The notion of 'reduce and refine' is one I've pursued. I truly believe that by making things less complex, by finding innovative ways to make sustainability affordable, we can advance the notion that it is possible.
It is hard to think of practical applications of the black hole. Because practical applications are so remote, many people assume we should not be interested. But this quest to understand the world is what defines us as human beings.
One of the companies that we've invested in is called Facebook. In only two years, between 2009 and 2011, the information exchanged between people increased 28 times. And that cannot be explained by new people joining Facebook.
Reddit strives to be a community-oriented link-sharing and news site, which means that all our content is submitted and voted on by members of our community. We don't interfere with that process at all, either in an editorial or curation capacity.
We are working to understand the tastes of people born in the 1980s and 1990s - it is very different from my generation. We do our own research. Marketing research companies, I think, are relatively academic.
People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don't really need to understand humans so well.
Somehow, the company must stay true to the founding vision while avoiding the pitfalls of rapid growth - and perhaps survive the hiring of a previously successful executive who doesn't work out.
NASA works for the White House. There are many at NASA that wish they were building a modern replacement for the Shuttle. However, they had marching orders to instead work on other things, some of which should have no place in a research organization...
You got to like your work. You have got to like what you are doing, you have got to be doing something worthwhile so you can like it - because it is worthwhile, that it makes a difference, don't you see?
Free speech is against governments, not against the NBA. So the players and coaches and indeed owners have been fined for their speech, which is costly rather than free. I sort of acknowledge that there is not free speech when you agree to work in th...
There was a second problem that was still not a technical problem... the project became classified. I couldn't work on it after having gone to all that trouble. I was considered a security risk, so I could not get a clearance.
I was an online service provider. It's not my job to police what people are uploading. It's the job of the content owners, and the law is very clear. If you create content, and you want to protect your copyrights, you have to do the work.
I think that our primary concern is that the membership in our industry become active. I'm not talking about the candidates being active. I'm talking about the few hundred thousand people who work in the industry around the United States.
My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.
Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.
I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.
There are confirmed stories of people who can break instruments and cause them to fail by walking in a room. I'm the opposite - I can walk into a room and something will work better than it is supposed to.
Can you hang in there with your investigators when things get going tough? Don't give up on investigators because they have a little weakness. Work with them until the Holy Ghost tells you not to.
You have to look at why people come and work at Nest. Part of it is that a lot of people here already know each other, but we're also on a mission with a purpose. People are personally motivated by energy or safety.
There aren't a lot of cover bands that do Boston material or do it well, and the reason for that is that they are hard to play. So we put a lot of work into it. The musicians that I've managed to surround myself with after all of these years are indi...
Free is not going to go away. Either the advertising model will still work, or there will still be literally hundreds of millions of people who want to put their information on the Net and want people to have access to it.
