This reads like fucking Ender's Game meets Atlas Shrugged.
Some bozo makes shitloads in the internet goldrush, and thinks he's some kind of fucking genius, so he appoints himself to solve "solar power, space travel, and electric cars".
But... turns out he co-founded SpaceX (first civilian rocket to reach orbit), and is chairman of Tesla Motors. Fuck.
This is an excellent article. Those unable to read multi-page presentation would do well to acquire the capability.
I usually dislike multi-page, but I was surprised that I didn't mind in this case.
I realized that it's the latency of multi-pages that I don't like. This site loaded instantly (for me). A factor in this was that I adblocked all the ads (when I disabled adblock, loading was significantly slower).
I don't like waiting for page-loads. It breaks my train, and maybe also there's the uncertainty of whether I'll be able to finish reading, since pages sometimes don't load - this has happened to me.
Hmmm.. if someone cached their multi-page article in the client (including the ads) and switched dynamically pages with javascript, one could achieve the same effect.
These are also "webapp" issues, and I think why offline webapps (google gears, AIR, silverlight, javaFX) are so important. I guess it will also finally disrupt Microsoft's Windows platform, without needing a new hardware platform (previously, mainframes, minicomputers and workstations were disrupted by new hardware platforms - I don't see that happening to Microsoft).
I think I actually like multi-page in itself - it gives me a natural break, and also enables literal "bookmarking" (yes, like pages in a book) if I don't want to finish it all right now (or if I want to remember part). I actually wrote a little greasemonkey script to add in anchor names to headings on long essays (eg: pg's), so that I can bookmark them (with #).
I haven't read PayPal Wars in a while, but I thought Elon bought into the company after owning X.com and kinda mucked around and then got dismissed by the board.
Was thinking the same. As I remember, Elon's X.com merged with PayPal, then Elon proceeded to oust the original PayPal founders and convert all the PayPal infrastructure from linux to windows (which was X.com's platform of choice). All this infighting went terribly, but I don't remember who ended up on top in the end.
I'm not saying Elon did nothing for PayPal, because it's still dominant, so he probably helped it grow, but calling him a 'Founder' is a bit of a stretch.
Peter Thiel and Max Levchin ended up on top in the end. But they have since made up with Elon. (If Elon had 'won', Paypal would be on Windows and would be called X.com now.)
