The economic consequences of non-compete agreements are interesting, to say the least.
I'm curious to see what happens to average salaries for programmers over the next few years if this investigation results in more competition. I'd also like to see if programmers care enough to bounce back and forth even more for salary bumps, but that's harder to measure.
Salaries may increase but more likely it will become like wall street for the most valued employees--that is, a bonus & stock options culture. So, for example, your base is 90k with 30k in options that vest in 3 years and a 15k year end bonus. So if you're thinking about making the jump to MegaCorp Inc. they're going to need to offer you a significantly better deal to cover your lost earnings.
Doesn't this happen already? Moreover, I don't think it will ever get as unbalanced as wallstreet compensation was at the height of the financial boom simply because we aren't as "close to the money" as traders are. E.g. A trader has a P&L so it's very easy to calculate how much value he brings to the firm. For an engineers working in industries other than finance the calculation isn't as straightforward and requires more art (read: politics) than simple calculations.
Note that this could in part be an attempt to circumvent the unenforceability of non-competes in California.
I keep banging on this drum, but it bears repeating: Silicon Valley/the Bay area is unique in the world, and compared to other would be competitors, in the US at least, is unique when it comes to public policy on non-competes.
Sure, but let's hear about the meetings he's holding with contributors, committees, or industry. Blacking out your site tells us where you stand on an issue but telling people what you are doing with your elected position to move that stance forward is even more powerful.
In any event, I applaud the congressman for his position.
I think the point is a bit clearer if you imagine each song having its own market.
I am not a member of the market for dubstep.
I am a cheapskate in the market for Taylor Swift songs - I'd never pay full price, but I could be tempted if they were twenty cents each.
I am a paying customer in the market for old blues albums.
So any one consumer is not always a cheapskate or always a paying customer. Every consumer is a cheapskate in most markets.
> and a greater challenge for SSDs trying to catch up with the amount of storage on offer.
This technology is pretty much exclusively for backups, no? Not really the competitive space for SSDs. With only a single read/write head and 18TB of information on a drive, you're looking at an enormous performance bottleneck.
increasing plate density has been the primary driver of the increased stream performance of the HDDs - with the same rotation speed the more dense plate results in the more bits to fly under the head. Random IO of course is a different beast. Though is you look at the data filling the disks - like movies - it is more about stream not random.
So you're saying as an official comment from a Facebook employee that Facebook at no time sell personal data? Not even marketing profiles as composites? This is/would be big news to me.
In a way one could argue that allowing targeting of ads so tightly, using personal data, is commercial gain through that personal data. Not sure I'd personally push it that far though.
> So you're saying as an official comment from a Facebook employee...
I come to, and comment on, this site because I believe it is filled largely with people of an above-average sophistication when it comes to these kinds of issues. Don't make me reconsider with this kind of inanity.
I'm just trying to clarify - sorry if you think certainty is not sophisticated enough for you.
If you can't make the statement for legal reasons then say that. If you can't make the statement for other reasons say that. If you don't want to comment officially then say that. I don't think it's that inane - either they (you) do sell data or don't; just strikes me that if you can't make such a statement officially then you're not likely in a position to really know if it's true or not.
TBH I'd just assumed that FB do sell such data, to know that they don't sell any personal data (as I indicated) is a big result IMO and one that I don't feel I've seen championed. Pretty much I assume any website with a large subscriber base sells such data unless they explicitly tell me they don't; even then I'm rarely convinced.
Apple's patent on "hand scaling velocity" simply gives a mathematical formula for the sentence: "scale at a speed proportional to how fast the fingers are moving."
There is nothing groundbreaking or advanced about the math here, or the idea behind it. Anyone implementing a multi-touch screen is likely to come to discover that a fixed scaling speed sometimes feels sluggish or awkwardly fast, and so that speed should adjust based on user input. And now, without realizing it, they've infringed on Apple's IP and are open to being sued.
Yes, the math he shows there from Apple's patent looks very obvious. Anyone looking to implement detection of multiple touches on a touchscreen would end up with basically those equations, or others that are functionally equivalent to them.
I want to give TFA's author more credit, but I worry that he is just copy-pasting some math, in hopes that math will just look incomprehensible and hence novel. But that a patent has some equations in it doesn't make it novel. This math certainly isn't.
If you want an example of a patent that actually does have nontrivial math, then the MP3 patents for example qualify. (Whether you think even that should be patentable is of course still an open question - but at least the math in the MP3 patents isn't obvious.)
For a lot of people, 'simple' and 'mathematical formula' is practically an oxymoron. I know, I know, it's a cliche to point it out, but it also illuminates the heart of the problem: The patent examiners are too overworked to pick up on the obviousness, and it doesn't look obvious to most people. It looks densely complex and inscrutable to most people. (The notion of whether we need to allow patents to be densely complex and inscrutable in the first place is another issue.)
Therefore, it's difficult to communicate just how bad the patent is to enough people to convince lawmakers to change the system.
Don't you end up eating the digestive system of the bug along with the rest of it? The sticking point for me is not that the animal is a bug, but that I am eating its waste. Never having eaten bugs, I'm not sure how exactly this works out.
When eating shrimp and lobster, you are typically eating the processed muscle mass (and shell, if you are into that), rather than the whole animal in one bite.
Typically wild insects meant for food are allowed to eat flour or corn meal for a couple of days in order to flush their digestive systems of whatever they may have been eating before. This isn't as big of an issue for farmed insects.
I'm curious to see what happens to average salaries for programmers over the next few years if this investigation results in more competition. I'd also like to see if programmers care enough to bounce back and forth even more for salary bumps, but that's harder to measure.