Is there something hugely profitable that I've missed about running a company into the ground? It seems to be all the rage lately, been seeing it at HP, at IBM, at Sun, couple smaller companies I've worked at in the past. Some jackhole will come in, talk a big game, cut tiny little perks that used to be given to employees to the bone, spend a couple billion dollars on some idiotic shit like another company or a shiny new headquarters that's later discovered to be riddled with asbestos and sitting on top of a colony of leprosy-ridden armadillos and then jettisons with a $50 million golden parachute while the company burns. This has happened far too many times recently to be coincidence!

A good way to tell if your company has been thus afflicted is to look at the quality of the coffee now compared to the quality a couple years ago. At one such company that I worked at a few years ago, I one day remarked to my test minion that the coffee at the company was so good that you hardly even minded the urine. After the VC's took over and replaced it with, I want to say, "Peet's Coffee", the coffee there was so bad that the urine was an improvement!

It appears to me as blue and black. Definitively. First viewed as a whole image, full screen on a tall portrait IPS and then checked on a second landscape IPS (these two screens long ago adjusted to show matched colours).

Both the black and blue appear to me somewhat blown out. Actually, the mottled black almost appears as a mutant non-colour unlike anything one sees in real life (the colour balance algorithm of a digital camera subtracting blue from the black is a perfect explanation for this).

If I scroll so that I can only see the top of the dress (down to just past the horizontal black band across her upper back) I can almost conceive of how some people see this dress as white and gold. What I actually perceive is an ambiguous image under false, untrustworthy light.

In my bedroom I have several unusual light sources which I regularly use. In addition to an incandescent lamp, there an extremely yellow bug lamp and a bright and narrow-spectrum blue LED light intended to shift circadian rhythm.

I love the yellow bug lamp because it's initially so dim I can turn it on briefly while my wife sleeps to find my socks, plus I often use it for reading late in my day so as not to expose myself to blue light. I also had red and green light sources for a while, before I discovered yellow bug-light perfection (the red and green bulbs were 40 W coloured-glass bulbs that constantly smelled bad because they instantly baked any stray dust—a failed experiment).

I have pretty good sense in my bedroom of which colours are more or less trustworthy under vastly different lighting conditions. Even under my narrow-spectrum blue light (in an otherwise dark bedroom) I can't make anything white look like this photograph. In my bedroom under a pure blue illumination (75% between 450 and 480 nm, centered at 464 nm; with 490 nm attenuated by 10 dB compared to the spectral peak) the highlights on my white sheets where the light is strongest are more saturated, and the dimmer regions are less saturated, opposite my impression of this photograph.

Perhaps people who spend a lot of time watching TV in dark rooms where people are wearing white clothing are conditioned differently.

EULA

Well, I don't know what they're planning, but ISTM that if they divide the storage area they can greatly extend the time at which they're generating energy in exchange for nearly halving the peak generation capability...and without much pumping (which adds an additional inefficiency or three).

OTOH, the amount of energy that can be generated by water stored at a particular height depends on the fall distance. So the potential generation capability will vary a lot as the tide changes. Maybe some of the inflow could be used to drive a hydralic ram to lift some of the water higher than max high tide level. But that *does* introduce additional inefficiencies.

All in all, I don't know, but it looks pretty iffy.

You don't need a huge tide, that just makes it more efficient, and cheaper to build, and requiring less land and construction. So perhaps it's only feasible in a few places, but any country with a coast on the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Indian Oceans should be able to make it work with enough effort and expense. Most of them just wouldnt' find it practical.

Tidal power would seem to have a lot going for it, but there's probably a good reason that it hasn't taken off before now. Of course, that reason may have been solved...

For that matter, cost overruns are also likely on large nuclear plant projects. (Every one I've heard about has had a significant cost overrun, of course there's a huge selection bias...)

Ah...Little Bobby Tables.

In an actual zombie apocalypse I think my list of threats would be:

1. Opportunistic bastards (thugs, gangs)
2. Desperate bastards (hungry, cold, afraid)
3. Devious bastards (poisoned, stabbed in sleep)
4. Survival skills (and fighting for the good spots)
5. Zombies

The problem with new Trek isn't JJ Abrams. It's us. The future painted by Star Trek in the 1960's isn't quite so distant any more. It's actually a little quaint. The "ethnic crewmen" are no longer awkward stereotypes. They are real people viewed much more as equals and just plain mundane.

The Scottish engineer is actually a real geeky Scot.
The Asian is more than a smiling cheerful guy.
The Russian is actually from Leningrad and actually sounds like someone who could be Spock's protoge.
The black girl comes off as more than just a switchboard operator.

Most of the tech of the old show seems dated so they find the need to make it all look even snazzier.

We are past most of the little details and the big details are taken for granted.

The future arrived. The bar is higher now. The remarkable has become the mundane.

Not really, the X3s are all made with third party GPU and modem functionality at TSMC. It's a bought design where they add a CPU and a brand to pretend they're competing in a market they're really not. The X5/X7s are Intel's homegrown solution with their own graphics and LTE modem and aimed only at the premium segment. You will not get Intel tech for cheap.

Why would that help them? Not being cruel but being open source and ARM a recompile away was supposed to be their big boon and with so much running on Android that's likely the primary source of ports. If they can't make it as a first party OS then they'll never go anywhere in the mobile world that's full of custom, poorly supported, one generation hardware, I don't see any compelling reason why you'd buy a Linux/x86 tablet if Linux/ARM tablets don't sell. And the aftermarket install market is probably just as tiny on the x86 side as on the rootable ARM side.

nope. They can block IR thermal cameras, but 99.987641% of all security cameras are not the multi thousand dollar FLIR type camera.

a $1.00 pair of mirrored lense sunglasses will also do this. Sorry AVG, your best and brightest are way behind the curve.

If you want to make their version, buy retroreflective tape and apply to your face or a set of cheap sunglasses.

Yes! We are now calling it a "stream!" The "stream" will have the ability to be more in-your-face! It will be the NUMBER ONE choice for social blaggers within a couple of years! Everyone is going to want Google+'s stream in their face! NUMBER ONE!

Yep, That is why anyone that is not aggressively paying off all the debt they have right now is a complete and utter fool.
I have friends that are buying new cars, etc... They are morons, raging morons... "but it's 1.2% ITS FREE MONEY!" they forget the loan origination fees they pay or are tacked on the loan... Oh that $35,000 car loan has a $1900 set of "fees" on it.... But we dont count that as part of the interest rate...

If you are having a time of prosperity, PAY DOWN ALL YOUR FUCKING DEBT! Because the next crash will come around sooner than you think because the banks are doing the same shit again.

Banks need heavy regulation put back on them. I also suggest we have a Bank police that goes around tazing executives at random if we even think they are thinking of anything "clever"