Considering the number of Phd's and M.S. graduates that Google employs versus Microsoft, it stands to reason that the average salary would be higher. As others have mentioned, when you factor cost of living, hours worked, and the degree employees hold, 128K doesn't go very far. Also in Washington State (where Microsoft is located), there is no state tax

When the median home price in Mountain View is over a million and the cost for a decent 2 bed/bath apartment is 3k/month, your dollar doesn't go to far.

This approach has the same issues that we have in cyber security (i.e. think x509 certificates and Certificate Authorities). How do you know who to trust? Can we always trust them? When should we trust them? If we use a reputation system to manage trust, how do we make it work such that it scales?

This approach has the same issues that we have in cyber security (i.e. think x509 certificates and Certificate Authorities). How do you know who to trust? Can we always trust them? If we use a reputation system to manage trust, how do we make it work such that it scales?

When people mention how autonomous vehicles can share information with each other, they implicitly assume that the vehicles and other entities within the environment will play fair and honest.

What happens if any of those systems are hacked either for nefarious reasons or just so that the driver of the hacked car can gain some advantage by sharing misinformation. ?

In this setup of autonomous vehicles, they become essentially computers on wheels. The issues that are faced in network security can manifest themselves with autonomous vehicles.

IBM said hello.

If I had a mod point...I'd mod you up. I think this approach is key. It is what I practice at work myself. You are right when you say that finding the right balance between doing research on random subjects and the project you are tasked to work on can be tricky.,

If your metric is hours, smart people will optimize with respect to hours. If your metric is students passing a standardize test, some teachers will optimize by "helping" the students pass the test.

Deciding on what metric to evaluate people is a very challenging problem that surfaces in any situation where you need to manage people. The best approach that is supported by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great is to create a culture on your team/company/etc.. that has the values that you as a manager want. This culture will then weed out the people who don't "fit in". Of course, creating this culture may take some time and so is suited for managers looking for long-term reward. Unfortunately, some managers are looking at things in the short-term.

All it does is move the pollution

Main point: Centralized power source vs decentralized power source. Centralized power sources (i.e. Electric vehicles) can benefit immediately from improvements to technology/efficiencies at the power plant.

Electric vehicles can do more than this by allowing for a centralized power source. Think about traditional gas powered cars. Changes in technology that allow for increased power efficiencies (i.e. better mpg) mostly impact the newer cars. Cars that were produced 10-15 years ago are less efficient, but they are still driven by a good chunk of the population.

Improvements in technology at the power plant can have an immediate impact on all Electric vehicles.

This seems reminiscent of the Excel vs Lotus 123 war and how Microsoft won. Joel Spolsky has a great article describing the tactics M$ used to win the war.

The basic idea was to eliminate barriers that would keep people from switching from Lotus 123. Below are some exerts from the article. I think there are some interesting parallels to Typescript and javascript.

Barrier:They have to convert their existing spreadsheets from 123 to Excel
Solution:Give Excel the capability to read 123 spreadsheets

Barrier:They have to learn a new user interface
Solution:Give Excel the ability to understand Lotus keystrokes, in case you were used to the old way of doing things

I seriously doubt that this is the actual savings. What about the servers that you need to purchase and run to do the data processing? What about the network equipment you will need to buy and run to support the large amount of data traveling across the network? (Using pc’s instead of terminals allows more data to be processed locally at the pc instead of sending it to the server)

What about the additional staff that you will need to manage the network and the servers?

Moving to dumb-terminal big-server model can introduce a single point of failure. At least with a pc, some data processing can happen locally even if the server goes down for some reason. With a terminal, its game over until the server is back up running. Every model has its tradeoff. Does this model make sense?

Why are they expending money on new versions of the scanners when not all airports have the first version?

Even if one assumed that the scanners could detect everything (which they can't), it would make since to at least have a version 1 scanner at all the airports.

So TSA purchases version 2 scanners that go into some airports. Terrorists just go to airports that have version 1. Oh wait, they can just go to airports that don't have any scanners. Weakest link principle.

This dynamic pricing idea is an extension of something that have been practiced by merchants for a very long time. Dynamic pricing is just price discrimination among different types of customers.

One method to discriminate is in favor of the most loyal customers. Airlines and hotels are examples of businesses that provide loyalty reward points that can be redeemed for discounts and fringe benefits.

Another method is to discriminate in favor of least loyal or new customers. Cable companies like Comcast do this. Here is how. They offer ridiculously low discounts for their cable packages for first time customers for the first x amount of months. The customers that threaten to leave, which would be the least loyal customers, are offered discounts on their current plans and packages if they stay. The people who don't get any discount are the most loyal. In fact, they can expect their cable bill to increase each month for channels/services that they don't really need or want.

This is the classic innovator's dilemma. It is how once great companies can miss the boat on new markets. They are constrained and encumbered by the demands and wants of their current customer base, which are responsible for the huge profits. Satisfying current customer demands can result in not allocating enough resources needed to develop technologies for emerging/new markets. It is easy to ignore new markets as they do not initially provide the profit opportunities that the companies current market provides.