Zookeeper.

Don't underestimate the impact Apache has had.

No. No it's not. On both your points. No.

Yeah, I can't understand why this is news. I've seen it on two sites now.

This wasn't even an M-class flare, and the CME is only expected to push planetary Kp to 4. As in this doesn't even register as a geomagnetic storm. See this page for an explanation of Kp and you can also see this page for the predicted impact.

Somehow some idiot picked up on this, and this news is making the rounds. I've seen a lot of people confused by the coverage - this is a bloody whisper in the solar flare world.

A $40 refund and a room in another hotel down the street at 3am or later in the morning isn't exactly "every effort to resolve the situation".

So the domain was owned by someone else, doing different things with it. Sounds like it was funny... or trying to be funny.

Why do I care about this?

There's a real problem here: they're planning to fund this project through Survivor type television selection process.

And there is a relatively high probability that these people could die. We'll have the world watching as we send a group of four likely under-equipped people to Mars. I would wholeheartedly like to see us go to Mars and beyond, but I'm concerned that this half-hazard approach may end up damaging the long-term will to do this than succeeding.

We need better radiation shielding - which is easily done with a meter or two of water in the hull. The problem is cost and construction - and I think we really should be putting our efforts towards orbital construction: building things in orbit - not plugging modules together. Honestly, I think the largest impact we could make to long-term, long-distance space flight at this point is getting good at one thing: welding in orbit.

Not really. The real-time components (aka correlation) are basically just straight up FFTs. Custom hardware in correlators might make sense (and probably does at scale), but through ASICs or FPGAs. They're not doing that (...yet). Throw a GPU or two into each node, and you'd get far more FLOPS than you would with a cray. This work is mostly embarrassingly parallel, so throwing money into cray's is a total waste of time.

It's not. It's really not much at all. For $150k, you could build a hadoop cluster that would happily accept the data stream, process it, and make it available for consumption. If you just want to store it, you don't even need that much.

That's a waste of a Cray. Well, a Cray is a waste of money these days anyway.

I actually thought this through... my first reaction was wow, that sucks. Maybe Valve isn't the utopia that people think it is.

Then I stepped back and remembered what I've heard about Valve. You make your own decisions - and you're accountable for them. They said they had a million dollar lab, but couldn't hire anyone to do the machining. But who decided to build that lab? Did they spend a million dollars on equipment then not use it?

A flat organizational structure doesn't mean there's no politics. It means politics are MORE important - it's harder for some team to simply burn cash, because everyone's eyes are on you. It's hugely increased freedom - but all of the responsibility that comes with it. Assuming that anyone in Valve could decide to go build a million dollar lab, what do you think would happen if it failed to get utilized?

This is one side of the story from one person. I'm sure there's more to it than the lab, but the lab example shows a basic misunderstanding of the personal responsibility one has in a flat org structure.