Helium is a non-renewable resource, even more so than liquid hydrocarbon fuels. At least with jet fuel you could synthesize it if you really wanted to and had a large enough energy input, but the only way to synthesize helium is to fuse hydrogen in large quantities and if we knew how to do that in a controllable fashion we probably wouldn't need to mess around with dirigibles. Once you extract helium from the ground it eventually ends up in the atmosphere and then escapes to space, so once it's gone it's gone for good.

I love how the U.S. military keeps inventing weapon systems that are far more effectively used against us than against the sorts of enemies we face these days. Sure, we get a few year's worth of lead time where we're the only one in possession of the new toys but once it's been invented, it's just a matter of time until everyone has it. Tell, me, who has more to lose from the wide availability of this sort of missile system? The people with the heaviest reliance on computers, of course. Same goes for Stuxnet, of course, except that was even worse because that weapon system delivers its own blueprint. Thanks, guys.

I worked at Microsoft for 18 years (up to 2011) and had a good mix of both IC and manager time.

The first thing you're missing is that the review system has been tweaked a few times since you left and it's worse now than it's ever been. Now the numeric system is 1 to 5 (1 is high, 5 is low), integers only, and all five numbers are used and have quotas. As of last year when I left, the very bottom review rating of 5 (equivalent in meaning to the 2.5 in the system you're familiar with) now has an enforced 10% quota. Yes, every year 10% of the work force gets a review score that devestates their career and puts them in serious danger of being fired. No, it doesn't matter how well those 10% did in absolute terms.

Secondly, I hear often hear people say, "But the curve isn't applied at the small team level; only at the large org level." That's only a semantic distinction. Sure, a front-line manager with 10 ICs isn't required to pick one person to recieve a 5. But he is required to stack rank all 10 people and send that up the chain with his recommended ratings, and those recommendations get normalized and tweaked to fit the curve at higher levels and sent back down again. So the manager might say, "My team did a kick-ass job this year, everyone did well, so I recommend that even my bottom person get nothing less than a 3." But when it goes up the chain, gets squeezed into the model, and comes back down, that bottom person may well now have a 5 and there's nothing the manager can do about it. The only thing he can do is go to that person and tell him, "Better pack your bags because you're screwed with a capital F." The entire system is random and non-deterministic.

Third, I agree that performance reviews are hard and anything we have to choose from sucks in some way (at least those systems that can scale to large companies). But Microsoft's system generates a certain set of unintended consequences that are horrifically corrosive and have rotted the company from the inside out. The most obvious unintended consequence is what you said - it's not enough to just do good work, you have to be seen doing it. It turns out that the smart thing to do is weight your efforts more toward the "be seen" part and less toward the "do work" part, to the extent that many people spend essentially all of their time "being seen" and almost none of their time doing actual product work. Over time those people tend to be rewarded disproportionately and the entire management chain ends up filled with people who's core strength is managing other's perceptions rather than doing great engineering. There are many other unintended consequences and I could fill a book talking about all of them, but suffice to say that it's slowly but surely killing the company.

Um, ok then . . . carry on with your DDoS, I guess. Cause, yeah, that'll show 'em.

No, that was a congratulatory comment. I complete agree with what you said.

Well, let's see. We just got done with a well-constructed, well-reasoned, well-executed protest against SOPA and PIPA, and we killed those bills dead as a *direct result*. When was the last time a DDoS did *anything* other than harden the resolve of the party being attacked? How do they think the MPAA et al will react? "Oh my goodness, some script kiddies are DDoSing our web site. Quick, release the MegaUpload people from jail and turn their servers back on! It's our only hope!"

My kingdom for a mod point. Great post!

Putting those FTL neutrinos to work, eh? Good job on the time-to-market, guys!

In that case our legal system will simply have to move away from the idea that prison is a punishment for wrongdoing to the idea that prison is a holding place for defectives. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if you *chose* to murder that person, or if your brain chemistry led you inexorably to murder that person and there was nothing you could do about it. The fact is that we don't want to let people with a propensity for murdering people run around loose in society, so either way you need to be removed from society.

In fact, in the absence of the idea of free will, it makes a lot of sense to not have graduated prison sentences (punishment fitting the crime) at all and just go to a system of one-strike-and-you're-put-away-for-life. If you're demonstrably defective and your brain chemistry can't allow you to behave in a socially acceptable way, then you need to be locked up. And if you're defective then there's really no sense in ever letting you out again, is there? It's not like a a prison sentence is going to teach you not to mis-behave; your initial defense was that you had no choice about your actions in the first place.

Of course, what we're actually *likely* to get in real life is the worst parts of both philosophies - the idea that only people who made free-will choices to be evil can be punished/penalized/incarcerated, but no one is capable of free-will choices (we're all at the mercy of our chemical makeup), therefore no action is ever taken to deter or prevent anti-social behavior.

Spoken like someone who doesn't live downwind of a coal-fired power plant.

I'll tell you how much clean air I've got: roughly 142 billion cubic miles of atmosphere on our planet, depending on your definition of "clean" and assuming you're willing to push the definition of "atmosphere" all the way up to 620 miles. You put the current value of the entirety of Earth's atmosphere at $1.4 billion dollars? And you figure your children will value the entire atmosphere at $1.4 million dollars?

Of course talking about the atmosphere in terms of volume is a little strange because the density varies so much. Say we want to talk about *useful* atmosphere up to about 50,000 feet or so (I'm feeling generous). In that case I've got about 1 billion cubic miles to sell you, which you value at $10 million dollars right now or at $10 thousand dollars (!) in the future.

Yeah, that's the thing about stuff like "clean air": it seems like it's infinite and free . . . until it's not and it's gone. Then it costs a hell of a lot more fix it than it would have to save it in the first place.

I agree that things like subsidies aren't straightforward, and no, I'm not excited about wealth transfers either. But our fossil-fuel energy sources have *huge* problems with externalized costs that aren't being paid by the people consuming the energy, and that's a problem that needs to be addressed in one way or another.

Yes, air quality is generally better now than it was 50 years ago (in first-world countries, anyway), but that didn't happen magically or accidentally. That happened almost entirely due to the sort of government regulations and policies that conservatives and libertarians deride (not to make assumptions about your political leanings). It sure as hell didn't happen out of the goodness of any corporation's heart - pollution is an external cost, remember?

This isn't diamond in any sense that we usualy think of it. Yes, it's carbon atoms, and yes, they're "crystallized", but the core of a white dwarf is composed mostly of electron-degnerate matter where all of the electrons have been disassociated from their parent atoms and all the nuclei clump together, floating in a sea of electrons. This stuff has a density of roughly 1000 kilograms (2,200 lbs) per cubic centimeter. I imagine it would *catastrophically* decompress if you could teleport a chunk of it back to earth. It's not diamond.

Except that if you're skeptical of the government on this one, then a picture of a corpse won't help your skepticism one little bit, or at least it shouldn't. Thanks to Photoshop, the days of photos being reliable evidence are long gone. Really, anyone who seriously suspects that the government just made up the whole story to look good will be satisfied by nothing less than the opportunity to do their own DNA tests on the body, which according to the government isn't possible.

Ultimately, the proof will be if OBL shows up alive and well in the future or not. If he's not dead, I'm sure he'll be more than willing to announce the fact. If he doesn't pull a Mark Twain then he's obviously indisposed somewhere and in that case Occam's Razor kind of leads us to believe that it went down more or less the way the government says it did, rather than looking for crazy conspiracy theories.

I think you didn't read the article carefully enough. The point is that that the developer surrenders essentially all control over their own pricing when they put something in the Amazon store. Amazon can just unilaterally tell you, "Oh, by the way, we're giving away your app this month. Don't like it? Tough." Now, yes, Amazon still has to give you a little bit of money in that case, but the definition of "a little bit" is pretty darn small: 20% of the list price, where the list price *must* be the lowest price you've ever sold your content at, ever, anywhere.

The point isn't that Amazon might engage in volume-based pricing strategies. Yes, times are changing and old retailing strategies don't always work. The point is that when you put your app in the Amazon store you surrender any ability to make your own decisions about your pricing strategy. Instead you hand your pricing strategy to another party who has very different goals than you do and will likely choose a pricing strategy that will optimize for their goals, not for your goals. If you're ok with that, then fine. But be aware of what's going to happen.

The point isn't that Amazon will be battling competitors for marketshare. The point is that the terms of the Amazon store allow them to price *a developer's content* in a way that helps Amazon capture marketshare while simultaneously screwing the developer's revenue. The developer has to surrender any control over their own pricing. You just trust that Amazon will price your content in a way that ends up benefiting you, but the IGDA is pointing out that Amazon has little incentive to manipulate prices in a manner beneficial to the developer and every incentive to manipulate prices in a manner beneficial to Amazon, and the two aren't at all the same thing. Read the article.

See, this is where Google goes off the rails and starts to believe its own press. Cutts said, in effect, "Our search engine tells us that our search engine is doing just fine." Yeah, well, ultimately Google's search engine isn't the center of the universe and the ultimate authority on everything. The users are. If the users say that the quality of search results are going down, then they're going down. Period. Google better figure out how to change their evaluation metrics to reflect what users are seeing rather than attempt to change user's opinions to match what their evaluation metrics say.