My late Dad had that so I checked myself for it. It sounds like there's a golden period (of around 2 years since the first consistent back pain) where the development of the condition can be stopped. Have you passed that period?
Student loan is quite inefficient, people going to University of Phoenix with low job acceptance rate majors get the same/similar interest rate with people going to Stanford for Computer Science. One side is way more likely to pay back than the other. That side is the horse, while the other one is the burden to the portfolio.
There are for-profit schools which spend 70% or more of their budget to solely marketing. I don't see they are producing good workforces.
Long term value: driving the masses to correctly study things that have higher chances of concretely contributing to society on short - medium term. I think it's quite valuable.
SoFi's way to survive is to collect high quality borrowers which risks are smaller than the average of the student loan portfolio.
Let's say govt gave all 8% (idk the real numbers) for everyone, but there are good students/alumnis in it whose risk are calculated actually as 4%, SoFi would refinance the loan with 5%. 1% margin is for SoFi.
Borrower is happy, SoFi is happy, student loan system gets a slap of reality in the long run & people would realize the inefficiency of the loaning system.
In the next phase after they have gathered the good borrowers, SoFi needs to nurture them to ensure their productivity, while offering other finances if needed. This is still not materialized yet I think. But, acquiring good borrowers & continuously serving them is the holy grail of the business I think.
Bakrie is one of the big players in the politic of Indonesia. It makes sense for him to try to control the (maybe 2nd) most used social media platform in Indo. He probably expects to have the same influence as what Obama 2008 digital campaign team had.
Being an investor for Path (and potentially have some say to their roadmap) is not the same with Obama 2008 digital campaign team. I doubt Abu Bakrie can utilize Path (since it's a close/private social network) the way Obama team did with social media back then and most recently.
This is Bakrie VC group, not Bakrie himself. More like his sons/daughters (second generation) using Bakrie's wealth, not him.
This is more like "my cars are better than yours" among the rich in Jakarta. Follow the startup scene there and you'll realize a pattern.
The richest family in Indonesia not too long ago bought kaskus.co.id (one of the most trafficked website in Indonesia) for $60M (rumour) and I'm almost sure the ROI is Mission Impossible (^_^).
It's more "I've got lots of money, gotta spend some somewhere...".
"...scientifically literate government leaders who push for evidence-based policies and demonstrate a scientific outlook are needed more than glib panderers with attitude."
In my subjective experience, scientifically literate leaders usually have way better attitude than ones who are not that literate.
B&N's Nook used Android. MS claims to have patents that cover Android stuff. MS wanted B&N to pay licence fees for that patented technology. B&N wanted to find out what exactly was covered. MS claimed that to disclose that information (which is in a public patent) they'd have to get B&N to NDA. Eventually, a list of patents arrive, and they're all for tiny stupid trivial stuff or for really old stuff; yet MS was trying to charge for them as if they were worth a full OS.
You're welcome to try. The problem is that the Rascal fetches a new image from the webcam after every click. In order to make sure that the bulbs have turned on (or off) before the image is updated, Eerik added a 1 second delay in the loop. I think this makes it impossible to toggle the bulbs at more than around 0.5 Hz (1 second on, 1 second off).
If it weren't for the delay, you could hit 300 Hz or so. You could probably even dim the bulbs with PWM if you wanted.
To kill a light bulb, it may well be more effective to cycle them at 0.5 than at 300 Hz, anyway-- you get more thermal cycling, and maybe even some interesting dynamics from the relay bouncing.
