doctorwho

Sophistry.

Google employees will now organize to lobby to bring a "stand your ground" law in California. When that happens we'll see how many hipsters feel like threatening someone who can afford a semi-automatic weapon and has the skills to rig it up to a quad-copter, or their home security system.

It's a very first world "not in my backyard" movement. Righteous indignation about someone with more money encroaching on "their place" in the universe. Get used to it little hipsters, you're not the first it's ever happened to and you won't be the last.

Where were these uber-concerned citizens while George Bush was raping the US and Iraq? Why are they not protesting at the White House or stopping NSA employees from getting to work? But yeah, trample the rights of individual people, that will help. It's easy (and a lot less dangerous) to hate and pester a guy who makes more money than you. Forget about who's ruining the country and focus on the guy you think is responsible for you losing your rent controlled apartment. A few disingenuous trouble makers (organizers) stirring up the poor and the stupid for a cause that isn't a cause, just the distracting, headline grabbing, crusade du jour.

A corporation doesn't get liability protection for free, the corporation itself remains liable for whatever it does while the shareholders (but not board members) are protected.

In a global economy, where corporations can exist anywhere they like, taxing corporate profits is almost a guarantee that we'll see the same thing that happened to manufacturing jobs happen to corporate headquarters. The corporations will move to countries with lower tax rates because they can and because it will save them billions. I'd move my HQ to keep a billion in the bank instead of giving to the clowns trying to run the country.

Just waiting for the founding of "Techlandia" where a big corporation (or several) form their own country and abolish all tax laws. Maybe they buy up some land, maybe they sponsor a country in trouble and take it over. As their own country they would make all the rules. All their employees live in Techlandia and pay no income tax. No more annual filings. No more tax audits. No more whiny politicians coming with their hands out. All infrastructure costs: roads, power, water, sewage and possibly even housing are borne by the corporations for their employees (who live there). They have their own national bank and keep ALL of their profits. Workers retire with huge cash hoards and live wherever the hell they please, like kings.

Some people are just better at exploring problem spaces, avoiding dead ends and making insightful connections that lead to solutions. It doesn't always come with experience, some people could work forever and never solve even a moderately difficult problem. These people build websites. The 10x engineer has a mindset and an approach that yields results more consistently than his/her peers.

So they went into debt for a Yugo instead of a BMW. It's the same problem. People aren't able to separate wants from needs and do the basic math that would tell them they'll end up with a crushing debt after a 4 year degree program that will (in most cases) provide them with no advantage at all in the workforce because of the glut of other "educated" applicants.

Desire and aptitude don't always go hand-in-hand. The people who always do well (you know the ones) will get the jobs and everyone else will whine about not being able to find a job that pays $100K right out of school. If you're going to end up flipping burgers anyway, why not save 100K and just go directly to the golden arches?

Without some proof that it works and that it's really as easy as you say, it's a much harder sell. Try testing it with and without the video and see how many signups you get. You can always do an email drip after you have their address, but you have to get them first! Is it worth losing some percentage of your leads?

I understand completely, but if learning is your motivation and you take on crushing debt to make it happen, you have no right to whine about it.

Would you be as sympathetic to someone who ran up thousands of dollars on their line of credit to buy luxury items? Nope. In fact we outright call these people idiots (without any shame) for spending more than they earn.

An advanced degree is a luxury item. It's a WANT and if you can't afford it then maybe you shouldn't have it.

Why are people still pursuing degrees which they will likely NEVER be able to use? This is not a problem that universities need to fix, but it is ultimately a self-correcting problem. If people can't get paid for studying X for 7+ years then post-grad X programs will dry up and disappear. As they should. If you're planning to go into one of these dead-end academic fields you should be required to take a full year course in Economics first.

If you actually have something working, add a video demo showing how quick and easy it is to configure a new site. That's what I'd be looking for.

I was thinking more about a time when universities were really a place you went to learn, not to kill time while you figured out what to do with your life. I was thinking 500 years ago not 50 years ago. Not everyone is cut out for it, but today everything thinks they are. Because they're told (sold the idea) that they can do/have whatever we want. Nobody looks at the price tag.

I guess it depends on where you live. In Canada you can have the loan discharged when you declare bankruptcy, after 10 years. One more thing that a young general arts student should look up before taking on a loan and joining a frat.

Dear Broke Snowflake,

Do you know who used to go to university before they became degree foundries? The very rich or the VERY smart. Why? They could afford it or they got sponsored because someone realized their future potential and how they might benefit the world at large. Smart people who loved learning went to university. To learn. NOT to secure a job at the other end.

Do you know who goes now? People who don't have a clue what they're doing, because they could get a loan and it was easier than thinking, planning or getting a job. So, people who don't think more than 5 days into the future (weekend!) are getting loans without any idea of the long term consequences. And then whining about it. Nobody forced the loan down your throat.

Somewhere along the way, universities realized they could make LOTS of money if they started selling dreams to the masses. So they did. That was their dream and you're paying for it.

The whole system is pooched but if you're one of the many lost snowflakes who got a degree you can't use or don't know how to use it and a loan you can't afford, it's too late to cry now. Declare bankruptcy. The university won't ask for your degree back and in 7 years your credit score will recover - that's a helluva lot sooner than you would have paid back the loan anyway.

Here's a quick video of the buckyball.

The video is from today. The image was printed about 18 years ago :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlysJLjUZZQ

3DCOM was going with a service model as well but the internets were pretty new to most people back then. They also got a write up in the Pipeline section of PCMagazine (new technologies section) back when suck things mattered. I think I saved a copy of that too. Time to go digging through the ancient technology box!

I'll dig it out of its box and take a snapshot, or a little video :)

It's pretty easy to extract all the image data from ANY video source using FFMPEG. If the command line version doesn't fit into your workflow, there's always libavcodec (what FFMPEG is based on). Give me a shout if you're interested in supporting any and all video formats.

Very cool! I wrote code to do this back in 1995 for a company called 3DCOM. We supported full color, full page prints from a sequence of 24 images, each from a slightly different angle to produce a 3D "holographic" printout. the effect was so good you could stick your finger into the image.

At the time (the dark ages of commodity printer technology) it required an EPSON inkjet that could do at least 1200dpi. After printing you just slapped a sticky-backed lenticular lens (lined up with registration marks) on the printout and voila!

I kept one 8"x10" 3D printout of a buckyball that's still pretty impressive looking, even after nearly 20 years!

This is just a large physical battery. The only way to win is if storing the energy in a weight system is more efficient or has more capacity than storing it in a chemical battery. It's certainly not as scalable as a chemical battery and requires a lot of infrastructure to pull off.

If they are still in the probation period and haven't signed an employment contract then I don't believe you are legally bound to pay them any severance but IANAL and the rules vary widely by jurisdiction. Check with an employment lawyer before doing anything. You won't regret spending that money.

I would not recommend trying to buy yourself out (i.e. pay to relieve your guilt). Save the cash for your business and do only what your lawyer says you have to do. There's a chance this employee will see it as a sign of guilt or weakness and try for more. It happened to me.

If this employee does good work but is toxic to the work environment, you might want to suggest a contract arrangement instead of full time employment. You could pay him to take on well defined tasks (offsite) and keep the interpersonal interaction to a minimum. That way you keep the talent but lose the friction.

Add "good communication skills" and "plays well with others" to your job description for the next round and tighten up your employment contract to provide for a probation period where any party can terminate within the first N days. You write up the conditions but get an employment lawyer to help you draft it into something legally enforceable in your jurisdiction.

Apple hasn't been charging for iOS or the software that ran the first iPod. It's included in the cost of the device, just like the cost of the embedded code in your Keurig is factored into the overall cost of the device.

Software isn't where Apple makes their money. It never was. They NEED software to make their hardware do anything but that's all they ever should have considered. The many years of rivalry with other OS makers was stupid and costly. They weren't really in competition.

You get a free copy of OSX with every Apple computer but charging for OSX upgrades only makes the job of keeping all that hardware running smoothly more difficult. It generates avoidable support calls and support is a huge cost.

If the software (they have to write anyway) is free and hundreds (or thousands) of bug fixes are always just a free download away then everyone benefits. Apple can stop focusing on feature parity with other operating systems and focus on what makes their devices better for their users.

What are the odds you'll ever be able to sell your shares?

Are you going to make more than if you invested that 15K today at a reasonable (but safe) rate of return?

What are the odds that the company goes belly up or you can't sell? Could you live with a 100% loss?

Did you find any DRM on the content or do you just like to whine?

Also...

Microsoft Research announced on Wednesday that Mr. Gates, who purchased the rights to the videos privately from the Feynman estate, BBC and from Cornell University, in cooperation with Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher, has created a Web site that is intended to enhance the videos by annotating them with related digital content.

Project Tuva http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html

If you've blown through 10 years of savings in 1 year that should be a warning sign. If, after a year of freelancing, you're not completely self-sustaining, I'd say it's time to re-evaluate your plan. You do have a PLAN right? You didn't just decide to try freelancing right? Please note that "looking for clients" is not a plan, it's a complete lack of a plan. If you can't explain to your mom why you're going to be a successful freelancer then I'd suggest you either take her advice or do something to prove you won't be moving back into her basement, if you're not there already.

>The author's daughter was harassed, and that is wrong. Full stop.

IF the author's daughter was harassed THEN that is wrong. Full stop.

I have no idea what really happened. You have no idea what really happened. Neither one of us was there. Neither was the mom. Her version is still just hearsay and worth exactly nothing. The only one who knows what happened is the young girl involved.

People throw the word harassment around a lot. Being bullied is the new black. What if this kid is super-sensitive (we all know people who cry when they step on ants) and the other kids just laughed at her and called her a teacher's pet. Maybe that was enough to sour this kid? But... is that harassment? Are the other kids just evil? Maybe the teacher was a completely insensitive jerk. Maybe the teacher was in on it. Maybe the mom embellished the story in some bizarre modern day blogging version of Munchausen by proxy.

At the end of the day all we can do is speculate that if A happened then B should have been done about it. In a perfect world A would never happen, but we don't live in that world and everyone who tells a story brings their own biases to the conversation. It's fodder for discussion and not much else because it's a story with only one version of the "facts".

You are so far from the point, the light from the point will take billions of years to reach you. It's the platform and the platform vendor that can't be trusted to keep you safe, that's before you even start talking about attack vectors from third parties a.k.a. Apple Partner Companies. And seriously, you're ready to get in bed with the DHS and FBI? They're the ones after your data!

The teacher has a responsibility to provide a safe environment THAT ENDS AT THE DOOR TO THEIR CLASS. If the harassment happened out of view, is the teacher still responsible? Are you responsible for harassment that takes place at your workplace outside your cubicle? Students have remedies, they all know what they are. I knew. If the child spoke up to a teacher, principal, janitor, or anyone and the school did nothing then I'd side with the OP in a heartbeat. Absent any real facts about what happened I'd have to guess (and it's only a guess) that the teacher wasn't the problem here.