Tom Clancy books inspired by Computer Science
- Load Balancer
- The Edge Case
- Denial of Service
- The End User
- Greater or Less Than Zero
- The Concrete Superclass
- The Spaghetti Code (released under a pseudonym in 2004, to harsh reviews)
- Slab Allocator
- Greedy Algorithm
- The Cardinal of the Kremlin (due to a misunderstanding)
- Colonel Panic (also misheard)
Entrepreneurship in China →
China's state-controlled entities are not particularly profitable. A study by Qiao Liu, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, concludes that the average return on equity for companies wholly or partly owned by the state is barely 4%, despite the benefit of cheap leverage provided by government-controlled banks. According to a recently published paper by Mr Liu and a colleague, Alan Siu, the returns of unlisted private firms are no less than ten percentage points higher.
Capitalism wins again...
A Letter to Jon Bon Jovi (What's Really "Killing The Music Business") →
Steve Jobs isn't the problem here. The music industry is the problem—too many bad songs are the problem.
How sad...
You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
— Alan Watts (via notentirely)
The NYT Paywall and Comcast
If the Internet were truly something other than a non-competitive utility, why wouldn't we see Comcast negotiating to bring the content of the New York Times to all its subscribers at no additional cost to them?
Time Warner Cable and the NFL Network are embroiled in a battle over carriage of the station based on cost and cable tier, but that is only made possible by the fact that there are lots of cable companies that compete to bring the best programming, whether HBO, ShowTime, or the NFL Network.
If Comcast truly wanted both to differentiate and prove the merits of a non-neutral Internet, they would seek to make deal with content publishers like the Times. But they are not. It is as if they themselves are relegated to the facts that they are a unconcerned middleman in the way of publishers and subscribers and that the industry itself is non-competitive. After all, what point is differentiation when Comcast is the only provider to my apartment?
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly ... who knows great enthusiasm, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
— Theodore Roosevelt
God gave us eyes so that we might see; He gave us ears that we might hear; He gave us wills that we might choose, and He gave us hearts that we might live.
— John Eldredge, Wild at Heart
Cheaters Believe They're That Good, Even When They're Not →
We all would like to think we're great, but this desire can get us into trouble. In fact, the brain is extremely good at convincing us, despite all the evidence, that we have lots of positive attributes. A new study in PNAS finds that people who have cheated on a test predict that they will do equally well on a future test in which know they cannot cheat, even if this prediction is costly.