Hey, Yahoo, remember that other photo-sharing site you already fucking own?

Please, do, tell me what 1.1 billion dollars worth of tumblr brings to the table that a mild reskin(to put the pictures with captions in columns, rather than in 'galleries') of flickr could have ready to demo inside a week and roll out in short order?

Good managers are very rare.

So we're told. Yet, the distribution of good and bad managers is almost exactly the same as good and bad line workers.

most of them are worth the money because they can generate share holder wealth.

Share value increases most when jobs are cut. Any idiot can cut salaries and jobs to get a quarterly bump in share price. The success of US corporations has more to do with corporate consolidation increasing pricing power than it does brilliant management.

We have a system where management success means the failure of everyone else who works for the company. Instead of an economy that is based on widespread prosperity, we have one based on prosperity for a very small group who succeed in a system whose rules they set, and misery for everyone else.

We actually have some historical experience with these situations, and it never, ever ends well for elite.

Anyway, more on topic, I hear there is a shortage of talent in the Bay Area. Although...since there are only so many LGBT software engineers who are good, software engineers who are good but who don't understand cost-of-living, single and straight software engineers that are good but don't understand that California girls are trained from birth to be cocaine-snorting psychotic leeches who will rob you blind (true story), etc.

Sounds like someone can't get a date.

You're still going to have to transfer all that power from the charger to the device, which is still going to require a lot of amps and a very thick cable. Even if you use 48VDC between the charger and the device, the cable between the charger and the device is going to have to be rated for something like 160 amps (in other words, your charging cable will be a pair of cables that are about the size of a typical cable from a car battery to the starter. Big, thick, heavy and stiff).

Maybe.

Fast charging + wireless charging + ubiquitous charging stations might make it very practical. For my lifestyle a two-hour battery life with 20-second recharges from just putting my phone on a certain region of my desk, nightstand, car console, etc. would work just fine.

As I recall, the paper from Google said something slightly different. It said they found no increase in failure rate. As a result, Google data centers do run warm: 80F. The employees in data centers wear shorts and t-shirts all the time.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/#temperature

The other option sucks more

Yeah, I agree, despite my grandmother's experience in her hundred years on Earth. She outlived two husbands and three of her four children, lived in arthritic pain, and spent her last five years weak and frail in a nursing home. I'd personally rather be dead than in a nursing home, but unless I'm living in hell I'd prefer to be alive.

I see you're still playing cowboys and indians

I almost always vote against both of them if I have an alternative, although I've voted for candidates from both and yeah, sometimes they seem identical. Bush and Blago were identical, Bush was the worst President I've seen in my life (I thought I'd never see one worse than Carter) and Blago was the worst Governor I've seen. Both sucked because they appointed incompetent cronies to key positions. Bush almost ruined the country and Blago did the same thing to Illinois.

My problem with the Republican party is their stance on taxes and social programs. Federal taxes are lower than than any time since Eisenhower and they're too high? Really? Their idiotic and disingenuous notion that cutting taxes on the rich helps the economy pisses me off; they have to know that history shows that's pure bullshit.

The Koches are bullying punks, but patsy? Who's he a patsy for? Everything they do is in their own greedy self interest. The working class tea partiers are the Koch's patsies.

One copyright, patents, drug laws, and a few other topics important to me I'm 100% against both parties.

As to Obama, he hasn't yet started any wars, and when he took office the economy was worse than at any time since the Great Depression, and the economy isn't great but it has improved greatly. He's certainly not a great President, though. I was especially annoyed with health care reform, that was just a gift to the insurance companies. We need a system like sane countries, all of whom have cheaper care but beats ours in every metric. I've known people who have died from lack of health care.

If you haven't read Nobots, wait for the book. The ebook version will be free.

What a lot of these articles forget is the current requirements to charge something fast. Just because something can be charged fast doesn't mean you can do it.

Let's take a typical laptop battery of 70 watt hours. To charge it in one hour, you need a 70W power supply (more or less). Now let's charge that same battery - if we can - in 30 seconds, or 120th of the time. You'll need an 8.4kW charger to do that, which is going to be much larger and heavier than the laptop. In Britain where the mains electricity is 240 volts, you're going to need 35 amps to do that (typical household circuit is 13 amps, high power circuits for example ovens and tumble dryers are 30A). In the United States you'll need 70 amps.

OK, so you can charge slower (but still much faster than a conventional battery) but it's still going to require a large (heavy) power supply for your laptop if you want to make the charging speed significantly faster than current lithium ion batteries. You're either going to wind up lugging around a lot of extra weight with your portable machine, or you're going to need two chargers (more expense). The thing is, the times when you really wish you can charge a battery quickly are always times you're travelling and so won't have the large heavy charger with you!

Is there a link to some article not in the mainstream media? The article has no details at all. Did she use an off-the-shelf super capacitor? What circuits did she make (one characteristic of a capacitor is the voltage immediately goes down as soon as you take charge from it, unlike a Li-Ion battery which maintains a more or less constant voltage through most of its charge), and how efficient is the voltage regulation? What about the energy density of the device? All supercaps I know of have a very small fraction of the energy density of a lithium ion battery. To replace a Li-Ion you need similar energy density or you get a massive phone.

You think I'm joking - there has been a baffling increase in the amount of "Russia had it better" posts around here lately.

I bet you could link to some of those posts to add impact to your statement, if you wanted to.

Given that(among the ants that don't have even cooler mechanisms, like specialized suicide soldiers who blow themselves up to shower the enemy with toxins) "swarm the enemy and keep biting and stinging without regards for casualties until nothing that isn't us is still moving" is considered a valid strategy, the chemical signalling actually makes sense: If an ant from another colony, or a predatory insect/arachnid, attacks a single ant, the ant's body automatically releases the alarm pheremone and the attacker gets zerg rushed.

It's just that, against implacable electronics that are totally indifferent to anything except being insulated by the uncounted bodies of the slain, this tactic doesn't work very well(see also: mammals that 'freeze' to avoid predators; but discover that cars aren't visual hunters; but they do kill anything that gets in their way)...

I suspect that it depends on whether sensitivity to electrical fields is useful in other contexts, or(if not directly useful) at least tightly-coupled to some other sensory mechanism that is survival-critical and will take quite some time to iterate toward an electrically insensitive replacement.

Mass death upon the power lines is obvious folly; but electrification is, what, a century old(in any ecologically-relevant amount, I know about various independent developers of primitive chemical batteries going back a great deal further; but that sort of scale barely matters), the blink of an eye in evolutionary time.

If this electrical sense isn't all that useful elsewhere, or is just some accident that didn't previously cause trouble, it could actually be culled from much of the population fairly quickly. If it has some other use, or is connected to genes that code for multiple things, some of them extremely useful, they might take ages, if ever, to stop doing this.

By mass, beasts have always reigned over the earth... A mixture of applied landscaping, chemical warfare, and rifles have allowed humans to carve out an enclave free of large mammals we don't approve of, and some of the nastier bugs and microbes(wealthy areas of the Northern Hemisphere, at least. Your mileage may vary. Offer void where restricted by law or subverted by rapid evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes. Terms and conditions may apply); but we've never been close to having the upper hand against things too small to shoot and too resilient to just habitat-destroy into submission.

Ah yes, isn't it repulsive how those 'liberals' just can't stay consistent on their support for indentured servants when their own economic interests are on the line? Truly a refutation of their ideology or something...