In related news, scientists discover the result of experimenting with a 6th taste of everything: fat...

Doesn't mean they have to like it. The question was "why would management not like that?"

Say I was planning to pay my mortgage at the end of the month and the 10yo sports car I've been nursing along (to save money over buying a new car) decided it was time for a repair (say a smog issue) because the State of California changed the rules on acceptable NxOy emissions.

You might say I can't have it both ways, paying lower car expenses for a while assuming their won't be a potentially large repair bill for an older car and budgeting the savings for a larger mortgage expense, but I'm not so sure that I should be required to like the fact that I have to juggle my budget (and not take a long planned Hawaiian vacation)...

Maybe instead of fixing the car, I should probably dump it and buy a cheaper/ more reliable used car that I can afford... Maybe I was stupid in trying to nurse that sports car along because I actually couldn't really afford the potential expected costs, but at least I got to drive it around for a while (even my use of the car was potentially "unfair" to the car's ability to have a owner that took better care of it)...

Of course, my car doesn't have a choice, but if it were a person, would you question its choice of choosing me to begin with, or only after it had realized other owners might have more financial resources to take better care of it? Or would you blame me for accepting the use of the car in the first place...

Not that easy...

Part of your pay is for what you do, part of your pay is to keep you from leaving and working somewhere else (presumably because they would have to hire and train someone new to replace you)...

If Steve, Alan and Lucy make 50 grand a year and you make 45 grand and your contributions to the company are comparable, but you really need the job because you are single parent in your mid-50's and don't want to go back into the job market in your mid-50's, and they all are married to high paying professionals...

Sadly, how much you personally want/need the job is sometimes factored into how much you are paid for that job... Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but that's how it works most of the time.

Large out-of-cycle compensation changes probably blow up their budget which gives management a big headache from a cash flow planning point of view. I suspect that's a reason not to like that.

This is especially true in some startups where there is generally minimal capital expenses and almost all cash is for payroll and factors straight to the burn rate. In most companies, the managers planning cash flow generally doesn't really know if people are being over-or-under paid and probably expects expenses for labor to be mostly predictable on longer budgeting timescales (just like employees expect their pay to be mostly predictable on longer timescales so they can budget for their expenses). Such companies are essentially living pay-check to pay-check and like many people aren't necessarily the most literate when it comes to financial matters (e.g., short term large variations in prevailing wages) until it hits them in the face.

Of course for a company like google that prints cash, it's probably just a few managers being embarrassed about their past compensation decisions, but at a personal level, I'm sure many managers are glad to pay equitably when people ask to keep the people any "good" people have these days (unless they have to "pay" for it by reducing their headcount numbers)...

That's a bit short sighted...
Esp given the current trend of paying new people in this competitive job market more than current employees for similar positions...
Although if you don't care about being underpaid, I guess it doesn't matter much...

No, cellular carriers are never innocent...
They are tracking your all the time through their towers all the time even if you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

You can turn your phone off to avoid this tracking, but you can also turn your phone off to avoid butt/pocket dialing.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Europe already has GMOs (58 varieties covering maize, cotton, soybean, oilseed rape, sugar beet). One of them in particular
MON810 corn, (from your favorite company) is planted in over 150,000 hectares since its approval in 1998 because of its resistance to the European corn borer.
AFAIK, most of the GMOs imported into the EU are feedstock from south american soybean crop (not the US).

FWIW, in California, every supermarket has this posted near the fresh produce section, but not associated with any particular product.

Proposition 65 WARNING: Products contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

This clearly conveys the real and important information to the consumer about the fresh produce for sale at every supermarket in California ;^)

Micron already has the problem of someone offering the same products for less than it costs to normally produce them. It's coming from a no-name competitor called Samsung. It's because Samsung is already on a more advanced production node than Micron (smaller chips, similar cost per wafer, hard to compete)...

The DRAM game is mostly about getting yields on advanced production nodes (e.g., 30nm vs 20nm) and financial games to fully depreciate/amortize the cost of constructing multi-billion dollar fabs. Currently on SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron are real players in this game (they have 90% of the market) and Micron is the smallest of the 3 (although to be fair, it's probably the only that could theoretically be purchased by a Chinese company).

If Tsinghua wanted to "attack" someone for memory technology, they would probably have better luck attacking Hynix as they already have a fab in Wuxi (china).

FWIW, here's more info about one of the main imaging cameras (LORRI).

Short story:1Kx1K** CCD sensor w/ 350 nm to 850 nm panchromatic sensor. To compensate for the low light levels, the primary mirror is 20.8cm in diameter, the field of view is only 0.29 and the integration times are pretty long (100-150ms or so).

AFAIK, the images they have posted so far are generally the CCD images only processed to remove CCD bias, read-out smearing, and fixed-pattern non-uniformity effects.

**The sensor also support a 2x2 pixel binning mode to reduce smear for really long exposure times or high sensitivity shots.

On the other hand, most contractors are allowed to subcontract. Say if you are a kitchen contractor on the upgrade and you can't get all your work done (because you took too long on your previous job), you can hire your buddy to help you start this new job. Uber doesn't generally allow you to sub-contract your piecework to your buddy (say your buddy that has a commercial licence and occasionally works for Lyft, so has essentially equivalent qualifications to you). This would fail one of the more common tests for being a contractor vs an employee.

In any case, the IRS has provided reasonably clear guidance in the area of limousine service. If the employing company is a pure dispatch company (e.g., it doesn't control how the drivers drive and the driver is not accountable to the company), then drivers can be considered contractors. If however, the employing company is a transport service (e.g., the company provides detailed instructions to its drivers
and monitors their daily performance and the driver doesn't maintain business like doing advertising or keeping logs), then the drivers must be considered employees.

You mean languages that you don't know aren't *greek* to you ;^)

Short story, some people just have bad tastes and marketing people should keep this in mind.

Summary. Results limited to repeat purchasing of consumer products. With total sales held constant, as the percentage of sales identified from these so-called harbinger-of-failure customers rises from 25% to 50%, the probability of success of that product decreases about 31%. If these customers have repeat purchase, the relative probability of success decrease even more (2 repeat purchases: success decrease 37%; 3 or more purchases: success decreases 56%).

Longer story? The paper describes their data set as follows:

The analysis defines a successful product as one that continues sales after 3 years (and a flop otherwise) based on aggregate sales. But they use data from loyalty card scans to identify groups of customers to test their hypothesis, and they limited their analysis to products that survived at least 1 year to avoid the "noise" associated with no chance to purchase products. FWIW, they do level some suspicion that the use/non-use of loyalty cards bias the data somewhat, however, the analysis was based on the following methodology...

Note they don't attempt to predict out-of-the-gate flop products (like the Zune), they merely note that it seems like some people's tastes for consumer items that are subject to repeat purchase are likely not indicative of ultimate retail success and for some reason this is unexpectedly correlated across different products. Their conclusion is that the preferences of these harbingers-of-failure customers for items are indicative of a negative preference in the greater population and that will likely limit the ultimate growth potential of a product, and stores shouldn't waste precious shelf space on such items favored by these people.

I'm all those folks collecting baseball cards, comic books and antique collectibles would have something to say about this attitude. Also, wasn't this similar to the rationale used to suppress labeling requirements for irradiated strawberries and GM foods (e.g., they were superior to their counterparts and otherwise nutritionally the same)?

Sometimes people just want what they want and feel deceived if they get something else (even if it is "superior" in some way).