If you haven't already, you should try making an appointment with a sleep doctor. Mine was able to write me a new prescription without a new sleep study, just a regular office visit. Make those insurance companies pay for what you are entitled to!
The article that graph comes from indicates that is self-reported data from the companies which may not be consistent in what is considered R&D vs. marketing cost.
For small businesses, Zenefits and other brokers offer almost exactly the same rates, which are the list rates of the insurance companies. The negotiation only comes in to play with larger companies (currently 50+ employees, next year it will be 100+, I think). For us, Zenefits seemed slightly more expensive, but it is hard to tell since they didn't give us good comparison data based on employee ages and coverage.
If you want to leverage the large company rates as a small company, you need to explore the PEO model, which Zenefits does not support, but ADP does (and several others).
I'm not really a big fan of ADP, but if Zenefits really did refuse to work with ADP to implement a real integration, I don't have much sympathy for Zenefits. They have enough funding they should be able to do things the right way now. I think Zenefits is trying to solve a real problem for small businesses, but we chose not to use them because the cost and the service level didn't make up for their nicer UI.
I think it is fair for people who make an enduring product to be compensated for that over their lifetime. I don't think your 20 year old burgers are still in demand, so no royalties are needed. If I wrote software to power a website (or an app) that is still in use 20 years later and people are still willing to pay to access it? Sounds reasonable to me.
I think your chances of succeeding in your startup increase tremendously if you've taken a couple of years to work at another startup, see what is required to make it work, and see what problems you want to avoid, before starting your own. I also think, for CMU in particular, students have less exposure to the Silicon Valley startup culture than Stanford students. Hopefully that is better now than when I went, but being naive about the business side of things can have some pretty negative consequences when you try to start your own thing.
Of course, if you really have an idea you are passionate about you should go out there and make it happen. But maybe find some other more experienced CMU folks to give you some advice while you do it :)
How about the steps noted in the post? Make sure you have a good password, use two-factor authentication, and be careful about clicking on any login links? It could also be incentive to change accounts, or change to a different communication mechanism. As long as this warning is triggered by actual data, I am not sure how you could categorize it as "FUD" or even political activism. Hacking into accounts should not be political - it should be criminal.
The study multiplies the information density by the rate of speech, and you are correct, the Japanese rate of speech is the highest, but it did not compensate for the low information density. This is likely a result of the small number of syllables present in the language (~400 compared to ~7,900 in english).
Of course, as many people here are saying, the analysis is based on written text and reading out loud, not spoken conversations, which would probably require a different analysis.
You should take a look at the research - there is established evidence for the impact of television on language development. The book NurtureShock gives a nice overview, but if you want to go directly to the research papers it looks like there are plenty of papers like this:
The problem with TV in particular seems to be the lack of interactivity. Children learn best by getting meaningful feedback from other people, and television cannot provide that. iPad apps and computers should be able to overcome that limitation, but I think we're early in the process of understanding the most effective ways to provide that for children, especially young children.
I am pretty sure the NFL would shut down any distribution very quickly - not sure how much of an opportunity there is if it blatantly violates someone's IP rights. What I don't understand is why the NFL wouldn't use it to generate more revenue. Do they really think the criticism would be any worse than it is today with 24/7 sports talk and online message boards? Why not have the criticism be more grounded in reality?
Can you give some more detail about what your process was for determining code quality? Just getting people to get a checkout and read through it? Running static analysis tools? Examining commit histories?
Everyone is focusing on mobile patents, but what impact does this have on the lawsuit with Oracle? Didn't Motorola have a Java license? Would that protect Google?
Can someone explain this for people who are not familiar with the way these affiliate programs work? Were people not paying taxes on affiliate revenue and would now have to start? Or is this a tax on the end customer buying from Amazon (which would be forced to collect CA sales tax)? How do either of these impact startups in CA? Does this impact businesses registered in DE that have an office in CA?
Shouldn't someone have to show actual damages in order to sue? The California Unfair Competition Act seems to be about unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business practices - I don't immediately see how that is relevant.
My guess is this is going to just force Dropbox into some kind of settlement because it will be cheaper than fighting it. And the lawyers promoting this get a nice cut, of course.
Does corporate insurance cover this sort of thing? How does a company protect itself from these kind of lawsuits?
How much of Microsoft's difficulty integrating things into Windows is a result of the anti-trust lawsuit they went through? People seem to forget that Microsoft went through 3 years of worrying that the government would break them up because they bundled a browser with Windows. That had to have changed how they felt about bundling new things into the OS. Or do people think it was long enough ago that the culture has moved on?