sofon

Isn't there relationship already problematic?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/20/firefox-g...

The waveforms will all likely be disclosed in their patents too:

https://patents.google.com/?assignee=E+Ink+Corp

Certainly a number of drive waveforms and the basic concepts are presented. There are likely implementation subtleties or specific configurations that are not explicitly disclosed.

You can probably figure out a lot about both the implementation, and motivation by digging through the patents.

Could you not get a prenup?

Are many/most companies with billion dollar valuations so exposed?

I would imagine most billion dollar companies have multiple sites and manufacturing and data centers spread across multiple sites.

That's such a neat idea. I wonder why floating plants don't already exist. I'm also surprised that I've not seen it in Scifi.

Why? VCs might just be not very good at selecting good plays?

Yes, or some startup figures out that they can start doing it and charge the tech companies for access to their platform.

An open standard would be better of course.

Sun was serious about software at least to the extent that Acorn was.

Interesting thread.

I think self-driving cars are short term doomed, and we've doomed them.

The problem is we view them as a purely technical problem where-as the real issues are sociological. It's not possible to create a self-driving car that acts perfectly on roads designed for humans (arguably, it's not possible to have humans acts perfectly either).

There are two solutions to this problem. Either shift human expectations such that they accept the failures of self-driving cars, or change the roads to make it easier for automated cars to drive on them.

I believe we should overwhelmingly be doing the second. We should be augmenting and instrumenting our road infrastructure to make self-driving easier. And in particular, we should be concentrating our efforts where this is easier, and has the most value (probably transit).

I don't see how that follows. They don't just waste money, they redirect resources that could be deployed better elsewhere.

Urgh, it's really bullshit.

A minority of Japanese workers are Kaishain (Salarypeople), and there's nothing you really really /need/ from a corporation. Corporate socialising is a thing, as is finding a partner at work. But given the low marriage rates in Japan, not really that big a deal. I guess there are people who are about the reputation of working at a well known company.

I read the article, but I can't see how the title is supported.

What is for example, the second largest tech hub and how narrow is silicon valley's lead over it.

I would guess that the bay area if way way ahead of anywhere else (I don't like it, but it seems to be self apparent) and the lead is not narrow at all.

I agree, we can't proceed without mistakes. But it's incorrect to say that there is no cost, and that we shouldn't minimise mistakes (which is what the comment I was replying to was implying).

The VC stuff... I'm not sure that it's not sustainable. The way VCs are selected is not totally efficient (I would say, not even very efficient). More than that, successful exits for VCs don't always mean that a product or service provided value to the world at large (or was a good use for limited engineering talent), there are lots of ways for a VC to get a successful exit without that happening (including a follow on investing giving them liquidity, before there is even a product on the market for example, or the company being acquired without having developed anything useful).

It's probably not very bad, but stupid experiments can have a negative influence on the community as a whole.

Let's say e-ink keyboards are a good idea, but it's too soon. An early implementation will quite possibly delay (more make completely unviable) trying the experiment again.

If it's just a bad idea, resources will have been diverted into the development of a failed product (which is years of someones life spent on something useless). Not only that, but the cost of trying other ideas is increased. You have to hire and train more developers to work on other projects, to make up for the time wasted. The cost of developers increases for other companies, perhaps trying out better ideas.

This particular instance probably isn't very significant. But people apply the same logic to "what's the harm in VCs funding blockchains for pets", or any other buzzword without really understanding it. Well the harm is that they shift the entire ecosystem toward something that is possibly not very useful. They increase the costs for other companies (perhaps bootstrapping) their own ideas. And they push us toward a market that is driven by buzzwords, not logic, which is where most of us end up working.

> - Earth will have another 10,20,30 Billion people living on it

Unlikely.

> - These people, ... lots of kids, and more

Also unlikely.

> - Human will inhabit more parts of the Earth that are uninhabitable

Unlikely

> spending of billions of additional humans (iPhones, Televisions, etc)

Unlikely

> - New technologies will require orders of magnitude more energy, such as flying cars, space travel, etc.

Yes, likely.

World population is set to decrease. Birth rates in the US, UK, Japan, South Korea, China are all below replacement. This seems to be a general trend that happens when countries reach a certain level of development.

I think most models should show world population peaking, and then declining.

I agree that nuclear is probably our best bet. The high profile screw ups (like Fukushima) are annoying and decrease public trust. But we need to get better at creating/regulating safe nuclear solutions.

> One proposal, developed by American economist Bartley Madden, is "free-to-choose medicine." Once drugs have passed Phase I trials demonstrating safety, doctors would be able to prescribe them... > > More radically, it might be possible to repeal the 1962 Kefauver-Harris amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, a provision that requires drug developers to prove a medication's efficacy (rather than just its safety) before it can receive FDA approval.

Personally I'd be in favour of letting seriously ill people try whatever they want. However I would not be in favour of allowing companies to charge for drugs which had not yet been proved effective.

Providing drugs for free might give companies more data to help develop (or potentially prove safety, efficacy) but generating revenue here is too open to abuse.

Pretty much all the Dyson's I've used have had very poor suction and hardly pick up anything.

The Toshiba bagless cleaners work well in my experience.

I don't understand the Dyson hype. Their products seem over-engineered, over-priced, and under-performing...

On top of which Dyson himself is strongly pro-Brexit [1] which is shaping up to be a disaster for the UK. Really don't hold out much hope for this.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/sir-james-dyson...

wow that's neat! sampling between PWM cycles is a cool idea.

I'd guess the issue is that the required parameters are not well controlled in the fabrication of most LEDs. Possibly LEDs not used as indicators, with a tighter wavelength output... most likely this would remove any cost advantage however.

Fascinating stuff!

Don't know, but I would guess that in most cases they want to coerce people into giving up their rights. I.e. "sign this to agree you give up your right to X". That might be remaining holiday pay or something else.

Actually... thinking back I've literally had an ex-boss in Japan try to get me to sign releases to various things. In the end I paid a lawyer to tell the guy to stop harassing me. This service would have been cheaper...

No, but this service did also do the rounds in Japan. In this case it's most likely not very useful, but I think people can understand what the utility might be (and the social context in Japan in a little different).

I think like most "weird Japan" articles this one is being mischaracterised somewhat.

It is often somewhat difficult in Japan to get your legal entitlement when leaving a so called "black" company. They might not easily pay out your remaining holiday, or they might use "power harassment" to otherwise make your exit process difficult.

So I can see that a company like this, while not providing legal services, removes the possibility of applying harassment to coerce employees to stay a bit longer or not take their full legal entitlement.

You could say the same thing about Janitors or network engineers or devops, or many other positions in a company. If they're doing their jobs well, they increase the productivity of all other employees.

Managers might get paid more because they are a scare resource or for other reasons, but it's not just because they increase productivity.

Really interesting article!

The Peter principle states that "every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence". The article cites an example from Sales teams. That it's the highest performing sales people that are promoted to sales team managers, and they don't perform well as managers (team performance drops).

They then talk about solutions, such are promoting people at random.

But it seems like at least part of the problem in endemic in our view of organisations. People often want management positions because they are paid more, are more secure, or have more power. Maybe if we shifted our view of management as "just being a different skill set" and not always being higher paid then we'd find people without the required skills wouldn't try and obtain those positions and would focus on what they are good at.

1 in 10 people being racist wouldn't really qualify as being "incredibly racist" in my view. Perhaps "incredibly racist" isn't a very useful term anyway.

Yes, it's important to look at data rather than anecdotes. We can both pick anecdotes to support different arguments. I could point out for example that the 4th largest company in Japan was founded by someone of Korean decent...

Yes, there is racism in Japan. Yes, racism is more socially acceptable than in the US. Yes, it seems likely that it is more often directed against Asian neighbours. You have not presented any data that suggests that it is "incredibly racist" in Japan.

I would be interest in further data that quantifies the racism in Japan. Rather than a series of anecdotes that seem to support an opinion you've already formed.

Do you trust the statistics that show how effective vaccines are and that the downsides are small?

Great! Me too! I wasn't involved directly in that work, but I trust that it hasn't been manipulated.

This is what I mean, I still trust these institutions (in part because I'm part of the technical/scientific community, and understand how it works). Many people appear to have lost trust in these institutions.

There's been a breakdown in trust.

People who accept vaccination as good, do so because they trust the scientific and political institutions which have developed and tested those vaccinations. A relatively small number of people have actually done the scientific work to prove the effectiveness of vaccination themselves.

People who do not believe that vaccinations are effective/an overall good do not have trust in this scientific and political institutions. Perhaps because the system has failed them economically, educationally or otherwise.

> Like I said, I'm not saying other countries aren't racist. I'm saying that the Japanese are incredibly racist towards other Asians.

You have supplied no data to support this statement, beyond anecdotes.

The data I've seen doesn't support the notion that the Japanese are "incredibly racist" against anyone at all.

They suggest using a frequency that minimises absorption by the atmosphere, and run the numbers. It's pretty interesting.

Interesting, by the World Value Survey figures South Korea looks worse than Japan overall. 34.1% of people mentioned that they would not want a person of a different race as a neighbour, as opposed to 22.3% in Japan.

I was still shocked by how high the numbers are for Japan. It's mostly dominated by people over 50 (27.8%) those under 29 only replied positively 10.5% of the time.

The numbers for the US are fascinating too. Overall only 5.6% of people said they wouldn't want a person of a different race as a neighbour. But the trend is the opposite to Japan, 6% of people under 29 said they would not want a person of a different race as a neighbour (4.7% of people over 50).

That young people on average are less likely to want a person of a different race as a neighbour in the US is surprising to me.