Wow. Did you take the wrong idea from the supply-demand curve.

People won't stock up on TVs just because they are cheap. And there was an unfulfilled demand for Picture-tubes-that-entertain.

How about this - set up a 10 tonne rock shop in the Kalahari desert. Keep it real cheap too. So there is a supply. Let's see how many you sell.

Demand isn't something binary - people don't have a demand for everything for which a supply exists or even an infinite demand for anything for which a demand exists. An opportunity for sales (and jobs) exists if there is a price at which there is an intersection on the supply demand curve.

We do have a demand for space ships. We might even have a supply. The price is off - it costs way too much (both in dollars, and risk to life). So unless the price drops (or a few people are willing to spend a lot on it), there is no meeting of the supply and demand, and no jobs.

The order of hindrance is often price>demand>supply - if no one wants your rock even for cheap, you can't start a profitable business. Often, getting costs low enough is the tough part, but even if you do, there must be a demand for it.

There is a supply of un-terraformed planets, so by your argument, there should be a demand. How come I don't see anyone selling these planets, even at a ridiculous price?

I have karma to burn. tl;dr - Listen to sales or at the most only make it available to (developers working at) current customers

I'm the lead sales for an Australian ERP software outfit. For the last ten years, we have got an increasing number of competitors breathing down our throats, and the marketplace has become very crowded. Our market has very little vendor lock-in or product differentiation at this point.

One of our lead developers has made our bug tracking list public facing. This is making our life very difficult. Potential clients google our product and see a huge list of bugs. Just a few days ago a huge deal fell through because of this. Our potential customer was horrified that we can't handle dates correctly (it actually has a problem only after 10,400AD), or that the database gets corrupted sometimes (if someone sets of an EMP when data is being written).

When we bring this to our lead dev, he gets moral and claims we shouldn't be in a race-to-the-bottom with our competitors, while ignoring the prisoner's dilemma. Also, while other developers appreciate this transparency, the managers who have the authority to make purchase decisions are scared off by the bug list (and our competitors include our bug list in their sales pitch to scare our current and potential customers - "See? Everyone knows their bugs. It is only hours before you get hacked unless you switch to our product!!"). This is costing us a lot of money that we need to pay people like the lead dev.

We might even be willing to let developers working at our current customers view the bug list, since developers understand and appreciate this. But this lead dev is resistant to that as well. So how can we him to stop making our lives much harder than it already is?

And good policy is very hard to get right.

So what about pay in kind - does that also get taxed at 90%? How about you set up a corporation and charge as a consultant - does your company get taxed at 90%? We can, of course, start making special exceptions to avoid this - a company formed by a former regulator must pay tax at the same rate as the regulator. But this is how policy creep starts. You want a sensible rule that is easy to enforce and can solve a complex social problem that cannot be avoided by loopholes? It is difficult to get right.

I'm late to the party, but I was in a similar situation as yours - Ph.D. in an area in which I couldn't get an industry job, and I actually had no industry experience (no internships or prior experience).

The three tips I'd give (based on my experience that finally helped me land a job) are as follows:
1. Use contacts. Don't try to do it on your own; seriously. With the level of automated resume filtering and keywoard matching, it would be hard to get your resume read by anyone without going through contacts; especially when your area of research is quite esoteric.
2. Market knowledge, not information. You learnt about algorithms and data structures; not worked on how to improve the memory requirements of a simulated annealing solver by 20 MB. Poepole management? Supervised undergraduates.
3. Demonstrate willingness and capability of learning. If you can't convince someone that you can deal with abstractions and transfer knowledge/experience from one domain to the other, why on earth would they hire a Ph.D? The only reason to hire you is that you should be able to address the problems that will arise in several years, not just what they face today.

As an addendum - if you are extremely picky about the industry, make sure you have at least one or two papers related to the industry.

Wow. Did you buy a lot of shares that you are trying to offload? Why the love of Alibaba and/or US bashing?

1. Alibaba is huge in China, but tiny in other markets. This is not a truly global operation.
2. So?
3. So?
4. See 2.
5. If you must know, the HK exchange refused to let them list.
6. Favor? For f***s sake, favor?? HK refused. Goldman gives big institutions very sweet terms and like a whore screws anyone for her pimp (in this case, Alibaba). They probably raised more money than they could in any other exchange.
7. So? This isn't about Amazon; though if you are familiar with it, you wouldn't be harping about NYSE and IPOs. "Investors" are notoriously fickle.
8. Alibaba has a record in ONE developing economy. And you have to understand that retail is a tricky business. There have been so many flops and a few hits that it might take years for a company to get a right strategy when they enter a new market. What about quality? What about customer service? The Chinese market might be used to toys with lead paint, but if Alibaba starts importing large volumes of this stuff, it is going to get some pretty intense scrutiny.

None of which is to say that Alibaba can't work things out - I'm sure they have some very smart people working there. But you seem to think Alibaba is the new king, and I'd say they are a specialist trying to expand - they will most likely carve out a big chunk of the market, but they are by no means a sure winner.

I know, I'm stuck in the old days where I like to print boarding passes, hotel receipts, parking passes, or scan and keep digital copies of my documents.

However, I recently took a (relatively) old computer (from 2012) and put Debian on it. Things more or less worked. Occasionally, I had to go down to the shell, but nothing that was too infuriating or difficult. Then one day I decided I wanted to (gasp!) use my wireless Epson printer with my Debian OS. It was like pulling my teeth out without anesthesia. CUPS is a piece of crap that is determined to waste people's time. I spent almost an entire day trying to follow various manuals, start print servers, open the configuration page in my browser, install GUI tools, and in general wonder why I signed up for this.

After giving up for the day, I went to bed, woke up the next morning, installed Windows 8 (I get it for free) on a separate partition, booted in, and in 5 minutes I printed out some tax forms and scanned a copy of my W2 for my records (this all took a little over an hour since I started the OS installation - even though I wasn't waiting at my desk constantly).

I guess when you can have your secretary print everything for you, then easy printing isn't really required before considering yourself going mainstream. I started out using my Windows just for printing, then slowly got tired of switching constantly. I started to do more and more in Windows (Quicken, Scrivener) even when there were Linux alternatives. Now I hardly boot into Linux.

This. The greater the population, the more people will wander into your store - even if it is just to get out of the rain. Sudden showers also drive traffic to your store. Is rainfall your new ally?

OTOH, I find it silly that people talk about Amazon being the enemy of your company. The true enemy of your organization was that you were relying on physical constraints to force customers to your store due to a lack of choice - especially now that Amazon is charging tax in many states. If you provide a service to your customers that Amazon cannot duplicate (being non-physical) then there will be a sizeable segment of the population that will flock to you. I visit my public library and stores because they offer a benefit that Starbucks and BitTorrent do not - a special of the day, an illusion (and sometimes real) friendliness, and an update on local events that I don't get from a vending machine. If you claim Starbucks is driving you out of business, you would have gone out of business by a bunch of vending machines.

Yes, amazon can run at a loss much longer than my local bookstore owner can - which is why she is friendly, holds book reading events, and takes an effort to ensure her customers leave the store happy. She doesn't compete with Amazon on price - she does it on service. When my Kindle DX malfunctioned long after the warranty expired, Amazon customer service replaced it without hesitation. Best Buy would charge me a restocking fee if I changed my mind five seconds after I paid.

TFA says that you need to run a malicious app that intentionally exploits that system. They tested multiple android devices (and I'm assuming different versions of the OS). Also, does this work with every VPN service (like Cisco AnyConnect), or only the native system?

Would it be possible to test if any existing Play store app accidentally/intentionally triggers this exploit? I (like many Android users) don't pirate apps (even though my phone is rooted), but if the popular Play store apps are compromised, that would be a big deal for me.

Yes, every time something goes wrong, let us point out how "stoopid" those scientists are in hindsight and claim that the "common sense" solution would have worked. Of course, it couldn't be that the people there did a lot of simulations, analysis, and decided that 0.75mm was a reasonable (not perfect - nothing is black and white) thickness and the disadvantage of thicker wheels was outweighed by the advantages of thinner wheels.

Yes, the designers took a risk - that is their job. To clearly assess the tradeoffs and come up with a good design that trades off risk and performance at an acceptable level. Something doesn't work out as you expect? Use that knowledge in the next iteration. At one extreme you have a lot of equipment with no wheels, and the other extreme you have just wheels, no equipment. You want to do the designer's job? Go ahead, show me what your "common-sense" analysis of the tradeoffs are - what equipment would you cut for thicker wheels, and back it up with a detailed discussion on how the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

True, but the impact of the lies are not all equivalent. The OP went for the most dramatic (and slashdot leaning) approach. But the lie about WMDs (and yes, misleading people with the truth is still a lie in my book - might not be technically a lie, but it sure is a scumbag move) resulted in far worse damages than the IRS "scandal" or stupid statements made by clueless politicians.

I notice you left out the pedo-bear... repressed memories?

Fair enough. I do not have this experience (as I rarely discuss religion with anyone - people tend to treat agnostics as easier to convert than atheists). However, I wonder how much that has to do with the questions. Suicide bombings (while vile) tend to put people on the defensive - I certainly know people get touchy when you take the worst examples of their history and hold it up for criticism, especially if you do not show in depth knowledge of their religion (especially Muslims in US might be more sensitive, because of a perceived bias against them)

When you said they don't know when to "use" religion, I didn't know how to interpret it (and I still don't) - most religious people I meet never "use" their religion in any way, apart from going to a temple/church/mosque, and observing a few traditions - and that isn't really a "use", more like a habit. As a result, I took (from the tone of your post) the term "use" to mean justification of an action, especially unpleasant ones.

OTOH, I totally feel Dawkins has gone overboard (as has Bill Maher, etc). Look, we get it - they don't like religious people (and maybe with good reason). But have they really converted anyone who was a practicing religious person? Not in the sense of "Meh, I go to church once in a while" type of person, but a devout believer? What are they trying to prove by bashing religions and getting people defensive? Any time they want to work on practical stuff (overturning bad legislation, for example), I'll support them. But forgive me if I don't just want to get into a religious person's face and try to make them feel live morons.

And how many Muslims do you know? Most Muslims also know when NOT to use religion. There are more than a billion of them - if half a billion of them did not know when to use it, I think we might have a tad bigger problem that we currently do.

Remember, the kooks you see on TV are like the kooks you see for other religions as well - they are the minority. Hell, the way faith is involved in politics in the US and informs policy decision (veiled as some other excuse) has done far more harm to the LGBT community than most other religions.

Since I don't have mod points, I'll second (and add to) this comment.

My scenario was almost identical - elderly parent, not tech savvy. I got a Kindle Fire HD five months ago, and have had no tech support calls. I added the most common apps to favorites (like Skype, E-mail, Browser), and configured them (disabled in-app purchasing, added e-mail accounts), and handed it over.

The carousel is one of the best features for this use case - my dad doesn't want to pin 20 widgets to the home screen; the carousel easily allows him to browse the most recent apps (the four or five he uses) and books and videos without having to shift home screens, navigate to an app drawer, or any of that. In fact, he might have forgotten all about the favorites since everything he needs is on the home screen (well, except the prime videos, and he discovered that on his own).

While it wasn't on the Fire HD, the new mayday functionality might be useful as well. And the audio and screen are really good (especially the audio - better than all my other tablets, and even my laptop speakers). He likes the swype feature - a huge drawback to the iOS devices (apart from the complexity - seriously, until you see how simple the Fire is, you won't understand how much the multiple home screen nonsense, hidden settings, etc. obfuscate a system for someone who doesn't want to learn about tech).

The drawbacks are the google apps are missing - especially Youtube. You can root it easily enough, but I'd recommend not going overboard - make underlying system changes, but don't change the UI. I feel the carousel is best for the usage scenario you have in mind. KISS principle.