smokinn's comments

Prop 13 limits property tax to the value of the house when you bought it unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value.

So what happens in other locations is that demand for locations starts going up, housing prices go up, taxes go up and people who can't pay those taxes get displaced. Developers buy those houses, raze them in favor of apartment complexes and eventually you get density.

If people can stay in their single family 1.5 or 2 million dollar homes and pay property taxes on the 30k they bought it for 30 years ago density won't happen because those are the people that vote and they'll keep voting for municipality limits on building to "keep the character of the neighborhood".

fleitz makes a very good point. You'll be getting hit with treble damages which you definitely don't want.

If that's your most pressing concern about expanding the business you should probably consider challenging the validity of the patent if it's truly as obvious as it seems.

http://info.legalzoom.com/challenge-patent-21969.html

That wasn't the inventor, it was the CEO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Heselden

You're right. I was purposely straining the term.

What I'm saying is that CIOs of pretty much every medium to largish company needs to justify their salary to the other C*s.

If he can justify it in terms of cost savings he justifies his salary. Right now, big companies either buy appliances (at huge cost and medium support cost) or build their own networks at small (or maybe huge) cost and huge support cost.

And what I really mean by "cloud" is the fact that pretty much any CIO will call a rack of servers with any virtualization vendors' software running on the bunch of them as the cloud. And honestly it's not wrong. If your company's culture is built right whether your "cloud" is "private" or otherwise shouldn't matter.

If Microsoft can turn the enterprise into the desktop, every enterprise on our software as a new goal. Which mean abandoning huge margins, they could make huge dents into SAP, CGI, IBM, Accenture and all these huge terrible enterprise software vendors. All of them combined are a huge opportunity for Microsoft to steal all market share from and honestly I think Microsoft could definitely pull their 90s tactics and be successful.

What about recycling the "private cloud" into something actually useful?

Microsoft has amazing expertise into taking any computer a 3rd party provides and making it work with their software. What about providing "cloud services" that can be guaranteed to never exit your own corporate firewall? I imagine this is going to be a huge need in the near future. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were a standard EU regular within 5 years.

This seems like an amazingly huge opportunity they could capitalize on. Become the standard software cloud solution of all software the way they they own email in the enterprise with exchange. Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them.

Same here for Comcast in Seattle. From 6-8pm I can't stream youtube on anything more than 360p or it buffers constantly.

Other video streaming services seem to stream fine (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video) and speedtest.net reports 56Mbps down, it's just youtube that suffers.

There's also Google's own version of trimmed down youtube: http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta

After enabling that I've never looked back. No comments and loads way faster.

In politics, getting anything done from scratch in 4 years is pretty hard.

That said, this is hardly some half-hearted promise. He ran on this promise and worked hard on pushing it through. In fact, when I moved I made sure I was in a coverage area because it's supposed to be become available in Q1 2014:

http://gigabitseattle.com/areas/

http://gigabitseattle.com/faqs/customer-faqs/#faq-425

He didn't quite get it done in 4 years but if it does come out in Q1 it'll have been 4.25 years which isn't bad considering the scale of the project and how many entrenched interests you have to fight.

Thousands is kind of downplaying it too. 32 thousand in the us alone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...

Probably in the hundreds of thousands globally.

Self-driving cars can't come fast enough.

Although Google is usually the brand associated with self-driving cars, DARPA actually did most of the work. The self-driving car challenge went on for many many years with ever increasing goals until DARPA decided the tech works now and stopped the competition.

Google then hired the team that won the last several competitions and kept the ball rolling.

Seems to me like this is the only path towards true innovation since companies are great at exploiting existing tech and making incremental and efficiency improvements but are usually really bad at making great leaps forward. If you provide incentives divorced from the market for desirable goals the market can later pick up the successes and build on them.

One of the problems with for-profit is that the company is likely to sell its community out if they think that'll make them more money. See: Elsevier buying Mendeley and the backlash from that: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/201...

This Onion talk put it really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_...

The article certainly seems wrong. Other than Hawaii which is an obvious outlier (36.61) the most expensive mainland electricity in the US is in California at 16.71.

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...

In the Europe the story is quite similar. The country with the most expensive electricity is Denmark at 29.5 but most vary between 10 and 20 cents.

http://www.energy.eu/

I don't believe it's at-will employment though in the UK.

You have to give a month's notice because your employer can't arbitrarily show up at your desk, say pack up your stuff and get out of the building within the hour (with security hovering around you and your computer locked down) and this is the last day we're paying you for.

The current sense of the term in which I use it now is capital-maximizing. If you have money, if you're capitalistic, you should be investing in what can make you the most money, or, if you're bought in to a system, you should be extracting the most "value" from it as possible.

I'm not using it as a political term, rather to describe our current, quarter-profit-maximization system driven by the stock market and public company board + CEO directives for how to run a company.

It's great for efficiently using capital to exploit existing innovations but it's really bad at things like investing in the public, social good of things like healthcare.

Sounds like the problem isn't actually medicare, sounds more like it's adding a capitalistic, profit-maximizing middleman into the system.

60% of that most certainly does not go to the creators.

The creators only get a small fraction of that and only after they've repaid their studios' various costs. A lot of the studios' costs come entirely out of their artist's royalties. Here's Courtney Love famously explaining how an album can gross 11 million dollars, the studio makes 6.6 million profit and the artist never sees a penny:

http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

Actually if you're interviewing at one of the big tech companies this is great advice for that as well.

For the rank and file 2 weeks is standard.

For upper level executives as soon as you resign you're escorted out the door by security and you're not allowed to touch anything. The level of access you had was so high that they don't want you learning anything more about the company's plans and want you out asap.

I doubt anyone cared that she resigned by phone.

How is it borderline impossible?

There's a technique pretty much every company that knows what's it doing applies to figure out exactly what you mentioned and it's called downstream impact analysis.

I'm absolutely 100% certain if you're an executive at Apple and you ask your finance department what the downstream impact is of an iPhone sale the finance department will come back with numbers for the profit variance when the customer wasn't already a customer, when they already were and a bunch of other scenarios.