TimGebhardt

Except that Tim Cook has said on shareholder calls that they have more cash than they know what to do with. At that point they should distribute more to shareholders.

Seconded. My wife takes our twin two year olds to the library twice a week for library story time and to play with the gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine. Both my wife and my kids like seeing their friends (and nobody has to get snacks or clean up their house for an afternoon playdate).

That's all fine and well for people like us that don't necessarily do hard labor for 30-40 years. But those that have to do physical labor aren't actually living longer. The rise in life expectancy is due to a fall in infant death rates and the wealthy living longer because they have access to really good health care.

According to my recruiter's stats he told me that 93% of those that accepted counter-offers from their original company were looking for a job again within 6 months. The two scenarios were a) The company extended the counter offer to keep the employee long enough to carry out the contingency plan (i.e. hire someone to take his place and then fire the guy who they couldn't count on to stick around) or b) all the reasons why the guy wanted to quit are still there, except maybe the money one -- and rarely does someone quit solely over money. People will deal with less money if they love getting up and going to work in the morning.

Moore's law was simply an observation or a prediction about the computing market at that time: That the number of transistors on a chip would need to double every 18 months if the chip manufacturers hoped to get people to buy the next gen. He argued that people/companies wouldn't upgrade their existing equipment for a measly 10-50% increase in performance. They'd need to double performance if they wanted to get rapid turn over to the next generation of products.

Then down the line the smart people from those firms can disrupt the existing players at their own game or a new game when the current-elite get lazy or can't innovate. That's how the market's supposed to work.

Summary: Author hopes we don't find life on Mars because if it's dead that provides an ill omen for the human race. He thinks if life on Mars wasn't sustainable then he repeats the whole argument that there must be some reason why advanced civilizations can't manage to get off the original rock they're assigned to and that's why we haven't seen any other intelligent life.

I think OOP really took off in industry because it was easy to sell third-party modules. You could "plug in" this module that you purchased and it was easy to hook up. Markets have a way of doing that: the solution that wins isn't necessarily the "best" solution but the one that's easiest to sell.