wow. The hero worship is strong with you. I agree that he has accomplished some pretty cool things, but calling him a "once-in-a-century" or "once-in-a-generation" person ignores all of the other people who have been as or more successful than him in multiple dimensions of success.
I don't think it's entirely unfair to say he's a "once in a generation" person (once in a century is pushing it), but that has little to do with his actual abilities, and more to do with his perceived abilities. He's got that combination of engineer, businessman and celebrity that people go crazy for. He's the modern Howard Hughes, and people love that. Whether he can deliver on people's expectations or not, he's a rarity.
please name some of these people who have been as or more successful - and don't go by wealth alone. I'm talking disrupting multiple, huge industries with innovative products.
I think Elon has accomplished a lot, but I think you're ignoring the fact that every one of his companies is still surprisingly risky. Tesla might not get another loan and it could go under in a year. SpaceX has fantastic margins, but they still have significant hurdles with failed launches (although this is true of rocketry in general) and navigating a political landscape. Solar City was going under when Elon saved it by combining it with Tesla, a very controversial move.
Elon has yet to run a profitable electronic vehicle company. Elon has yet to run a stable alternative to NASA. Elon has yet to ween the world off its oil dependence. He is working towards all of them and it's great! But he hasn't succeeded in disrupting any of them yet, because all of the alternatives still exist and are as healthy as ever.
An alternative to NASA is an odd and incorrect way of describing SpaceX. NASA is a customer to SpaceX, there is no intention of being a NASA alternative. You could say they want to be an alternative/competitor to the aerospace and defense contractors though
Sure. Alistair Pilkington and Arthur Fowle, between the two of them invented the technologies used to create almost all glass. It might not seem like it's high impact, but from the glass in office buildings, to automotive glass, to smartphone/tablet/TV glass, two highly impactful people who touched more than Elon Musk has.
Allan Alcorn invented Pong. It spawned and inspired an industry that grew to almost $100 billion, and the technologies used in video games have spread, again, to every aspect of technology, to the point that Microsoft used Cortana, a video game character, to leverage name/brand recognition with gamers in one if it's core products.
Bill Gates, for better or worse, transformed the personal computing industry, and has been on a humanitarian campaign for the last several years.
Setting aside food supply management politics, Robert Fraley introduced the first work on transgenic foods and continues to be a strong contributor to modern food science.
Norman Borlaug. "and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation" is the best introduction a human could have. If you don't know who he is or what he did, you owe it to yourself to learn more :)
Moving on to relative contemporaries:
Linus Torvalds made Linux, which as you may have heard, has impacted technology a bit.
Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau basically invented the web and inspired the modern web.
On the tech and financial side, Mark Zuckerberg has done quite well with Facebook, and for better or worse is driving connectivity into unconnected parts of the world.
Elon Musk is a visionary, and is pretty cool, but he is not exactly once-in-a-generation.
I literally laughed out loud at this. Obviously greatness is subjective, but you are really reaching if you think someone saving a billion lives isn't 'on the same level' as Elon Musk who has yet to go to the moon (although I'm sure he will), who has yet to make a profitable car company (this one I'm not so sure about), who has yet to change the energy infrastructure of the world (he's chipping away at this one steadily).
The important thing about history is it's written after the fact. If Elon Musk died today he would be remembered for his work at PayPal and starting several ambitious companies before they achieved financial success. I'd wager that if he died today all of his companies would fail and he would be remembered for trying to do too much and working himself to death before he achieved his goals. He could very well end up as a Greek tragedy.
You are just reinforcing my point. You're listing people that are generations in the past, which is exactly what I said. you're grouping Elon into a once-a-generation / once-a-century type of person.
C'mon, Elon has surpassed all of these guys. Steve Jobs comes the closest, but he was a brilliant designer, not an engineer like Elon. Wayne Huizenga is an interesting character, obvious business genius, but nothing like Elon. Jeff Bezos is brilliant at executing, but he has only really built one company, and is dabbling/nowhere close to what Elon accomplished with space ventures.
Actually Elon isn't an engineer, he has Bachelor of Science degrees in Physics and Economics (Wharton) as well as 2 days worth of a PhD in Applied Physics and Materials Science (Stanford).
What I didn't know was that Jeff Bezos actually does have an engineering degree, a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (Princeton).
I disagree, being an engineer is similar to being a doctor, meaning you go through training and take an oath before officially becoming one. I wouldn't consider a colleague an engineer if they didn't take the engineering oath.
That's to be a registered engineer. It means you can sign off on human-used structures and machines. Lots of people are engineers, and just get a registered engineer to look it over and sign off before production.
- a key is made public, and we have to call a user or refund them (for retention purposes)
- a key is made public, and we revoked the key, potentially breaking the customers builds/deploys and potentially knocking a customers stuff out (if, for example, a key is disabled during a push to production).
Disclosure: I am the author of that post and Product Manager for this project as well as other related work like Certificate Transparency and Key Transparency.
While I can not say what Google will do in the future, I can say we are very supportive of Let's Encrypt. We have provided them funding and I personally act as an advisor to Let's Encrypt.
No, you are not. You have an illusion of control over your vehicle, and while you may have a measure of operability, the actual control of your vehicle is depending on the correct functioning of the software and hardware that manages the various controls in your car (gas pedal, steering wheel, brakes, etc), and the efficacy of your operation of the vehicle is entirely dependent on the driving conditions, including other drivers, weather, wildlife, etc.
In fairness, your operation of the vehicle has a substantial impact on the outcome of operating the vehicle, the the decision loop that your brain implements while driving is largely incapable of effectively processing and executing on the volume of information and variables that are in play in the circumstances that lead to high speed collisions.
Anecdotally you might feel in control, but it is probably worth noting that most people, drunk or sober, tired on fully awake, fully alert or texting, felt like they were in control when they were suddenly the cause of, or involved in a collision.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for ageism -- why?
There's no magic button you can push in your brain that says 'don't form conditional expectations based on protected categories'. If you're a recruiter and older candidates keep blowing you off, would you really continue to put in the same amount of effort to try to recruit them, even if you consciously attempted to?
Nah, self driving electric vehicles with 6 seats operating on an UberPOOL model will dominate, and it wouldn't be surprising to see the UberPOOL model be extended to a subscription service as well where you simply pay a commit for the service level each month, get an included number of trips, and a further discounted on trips over that number.
Having the commit will make it maore feasible to fund vehicles that are intended for a specific area, and the pool model allows Uber to recover margin during pricing surges and users who don't want to pay the commit (after all, the discount on the fare would only apply to the portion of the pool fare ascribed to the subscribed to the passenger).
One neat thing about this (that probably won't end up making that big a difference for most people, just those few with high-mileage commutes in low traffic areas) is minivans can safely go faster on the freeway than buses.
Yeah buddy, I don't know where you live, but I grew up in northern Manitoba, lived in Winnipeg, and in other parts of rural southern Manitoba. I have family throughout Alberta and Saskatchewan, and on the east coast. They have been following, promoting and loving Trumps message. If you don't think Trumps message resonated with blue collar folks in Canada, you better break out your filter bubble and take a look around, and think about what you want the political landscape of the country to look like after the next election.
The difference is that the U.S. is a heavily rural country, whereas Canada is the second most urbanized country in the world. Our hinterland is not sufficiently populous to elect a Trump-like figure.
A lot of QC is made of run down blue collar workers who are on hard economic times, and somewhat xenophobic. I'm wouldn't be so quick to say Trumps policy would fail here.
The problem for them though is that they are also French, so things like the ADQ are tied to the inevitable "we'd be better on our own" and don't ever leave the province.
