absherwin

*This is equivalent to: There are tons of people who think space is cool or useful and do nothing because it's too expensive and that won't be true with SpaceX's costs in 10 years.

-They want to take advantage of the publicity to sign up as many people as possible, hoping a decent percentage stay at the higher rate.

-They hypothesized the price was too high and are testing the effect of lowering it.

I suspect it's a latter with the former as a fallback benefit. Their most recent product change coincided with a 20% price decrease. O'Reilly wants to focus on making the best product possible, even if the higher expenses and lower prices mean reduced profitability in the near-term because he sees how huge this can be in the long-term if done right.

Pearson likely doubted the wisdom of short-term sacrifice which is how each side leaves feeling happy.

UberX will eventually charge prices more like $0.60 per minute plus $0.20 per mile.

A rough estimate based on the distribution of miles driven is that 30% of Americans should give up their cars under these numbers. Of course, many won't because owning a car isn't purely a financial decision and humans change slowly.

Discussions and imagination move much faster than reality but the world will catch up.

Technical note: The price per hour should be (time-related depreciation)/miles + hourly wage divided by the utilization rate. Mileage should be the sum of fuel costs per mile, maintenance cost per mile, and mileage based depreciation.

Running these numbers for a driver expecting $20 per hour (Average for a Taxi driver is ~$12) with 2/3 utilization and driving a Prius yields a pricing structure of ~$0.60 per minute and ~$0.20 per mile.

The author has been a vocal critic of missile defense systems for decades. While that doesn't negate his arguments, it suggests a potential motivation for his artificial definition of success.

Edit: As the comment below points out, the rocket's trajectory could be changed so as to increase casualties. While that's true, it won't do so on average for several reasons. A rocket is only targeted if the system believes it has a high probability of striking a populated area. Since the expected losses are high, average will be better. In fact, average should be much better because the distribution of population density is so skewed. A small percentage of land is in dense regions. In this particular case, there's the added advantage that the most populous cities are relatively far away from Gaza so early impact is better.

Edit to respond to comment: The context is a an executive talking about whether accounts that FedEx classifies as internet pharmacies should be counted towards sales goals used for bonuses. That means they could classify new accounts as belonging to this group or not. It's worth noting that their definition is likely not synonymous with the plain meaning of internet pharmacy. Rather it means that subset that they expect the DEA will put out of business. I'm sure Caremark isn't excluded from normal sales metrics and subjected to extraordinary credit requirements.

To believe that FedEx lacked knowledge of illegal activity, one must believe that they assumed some of these pharmacies were genuine and that while it was feasible to create special policies to ensure FedEx was paid, policies to verify the organizations legitimacy (which would also increase the chance of them being paid), were impractical. However, that will be difficult because one executive told another that: "...these types of accounts will always result in a loss at some point. They have a very short lifespan and will eventually be shut down by the DEA." (emphasis added)

They certainly can't argue, as many others in this thread have, that the companies weren't identifiable: They were doing it to enforce this policy. The credit department maintained a list of pharmacies that, at one time, had 600 entries on it.

From my limited personal experience, every startup I've chatted about this with has some sort of forecast though the degree of seriousness with which is was constructed and is used varies.

    -Bad: Do nothing
    -Better: Object to everything and you might win the lottery
    -Best: Object reasonably that they may be taken seriously
    -Beyond amazing: Admit everything in such a sympathetic way to minimize guilt*

    *Gerry Spence

That suggests the cultural problem is decline in longer-term thinking or more likely a decline in arbitrary codes of behavior without a concomitant increase in longer-term thinking that would recreate many of those same norms.

American business used to place a high value on trust: "A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom. I think that is the fundamental basis of business." -J. Pierpont Morgan

As another example, Warren Buffet seldom does diligence to determine an offer; he trusts those from who he buys to deal and report honestly.

Is the company even a major player in the smart thermostat space? It's not even listed in this market analysis from last fall: http://cleantechnica.com/2013/11/14/honeywell-leads-smart-th....

It looks more like a competitor in the home automation systems space that sells smart thermostats mainly as part of a more comprehensive system.

Given the absence of action against any of their more major competitors, this seems like a coincidence.

That seems unlikely to true if a passion for fixing a particular problem is both a significant factor in predicting a startup's success and unlikely to be present in one who makes decisions by modeling the value-maximizing way to live one's life.

From reading the arguments in this case, it's not clear to me that the judges would have been impressed by that distinction. Their focus was on whether Lavabit had the technical capability to provide the information the government demanded. In both cases, the answer is yes. We won't know the actual answer until this has been litigated. If it has and I've missed it, I'd love to see the case in question.

Do all of the implementations, particularly on mobile, actually provide such security? If a court is willing to order TLS keys to be turned over in order to enable the government to access information, why couldn't they order the developer to release a backdoored version through the relevant App Store or other update mechanism? If the author refuses to comply, then they will demand the codesigning keys so they can backdoor it themselves.

To quote your critique of another's security proposal: "Then the only difference between hushmail and your model is exactly what the FBI will get a subpoena to have you type into your server to subvert your users. The models are equivalently insecure."

Note that the simple concept of a game is not subject to copyright. Also note that your failure to register does not relieve the offending party of liability though it might remain advantageous to do so.

In short, talk with a lawyer.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and the foregoing should not be construed as legal advice.

If someone stated that men and women have different numbers of teeth, why not encourage an experiment? It's not an absurd statement unless you've gathered evidence or trust the evidence you've read elsewhere.

The challenge in this case is that morality can't be determined objectively without reference to some other framework, which itself is likely subjective. So it doesn't tell us whether Eich can reason or incorporate evidence. He likely formulates his view from a different set of assumptions.

Starting in 1837, gold coins in the US had 0.48375oz of gold per $10. So $27,000 in coins would be worth $1,755,432 given a price for gold of $1344 per oz. This excludes the value of the copper with which the gold was alloyed, which would be worth roughly another $30.

The government's wiretap order and the subsequent contempt proceedings suggests that despite the technical problems of Lavabit, the government did not get the data they sought. Had Snowden used GMail, do you believe the government would have received the information they sought?

This isn't security in the sense you'd use it in an audit. It's just a design decision. In the vernacular, designs that permit the release of private information are sometimes called insecure.

GMail is not secure against the NSA or even a state judge's warrant. That has numerous advantages for society but regardless it's not and never will be secure against government orders. That's never been its design. Levinson's service was secure against them for certain clients.

The reason the anti-NSA crowd is intrigued by him is the same reason sources told their secrets to Bob Woodward. He proved willing to protect Deep Throat's identity despite immense effort to out it. Similarly Levinson was willing to risk his business and contempt proceedings to protect Snowden.

Edit to respond to edit: Built-ins and slots are even faster but the key point is that the ctypes-based class is actually slower than simply using a class with ordinary Python variables.

The reason ctypes is slower is that addition isn't defined on c_ints which requires casting them back to Python ints for each operation. This can be avoided by using ctypes to call a C function to perform addition.

Using slots is 0.06ms faster while namedtuple is slower.

A bigger speedup in CPython can be achieved by just using the builtin sum function twice to avoid the for loop.

Here's a gist: https://gist.github.com/absherwin/8976587

Unfortunately, the comment isn't editable so I'll add more detail here. The more accurate number is $3.32B in cash and equivalents less ($3.57B in current liabilities - $2.97 in current non-cash assets). This totals $2.72B.

However, I understated the tax benefit. Motorola had a $2.5B reserve against their tax assets since they weren't profitable, which is $0.8B less than my original estimate. So the total error from these two items is an understatement of Google's recoveries by $0.52B, which means they recovered about $10.9B of $12.5B.

Note that there are likely other errors still present in this new calculation due to both lack of information and less than thorough research.

Motorola had ~$3B in cash when acquired. Google previously sold their set-top box unit for $2.35B and realized about $1.7B in tax benefits from previous losses. However since acquiring it has taken $1.038B in losses, which is $0.67B post-tax. There will be another write down for the lost goodwill less the value of the remaining IP that should be worth very approximately $1B. So including the $3B from Lenovo, they recouped approximately $10.4B of the initial $12.5B purchase price.

Edit: Previous version excluded cash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yanukovych#Consolidation...

The alternative doesn't have to be abolishing stack ranking. The manager's manager should instead ask for justification and help the manager raise standards if they are too low. If not, he should repeat the same process with his manager. The +-3% variance indicates that the executive team expected this to happen. Since the feedback indicates that it's not happening in some (many) cases, hopefully this has triggered top-down conversations on the right way to implement.