schmittz

My family's q7 has default cabin illumination when the headlights are on. It took me 2 months to notice that was the case. As long as the screen dims automatically when not in use, I think that most people won't mind, but I could be wrong. I'd also imagine that Tesla was smart enough to think about having a way to hibernate the screen.

While I think that anyone should be allowed to discriminate against anyone they want to in private forums (i.e. restaurants or businesses), laws prevent you from discriminating on the basis of sex although not appearance (with the exception of a few states) or if the position is covered under the Bona Fide Occupational Qualification exception. That being said, "being an asshole" isn't a covered category under anti-discrimination law, so they're perfectly allowed to discriminate all they want.

Yes, I apologize. I wasn't telling you off, I wanted to succinctly point out that there's more to the idea. To address your semi-rhetorical question, this model is easily adaptable to anything that you want to casually learn (excluding what I'll call "traditional education spheres"). That is to say, right now it's incredibly difficult both to offer to teach a cooking class in your community and to find a cooking class to take. Thinking about Niroka as a way to connect people with skills willing to teach to people interested in learning new hobbies is better than thinking about it as a place to go to learn (blank). If they grow and expand in this way, Niroka would become the starting point if you're interested in learning a new skill that can't easily be absorbed through what's currently available on YouTube or printed on the web (this also presents people who do offer some of these services that way an easy way to monetize). In a similar vein, it can also be easily adapted to handle scheduling for small businesses dedicated to teaching schools (in exchange for a cut, they maintain the schedule of classes and provide a large potential audience for say, a local pottery place or yarn store, etc.) The harder market to tackle would be traditional education where topics can require highly specialized knowledge and fall prey to bad teachers.

You're assuming the end game is programming.

That's an interesting concept. It would be helpful to see that other people are having the same issues in a given class. I wonder how successful an automated system would be based on key words. Something like a twitter stream for a live feed, but more concentrated to focus on recurring questions.

A slight typo in the author's bit (which is fascinating), the Collatz sequence doesn't terminate in a series of 1's. By its definition, once 1 is reached, the series repeats {1,4,2,1,4....}. Thus, the number of steps required to reach 1 is called the "stopping time" of the sequence. See the Wikipedia article on the Collatz conjecture for some great visualizations of low seed value termination trajectories for the Collatz sequence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture

For those interested, here's a list of the actual valued naming opportunities. Although, it doesn't include anything about naming spaces. (Scroll to the bottom) https://www.cmu.edu/campaign/about/endowment.html

People have a horrible misunderstanding of libertarianism. Libertarians believe people should be absolutely free to do what they want with their money. Libertarianism is not a fancy word for narcissistic hedonism. From a philosophical standpoint, libertarians should welcome charity/philanthropy as it is a free market solution to dealing with society's problems. They are merely against forced charity (i.e. welfare, medicaid, etc.). Mr. Dietrich's donation fits perfectly within a libertarian framework. Sorry to ruin the joke, but there's no hidden juxtaposition there.

I don't understand this at all. There's no direct bribing because of the ramifications, but there is a lot of post-office job offer and campaign contribution gamesmanship, as everyone recognizes. However, I'm not sure where you're drawing your data from. Could you enlighten me? My anecdotal perception is that the "required" donations operate largely the same between parties. As per data compiled by the reputable OpenSecrets, of the top contributing organizations from 1989-2010, most of them donate strongly to Democratic candidates (this I assume would be the amounts used to "bribe" politicians).[1] Regardless of this fact, I still don't see an analogy between a flip-flop vote (I don't know the vote numbers, so that phrasing might not be true) on TARP by the Republicans (while I don't know numbers, as I recall, the Democrats also voted heavily against a "bailout" package before voting for it) and the way that AT&T might use political clout to push through this merger.

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php

EDIT: Interesting to note, however, that AT&T is third on the list of all time donors and on the fence for Dem/Rep support. If the justice department wasn't full of appointments or hires as opposed to elected officials, this could strongly weaken the likely outcome of this suit. In any case, will be interesting to note the effect in upcoming elections that this has on AT&T's donation patterns.

I'm not looking to debate this at all, but I'm not sure how program designed to prevent the insolvency of a major portion of US assets and the anti-competitive practices of one company are related or why you're singling out Republicans in both your metaphor or in relation to AT&T.

I'll admit at the time I posted my comment, I wasn't particularly well versed in the history of computing. Thanks for the links, they are insightful.

Although, important to note that while Xerox invented GUIs, they were about to trash the project before Apple stepped in and nurtured it. Speculation about what would have happened if they didn't do this is mostly meaningless, but disregarding the promulgation and popularization of GUIs in lieu of crediting only their original inventor is totally unfair.

Naming Tim Cook as CEO makes a lot of sense. Obviously, it made the most sense to Jobs himself. People like to think that Apple's design alone is the only reason the company's grown so large. It's easy to forget that without the operational work of Cook, Apple could not even have built the products they did. In that regard it makes more sense for Cook to be CEO because he can insure that the company remains as profitable as it is, while also enabling new devices to be realized. With great designs and weak organizational leadership, Apple cannot thrive as it has.

Your point is murky. Usually investors are ahead of "the news." Some of the best examples of this are actually with Apple (go figure). The days after a major product launch the stock usually falls several percent. This can be attributed to the fact that people buy in leading up to the event and cash out afterwards. Analysts had moderate estimates for RIM's quarterly, they came in way under (making it extra funny they emphasized their "strong" earnings in their response) and their stock price fell 20% that day. They know their hurt, their investors now know they're hurting (they had an idea before, hence moderate estimates), the letter was aimed at convincing the public they're just fine. Honesty works, look at the recent Domino's PR campaign, sales are up after admitting their product was shitty.

I completely disagree. A company can be frank and honest without revealing anything. Of course they needed to release a press statement in immediate response. The press release could have been written much better as to not sound so nonchalant about the whole situation. For instance, they could have acknowledged the shortcomings of their current product and announced that their current roadmap's focus was on developing innovative, superior products. They could have also said that in light of the letter, they were beginning a new internal dialogue to allow employees to address problems in the company subsequently increasing profit, productivity, and potential.

There is a not starving (though severely bankrupt) very small peninsula country on the atlantic that has not legalized, though "decriminalized" ALL drugs to measured success. That country is Portugal, which officially decriminalized all drugs nationwide in 2001. It is a very interesting data point in the argument over drug legalizations. Arguably it is the closest anyone has come to large scale legalization of drugs (interestingly, their case is not limited to just marijuana). More information can be found in this Scientific American article and the Wikipedia article on the drug policies of Portugal: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-dr... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

Full PDF text of UBC study ("Happy Guys Finish Last: The Impact of Emotion Expressions on Sexual Attraction") here: http://ubc-emotionlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/Happy-Gu...

It's weird that this article mentions the problem of graphene lacking a semiconducting form and then fails to mention carbon nanotubes at all. I don't do research in this area, so I'm unaware, but it seems that much more work is currently being done with CNTs than graphene.

On a related note. Much of applied (primarily solid state) physics, materials science, and the engineerings are now designing new materials for use in many applications. Given the vast possibilities, limited funds, and recent development of powerful mathematical models for simulating systems, many companies and research groups have gone to large scale simulations as the primary means for testing new materials systems and only after discovering the possibilities are these constructed for testing. This means a firm grounding in mathematics (and more specifically these techniques: molecular dynamics, density functional theory, etc.) is headed from "crucial" towards "prerequisite" for people to work in these fields.

He is, in general, extremely frugal. However, he also owns a chalet and Porsche that he drives when at the private chalet (although, I'd argue that for someone worth more than 20 billion dollars, that's fairly frugal.)

I'm not sure what the point of your post is as it's unrelated to the comment it's in reply to. But aside from that fact, be careful to avoid confusing price increases due to shortages and price increases due to speculation about perceived current or future shortages.

Out of curiosity, what state do you live in? That's why right to work states are so great, because it ensures your ability to work regardless of unionizations. It's also why unions spend an incredible money lobbying against states becoming right to work.

That's not true. A wrongful termination suit can be brought against any employer. Employment law is handled on a state by state basis. In most states, once an employee has worked for someone for 90 days, termination without documentation of attempted intervention or sufficient transgression represents sufficient ground for the terminated employee to be reinstated or compensated for damages. Small businesses tend to be less formal about handling employee termination because employees of small businesses are less likely to seek remuneration for wrongful termination. Also, wrongful termination suits can be rather large and generally require very little legal work on the plaintiff's part so most law firms pick up the case for no fee and instead a percentage cut of the settlement.

Thanks. I was watching the NBA playoff coverage as I typed that. Clearly it pervaded my subconscious.

I agree that incumbents don't like disruptive innovation (in general), but who says that a) Apple wouldn't mind as they've in general done a phenomenal job of interrupting themselves before others have had the chance over the last twenty years or b) that another new company won't unseed Apple as Apple (while not in market share, but in prominence and recently also income) has unseeded Microsoft.

This comment is interesting, because when the iPad first was announced, I had a lot of people give me the "oversized iPod" line and I tried to explain that even just significantly increasing screen real estate was enough to open the device to massively increased functionality. Glad to see some analogous, anecdotal support.

This is going to be incredibly interesting to see what happens starting tomorrow for the remainder of the trading week. From a business perspective, this company is hardly worth its 4.5$ billion valuation. However, I have a theory that we're starting to see companies that are valued based on unquantifiable social utility as opposed to just hard economics. Although, this could just be "the bubble" finally forming...

It's average now, slightly better than a base Comcast connection, but that's about it. (I can compare directly since I lived on campus two years and off the last two). I suppose it would depend on what you were doing that would make it matter whether Google Fiber was important or not, but certainly for running large scale things, especially simulations from cloud based sources, Google Fiber would be massively appealing. I'd argue that the effect of ultra high speed internet on a large population base isn't predictable and could only be a positive for the region in terms of drawing developers et al. Also, thank you for laughing at your pun instead of crassly saying "pun not intended."

As I am in this year's graduating class, I was immensely excited to hear this news. Carnegie Mellon's greater fostering of entrepreneurship through initiatives such as this and the relatively new Engineering and Technology Innovation Management program (masters program with classes in Tepper, one of the top graduate business programs, and a required internship at a startup) will prove very fruitful. If we could just also get Google Fiber to come to Pittsburgh, it would be possible to start to see another great entrepreneurship hub form.

I'm absolutely confused why you have such hostility. Did you forget the premise of the organization that hosts this news board? Also, did you read the link? The funding is coming from Jon Kaplan, CEO of Pure Digital Technologies and creator of the Flip camera, not "bankers."