Microsoft does "me too". Apple did well with the ipod, Microsoft called up China and ordered a cheap copy. Nintendo and the other companies had good game consoles, Microsoft stuck their name on one, apparently without having much of a clue about the market they were entering. They then lose a billion dollars or so on each, stubbornly refusing to admit failure.

Google checks out the market, then releases something that's best-in-class, or often fairly unique, being the first major offering of it's type. They spend a ten or twenty million trying it out. If it only breaks even, they move on to the next idea. They don't keep at a losing strategy, losing a billion dollars on something. Instead, they move on to the next idea until they find which one will make them a billion dollars.

At the end of the day, that's the difference- Microsoft's big initiatives that they really push for years lose a billion dollars, Google's big projects that they really push make a billion dollars.

* Google tried "me too" once, with Google+. Fortunately for them, they can well afford one big error because they are winning big in a dozen other areas.

It's more convenient to plug in a dongle and be done than to plug in a dongle, connect a smartphone, and then hope your application works with the Chromecast. A real hdmi connection will outperform the Chromecast screencasting by a couple orders of magnitude. Since it's Chromebook-like hardware, it'll run Ubuntu or other Linux - the same OS running on everything from desktops and radios to super computers. Programs can be written in any language. It has full remote management capability (ssh etc.) so you can set it up and everything from your desktop, using the same methods you use to manage servers over a network, unlike a smartphone.

I have one use-case right away. We want to hang a monitor or TV on the wall as a kind of digital bulletin board that has constant updates. This device would be perfect. We COULD use a smartphone and a dongle, but just a dongle (no smartphone needed) makes it simpler, and running Linux on the dongle means it's more powerful and flexible- I can program it in Perl, C, Ruby, or PHP rather than being forced to write an Android app in Java.

Link

I have an engineering degree and the college I went to had a general philosophy of trying to make "well rounded" engineers by forcing us to take various liberal arts courses. I don't have an issue with the general idea but I can tell you from first hand experience that colleges that try this almost invariably fail miserably at it. Mine certainly did. I got a great engineering education but humanities? Not so much.

I can assure you that the random smattering of non-STEM courses I took as college grad did not meaningfully expand my mind. I'm kind of a naturally curious person and I learned far more about humanities outside of classes than I ever did in a formal classroom. Forcing engineers to take a few randomly-chosen-whatever-fits-my-schedule courses really doesn't accomplish much. The problem isn't with the concept of learning about disparate subjects, the problem is with the execution of that plan. Learning about engineering by necessity takes up a HUGE amount of the credit hour budget for a degree. There simply isn't a lot of left over curriculum space for a meaningful humanities education to fit in. I do not really see how a school could deliver both a quality engineering AND humanities education in the same four years.

Clearly I don't understand capitalism.

Clearly. Geoblocking is at least partially about market segmentation. The EU is so large that it has extremely major disparities in wealth between its member nations. Consider the difference between Sweden and Romania. If you have a movie and charge a single price to stream it across the entire EU then:

a) Some people will find it incredibly cheap and others will find it still too expensive, just pushing them back towards piracy.

b) You end up having to deal with the tax systems of every single EU country anyway due to the retarded VAT changes they introduced this year, so it doesn't help simplify your business at all, and you theoretically aren't allowed to opt out of serving particular regions due to their horrible paperwork requirements, so being able to geoblock unprofitably complicated regions whilst claiming you have some other reason is quite attractive.

Cetaceans Able To Focus Sound For Echolocation

Well crustacians are able to focus sound for murder . Beat that, cetaceans!

Nonsense rationalization.
Part of what makes a sport a sport is the consistency of competition.
Do you see Germany playing with different-sized soccer goals than Brazil? Do you see Finnish hockey played with golf clubs? To use your example, do you change the number of pins based on the bowler?

Of course not. The idea would be absurd.

To then put the rules and standards at the whim of the populace is crass and ridiculous, tantamount to making a motor-race more like a racing version America's Got Talent where 'viewer votes' materially affect the outcome.

Let's say Danica Patrick joins the ePrix. She promises to drive topless if she wins the vote, and does, beating the next-best driver by 0.05 seconds. Did she win because she was a better driver, then? Or because she had tits and was willing to show them? Maybe Kim Kardashian could join the next race and really make it competitive?

I don't know about you, but I'm frankly uninterested in any 'sporting' contest in which the victor is decided by who prompts more slavering fans to call in. That's no longer a "sport" but merely "celebrity".

You mean like browsers and Javascript? In that case 99% of the population has lost already. The pwn2own competition results are rather miserable.

I don't think it's so bad. The pwn2own competition is notable primarily for the ridiculous levels of skill required to actually beat modern browser security (note: I do not include the still unsandboxed Firefox in this category).

What's been happening in recent years is that more and more bugs are being found by whitehat hackers first, with the complexity and difficulty of beating them going up radically over time. It used to be that random hackers in their bedrooms could put together browser exploit kits. Nowadays the people being whacked by clicking on "bad links" are mostly people who aren't keeping their software up to date properly or using decent browsers. Remember SQL Slammer and Code Red? It used to be that teenagers could find RCE vulns in Windows. Now it's much harder.

This trend is reflected in the rapidly escalating cost of buying exploits on the black market. There didn't even used to be a market for exploits.

Also look at the escalating difficulty of jailbreaking iPhones and Xboxes. The defenders learn from each successful attack and each time they fall, they get back up stronger than before. And that's despite the fact that there's hardly any money in writing secure software. Many customers will be happy if you simply patch holes that are reported to you, with few people choosing which product to use on the basis of a good security track record.

So it seems like things are getting better and the game is rapidly moving beyond many attackers abilities, the age of the script kiddie is largely coming to an end when it comes to attacking user endpoints. Instead a new game is starting, one where professional teams of government sponsored hackers fight against professional teams of private-sector sponsored defenders. We can claim this isn't progress of a sort, but without the previous hardening efforts, the industry would be tackling both types of attackers at once ...

Wow, this is great to hear - I'd never heard of you guys before. :)

And looking at your site, I like what you're doing even more - direct 3d printed aerospikes? Pretty darn cool. What sort of 3d printing tech are you using? Have you looked into the new hybrid laser spraying / CNC system that's out there (I forget the manufacturer)? The use of high velocity dust as source material gives you almost limitless material flexibility and improved physical properties that you can't get out of plain laser sintering, and the combination with CNC yields fast total part turnaround times.

And you're working on turbopump alternatives? Geez, you're playing with all of my favorite things here.... ;)

What sort of launch are you all looking at - is this ground launched (and if so, do you have a near-equatorial site) or air launched? I'd love to see more details about your rockets, what sort of ISP figures you're getting so far, how you're manufacturing your tanks, and on and on. But I guess I'll have to wait just like everyone else ;)

I wish you lots of success! And even if you don't make it, at the very least you'll have added a ton of practical research to the world :)

Note that it's technically possible to have something like this with a slow reactor; you could for example use steam as a moderator, which will transmit a reasonable proportion of near infrared through it (the hotter you can run your fuel particles, the better transmission you'll get). But not only will you lose some light, but just the simple act of neutron moderation is a very heat-intensive process, meaning big radiators if you want big power (not to mention that the moderator itself for such a slow reactor is also far heavier than the core). The whole point of my variant is to avoid the moderator and avoid the ship having to ever capture anything but incident heat lost due to generation, transmission, reflection, etc losses.

One possibility for a slow reactor, albeit only directly applicable to the rocket mode above, is to have your propellant be your moderator, absorbing both IR and moderating fast neutrons. The fact that it's heating then becomes irrelevant (actually an advantage), since you're dumping it out the nozzle for thrust. If one wanted mission flexibility in such a scenario you could have such a moderator-ejecting rocket mode used to get to orbit, and then switch to retaining the moderator once in orbit and cooling it instead in order to make use of the fission fragment operating mode.

But a fast reactor would obviously be highly preferable so you don't have to worry about a moderator at all. :) I'm just pointing the above out because slow reactor versions have already been simulated.

Wait a minute, no, I entered it right into the calculator the first time around. Argh, this interface is confusing. Radiative equilibrium for Tunsten at its melting point 3300C according to the calculator is 92MW/m. A "cool" 1200C radiative temperature according to the calculator 2,6MW/m. According to the calculator, 10kW/m is about 380C.

I didn't choose the word fuel by accident. You will note I did not say gasoline or diesel. Fuel can come in the form of stored electrons. You can tax electricity just as easily as gasoline. You can also adjust the tax rate to adjust for improving fuel economy.

The cornerstone of it is the dusty fission fragment rocket, so I'd start there. Another key aspect is the use of a accelerator-driven subcritical fast reactor rather than a critical slow reactor. Lastly it's a variant of a nuclear lightbulb, albeit (as mentioned) without the primary drawbacks of them (containment and radiation blackening of the chamber blocking the light). This latter aspect is due to the spectrum changes of fused silica (I can't find a paper on short notice that shows the IR spectrum, but you can see that for most types of fused silica / fused quartz, there's little loss of transmission on the red side of the spectrum; this holds true but is even more pronounced in the IR range).

Any crime perpetrated by someone held responsible for the victim or subject by reasonable judgement shall be tried and sentenced as escalated one step more severe than the normal context of the crime, according to the following list:
infraction -> misdemeanor -> gross misdemeanor -> felony -> capital crime.

Therefore, while "beating someone up" might be a gross misdemeanor assault in the eyes of the law, when performed by a custodial parent on their child, or a nursing attendant on one of their wards, it would be considered a felony.
Petty theft of $100 might be a misdemeanor, but when it's done by someone in custody of the cash drawer, it's a gross misdemeanor.
By this standard, however, sitting members of Congress and the President could be considered to be "responsible" for the entire country, and thus automatically always escalated.

Even discounting the spoofing possibilities your proposal would mean that anyone who uses baidu from outside china will find themselves cut off from github. I expect that isn't what github wants.