The two top-rated entries in the HN comments for PG's essay are disagreements, both stating that the essay is flawed. I'm not so sure the groupthink is really that bad here on HN.
Just staying, our literally written policy was "Offer DDD": donate, destroy, or "dispose of" (a polite euphemism for "You keep it") the misshipped item. I would have added the Christmas flourish if I were saying it in December, too, but the options would have been the same in July. (n.b. The business does not care what you do. We want to convey, in the politest possible way, that we both don't want it and don't want to talk to you about it.)
As a Microsoft employee, I'm also strongly encouraged to donate to the charities of my choice. Microsoft will match all of my donations, dollar for dollar, with no preferences (I know people who've had Microsoft match their donations to the EFF and FSF).
Worked at a non-profit for a while, and we had quite a few free licenses that were bought at the MS company store and then donated to us. They were a little tricky in their conditions, but nothing beats free for expensive licences.
For the record: http://techsoup.org is an organization that makes it easy for non-profits to get cheap/free software licenses and hardware. They've worked out deals with many major companies, not just Microsoft.
I laughed out loud on that one (made the guy next to me jump.)
I gotta say, good PR or not, easier or not, the email saying we noticed our own mistake, let something good come out of it, really does make me like them a bit more.
PayPal once refunded me out of their own pocket for a seller's obvious mistake. This was for about $30 USD and only a few months ago. I was blown away.
I believe PayPal refunded me simply so I wouldn't sue them... but who knows?
Here is the lowdown...
I purchased ~10 1500W rated ATX power cords on ebay from a seller in china.
I fired up 2-3 servers and the cords literally started smoking/melting under ~300 watts of load.
Upon dissection of the cords, it was obvious they were fakes and would never be able to stand 1500 watts of load. They were all comprised of hundreds of 30+ gauge wires.
Long story short... I had to pay for shipment back to china in order to receive a refund.
I wrote to paypal in my furious state, explaining how the seller had nearly burnt down my home (what if the cables went as soon as I stepped out for a smoke?)... and they refunded me literally out of their own pocket.
They said [sic] ... "typically you must return the items but in this case we will refund the payment for you".
I wrote them back wishing the seller would have been reprimanded some how or have had to felt the loss but that was the last I heard from them.
Gates is rumored to have scored a perfect 800 on the math portion or his SAT. He was studying Math at Harvard and published a paper in 'Discrete Mathematics' despite having dropped out before finishing undergrad:
I think there's reason to believe he could have been an outstanding programmer. Has anybody read the source code for a program verifiably written by Gates? Was Donkey.bas really written by him?
I do not know enough about his background to say one way or another whether he was a great programmer, but getting an 800 on the SAT math section isn't exactly a legendary achievement. It is weighted so that the number of people getting an 800 is not insignificant.
That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are "recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect 800. This wasn't true when Gates took it - perfect meant perfect then.
At my undergrad, something like 1 in 10 incoming freshmen had perfect SAT scores, and I know a couple of folks at Google with perfect scores as well.
"That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are "recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect 800."
Not true, for the math anyway. You can get a few wrong on the verbal section and still get an 800, and don't ask me how the writing works.
In any case, the effects of the 1994 recentering on higher-end scores (for whatever they're worth) are greatly exaggerated.
What percentage of Google queries do you think might eventually become WA queries? I'd say easily < 1%. I see the two as very complementary, not really competing.
"Eric realizes that if he’d had a bit more courage and self-discipline, and moved from mathematics into physics rather than programming, he would have been rather likely to have invented decoherence theory himself and become a physicist renowned for kicking the props out from under the Copenhagen Interpretation."
From the followup:
"I just turned 51. That means, in order to believe that I could do really strong and original physics work now, I’d have to start with a justified belief that I’m as talented as Hawking or Einstein. This is almost certainly not the case. I would say “certainly”, except that my general track record of creativity and insight is far enough off the mean to raise just the tiniest smidgen of realistic doubt about this. And I was, after all, ahead of the physics literature on something conceptually important at least once - even a lot of physicists never manage that."
One reads such words, and what can one say but... "esr."
Historically, our job security beats the Papacy hands down. Even excluding the early Popes who were martyred in quick succession, the average papal tenure is under 8 years, with a fair number of murders and alleged murders. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popes. So I think you're right about the Pope's envy :)
Regarding the job market, I do contract work in Colorado and have had no problems either. My programmer friends in the US, Europe, and Brazil are all gainfully employed. I think there's a chronic shortage of good programming talent that's not going away anytime soon.
I also have hope for more independent creation, especially since I prefer indie / weird art to blockbuster stuff. But as much as I like your scenario, copyright still plays an important role in it to enable creators to live doing this.
I wonder if people's attitudes will change when The Pirate Bay is ripping off these independent artists, as opposed to the Big Evil Cos.
