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I would expect reasonable hours, some guarantee that the startup would be around for a year, a bigger potential pay-off than a big company, and that the other guy was a reasonable person with good ideas that was not a micro-manager.

You know, software developers know EXACTLY why facebook is recommending dead friends. Yes, almost all of us KNOW that the algorithm has absolutely no way of knowing that dude is dead. We also understand exactly why the trigger "he is not posting much" works.

But for whatever reason, when someone mentions something like this, we pretend we don't know the algorithms behind it. Dudes, you know it's no facebook conspiracy - they are just using some standard algorithms you understand pretty well, so let's not pretend like it's some special thing.

If their algorithms somehow parsed the RIP on his wall and stopped suggesting him, then THAT would be special.

It's a pretty bad and unscalable idea. Don't follow it. It won't work. 100.000 searches is nothing, start breaking it down to how many are willing to pay, and you see how small the market is. Unless you have an extra-ordinary passion for this area, find something more immediately lucrative.

Searches for What?

It won't work. Do the calculation on the SIZE of your market, then do the calculation on how you will REACH your market.

You'll discover that there is a problem.

Buffet invested in December 2008. Here is the graph of the stock price: http://www.google.com/finance?q=HKG:1211

When I was younger, I really didn't understand the game. But now I see that it's like watching a game of chess - same principles, but just a bit more exciting.

How can such a long argument go on and nobody is simply making a post with a series of numbers showing search engine marketshare from 2001?

Wake up between 7 and 8 (naturally, no alarm clock), answer emails, go get breakfast, eat while watching the daily show. Check what's new online. Start actually working at 10. Go out for a walk around 13, and get some lunch, 14:30 back, and work till 10pm. Sometimes will go out around 8pm to meet people.

That's not a particularly strong argument. It's just a call to authority argument without actually adding any real information one way or the other.

Here: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease25.html

Google was supplying the search results for Yahoo in the year 2000, long before Adwords. Yahoo was one of the biggest portals at the time. I really don't understand how you can say Google was not relevant before Adwords.

Google was the king of the search business back then, and that was long before Adwords came along.

Adwords was not critical to Googles share when it came to searches. Google was growing massively, everyone was paying attention to Google long before Adwords came on the scene.

Adwords allowed Google make money, but it did not contribute to growth in search.

Who was the major player in search at the time Adwords was introduced? Ask.com? Lycos? Altavista? Or perhaps, Yahoo, powered by Google?

Your position has gotten a bit blurred the more you argue. To clarify again:

- My statement is that Google was a rapidly growing search engine because they made the right UI decisions

- Your statement seems to be that without adwords, Google would have stopped growing and ultimately failed

Am I understanding your argument wrongly? Because it does not make much sense.

What I mean is that the item it is turning is marked, so I can detect it's position. Using infrared perhaps?

What I mean is that these far east places are more focused on the west, and less on the 3rd world. Go to shanghai or hong kong - there are very few Africans. But go to Dubai...

The money is in Dubai.

I'm unlikely to buy bulk later. You sure that they will give me a free motor just because I ask for it? Sounds...too good to be true :)

Nice, that's exactly the info I want to hear. By the way, I need to also measure the position of the object being turned. That is, I was intending for my robot to have two modes - training mode and execution mode, so your DC suggestion makes it even better.

Thing is - I don't want to skimp on the positioning logic - I need it pretty accurate in space (sub millimeter) and in time. Overshooting the target is fine, I'll correct it with one of those algorithms.

What is the most arduino compatible and accurate measurement method that will handle both use-cases? I should be able to use it both to control my DC motor, and also to record the position of the wheel being turned, even when the motor is switched off?

This is exactly my problem. I can look at the picture and see the information, but how do I figure out if that motor will do what I want it to do without buying it and programming it?

I need to move 2kg through space in a natural manner - is there any series of numbers I can apply that will allow me tell if that motor would be suitable for this?

A DC-Motor with optical feedback sounds like a pretty good option. They are also much cheaper, are they not?

Would I be able to control such a motor appropriately with a standard board like the arduino? Imagine I were moving 2kg 30centimers, and I want this to react as a human hand would (same speed, start time), would this even be possible?

When chinese travel to other countries, they tend to create chinatowns. They don't mix with the local population so much - look at Indonesia, Thailand, South Africa, etc.

Regarding the center: It's not further east. Dubai is setting itself up as the place for the rich from that axis to come and chill out. Hong Kong is just a sea port, Singapore has no wish to have 3rd world citizens in there and Shanghai is just a playground for young french men.

The new center of the 3rd world is in the UAE.

Those names for Africa and the U.S are not modern inventions. See my reply below about China resources.

You're wrong. That's what the west wanted in Africa, and that's why the west would send machines and one or two foremen there to simply extract the stuff and ship it back.

China is shipping a lot of people to Africa, building a lot of infrastructure. The contracts they are signing are not as exploitive as the contracts the western countries signed. They are not doing the same back-hand deals with dictators.

China is playing a much different game, and it's easy to say that they want to exploit, but it's not quite as simple as that.

For example, the chinese are building refineries. The west had little interest in building refineries, they wanted to only extract.

Basically, let's put it this way: The west had more than 40 years of exclusive access to the African mineral industry. It resulted in little development in Africa, and a lot of wars. Whatever china does, it can't be worse.

This is why china is making quick inroads into Africa. They don't have this blanket perception of Africa, they rather work those spots that actually make them money.

I betya in some strategy meeting in paypal, it was decided to shut down all African countries. Someone clicked some buttons and that's the end of access from Africa.

The Chinese would work differently - they'd still try to squeeze whatever juice can still be got out that. Africa is increasingly becoming Dubai/China focused, and at some point the west will realise that a huge market does not recognize them as viable business partners anymore.

Consider Dubai as a pivoting point for India/China and Africa. That's a new center of the world that is developing independently of the west.

It's market share was not tiny. It was growing rapidly, and was already dominating.

I think I've had enough of this argument. People like you are never wrong - you are arguing absolutely orthogonal to me, and punctuating it with personal attacks.

If I had invested money in Tesla, I'd take it out right now and handle the loss. This company is going to fail - all the signs are there, this sounds like a repeat of those 1999-2000 companies, complete with the scandals and fights with reporters.

In September 2000, Google was already the most important search engine out there. It was already successful, and adwords had nothing to do with its success. It had 20million in the bank already.

Please avoid the personal attacks, it's not good form.

Adwords came MUCH MUCH later, when Google dominated the landscape. Of course, by all words, I don't mean useless words like conjunctions.

When people think back, they blur factors (like you are blurring adwords with googles initial success). I was there when Google took over, and it WAS as simple as I said.

They first had a popular search engine, and they built a good business on top of that. The business building part was complex, probably, but getting the search engine to be popular was just a front-end thing.

Googles speed was not relevant, Altavista and many other search engines prominently displayed how fast they were. There was a sort of speed competition at the time, so Google was not significantly faster than the others. Those other engines (like altavista) did not even have websites with lots of images or so, so it loaded just as fast as google.

Picking the right user-interface has been the reason for success for many companies. People will come and overcomplicate it later, but in the end, it was just the user-interface that made them win.

There are really only TWO decisions that google made that made them successful. When something works, people like to go back and look at complicated things and say that those are the reasons it worked. The reason that google beat the others were really very simple and they had to do with the front-end only:

1. They were the simplest to use at the time. All the other search engine things had a lot of frills and pages and ads and so on. Google was just very plain, and as a result, simple

2. By default, they included ALL the words you typed in. Competitors at the time were trying to maximise search results by searching for each word individually, which led to a lot of irrelevant results. Just by including all the words in the query, google had a much better hit rate

All the rest was unimportant. Those two simply front-end decisions made the google search engine loved by the geeky anti-corporate people who ruled the web at the time (slashdot, linux advocates), and they recommended it to everyone who was joining the net. By appealing to the geeks, who then acted as the authority figures to the normals, google was able to take over the search market back then.

It was really not that complicated.

Chat is about the same class as Marijuana.

Drugs are not good things: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syhT3nTWFdI

That's not true.