Having a space to yourself, separate from everything else, is the absolute biggest hurdle. For me (I have an attic space), I recommend making sure there are zero distractions from work. Don't install an Xbox, etc. Decorate it to taste, but it shouldn't be a man cave.

Decades ago, I used to work with a chip company that sold microcontrollers. Whenever we found out that the incumbent chipmaker was Microchip, we kind of bowed out. They have incredible customer loyalty.

(Of course, he's talking about the board versus the general employee base.) "Choosing a Board of Directors based on race and gender is a lousy way to run a company. Cypress will never do it. Furthermore, we will never be pressured into it, because bowing to well-meaning, special-interest groups is an immoral way to run a company, given all the people it would hurt. We simply cannot allow arbitrary rules to be forced on us by organizations that lack business expertise. I would rather be labeled as a person who is unkind to religious groups than as a coward who harms his employees and investors by mindlessly following high-sounding, but false, standards of right and wrong." More here: http://www.cypress.com/documen...

8-/

King of the Hill OCD defense: "I'd do that, but if I do, Garth Brooks will die.

...you won't pay *half* that.

Missing earnings estimates wiped out the $8B in market value, not the tweet.

California can't admit that kow-towing to environmentalists got them into this mess, so yeah... "warm blob." But, hey... Californians still have their delta smelt...

a maze, a test to get them to recognise new objects, and one to get them to remember the places they should avoid.

I really, really want to see that third test.

There are many different strains of libertarian thought. Only Randian anarcho-capitalists would really complain about a pollution tax. In fact, they'd try to put a market around it--"cap and trade." Even Milton Friedman conceded that laws and regulations are necessary in situations where market forces can't really make someone hole. It's not practical for a smoke-billowing plant to compensate everyone whose shirt is dirtied from the soot, for example.

Despite a few flashes of brilliance, all that he did was peddle smugness and laugh lines to fellow Manhattan liberals. While it's true that he often caught the mainstream media sleeping, he kept jumping back and forth between "Take me seriously!" and "My show is on after a show about prank-calling puppets!" whenever it suited him. Of course, i can't express this opinion without someone reflexively yelling "FOX NEWS!! BRIETBART! KOCH BROTHERS!!" In a way, Stewart is at least partially responsible for the fact that "persuasion" and "argument" is today simply defined as "successful soundings into the right echo chambers."

...from the very same gov't that treats its citizens' privacy as a threat. Pass.

I spent 10 years in Silicon Valley doing PR for flash and other nonvolatile memories. In 1997, we thought we were having Hugo Gernsback visions of the future when we were talking about flash eventually hitting $1/MB. Seems kind of silly now.

Check out this Actel whitepaper (PDF). Describes a similar phenomenon, with such errors taking place three times more often in mile-high Denver than Baghdad by the Bay San Francisco.