So basically it has value because people expect it to (just like currency)... It's just the expectation holds for a broader number of eventualities...

Or just a standard yeast infection...

As any baker will tell you, it often only takes a little bit of bad yeast to stop the good yeast...

Your updated numbers are okay, but your conclusion is crap.

Of course Caltech looks at race, but unlike Harvard, it's a more of a STEM pool that it's drawing from, so it looks like the STEM pool of applicants. In fact when I attended, often admissions reviewers (who were mostly white-male faculty) would openly lament the multitude of applications from the asian-with-glasses-plays-piano-or-violin stereotype.

FWIW, the big push over the last 20 years at Caltech was to increase the number of women attending (not different races), so it is totally unsurprising (to me) that the asian population went up since the time I attended because it probably just mirrors the female-STEM high school population in California.

As for graduating on time, well, it's a tough school, but statistics don't bear out your assertion that rich asians are under-represented in the didn't-graduate-in-4-years-or-at-all pool. When I attended there, one of my school newspaper reporters looked at the statistics for an in-depth admission report and there is very little correlation with anything in the didn't-graduate-in-4-years rate (other than parents being a California resident).

Most potentially negative educational outcomes often were somewhat correlated with being a California resident (even though being private school, there is no tuition break for a California resident), because not being a well-known national institution (but more even with Harvard internationally in the STEM area, but behind MIT) the student pool is somewhat self-selecting having more qualified folks be out-of-state and international students. Also most other things being equal, California residents matriculate at a higher rate (east coasters accepted to multiple schools matriculate at Caltech at a much lower rate), and more likely to transfer to a UC school before they graduate if they are having trouble (rather than stick-it-out).

Of course the fact that California-resident Techers are also more Asian than the out-of-state/international pool, creates some Asian correlation in every statistic. However, with an entering class size of only about 200-250 people, the statistical significance of any trend is probably dubious as well. According to federal statistics, in 2006, 100% of underrepresented minorities graduated, but this fell to 80% in 2007, I think that was a result of 1 person less.

Although 80% average graduation rate means 40 folks don't graduate on-time, but in my class, I know of 10 folks that actually flamed out after 1 year. Also, if you look at the statistics of the student residence houses, the highest graduation rates are Lloyd and Fleming house and the lowest graduation rates are Dabney and Avery. Knowing the typical populations of these houses, I would say that a generalization that somehow accepting more Asians would help bring up the graduation rate is somewhat dubious (Avery and Lloyd house might be a poster-child for asian high-achievers, Fleming is much more representative of the population at large, and Dabney probably isn't representative of any population that is tracked by admission statistics). If manipulating statistics was the goal, Caltech should be simply accepting fewer Californians (which it's been trying to do for quite a while)...

FTFY. Not being able to make payroll applies to public and non-public companies. Tesla became a public company in 2010 and Elon was discussing these pre-IPO events that occurred in 2008 before they were publicly trade-able.

Insolvent just means the company doesn't have access to enough free/unimpaired assets to operate legally, not that a company doesn't have enough assets (e.g., receivables, contracts, intellectual property, or business goodwill which are not liquid). If a company is bordering on insolvency, many companies choose massive equity dilution and/or a fire-sale of assets to recapitalize the company just to stay alive.

Of course *exchange listed* companies must be solvent or they become delisted, but generally not immediately the day it misses a payroll but after it declares bankruptcy. However, you can certainly trade ownership in unlisted and/or insolvent companies and they can also continue to operate in quasi-legal form. If they continue to operate they will build up lots of liability (including payroll liability) to the principals and directors during the time they operate and these liabilities may or may-not be shield-able during bankruptcy, so in this situation, generally the principals immediately file for bankruptcy protection and/or lay-off all employees to protect themselves.

However, in practice, even though not-paying employees is illegal, in most jurisdictions (like California) when you get a wage-judgement, there isn't such a thing as a wage-lien, so you generally need to sue to get your wages or wait for the bankruptcy settlement. Odds are pretty bad in both cases of ever seeing a dime if the principals of the company don't happen to have a pile of cash stashed in bank accounts (although having a principal like Elon might be an exception to these odds).

Why yes, I have sadly had direct experience with this :^(

In case you have forgotten, someone executed a similar plan at least once before resulting in one of the highest rated season premiere on the comedy central network...

Will they try it? Probably not, but it's not unheard of...

Qi (the current spec) basically induction coil based and limited to about 5 watts. It is AC in nature and thus in a car requires DC->AC (and the associated losses) from the electrical system, then AC->DC rectification (and associated losses) on the device being charged.

AFAIKT, the open dots alliance is a dc charging system (with a diode rectifier bridge to handle the polarity swap) capable of up to 160 watts. Presumably there would be less loss leaving things DC and fewer components required on the device being charged and in the case of a car electrical system fewer components on the charger.

If I had to speculate (and /. is the place to do so), I would guess that it was likely that at least one of the Engineers...

* Recruited another employee in violation of a no-solicitation agreement.
* Had a "choice-of-law" provision attached to their employment agreement (and were originally employed outside of California)
* Had some ownership stake in the A123 which had some restrictions which Apple volunteered to buy-out. (which would be stupid for apple to do, but you never know).

As I understand it, Apple was in process of petitioning for a change of venue (to California). Although California law is clear that no-compete employment agreements cannot be enforced, it less clear when no-competes agreements are entangled with ownership changes or in the case of no-solicitation so as to avoid any distraction to their new employees, they probably just decided to settle (for the right price)...

I don't know if simply following the crowd is a form of cowardice, more often an expression of human make as social beings.

You may argue that humans are at the top of the food chain, but more often than not, it takes a village to assure long term survival and being social beings is one behavior designed to gain acceptance in a village.

On the other hand, we tend to detest what is too similar to ourselves, so in a sense humans are like skyrmion (bosons that sometimes exhibit fermion exclusion statistics). At least that's one way to look at it if you extrapolate things from the behavior of sub-atomic particles ;^)

The Ticking Time Bomb of Car Fob Security is already upon us and I suspect that this will explode long before the IoT bomb even has a chance to finish winding up...

Perhaps they wish it would have been still called by its original name: GRID
(I'm guessing that both identifiers would comply with this new WHO guideline, but one is certainly more politically correct than the other)

Well, since the country is actually officially the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I guess your suggestion isn't as offensive as it could have been ;^)

Hmm, Socrates didn't actually write/say this (apparently someone else wrote this as part of their thesis in the 1900's and it's been misattributed many times since then) as there are no actual surviving works of Socrates (most of our information about Socrates comes from Plato, one of his disciples).

It is also seems highly unlikely he would say something anything like this except as part of the losing part of a Socratic argument exploration. As I recall he was essentially tried on charges like corrupting the youth and blasphemy and generally being a devil's advocate and disavowing being a teacher which would seem to put his politics on the other side of this quote...

FTFY

Unless of course you engage in vodka eyeballing for protection ;^)