1. Big waterfall software projects fail. I collect examples of project successes and failures, and I have never come across a large software project that was successfully delivered on-time and on-budget. It's like unicorns: People dream of them, but they don't really exist. The only way you even have a chance of delivering a big project is to break it into pieces and deliver a lot of small projects.

2. Government funding forces you to do waterfall projects. Funding for big projects must be approved, meaning that you have to get all the requirements and project planning defined up front. After that, even if you can work some iterations into the implementation, you are still basically doing a big waterfall project. See (1) above.

3. Politics (if you are more direct: corruption). Big government projects go through a horrible bidding process. The successful bidder must outsource parts of the project, and the outsourcing must be distributed to the right types of businesses (women/minority/whatever) in the right political districts. None of this has anything to do with getting a good project done. It's more like making your best developers write code while carrying sacks of cement on their backs and hopping on one foot.

4. Lastly, regulations. Back when I worked in government acquisition, we once has a small contract to let. One bidder was a company that had never done government work before, but they thought they'd give it a try. They underbid the competition by a factor of 3 or 4. My boss quietly took the CEO to the side and told him that he'd better double his bid, because he had no clue how much regulatory crap and how much paperwork was about to head his way. The company doubled their bid, got the contract, and I'm pretty sure they still lost money on the deal.

tl;dr - Who in their right mind wants to work on a project that is (2) doomed to failure from the start, (3) prohibits you from trying to do a good job and (4) is more about paperwork than anything else.

I don't live in London, but I have been there (and elsewhere in the UK) many times. Yes, the ubiquitous black cab is nice, and the drivers are competent. The question really is this: Should the government prohibit consumers from paying someone else for a ride?

As long as the customer understands that they are basically hitching a ride with an unknown private person, I just don't see the problem. If I want the assurance of a black cab, I'll flag one down. If I don't care, then I don't care - it's really not much different from sticking my thumb out and hitching a ride, except I have some assurance that someone will actually stop and pick me up.

So, you install solar cells, but you only actually get to use them when your car is in the carport - otherwise they're a wasted investment. Given that solar cells already cost more per kwH that most other types of electrical generation, that makes a whole lot of sense - not.

Anyway, is "functional art" mean to be a euphemism for "ugly as sin"?

If you want to put solar cells on a roof and attach them to the grid, more power to you. But that's not what they're touting here.

The libertarian view of this: Uber customers know that they are calling a car driven by some random person. If they want to do that, really, it's their own business. If they want the assurance of a background-checked driver, they are also free to call a taxi company. What's wrong with keeping the government out of it and letting people choose?

Turning a camera off - this should work the same as things like medical hotlines. For most hotlines, every call is recorded. You, as a patient, can request that the recording be turned off. Your request will be recorded, and then nothing more (at least, that's how it is supposed to work).

It should be the same for police officers: Sure, there are times they may need to turn the camera's off, but the reason should be clear and should itself be recorded. In the absence of a justification, the camera should always run.

Note that the plaintiffs are not the manufacturers, but two random owners of Android phones. This is nothing but lawyers abusing the U.S. legal system, trying to extort a settlement out of a big company.

When is the U.S. going to get around to tort reform?

why don't we also stop using the term "congress critters"

It's just a euphemism, we all know what we mean. Anyway, "corrupt sociopath" doesn't have the same cachet...

Depends on what "online communications" are.

If you mean things like Email, the answer is "none" - simply because Email-encryption remains too difficult for people to setup and use, so no one does.

If you include browsing, well, since Snowdon, the websites I run are https-only. Unfortunately, most sites haven't taken this step - and anyway, it only helps if you also block the trackers and take other privacy measures.

Orbital launch cost is a red herring; it's expensive, and this isn't going to change. We live in a whopping big gravity well.

The goal has to be building an infrastructure. Get mining and production infrastructure up there. That's going to be a huge investment, but once it's in place you can produce ever more of what you need directly, without having to haul it out of the well.

Provide incentives for private industry, and get the fsck out of the way.

Promise $5 billion to the first company to send the same spaceship to orbit 10 times and return. $10 billion to the first company to send the same spaceship to geo-sync orbit 3 times. $20 billion to the first company to bring an asteroid above size X to a lagrange point. $50 billion to the first company to have people live on the moon for two weeks. Change the goals and figures to suit. Total cost will be a fraction of having the bloated NASA bureaucracy do the same things.

Then get rid of all possible regulations, and eliminate most liability. Space is hazardous - let's assume participants are adults who know what they are getting into.

Then get out of the way.

If Microsoft has half-a-brain, they will see this as the business opportunity it is. Charge a fee for additional support from every government and organization that will pay, and it's quite the business model

I'm not talking about individual companies or homes burning trash, but rather municipal incinerators with carefully controlled processes. Modern incinerators produce little beyond water vapor and CO2. You get substantial amounts of power, eliminate essentially all chemicals (that would otherwise eventually pollute the ground water) and you recover most of the metals that would otherwise be lost in a landfill. Municipal incineration is standard in much of Europe.

Here's the story as I understand it:

- There's an ignition switch. If you have a really heavy key-ring, it is possible that the weight of your keys can turn the switch "off".

- Over the course of a decade 13 People have died in car accidents that might have had something to do with this.

- GM apparently, at some point over all those years, altered the ignition switch to require more force to turn it.

So somehow the car manufacturer is evil?

This sounds a lot more like ambulance-chasing lawyers hoping to use publicity as a lever to pry out a big settlement...

Other /.ers have covered the issues around the peanut butter well enough. What no one has mentioned is the continued idiocy of landfills in the US. Why doesn't the US incinerate? You get energy out of the trash, destroy poisonous chemicals, recover the metals, and at the end you have a much smaller volume of waste that needs to be disposed of.

I've taught off and on for 30 years now, and over the entire time one thing has remained pretty constant: About 10% of the students completing the programs are really good; they will be star programmers and eventually software architects. Another 40% are competent - they would be able to carry out plans created by others, but should never carry any larger responsibility. Good, solid programmers. The remaining 50% manage to graduate, but frankly should never work directly in the field. Maybe they can be testers or write documentation, but never let them write a line of code in a real project.

Unfortunately, it's not always obvious what kind of person you are hiring. Add to this mix the people who are self-taught, who are coming from some other field, and may have wildly inappropriate ideas. Just as an example, I am currently working with a company whose star programmer (and he really is very good) comes from process control - and has zero clue about testing or quality control. He writes code and assumes that it works, and his company is so glad to have him (at a grunt-level salary) that they refuse to insult him by testing his code - so they deliver his work untested straight to clients - you can imagine how well this works.

tl;dr: There is no shortage of bodies in STEM fields. However, there is a shortage of good people who also have a solid education in and understand of their field. This is true in computer science, and almost certainly in every other STEM field out there.