shmed

You literally just proved it right

Microsoft is investing massive resources into the Sound Transit system. They just donated acres of land to the city (as well as a bunch of money) to add a train stop right next to their campus. Microsoft is one of the main reason the East Link Extension was funded (new train line connecting Seattle to Mercer Island to Bellevue to Redmond).

Microsoft has over a 100 massive data centers throughout the world. The carbon footprint of their head quarter is just a small fractions of the massive amount of energy needed to power the millions of machines Microsoft deployed across the globe.

About 50 people signed some petition (most of them weren't even working on hololens). Not much out of the 120 000 people working at MSFT

R&D is not just "research", it's also "development". All money spent on engineering work count toward that 16 billion.

Yeah that's not true... Amazon's net income for the last quarter (ending on May 31 2019) was 3.561B, while Walmart's net income for the last quarter (ending on April 31 2019) was $3.842B

People don't rent out empty apartments on Airbnb... There's plenty of stuff that could be stolen out of an Airbnb

Cixin book covers those aspect pretty well. One of the main element behind his version of the Dark Forest theory is something he calls the "Chain of suspicion". He argues that in a world were communication is limited by the speed of light, there's no way to establish a coherent dialog during first contact between two civilizations that would allow you to completely trust the other party. If you cannot trust that the other party will not destroy you given the chance, then the only way for you to be guaranteed not to be destroyed is to destroy them first. Even if both parties want peace, there's no way for you to convince the other party that you want peace without also giving them the time to destroy you. It's basically a game theory situation where trying to go for peaceful communication is way too risky, and the stake in play are the survival of your civilization. It's also implied that civilization that played the "peace" card will simply get eliminated the moment they encounter someone playing the "destroy" card, making you much less likely to actually encounter a peaceful civilization.

Some people don't care about hoarding game discs or cartridge. I have drawers full of Nintendo Cartdrige, playstation 1, 2 and 3 discs, a few older xbox games, that I can't play anymore because the required console died, or they are back in my childhood home where I grew up. To be honest, I don't even want to play any of those games anymore, but if for some nostalgia infused reason I wanted to, I'd much rather they just be automatically available to stream on my TV or my laptop than having to spend hours tracking down all the required hardware for me to play a game that I'll most likely get bored with within an hour or two.

The same thing happened with movies, with some people wanting to hoard boxes and boxes of dvd, vhs or blurays, thinking that they are somewhat smarter than people who just pay some subscription (or digital rental) to stream whatever movies they want to watch when they want it, on the device they want to watch it on.

Surprising that the US consider themselves to have better social support than Canada and many other european countries.

I have a hard time believing IKEA is worth anywhere close to what the big tech giants are worth.

Luckily for Microsoft, there's many developpers that don't work on mobile. There's millions of developpers working for banks, governement, or other large organization, and many of them are choosing Microsoft technologies for their stacks. Mobile app had its gold rush in the early 2010s, but now Microsoft is investing into capturing developpers to use their cloud platform, and they are obviously doing very well in that area.

Really curious about where you got the data that Apple has 1 billion active user. I know they sold over a billion iphone overtime, but that's certainly not 1 billion different customers buying iphones. Also, I would assume a pretty big intersection of Mac or iPad users also own an iphone, so that wouldn't count as many customers either.

I am not saying people shouldn't be outraged, but please read the actual claims rather than just reading the patent titles. Titles are just a general description of the invention. Inventor don't patent titles, they patent a claim that is described in a long technical patent application. DeepMind is not patenting the general idea of a "recurrent neural network", they just have a claim that can be described as recurrent neural network. In the actual patent documents, they need an actual in depth technical description of a new process or invention that is not covered by any existing publication.

Did you actually read the patent? Or did you just read the title? The title of the patent is not the patent itself. The details of what they are patenting is described in (sometime very longs and numerous) pages of technical description. I'm an engineer at a big tech company and I'm an author on many patents that have pretty generic/vague names. The actual invention is described in depth in the patent application and that's what's important

You are right, and that's why diversity of revenue is a good thing. If tomorrow Office and Windows drop revenue by half, Microsoft as a whole wont drop revenue by half, and I guess that's the main point the pie chart is making.

But I also agree with you that the Pie Chart might not be completely accurate and might be oversimplifying the situation, but I think there's no denying Microsoft is one of the most diversified tech company out there in term of revenue.

The main point from an investor perspective is that if anything happens to the "ads market" landscape, Google as a whole will be greatly affected. For example, new legislation surrounding targeted advertising or use of personal identifiable information for marketing purpose could have a major impact on Google. And those are not some far fetch and unlikely scenario. Some government are eager to put some rules and barriers to protect user privacy and to limit what can be done with it (specially in Europe), and many consumers agree and also care about "their" data. Legislation is not the only risk, even technological breakthrough could shake the ad industry. For example, smartphone became a big deal in the span of very few years. It took Google and Facebook a couple years to adapt to shifting advertising revenue from web browsing to mobile browsing. If you remember some of the early financial reports from Facebook back in 2012, most of them were disappointing due to the fact that many of their users shifted to mobile browsing, and Facebook had a really hard time find a way to display ads on mobile that would result in a click. Their whole business was impacted and it took them a couple years to start growing their ad business again.

The main point is, if you only make money by selling 1 thing (which is Ads, regardless of what medium they use to show their ads), then if something actually happens to that source of revenue, the effect is major. The more diversified your revenue source is, the less likely it is that a single event will affect your company in a major way. Again, not saying Google doesn't have many products, and obviously, having search ads, youtube ads, mobile ads, (and more) as different mediums help mitigate some of the risk that could affect those individual products, but they are still very much exposed to the risks of a changing market.

yeah not sure why this was news worthy. Over the last couple of weeks, MSFT and GOOG have been trading places pretty often

And they are not taking your Surface RT either. You can keep using it for ever, in the same state as it was when you purchased it, just don't expect new features.

What about thieves? If I break into a bank or a jewelry store and leave with million dollars worth of gold, then get caught. Should I just "restitute" the stolen goods and go back home? My only crime was to harm corporate profits, I didn't put anyone under physical danger. What about if I steal someone's car (not a corporation)? Does it change based on who you target (rather than based on the crime itself)? And if the only punishment is monetary, rather than jail time, does that mean committing a crime becomes a question of "can I afford to commit the crime and simply pay the fine?". Let's say I'm a millionaire that get its thrill from breaking into museum and stealing valuable art pieces. Are we just gonna ask him to give them back (if he ever get caught) and pay a "stealing" fee?

My understanding from this article is that Ford will continue to sell SUVs, Trucks and Crossovers. They are only decreasing the size of their "Sedan" portfolio. Basically they are discontinuing those vehicules : Fiesta, Focus, Fusion, C-Max and Taurus. They are keeping everything else (including F-150, Mustang, Explorer, Escape, Bronco) as well as adding a new "Ford Active" car.

There's a button "Search with filters" right next to the search box.

The article clearly says that HR offered to switch her to another team, but she didn't want to because she liked her current team and her current boss. Other than this it would require switching the guy to another team, but then they probably wouldn't force someone to quit their team without first doing an investigation (or letting the police force finish their investigation), which is what they did.

It's different from the vive controller due to not having external sensors, but its very similar to what Microsoft showcased with all their new touch controllers and inside out third party headset for Windows Holographic

More importantly, it doesnt require external sensors (to the opposite of the vive controllers and headset which require the 2 lighthouse sensors)

The title point out that it's "overfitted". Basically the AI just reproduced almost the exact song that it was fitted with. It's basically a failed experiment where the machine didn't learn how to make music, but insted just repeated the note that it was taught. Not the best example to show case what RNN can do for music.

Which they do. There is absolutely a report bug item in the help menu. There's a full "Feedback" section in the menu made exactly for this purpose.

Get the Enterprise Edition and you'll get full control on what data is leaving your machine.

Its sophisticated in the sense that it makes you trust them and willingly share your information with them. It doesn't rely on some brute force method or some complicated hacking method, it simply rely on a modern workflow that people are used to go through without thinking twice about it. It is simple and incredibly efficient.

We dont really have any proof that this is the only code that got executed. Whoever owned the OAuth account had direct access to your information from google's servers, he wouldnt need to go through you as a client to get it.