I'm a manager at Microsoft and I can clear this up a bit, because it sounds totally random.

Your performance review determines your 'rewards', which is your 'merit increase' (salary), bonus, and stock award. Let's say you make $200k a year, and your maximum bonus range is up to 20%. Your target/expected bonus is half of that, so 10%. If you get a "100", this is really "100%" of your expected bonus, so you get 10% of $200k, or $20k bonus. If you have a great performance year and your boss gives you a 140, then you get 140% of your expected bonus range. This means that your top bonus percentage is "200%" of your expected bonus, aka your max bonus. I think this is purely for psychological reasons - people hear that they got a 100% and think that's awesome, vs hearing they got a 50% and being disappointed.

The other thing is that you can't give someone a bonus of 107 or something. It's only in 20-point increments and there are certain ones that (at least in my experience) aren't available, so the options are: 0 [you're being managed out], 60 [you're being given a stern warning], 80 [slightly underperforming, but not a big deal], 100 [expected - this is probably 50% of all employees], 120 [overperformed], 140 [wowowow], 160, 180, 200. The higher numbers are reserved for exceptional circumstances OR lower level employees who are early in career, so giving them a 40% larger bonus isn't that expensive for the company.

There's also quite a lot of wiggle room on the final merit/bonus/stock calculation, where your manager might give you a 120 - but then the overall studio or group or org or the whole company get slightly adjusted along the way. If you're in Azure, you might get a larger bonus all other things being equal over someone working on HoloLens or Xbox.

If it's good enough for Penn State, it should be good enough for me...

I've got 4 acres. Let's do some math and compare this against solar.

I did a rough calculation and found that, if I wanted to, I could install about 1MW worth of solar panels on my property. Scaling up to 10MW would take my nearest 10 neighbors, but lets roll with it. Cost would likely be in the range of $2/watt installed. (DIY I'm looking at $1) So call it $10m. In my area I pay $0.0981 per kWh, and I generate about 1400kWhr/year with a 1kW solar install. Or, to look at it another way, the sun shines 1400 hours per year here. 10MW worth of solar panels will generate ~14MWhrs per year and would return $1.37M in electrical energy, giving a payback period of about 7.3 years.

Assuming the nuclear is running 24/7 without any down time, always running at full efficiency - they'll generate 87.6MWhrs and have a return of $8.6M/year. Given the "under $100 million" price tag, they're looking at a payback period of around 11.6 years.. HOWEVER. Nuclear has ongoing costs and fueling, which I haven't included. And solar certainly has some maintenance and repair, but I really doubt it's going to be higher than nuclear.

This price seems, to me, to be completely reasonable and worth the expense. Even if its more expensive than solar, it's baseline power available 24/7, without the need for batteries. The 'using less land' bit is worthless to me, but a small reactor like this could power my entire town. A random business could install them somewhere ~50 miles out from a metropolitan area and it would be a fantastic investment. Imagine doing it in Southern California where they pay $0.35/kWh - payback period would be like 4 years!!

There is a standard - it's CCS. Tesla wanted their own proprietary thing, so they did that roughly 10 years ago - and now that CCS is everywhere, Tesla wants people to stop using the standard and to adopt their proprietary connector.

If Tesla had done this 5 years ago, we'd be in a much different situation. Also... what good is a Tesla Supercharging station if only Tesla vehicles are allowed to charge at them?

We agreed to 3 year contracts on all 5 houses on our street, with not major upfront install costs.

I really do think we need better protection laws for home buyers in these situations.

I purchased a house ~18 months ago, and prior to putting in an offer I called our cable company (Spectrum) and they assured me that I could get 1gig cable service. So we bought the house, and on closing day I called to set it up... They said they couldn't, because there was no line installed. They eventually quoted me $80k to install it.

It took me 18 months and lots of work to finally get a different company to lay 1/4 mile of fiber optic line (in a conduit that already existed) so that our neighborhood could all have fiber.

If someone had claimed that the house could get water, and then it couldn't - I could sue. Or if it wasn't wired for electricity or something. But not internet access - and that shouldn't be the case.

Liquid mirrors don't work in zero gravity...

Building it on the Moon buys us physics that makes it so when you spin the liquid, it creates a paraboloid rather than spinning it and creating a 'donut' or 'tube' of the liquid.

SN 1987A is approximately 167,885 light years away, and they are showing a change of around 4 hours.

4 hours divided by 167,885 years (4029240 hours) = ~0.00001% (I hope I did that math correctly).

So like.. if the age of the Universe is 13.7 billion years, we would incorrectly believe it was 13.7000137 billion years old.

Before watching the video, I thought "Oh, the back end folds into the passenger compartment, so it takes up less space. I wonder how they'll prevent people from getting crushed?"

After watching the video I thought "Wait... The whole back part of the car is hollow, and just wraps around the passenger compartment!?"

What the hell is the point? They've made a car twice as long, that is completely unusable space. Just cut that part off, and put the big black wheels in the spot that the small casters are. There, now your car is ALWAYS half the size!

I have worked at 3 game studios - Amaze Entertainment (now Griptonite), Sony Online Entertainment, and now Microsoft. I've worked on the PSP, PS3, PC, and Xbox One. I have worked on relatively short cycle year long games as the main programmer, I've written back end software for MMOs as a core-tech guy (mostly removed from the game) and as a part of the game team. I've worked on more MMO titles than most devs.

The closer you are to the game, the more hours you're going to work. SOE was particularly bad - I worked there for 6 years and only had a single real raise. The first two years was on a core tech team that was really awesome. My manager was super experienced, and we set time lines and expectations for raises, and he followed through. I learned a lot, and was making my way up. But then the team evaporated and I was put directly on a game team. I was promised bonuses that regularly fell through. "When we hit Alpha in June, you'll all get bonuses!" - Great! Oh... the game doesn't hit Alpha in June? Well, there goes June.. July... August... Game gets a facelift... Alpha the next year in June! Or July, or August. Get used to that. And promotions? Few and far between, and they always pull the "no promotions until we ship" card, which if you're working on a 6-year long dev cycle for an MMO doesn't make sense. I don't know of a single programmer who got a promotion while at SOE for the last 4 years when I was working there. At most places, if you're not directly on a team, you get a standard bonus at the end of the fiscal year - it's not huge, but it's pretty reliable. If you are on a game team, you get milestone bonuses instead, which get pushed around, and without fail they always claim that the parking lot will be filled with Ferrari's.

Management is usually bad. My last boss seemed bipolar about my performance. One month it was "Great! On track for a promotion at alpha!" to "We really expect you to put in 60 hours a week." When you're young and fresh into the industry, don't have a wife or kids, you can do 60 hours a week. But you're going to feel miserable doing it when you're trying to have a reasonable work/life balance, and with experience you'll realize that 60-hour weeks for a year is not sustainable. There was a month when I did 90+ hours every week to help a project ship on time - I didn't get a bonus, didn't get any time off, nothing, even though my manager for the project praised my work.

Of course, there is a reason I still work in games. The most passionate programmers are working in games. You get to do something you absolutely love, with really smart people, and make pretty good money doing it. At Microsoft I'm a bit more removed from the game team - which means I do my 40 and I go home. I think that you have to strive to find the balance that you want. I can't see myself ever trading my job for some boring programming position outside of games.

Being detained is not the same as being arrested.

Not really found. This is like trying to find a lost child, and your search dog picks up a scent, or you find a child size shoe.

Still lost. Not found.

It's you. I've flashed firmwares of hundreds of devices - motherboards, phones, video cards, embedded systems, routers, etc, and I have never once had one of them brick.

It doesn't make much of a difference to Kepler.

Kepler measures the light level over time, and uses the amount of obstructed time to make most of it's calculations. It does also use the total light output difference to determine the size of the planet (really the ratio of the size of the planet to the size of the star) - but the error bars are pretty big anyway, way more than the total light output of dark side of the Earth.

The only way that Kepler would miss the planet all together was if the alien civilization made their planet put out as much light as their star.... Not very likely. An advanced civilization might want to make their planet as bright as daylight all the time, but that would be much less bright than the star.

Use a web-based (GoToMyPc.com?) or pre-installed remote administration app (Windows Remote Desktop? maybe VNC?) - or install RealVNC and use it's web app. Then control your home PC and run whatever IDE and language you prefer. I'd recommend Visual Studio Express and C# or C/C++, but that's just personal preference.

You're not comparing apples to apples.

First of all, you're ignoring the amount of energy required to import and refine the gasoline. I've heard estimates as high as 8kWh per gallon for refining. Most of the power plants in the country use coal, which doesn't have an energy intensive refining process.

Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that 40% of electric vehicle owners have solar panels. This negates that pesky coal power plant and its transmission deficiencies.

If you compare the efficiency of the vehicle itself, when you put electricity into an EV, it is 85%+ efficient. If you put gasoline into a car, it is 25% efficient (max). With a gasoline car, no matter what technology comes out, that vehicle will never be more than 25% efficient. With an EV, if you want to have a green car, you can buy solar panels and charge your car that way. Or you can live in an area with wind, solar, geothermal, or nuclear sources (Southern California) and offset pollution that way. Or you can join a program with your electricity provider, and pay a little extra, and get a higher percentage of your electricity from renewable sources.