People buy based on how products are marketed to them, not how they'll actually use it.

They sell you there resources, connections,network, and reputation. Very difficult to get your foot in the door for a job if all you have is knowledge and skill.

Why? It takes work for companies to actually spend the time and effort to evaluate each potential candidate for a job and figure out the candidate's actual knowledge and skill set.

The easiest thing for an employer to do to filter out resumes/applicants is to trust the brand name. It is the same thing that people do in a grocery store when they want to choose a product that is produced by many companies. It is a heuristic to conserve mental energy and a way of life.

You can add napster as another case example. Did the legal battle on music piracy really change anything? No. What ended up happening was a handful of individuals were fined ridiculous amounts of money that they would never would make in their life time.

You know what changed everything? Having a legitimate alternative to being forced to pay $20 for an album with maybe only 2 or 3 descent songs on it. Cue itunes.

mod up

Faith and science need not compete with each other.; they can coexist. In other words, people treat the two as a false dichotomy.

A person's faith should not prevent them from believing in science. Conversely, a person's belief in science should prevent them from having faith.

If one could prove one's faith, it wouldn't be called faith, it would be called science.

There are scientific ideas that we believe to be true, but cannot yet prove. A long standing example was fermats last theorem. People had for a long time felt it was true, but until recent time, they were unable to prove it. A modern day example could be NP vs P. Many scientists suspect that an NP complete problem cannot be solved in polynomial time, but no one has a proof.

The main point is that even in science, there are things that we cannot yet prove. There are some things that we may never be able to prove. We have our beliefs about what we feel is true. Our faith in our belief guides us in our attempt to answer the as yet unanswerable questions. The fact that we may not have an answer to a scientific question,but only beliefs about the answer, does not prevent us from being scientific.

Considering the number of Phd's and M.S. graduates that Google employs versus Microsoft, it stands to reason that the average salary would be higher. As others have mentioned, when you factor cost of living, hours worked, and the degree employees hold, 128K doesn't go very far. Also in Washington State (where Microsoft is located), there is no state tax

When the median home price in Mountain View is over a million and the cost for a decent 2 bed/bath apartment is 3k/month, your dollar doesn't go to far.

This approach has the same issues that we have in cyber security (i.e. think x509 certificates and Certificate Authorities). How do you know who to trust? Can we always trust them? When should we trust them? If we use a reputation system to manage trust, how do we make it work such that it scales?

This approach has the same issues that we have in cyber security (i.e. think x509 certificates and Certificate Authorities). How do you know who to trust? Can we always trust them? If we use a reputation system to manage trust, how do we make it work such that it scales?

When people mention how autonomous vehicles can share information with each other, they implicitly assume that the vehicles and other entities within the environment will play fair and honest.

What happens if any of those systems are hacked either for nefarious reasons or just so that the driver of the hacked car can gain some advantage by sharing misinformation. ?

In this setup of autonomous vehicles, they become essentially computers on wheels. The issues that are faced in network security can manifest themselves with autonomous vehicles.

IBM said hello.

If I had a mod point...I'd mod you up. I think this approach is key. It is what I practice at work myself. You are right when you say that finding the right balance between doing research on random subjects and the project you are tasked to work on can be tricky.,

If your metric is hours, smart people will optimize with respect to hours. If your metric is students passing a standardize test, some teachers will optimize by "helping" the students pass the test.

Deciding on what metric to evaluate people is a very challenging problem that surfaces in any situation where you need to manage people. The best approach that is supported by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great is to create a culture on your team/company/etc.. that has the values that you as a manager want. This culture will then weed out the people who don't "fit in". Of course, creating this culture may take some time and so is suited for managers looking for long-term reward. Unfortunately, some managers are looking at things in the short-term.

All it does is move the pollution

Main point: Centralized power source vs decentralized power source. Centralized power sources (i.e. Electric vehicles) can benefit immediately from improvements to technology/efficiencies at the power plant.

Electric vehicles can do more than this by allowing for a centralized power source. Think about traditional gas powered cars. Changes in technology that allow for increased power efficiencies (i.e. better mpg) mostly impact the newer cars. Cars that were produced 10-15 years ago are less efficient, but they are still driven by a good chunk of the population.

Improvements in technology at the power plant can have an immediate impact on all Electric vehicles.

This seems reminiscent of the Excel vs Lotus 123 war and how Microsoft won. Joel Spolsky has a great article describing the tactics M$ used to win the war.

The basic idea was to eliminate barriers that would keep people from switching from Lotus 123. Below are some exerts from the article. I think there are some interesting parallels to Typescript and javascript.

Barrier:They have to convert their existing spreadsheets from 123 to Excel
Solution:Give Excel the capability to read 123 spreadsheets

Barrier:They have to learn a new user interface
Solution:Give Excel the ability to understand Lotus keystrokes, in case you were used to the old way of doing things

I seriously doubt that this is the actual savings. What about the servers that you need to purchase and run to do the data processing? What about the network equipment you will need to buy and run to support the large amount of data traveling across the network? (Using pc’s instead of terminals allows more data to be processed locally at the pc instead of sending it to the server)

What about the additional staff that you will need to manage the network and the servers?

Moving to dumb-terminal big-server model can introduce a single point of failure. At least with a pc, some data processing can happen locally even if the server goes down for some reason. With a terminal, its game over until the server is back up running. Every model has its tradeoff. Does this model make sense?