I don't know this space well, but if I understood the SVForum EMTech talk I attended last week, that's what Ripple is doing.
243 karma · joined November 26, 2008
And the impact: -- AXA Rosenberg had to make clients whole for $217 million in losses, plus pay a $25 million penalty. -- Barr Rosenberg had to pay a $2.5 million penalty and is barred from the securities industry for life. -- AXA Rosenberg's assets under management fell from $70 billion to $29 billion (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/business/ex-axa-rosenberg-...)
UCF student Konstantin Ravvin told ABC News he thought UCF’s so-called cheating scandal had been blown out of proportion.
“This is college, everyone cheats. Everyone cheats in life in general,” Ravvin told ABC News. “I just think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn’t cheated on an exam. They’re making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if they want to teach us some sort of moral lesson.”
Edsger Dijkstra described himself as a "humble programmer" in his Turing lecture (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EW...). Don Knuth categorizes his contributions in three groups: "As a researcher... As a university professor... And as a programmer..." (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/bio.dvi). Joseph Weizenbaum's New York Times obituary headline called him a "Famed Programmer" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/world/europe/13weizenbaum....). Tony Hoare's description of his work on implementing Algol includes this: "I eventually married Jill, the other programmer who came to work on the same project" (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/3/21782-an-interview-with... -- ACM access required).
Maybe one day if I work very hard and am very lucky people will think I am a programmer, too.
This is old news:
Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats. [Howard H. Aiken, as quoted in Portraits in Silicon (1987) by Robert Slater] [from wikiquote]
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. [Thomas Edison, spoken statement (c. 1903); published in Harper's Monthly (September 1932)] [from wikiquote]
Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless. [Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html]
NDAs may have uses in established companies with very specific trade secrets that established competitors would be able to use right away (see, e.g., http://www.mbay.net/~heuer/Spystory/Industry.htm -- though that points out that some people are willing to risk criminal indictments, not just civil suits...). They're not worth the trouble for your cool idea to, say, monitor eBay auctions via Twitter and bid by tweet. Uh-oh, I guess we're not in stealth mode any more, Toto. ;-)
That example is silly and extreme to illustrate the point. In your parenthetical example, the costs to be accounted for include not only the index information but also the catalog of shared files.
"Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications. Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents."
Fundamentally, you will only know in retrospect whether or not you made the right decision. On the other hand, the stakes are not as large as they seem: 5 years is 125% of your time as an undergraduate, but only 12.5% of your career. (In other words, you have time to switch courses later, though it may appear now that you don't.)
Finally, the advice I always repeat to people facing difficult decisions. (Anyone who knows where this came from is welcome to tell me. I would attribute it if I knew the source.) .... When you have a difficult and important decision to make, flip a coin. Not because flipping a coin is a good way to make important decisions, but because in the moments while it is spinning in the air you will know which way you want it to land.
Trust yourself, good luck, and congratulations on earning such a plethora of attractive options.
From, you guessed it, Paul Graham... (Specifically, footnote #1 of chapter 6 of Hackers and Painters, aka "How to Make Wealth" http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html#f1n)
I was in school when I first read that line. I showed it to a fairly well-known scientist who immediately put a copy on his office door. The smartest people I have met are also the quickest to admit they don't know.
MS = More of the Same
PhD = Piled Higher and Deeper
Even the off-hand pop culture references are crapulous: "A Confederacy of Dunces" surely counts as a "classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie", and it is a lot funnier than anything Ayn Rand ever wrote.
This is a lovely idea, but suffers from a severe bootstrapping problem. How should the firm choose the technical person to hire? Or which consultants to use to recommend a technical person?
I have seen plenty of situations where the technical person onboard is second-rate -- or worse. I have also seen plenty of over-priced second-rate consultants.
IMHO part of the solution will be the eventual emergence of meaningful certifications of technical competence. Although problematic in a number of ways, the IEEE CSDP is probably a good first effort. Other professions are licensed, and have continuing education requirements.