tanzam75

It's not "MBA-speak"; this sense of the word "secular" is used in economics, time-series analysis, astronomy, etc.

Of course it's MBA-speak. MBA-speak does not mean that they invented the word, or that only MBAs use the word. It just means that MBAs prefer to use the word where another one would do.

Nadella could have talked about "long-term trends" or "ongoing trends" or "sustainable trends." However, he chose to use "secular trends." His fondness for jargon makes him harder to understand.

Another example of MBA-speak is "synergy." The OED traces "joint action, cooperation" to 1632, and "a combined effect which is greater than additive" to 1904 ("synergism"). The first listed MBA-speak usage of the term is a 1981 article in The Economist on brokerage mergers.

Does that mean that "synergy" is "not MBA-speak" because the term is also used by scientists? Of course not! It just means that the MBAs adopted a term that others had already been using.

I would place "secular" into the same category as "synergy." The OED traces its astronomical usage to 1801 and its economics usage to 1895. Its first appearance outside a scientific context is in 1973, in an article in The Daily Telegraph on interest rates.

Edit: Nadella said re: how MS looks at acquisitions (http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/13/11920306/microsoft-ceo-sat...) "Is this asset riding secular usage and technology trends?" - anyone know what that means?

In general English, "secular" means "non-religious."

In MBA-speak, "secular" means "non-cyclical."

An example of cyclical growth would be ExxonMobil between 2004 and 2007. They couldn't keep up this growth, because it was due entirely to swings in the price of oil.

An example of secular growth would be Google between 2004 and 2007. They were able to ride the trend of advertising moving online. (Advertising is a cyclical business, but Google won't feel it until advertising stops moving online.)

Nadella is saying that he believes LinkedIn is riding a sustained trend.

Before 2013, Visa and Mastercard forbade credit card surcharges. However, cash discounts were allowed.

The problem was the Most Favored Nation clause in the credit card contracts. Merchants could offer cash discounts, but they could not offer discounts to non-Visa credit cards.

Since the antitrust settlements, all four U.S. credit card networks have allowed surcharges. Also, the Most Favored Nation clause only applies to "equal or higher cost" competitors.

Walmart US could fight Visa by adding a surcharge only to Visa cards. Walmart Canada cannot. In 2013, a similar antitrust case was dismissed in Canada.

Windows 7 was the VM, not the host.

Oh. Then I agree with you that Microsoft screwed up the licensing -- but it's a different screw-up.

Windows 7 Ultimate is just like Windows 7 Enterprise, except for the virtualization rights. With Enterprise, each license allows 4 concurrent VMs. With Ultimate, you only get one.

The original idea of Ultimate was to be a consumer version of Enterprise. You didn't have to go through a salesman. You could just buy Ultimate on Newegg or Amazon.

However, Microsoft crippled Ultimate by putting in the 1-VM restriction. Considering how much Ultimate cost, this was a really cheap move on Microsoft's part.

I spent HOURS on the phone trying to acquire a license for Windows 7 Enterprise, I needed it for Hyper-V.

I'm not sure why you're trying to do that.

Windows 7 cannot run Hyper-V. You can install the Hyper-V Manager on Windows 7, but that only requires Pro or Ultimate. [1]

Client Hyper-V was only added in Windows 8, and you only need Pro. [2]

[1] https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f0f1dc3d-9...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b8/2011/09/07/bringing-hype...

It's a shame that Google Maps is inferior to my iGo tablet running Windows Mobile from 10 years ago. And it didn't need to have continuous wireless data access. ... How was iGo capable to deliver superior maps so many years ago?

They purchased data from a mapping company. Ten years ago, the two largest mapping companies in the world were Navteq and Tele Atlas. Google used to buy data from these companies as well, but they stopped paying and decided to build up their own maps data from scratch.

Even Bing's Maps are more usable.

If you zoom to Sarajevo and look at the bottom-right of the Bing Maps window, it says: "© 2015 HERE. © 2015 Microsoft Corporation."

Navteq was bought by Nokia, got renamed HERE Maps, and has just been sold to a consortium of German automakers.

Microsoft currently has a multi-year contract with HERE Maps as part of their deal with Nokia. Also, Helmut Panke is on the Microsoft Board of Directors. He used to be the Chairman of the Management Board of BMW.

Even if you don't allow them to be sold off, nothing is stopping someone from entering an agreement where they have to pay the same amount monthly to a person X in exchange for a lump sum received now. So they still receive their checks but they have to pay that money to someone anyway.

Such an arrangement would be an unsecured personal loan, which would not survive a bankruptcy filing.

This is why you see commercials on late-night TV for structured settlement cash-outs, but you don't see commercials offering to pay you a lump sum in return for handing over your Social Security payments.

The Social Security system pays out $700 billion in benefits each year. The entire structured settlement market is only about $6 billion a year. However, Social Security payments cannot be assigned, and structured settlements can.

These companies don't want to give out unsecured loans to poor people with lead poisoning who don't have jobs. They want to pay pennies on the dollar for a guaranteed stream of payments.

Structured settlement cases became more popular in the United States during the 1970s as an alternative to lump sum settlements. The increased popularity was due to several rulings by the IRS, an increase in personal injury awards, and higher interest rates.

Well, in the 1970s, people had pensions and the 401(k) was a "thrift plan." Yet we've enacted all sorts of protections for the 401(k), because it is now the primary mechanism of retirement savings available to most Americans.

Structured settlements may have originated as a tax break in the 1970s. However, in the last 40 years they've become a way to provide a secure income stream for plaintiffs. We need to treat them as such.

I don't see why structured settlements should be allowed to be sold off at all.

The whole point of choosing a structured settlement is to prevent the person from spending a one-time windfall. So why allow that arrangement to be undone after the fact?

When you retire, you cannot assign your Social Security payments to a company in return for a lump sum. Many pension plans also prohibit you from assigning your pension checks. As a society, we've decided that preventing retirees from becoming destitute is more important than allowing those retirees to access their benefit as a lump sum.

Why is it different for structured settlements?

It would take only one nuclear device being "detonated" in low orbit, to wipe out nearly all of the satellites in a large area of that space. The resulting EMP may wreck quite a few ground-based systems too, IIRC from a book I read recently. Can't recall the name, though...

A nuclear weapon detonated in low earth orbit would not destroy a single global navigation satellite. They are not in low earth orbit.

A nuclear weapon detonated in medium earth orbit would wipe out between 0 and 1 navigation satellite, depending on how close you get. The satellites just aren't that close together.

An EMP would destroy electronics on the ground, but this will be a systemic effect. Satellite navigation would be collateral damage. When the ground-based electronics are replaced, though, the satellites will still be working.

In any case, disrupting satellite-based navigation is the simplest kind of rocket science: a missile that just has to go up and then detonate, no aiming required.

Nuclear weapons are powerful, but they still have to obey the laws of physics. If you get far enough away, the inverse-squared law makes even a nuclear explosion look like a firecracker.

A 1 megaton nuclear weapon would have to be detonated within half a kilometer to damage a satellite physically: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent...

The shielding needed to protect a satellite against EMP only adds 5% to the cost of the satellite: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1997_h/h970716u.htm

So basically, it's going to take one nuclear warhead to destroy one navigation satellite. If a rogue nation has 60 nuclear warheads, it's hardly going to waste them to take out 60 navigation satellites.

I wonder how robust the GPS system is. Could an unexpected space phenomenon bring it down? What would happen if a rogue nation started shooting down the satellites?

GPS is not the only system. We currently have about 2.7 global satellite navigation constellations available for use.

The American GPS and the Russian GLONASS are both complete. The Chinese Beidou system is about 40% complete. The European Galileo system is about 30% complete. Each system also has about 20% redundancy in the form of on-orbit spares.

Dual-system GPS/GLONASS receivers are now nearly everywhere. I was just looking at a phone that has a triple-system GPS/GLONASS/Beidou receiver. In a few years, quad-system receivers will be commonplace.

A rogue nation would have to shoot down about 1.9 constellations, or about 60 satellites, before we drop below full coverage.

The American, Chinese, and European systems have the same orbital inclination. If a gap opened, any satellite from any of these three systems could theoretically fill that gap. It would take some time to reposition the satellites, though.

There is also additional redundancy in the eastern hemisphere. India and Japan have satellites that provide regional coverage. Part of the Chinese system also operates as a regional constellation.

At this point, the rogue state is at war with the US, Russia, China, the EU, India, and Japan. They might as well just surrender.

His business means rockets are going to go from $400 million to $150 million. That's nice and all, but it's not an extraordinary revolution.

Rockets didn't cost $400 million before SpaceX. You could already get a satellite into geostationary orbit for about $70 million -- or rather, you would have been able to, if politics hadn't intervened.

Twenty years ago, the Chinese were major players in the launch services market. They picked up quite a bit of business after the Challenger explosion. One of the two commercial satellites that was retrieved by STS-51A was re-launched on a Chinese rocket. One-fifth of the original Iridium constellation was launched on Chinese rockets.

In the late 1990s, the United States banned launches on Chinese rockets if the satellite had any American parts. That meant that no Western satellites could be launched on Chinese rockets. What happens to prices when the low bidder isn't allowed to bid? You guessed it.

What SpaceX has accomplished so far is to restore prices to where they would be if the Chinese had stayed in the market. It's impressive that they can match "the China price" from California. However, it's not exactly revolutionizing the industry yet.

A large communications satellite costs hundreds of millions of dollars. A large military satellite costs over $1 billion. Launch costs are simply not the constraining factor in the satellite industry.

However, SpaceX is promising to drive costs even lower through reusability. Then we'll see if there's actually as much price elasticity in launch services as Elon Musk is expecting. That will ultimately determine SpaceX's legacy, whether it is a revolution or not.

If you want to see some sci-fi magic, just look at the Space Shuttle, That's some amazing witchcraft right there.

A reusable spacecraft that costs more than an expendable launcher?

Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi by land area.

Michigan is larger if you include part of the Great Lakes.

Japan had been allied to Germany. The Wehrmacht had been one of the most effective fighting forces the world has ever known. The Imperial Japanese Army had been formed on the Prussian model back in the 19th century.

The German Wehrmacht had just been defeated by the Soviet Army three months earlier.

Also, the Japanese army had already tried and failed to defeat the Soviet army in 1939. In fact, that's how Zhukov got his first Hero of the Soviet Union award. That was in 1939, before the massive Soviet arms buildup, before the dissipation of Japanese strength in the Pacific.

A Japanese general would have to be delusional to think that he could hold out against the Soviets in 1945.

I think that the real problem is that most people will not pay for 5 different streaming services. Remember, the median family income in the US is only about 50k, which I'm guessing is less than most people here make by themselves.

Why won't they pay for 5 streaming services? They're already paying for 100 channels.

Remember, cable or satellite TV together have 80% penetration in the United States. That means that your median family with the $50k income is paying close to $80 per month for video entertainment. ($80 happens to be Comcast's video ARPU.)

If the end-game is the unbundling of video content from the delivery mechanism, then that $80 will buy a lot of streaming services. Probably more than five. Depends how they're bundled.

I can believe that their technology works. I've been hearing about this sort of stuff for ten years before I first heard of Theranos. Search for "lab on a chip." There are grad students working on this sort of stuff at every major research university.

However, the $9 billion valuation feels bubblish. Consider that Quest and Labcorp are both $10 billion companies, and Theranos is talking about driving down the price of testing. They need a lot of elasticity in this market to make the numbers work out.

Since NT 6.0 (Vista), graphics drivers run primarily in user mode. There is still a kernel mode component, the miniport driver, but it is kept small to reduce the likelihood of crashes.

There are some other drivers that also run in user mode, but graphics drivers were the really big change. Most bluescreens in Windows XP were caused by graphics drivers.

Since Vista, Windows has been able to recover from a failure in the graphics driver. The screen blinks for a second, and then a balloon notification comes up, saying that the graphics driver has been restarted.

Well, corporations are launching new products all the time. Each new product can be thought of as a VC investment in a new startup.

However, the VC investors have to share the winnings with the founders, while the large corporations get to keep basically all of it. Oh, sure, the corporation might pay out bonuses and promotions, but this is a small fraction compared to what startup founders get to keep.

Thus, VC investors start out with a built-in disadvantage that they have to overcome: call it "founder drag." It's sort of like the race between active funds and index funds. The actively-managed funds have to overcome their higher expense ratio just to get back to even.

You don't even need an annual fee. Even a one-time fee is sufficient deterrent to blanket extension of copyright.

The old 56-year copyright term used to be split into two 28-year periods. You basically paid a one-time fee: half at the original registration, then half (adjusted for inflation) at renewal. If you didn't renew, then you got to pay half the fee for half the copyright term.

Only 15% of copyrights on books, periodicals, and music were ever renewed. The renewal rates were higher for maps (40%) and motion pictures (50%).

Thus, commercially-significant work was protected. However, the vast majority of work (85% of books!) only had an ephemeral cultural value, so the authors chose to take the fee discount and allow their works to enter the public domain.

Source: Divide 1977 renewals by 1950 registrations for each category. This is off-by-one (27 years instead of 28) because 1949 and 1978 tabulations aren't as easy to access. That's why I give round numbers.

A), ambitious and unrealistic are not mutually exclusive. It was ambitious and unrealistic to attempt a moon landing in under a decade.

That's absolutely not true. It was ambitious and totally realistic to attempt a moon landing in 10 years.

Kennedy only selected that goal after von Braun said that it could be done "by 1967/68". He even added an extra two years of padding, just in case von Braun was being optimistic.

Anyone who knew anything about space flight knew that Kennedy's goal was achievable. In fact, some thought that von Braun was gold-plating the program unnecessarily. McDonnell did some engineering studies for landing one man on the moon using Gemini and a Saturn C-3 (about half the payload capacity of a Saturn V).

If 90% of civil engineers would say in 2013 that Elon Musks hyperloop plan was realistic, then it would be where the moon landing was in 1961. But they wouldn't. In comparison to the moon landing, Elon Musk's hyperloop was wildly unrealistic.

Why? If you apply game theory, one of the three will try to defect and undercut the other two.

Because they're playing a repeating game. AbbVie and Merck are big pharma companies. They don't particularly want to get into a price war.

It would be different if a small biotech firm were coming in. They might not get a second shot at it for a long time, so they are much more likely to undercut on price.

Also, three is a low number. Defection is more likely when the number of players goes up.

Of course, they're not going to come in dollar-for-dollar identical to the pricing of Sovaldi and Harvoni. However, the insurance companies seem to be hoping for some really sharp drops in price, which are less likely.

The thing is, that's not happening at all. Nearly all US insurers are covering the new therapies. There are a couple that are holding out and only doing individual approvals.

So what are all the news articles about? A problem that is only hypothetical? The reporters don't seem to have a hard time finding cases of Hepatitis C patients who have been denied:

http://kaiserhealthnews.org/news/most-illinois-medicaid-pati...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/28/359553282/insurer...

Then there's the fact that AbbVie and Merck are coming into the market soon with their own Hepatitis C drugs that also have 90% cure rates. It seems hard to believe that either of these companies will come in significantly below the price of Sovaldi, but that's what the insurance companies are hoping for.

Why not take a page from the financial industry?

Solvadi could be paid for with monthly payments, say, 90% of the average price of conventional Hepatitis C treatment. Once the total payments add up to the price of Solvadi, they stop.

The patient gets cured right away. The healthcare system sees a 10% savings instead of a $90,000 bill. Gilead gets a smoothed-out income stream that helps to insulate it from the feast-or-famine cycle.

What's more, this places a built-in limit on the price of the drug. If Gilead sets the price too high, then the monthly payments never add up.

In a system where the patient could switch insurers, the monthly payments would have to be imposed on the new insurer. Otherwise, we're back to the US game-theory standoff.

The British National Health Service can make that trade-off. Because the NHS covers the entire population, it knows that it will recoup the high up-front cost by avoiding other treatment later in the patient's life.

An American insurer would rather put you on the older treatment and make your life so miserable that you switch to another insurance company at the next open enrollment. It makes no sense in the aggregate, but it makes sense for any one insurer.

No insurer wants to have the most generous policy, because it will just attract Hepatitis C patients from other insurers, hitting them with the up-front costs. However, they would not get all the delayed savings, because the patients could switch to a different insurer after they were cured.

The only way to break the game-theory logjam is to force the drug to be covered nationwide. Then, all the insurers pay the up-front cost, and on average, all of them reap the savings.

There was a polio outbreak in China in 2011 that was traced back to Pakistan. Prior to that outbreak, the last case of polio in China had been in 1999.

The outbreak was contained after 21 confirmed infections plus another 23 suspected. The Chinese public health system mobilized 1000 health workers, spent $26 million, and vaccinated 44 million people.

If we can't get rid of polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then this will just keep happening.

NEJM editorial: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1311591

Some years ago, there was a video about the moon landing in Washington DC airport (it was at a Smithsonian exhibit or store or some such). It included video of the control room when the alarm went off during descent. There was silence and blank faces - nobody knew what to do.

You have to be careful interpreting something like that. Without the backstory, you run the risk of projecting your own emotions onto the events.

Mission Control was actually not very worried about the program alarms. According to Gene Kranz in his memoirs, the white team had been fed a program alarm during a pre-flight simulation. In fact, it was the last simulation they ran through before launch, so it was fresh in their minds.

During the simulation, Mission Control incorrectly called an abort. During the debrief, the instructors told them that the program alarm was non-fatal, and they should have continued to a lunar landing.

During the actual lunar landing, Mission Control was astonished to run into the same scenario. It was like running through the simulation a second time.

But by the time the alarm went off the second time on descent, it was completely different. Someone - whoever was in overall charge - called a role (something like "descent control officer") and that person responded "go", all within one second.

Neil Armstrong did have to ask twice, but he did get a response from Mission Control on the first alarm. Mission Control did not ignore the first alarm.

The delay was caused by having to consult a list of fatal and non-fatal program alarms. Once they had that list, it was easy to call a Go on subsequent program alarms. However, they couldn't just give a Go to the first alarm without checking the list.

Armstrong and Aldrin hadn't participated in that earlier simulation, so they were probably a lot more worried than Mission Control was!

Here is the transcript with references to Kranz's book: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.landing.html

Their revenues were $8.15 billion (just over $100 per customer, for the whole year). ... What's really shocking is that their revenue per customer relationship is under $130 per year.

You seem to be an order of magnitude off on your ARPU calculations. $8.15 billion in revenue (p. F-4) / 5.9 million customers (p. 1) = $1,381 ARPU

Either that, or you're mixing up monthly with annual. On p. 4, they calculate their monthly revenue per residential customer relationship at $108.

However, you are generally correct that the cable business is a tough business to be in. Lots of labor costs, lots of capex, lots of interest costs. On an ROA basis, they're not doing that much better than the regulated utilities.

Amtrak still uses motor-generators on some parts of the Northeast Corridor to convert 60 Hz AC grid power to 25 Hz AC traction power.

It's exactly what it sounds like: a motor that is mechanically coupled to a generator. The motor runs on 60 Hz AC and turns the generator at the correct speed to produce 25 Hz AC.

Sorry, I gave the wrong chemistry.

The carbon-chloride battery is labeled as "heavy-duty," because it has greater capacity than the carbon-zinc battery ("general-purpose").

When alkaline batteries were invented, the older chemistry continued to be sold as heavy-duty. This leads to the strange situation where the heavy-duty battery has less capacity than the other batteries you find on the shelf.

I've definitely bought bad (really cheap..) store-brand batteries that lasted inconveniently short. If it's Duracell I know it's good.

If you bought the cheapest battery on the shelf, then it probably wasn't an alkaline battery. A heavy-duty battery (carbon-zinc) has half the capacity of an alkaline.

If you buy Duracell, you know you will get at least an alkaline battery. Duracell simply does not sell heavy-duty batteries, hence the brand name: the durable cell. It's mostly a matter of brand positioning, rather than technology.

Rayovac uses one brand for both alkaline and heavy-duty batteries, which cheapens their brand when a consumer buys the wrong type and all the batteries die a quick death. Energizer addresses this problem by selling heavy-duty batteries under the Everready brand.