dodo53

I think generally the current theory is that quantum entanglement doesn't allow you to transmit information faster than the speed of light as you can't choose which state your local particle collapses into (although there's some disagreement about whether communication could be achieved with groups of entangled particles) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light (Quantum mechanics section)

Who new the singularity would start as an arms race between AI writing obfuscated legal documents and AI decoding them :oP

I always imagine that future construction of houses will be less like a giant 3d printer larger than the house laying it down, and more like a bunch of smaller specialised robots building up a structure like ants build a mound or spiders build a web.

Well I don't know your particular situation, but I think I'd respect a CEO/dev manager more if they said: I appreciate some people work better at different times and personally I'm a night owl, I trust you guys to get stuff done, come in when it maximises your own productivity (within constraints of having enough time overlap where necessary).

This is very cool - one quibble though, there doesn't seem to be any test of 'slow' in the slow build. You could add a linear regression slope and select for songs where Pearson coefficient is high, the slope is small and the last decile volume/first decile volume is high is large.

That is an awesome website if you've not seen it before.

or because if you've already started a family you are generally expected to spend a certain amount of time looking after them/enjoying their company. People get socially ostracised/divorces/estranged children for working too hard at the office too.

vim and emacs would be fun too :oP

I think it's also because we tend to see outsourcing as management-sees-devs-as-interchangeable-workers. If good devs in Bangalore/Beijing were given ownership of products and allowed influence over direction of things I'm sure they'd do great. But outsourcing seems to go hand-in-hand with a business creates requirements, devs follow orders attitude.

It's quite a community selection bias to ask people to pay for houses before the whole town is constructed - presumably towards people who are already pretty wealthy (or incredibly risk-tolerant).

I also wonder with that kind of money and momentum whether you could e.g. buy a neighbourhood of Detroit and regenerate it.

What about as a further peer-pressure type 'good citizenship' patent thing - a voluntary pay $x per patent in your portfolio to a non-profit which uses money to search existing patent-base and seek to preemptively invalidate invalid/frivolous patents. You could have a little badge on your website or some such.

I think ironically the more obvious the return on investment of the research is, the less sense it makes for government to fund it - the private sector is more likely to fund something where the route to commercialisation is clear.

Or: basic science is a public good, and is underinvested in by free markets.

Well progressive taxation already redistributes money whether it's from aggregate advants of smarts or looks. You're talking of non-economic advantages, which are not redistributed for smarts either

Or worse - reverse it and you have if I think you're ugly, you can't have good thoughts.

yes! Maybe would be better to have a commentable hacker wiki section.

ha I misread that as GOP (Grand Old Party = US Republicans) :o)

I'm surprised they wouldn't prefer to leave them up but subpoena the data afterwards (or even require realtime backdoor access to it).

ok that makes sense, thanks

I don't really get why it's a big deal. They have to report the normal net loss, and the amount and categories of things they're excluding is public knowledge so why does it matter if they decide to come up with a possibly not-useful metric - isn't it Invetor-Beware on whether to consider that metric or not?

>One of our clients, net worth in the $60M range, built a small company and was acquired with stock from a multi-national. Stock is often called a "paper" asset.

This seems odd (also the example of programmer with stock options later) - so is he saying that because the payment is in equity you're in the financial sector / not producing real value? I'd read that last line as being disparaging about stock because it's "paper". The only example with any bite is the investment banker admitting they think they add no value.

it feels a bit like: damn those scientists/engineers trying to solve complex problems with a one one-size-fits-all analytical/reductionist toolbag; some problems are really hard! What we need is to use our one-size-fits-all Structured Dialogue Design!

which is maybe not saying much :oP

off-topic: I have a perverse desire to put some microphones up, see if there's any birdsong recognition software out there, and tweet whenever a bird in range tweets :oP

Would be very interested if you could find a link (had brief unsuccessful look myself)

It's a very bad way of putting it - but I think there's a valid discussion needed around whether schools should enforce 'rounded' education - I think the question is essentially what should we do students who are at 10th grade maths and 5th grade social science?

Should we allow earlier education specialization? (ie move them up grades but accept they'll be lacking in some areas) Or keep them in 5th grade until they are sufficiently good in all areas - maybe allowing them skip classes they're already excelling in so they have more free time for self-study?

I imagine allowing 5th graders to attend 10th grade maths only say (or more general any student being in a mix of any level in any subject) becomes impractical to schedule.

UPDATE: and as other people pointed out that's ignoring all the potential social advantages of being roughly grouped by age

by finding a good tenant by asking your friends on Facebook might be a good idea - some form of social vouching would really help (even if it's friend-of-friend-of-friend).

Crazier idea - what if the patent pool (for some domain maybe?) was fixed? (ie. there can only exist 10k patents?) Then the cost of patent search isn't ever increasing as long as rate of patenting is higher than rate of expiry. And possible it could provide a mechanism for removing frivolous patents (like - you could buy a patent 'slot' off an existing holder - so you'd be incentivised to find the most stupid patent so you could offer them the least cash upfront, as they'd not be holding out for licensing profits).

If you infringe a patent - isn't possible to get a fixed cost or is it a fraction of earnings? Can you be more out of pocket than what you earn? ie can you do

[1. Possibly cursory layperson check of existing patents ]

2. Weekend / hobby / small-scale project

3. Oh! People like it, it's making money / scaling!

4. Get lawyer in to do proper patent search before continuing?

(not that this is ideal either)

Heh - well, some of them have pretensions to holiness http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1226114/Goldman-Sach...

(I do know people there who are very nice also)

I think that's quite funny. If he really was poor, that unexpected family member becoming ill would probably have knocked him back financially / meant he had to take time off work to care for them whatever.