As one who runs several businesses while investing in many others I can tell you that the "gambling mentality" can very much be applied to business as well

Many of the Silicon Valley upstarts do not even deserve one single penny of investments for their founders' strategy are so wrong, so narrow, and so stupid, but yet, they regularly got million-dollar injection because someone take a chance

You may think that many of the "angel investors" are seasoned investors, that whenever they "take a chance" they knew what they were doing. The reality however, is that many of those investments are based on nothing more than what TFA has pointed out, a "response to pleasure-triggering behavior"

Yes, I have had my own moments and I have invested my good money into rotten useless duds

I have read the comments and most of them are the typical of "capitalism is to be blamed" kind of argument

The one inherent inequality that truly exists in the system is INITIATIVE --- in which, persons who are more prone to take proactive actions are more prone to become successful and/or to have higher possibilities in surviving any given crisis

Those who argue that capitalism is the one thing that has caused the discrepancies of wealth distribution never care about the reality - that is, if one is lazy and never takes any initiative, how can that person become wealthy in the first place?

I have been in the tech scene for decades, and having have my "tech baptism" we always have that "community" feel to what we do

That was decades ago

Now, everything changed. Tech companies today are like warring fiefdoms. Instead of focus on innovation they wasted all their resources on making their competitors suffer

Take this SIRI/Nuance -- Apple/Samsung saga for example ---

Instead of innovate - Innovate - INNOVATE what we have here are "strategizing - scheming - blocking"

Instead of innovation the tech companies are more interested in dog fights, and the one thing that I need to know is this ---

Why are they doing all these?

Is it because they no longer have the urge to innovate?

Or is it because the corporate culture (the ROI mentality) that has taken over (in almost all the big tech companies that I know) and it is killing the tech field as we know it?

This is a very unhealthy trend, very very unhealthy, and if we let them corporate guys taking over our tech industry sooner or later we will be facing the sad cold reality that one day, somebody else, maybe India or China or Russia, will become much more technologically advance than the West

Please pay a visit to India or Russia or China, if you have the chance. Over there they still have a lot of people devoting their lives on innovation, because to them, it is the right thing to do

While there's no doubt that technology does play a part in the success of that school, MHO is that it is wrong to attribute all the success on technology alone

The fact is that school got so much attention from so many people, so much so that the inventor of the 3D printed limb, Richard van As was present at that school

Or, in other words, it was Hawthorne Effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... ) that has contributed to the dramatic improvement on the performances of the students of that school

While I do not know how you would define that "overly" in the "overly spiced" description of yours, real Thai food (and yes, I have been to Thailand many times on business trips) are certainly much more tasty than what you get from those "Thai Restaurants" on your main street in Europe or America

I have great doubt that the robot could do a decent job identifying a real tasty Thai food from a bad one

Sure, the bot can judge the level of spiciness / sourness / sweetness by measuring the level of glucose / acid / capsaicinoids, but that still doesn't mean it can ascertain how tasty the food is

Actually, BOTH !!