Your email isn't publicly available, nor is it accessible via your G+ link.
Mine is a gmail account, less the trailing 'ha' in my /. username.

Travel where?

And wow it's been a while since I posted here. I was quite rambunctious a decade and a half ago, wasn't I :-)

Perhaps learning calculus is about learning to think in abstract and increasingly difficult (although mathematically provable and correct) realms of intangible worlds.

And software engineering is nothing, if not that.

Take a look at ZTree.
Like TC but totally keyboard driven. I can't live without it.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bing

Turn off the WiFi adapter before putting your droid on standby.
Turn it back on when you wake it back up.
Your standby battery life will go from one day to over a week.

See also, survivor bias.

You'll get a few hits on this one, no doubt. Well, one for sure.
Any chance I could ping you directly with a few questions?

One word for you : Craigslist.
Assuming you're in a locale with decent CL usage, there's no better techno-recycle center.

Honestly I think you have it backwards.

Old school engineers doing it by hand had to know what they were doing.

Noobs with enough experience to 'look good' can have their deficiencies glossed over by the powerful CAD/CAM software, letting them build inconsequential assemblies that individually would work nicely in isolation, but fail as a whole because they didn't understand (or consider) the engineering and physics at the higher level.

Consider the difference between software engineering and programming. An average coder that knows his way around Eclipse can write a hand full of nice classes, but real software engineering by the heavy hitters can happen in a room without a computer - that's where you see the big picture.

but how often do you need to accelerate from a dead standstill to 60mph, as quickly as possible?

Eight or more times a day, each time I get onto the freeway in the middle of fast traffic. Merging into 70mph traffic when your can can only get to 42mph on the onramp and the odds of getting slammed from behind go up exponentially. Personally I like to be going about 10mph faster than the rest of traffic while I'm merging in, so I can ease off it a little to fit into the most appropriate gap in cars (at 70mph, most cars decelerate down to 55 or 60 a LOT faster than they can accelerate up to 80 or 85.)

8G ipod touch = $200
16G ipad (2nd generation) = $400

My guess is that the ipad mini will split the difference and retail for $300. They may take the difference between the ipod touch ($200) and the ipad 3 ($500) and retail out the ipad mini at $350, but I'm thinking that the Google Nexus 7 retail price is going to pressure the price of the ipad mini to come in at $300.

Civilization Revolutions.
Hate to admit it but I spent an hour Googling to see if it was available on the Android before making my final purchase decision on a phone last week.

This.

Want some incredible results from your software engineers? Here's all the culture you need :
Give them a very quiet place to work, free from distractions, and take away the barriers to success / productivity.
- Too warm? That's a distraction that will destroy any attempts at getting work done that day.
- One or more people having personal discussions loud enough that the dev overhears them? Esp if the chatty people aren't on the dev team? Another day's productivity pissed away.
- It takes a good developer half an hour or so to 'get in the zone' doing heavy / hardcore coding and debugging. If he has to get up and go find food all those balls in the air drop to the ground and he starts over again when he finally gets back from eating. Find out what they eat and have it magically show up at their desk about 11:45am and they will feed their face while they continue being productive. If they're billable that extra hour, then there is nothing on Earth that you could feed them that costs more than that billable hour (but odds are they will be happy with a subway sandwich and a bag of chips.)
- Need to request permission / wait for a signature before doing something routine? Need to wait to have someone else make changes that the developer could make (perfect example : DDL or DML changes in the developer database)? Another day's productivity lost.
- Figure out who the slackers are and cull the herd a little. A small team of shit-hot developers that work well together can deliver rings around a larger team mixed with good / weak players.
- Any meetings that are useless? Don't make them attend. Any meeting with 8+ non-developers in it is probably useless, from the 'does a developer need to be here' perspective.
- Give the heavy hitters more hardware than you can imagine them possibly using - they'll find a way to put four monitors, two servers and two laptops to good use, and anything they don't use they will pass on to someone that can. Nothing says 'I love you' to a good developer than a new tech toy, or a new laptop when their old one is about two years old.

All that 'team-building' crap? Save it. Want a real team-building exercise, send a few of them away to a conference and only give them one car so they have to stick together, give them enough rope to get in trouble together. When they come back they will be an Olympic quality team.

You know I can't do that, Dave.

I couldn't believe it so I went searching. My research supports everything you said.
My previous post was incorrect. The funny thing is that everybody above was making fun of the Yaris' ability to stop at 1G, but based on what I'm finding that's pretty close to the truth. That also surprised me. Two in one day. Ouch.