I am willing to bet that the ages of those who resigned were all over 55. That some of the adaptations were things like rewarding skill not seniority. That new hires might actually be paid as much as someone with 20+ years.

A big fat no to any exemption for programmers. Not no to overtime regulations. I can remember a clear case of a friend of mine who was hired at a local, but large, consultancy; they promised and swore on a stack of bibles that it was 9-5 all the way. So he signed on for a fairly senior manager's job and his co-managers just laughed and non could basically remember not working past 7 or not working at least one day on the weekend. So he left on his first day. The place he had left gladly took him back as they had parted on very good terms and the reason for leaving was the wildly better paycheck at the new place.

As a senior manager he knew that there was nothing he could have done about it. What chance did Joe code monkey have?

A job is a job, if not overworking programmers results in these companies having to hire more programmers then good. I see no magical exception as to why programmers should be punished.

I have worked at a very few places where it was cool hip and fun. Working late into the night was a joy and basically hanging out with like minded people. But the vast majority of programmers are wage slaves working in cubeville. Terrible management often results in death marches where programmers are basically expected to work 24 hours a day and sleeping is barely tolerated. These death marches are basically the norm at most companies seeing that most managers/marketing people over promise, under manage, and under pay their staff.

These programmers desperately need protection. The few places where happy people love their jobs do not justify allowing companies (especially game companies) to exploit their workers to the point where their wives start an organization to protest the horrible working conditions (literally).

More complicated than that. One thing Tesla does is very advanced battery management. If you crack open the battery pack for your "dead" laptop battery you will find that it is made up of different cells (often 6-12). Each cell produces a bit over 3 volts. So if you take your volt meter you will probably find most of the cells are fine with one being stone cold dead and another half dead. The key problem is that the total voltage is now below what is needed to keep your laptop running. But if you replaced the individual couple of bad cells with good ones from an equally "dead" battery back you would find that you now had a battery back with something greater than 70-80% of its original capacity.

The problem is that the laptop companies are making them "good enough" not out of some conspiracy(I hope) but that there would be some notable extra costs to playing games to bypass the dead cells.

But what most people are talking about with house batteries is that any size and weight compromises would not be included and thus there could be a low cost low energy density battery that would be economical on a Kwh basis.

My prediction is that any house batteries will not be lithium or will be a distant cousin of lithium.

One of the things that has been driving battery development is size and weight. Basically the higher the power density the cooler the iPhone. But with a house you don't really care if the battery is the size of a deep freeze as long as it does its job. This is not entirely true in that shipping and installation are a bit of a concern but once there most people won't care.

What an ideal house battery will have is long term durability (20+ years), very low maintenance, and very low cost per Kwh.

These are close to what researchers are looking for with car batteries ;thus house batteries not only benefit from the car battery research but can use low power density discoveries that cars might not readily use.

But where this all gets interesting is that the economics look very bad for the power companies if only a few percent of customers are able to abandon the grid. Typically those who can abandon the grid will be private homes owned by slightly wealthier people. These are easy and typically profitable customers to service so losing many of them will see profits vanish while not seeing infrastructure costs drop significantly (you still have to run power past their houses).

But the power companies are facing all kinds of much more subtle problems. For instance people generally hate the power company, thus they will typically enjoy screwing them over if the costs are roughly equal. Also people like going green which means that they are willing to endure minor hardships to go off grid (appeals to boomers). Lastly as boomers are heading into retirement one of the most important things is to nail down a budget. Energy costs can be unpredictable and so installing a fully off grid system could result in a near perfect guaranteed energy cost.

Going forward people are also going to have more and more electric cars. A full solar system with large batteries will potentially mean little or no energy costs when running a car. This again will appeal to people on a fixed budget as they can then watch gas prices go up and down and simply not care.

But the economics are very interesting. If the power company loses 5% of their customers that will almost translate to a 5% drop in revenue with only a tiny drop in costs. This could then start a vicious cycle where they try to make up for it with higher rates which drives away customers and so on. This could spiral until the only people still on the grid are those who can't go solar because of too high a demand for too little surface area (tall buildings) or simply don't have the capital wealth to finance the upgrade (poor people).

Some people have commented that some factories can't go off grid but this is a fallacy in that other than the heaviest of heavy industry most factories could easily meet their energy needs with a solar system combined with some local generation. The key to the local generation making sense is if the above vicious circle were to drive up electrical prices local generation would make sense for a growing number of situations.

There is a great historical precedent for this. Horses in large cities. Basically if in 1880 you drove your buggy into any large city you weren't alone and there were plenty of services available. But once the car began to take over and the richer made the switch it not only ate into the customer base a bit but it caused many horse service companies to no longer be able to justify the lower profit use of such prime downtown real-estate. So as more and more horse servicing companies closed it became more difficult to have a horse in a big city. Then the city officials realized that horses sort of sucked (cleaning horse poop and dead horses from the streets isn't cheap) so they began to push them out. Horses continued in the countryside for decades longer but in the cities the horses were mostly gone very very quickly. So one cannot simply compare the costs of a horse to a car and make a prediction. It becomes the whole situation from psychology to short term finance to long term finance. Then there are the little bursts that will change things. In my area every storm that is even slightly out of the ordinary seems to wipe out part of the power grid. I suspect that once a small percentage of people go off grid that with every storm they will set a (literally) shining example of not having to depend upon a corner cutting utility to provide energy causing another handful of neighbours to make the leap.

But one of the number 1 things to drive people to any battery technology is the power companies' stupidity. In my area they are trying to basically require customers to get the signature of a Yeti before they can feed back into the grid. Thus the power companies are making it hard to do the solar system as a half measure. Thus people won't be able to dip their toe into the solar waters but will have to jump in headfirst and just tough it out to make it work. For the first customers this will be a painful and scary thing. But as more local companies become more competent it will become more and more painless.

One other comparison that doesn't work very well is cellphones to landlines. In most cases the landline companies are becoming cellphone companies and there are still monthly charges. But with solar you put it up and are basically done with it. The only somewhat longer term beneficiaries (other than manufacturers and occasional maintenance) are the finance companies.

Far worse is that this approach will end up with some "Microsoft Shop" hard-selling management every day of the year on getting more and more MS Enterprise crap. Many years ago I was in a boardroom to witness a MS sales presentation where they basically found every bit of opensource the company was using and said that it was insecure crap and had to go. Then they made a long winded argument that the IT costs for the company were going to drop by 80%. What MS was proposing was going to cost well over double that per year; it was total BS. But for months after the management kept asking the part time IT guy if it was true that the Linux source code had been "leaked" to hackers.

My recommendation (followed) was that they fire the accountant who had brought in the MS shop people for this "Audit" as it had effectively been a massive security breach. That same company recently upgraded the last of their servers to a Core2Duo. Keep in mind that this companies servers monitored a manufacturing process without ever a single failure, weren't connected to the internet. And that the tiny handful of computers that were networked were basically "surfing" the net. The IT guy even kept the accounting computers offline to keep everything simple.

Quite simply any organization that lets MS in the door at this point is a fool.

But my recommendation to any school system is to go with the Chromebook for some needs and crappy old machines running Linux for many other needs. Properly set up it can be brain dead simple for everyone. The simple test would be "Can it run Youtube HD without stuttering? Can it run the more complicated sites such as DoCircuits?" as that is about all the bandwidth and processor capability that is needed.

As for RT I believe that even MS is abandoning that effort.

So here is a guy who is pawning his medals after a lifetime in academia having about as successful a career as is possible in science; and at the same time some douche with a 2 year old MBA is trying to figure out "Ferrari, or Lamborghini?"

One career will change the lives of pretty much everybody, and the other will involve being rewarded for raping pension plans.

One career will bring a lifetime of intellectual satisfaction and the other will bulk up an inner psychopath.

Yes our civilization is fairly broken.

I love my iPad but if I had to use it as my primary tool for completing schoolwork and taking lessons, I would lose my mind.

This one is a bit of a no-brainer. There is the keyboard, the trackpad, the cost, and the screen-size. Also many sites require such niceties such as right clicking, or click and dragging.

But what is even more silly is when Microsoft pathetically tries to strongarm a school system into using its wayyyyy expensive surface technology. It is not only expensive on a per unit basis but is used by Microsoft to engage their whole licensing nightmare engine with one upsell after another of enterprise crap.

So while any school system that gets iPads is just wasting its money, any school people who get the surface should be fired for wasteful incompetence.

For $50 and a case of beer blackberry would sell its soul to the government spies and put in a back door. At this point any high value data that isn't being transmitted over an opensource system might as well be put on some floppies and sent to the spooks.

But realistically the government is one of the last big holdouts for large installed BB bases so they can negotiate with a very large carrot and a very large stick.

I suspect that the line between buses and taxis will simply blur. Generally we define a bus as something that follows a fixed route and a taxi as something that will take you from point to point. Right now you can get some airport shuttles that will pick you up at your house and most taxis will allow you to share a ride with someone who has a slightly different destination.

But for me one of the most important groups of drivers are commuters. They are a huge bunch who all pile onto the roads twice a day at roughly the same two times. Then their cars sit and do nothing for most of the remainder of their existence. When people talk about driverless cars reducing the need for ownership they are forgetting that the benefit of shared ownership is that the asset is kept busy for the maximum amount of time. But if every commuter switched to a cab then either there wouldn't be enough cabs or then a huge number cabs would end up only run twice a day and the fee for supporting such a large number of assets would be roughly in line with personal ownership.

Thus any solution that economically deals with consumers will be one of the dominant uses of driverless vehicles. I suspect that it will be through the use of mini-buses doing a carpool like car share. People will arrange for a pickup and a destination and then will allow the service to figure out the optimal grouping of passengers to minimise time and distance while servicing the maximum number of passengers. These same mini-buses could be of all kinds of sizes depending upon the areas being serviced and their use during the remainder of the day.

The above does not preclude normal transit services or normal taxi services but what it does do is to potentially service a huge percentage of drivers with a service that meets their critical needs of point to point service that is very reliable for the least amount of cost.

This last bit is critical as many people forgo public transit because most transit services are notoriously unreliable or not conveniently structured and this could cost many people their jobs. So they grab their expensive chunk of metal and drive it alone to work.

Years ago I took a bus to work and it was a nightmare. It was only that my work was judged on productivity not arriving at a set time that I could do this. Quite simply the bus would often strand me with a 40 minute walk after taking 30 minutes to get me to that point. Yet in my general area there were about 6 of us going to that one company alone. This was a business park and I suspect that within a 5 minute drive of my place that there were hundreds all going to the business park. Not enough for a regular hourly bus run but ideal for some sort of car pooling system. It was only that we were incompetent boobs that we could never quite structure an effective car pool. Also the lack of a fixed start time made it even harder. But a computer run system should be able to work just fine.

So the key is to not look at this from a moving people around point of view but by asking what are people's priorities. For most I suspect that on time all the time is critical for a transit system and that the cost merely has to stay below operating a personal vehicle. But for ever little bit of unreliability in the system there will be a massive exodus as the cost of being fired will wildly outweigh the cost of a personal vehicle.

That is a microeconomic consideration but there is also a macroeconomic consideration; this is how a highly functional low cost public transit system can vastly reduce many costs and improve the economics of a city. If people aren't having to buy cars and are spending less time in traffic or on an inefficient transit system there will be more money available for local economics and higher local productivity. Plus fewer cars on the road can translate to a smaller roads budget which ideally either means more public spending on good things (parks etc) or lower taxes. Also many businesses require timely delivery of goods and thus many businesses can operate a bit better with better traffic flow.

So my prediction is that some cities will impede public transit automation (and prevent effective competition such as car pooling bus services) and these same cities will find themselves sliding down the ranking tables as compared to cities that embrace such technologies. It won't be a "collapse of civilization" situation but one of compound interest. If one city is getting better at 1.1% and another is growing at 0.5% then in a few decades this will compound into a night and day difference. But I suspect that the differences will be massive between a city with a highly automated transit system and one that got protectionist and kept human drivers doing 20th century routing along with human taxi drivers.

Then there can be whole other twists of stupid. For instance in an area a few hours from me the regulators made a private bus line operate wildly unprofitable routes to disadvantaged areas as a condition of their licence. When they left saying that this was too much and for a month there was no rural bus service in the whole province a new company came along and said, "We'll run the profitable routes but under no circumstances will we allow you to tell us what routes we run or when." The province agreed but I suspect that eventually they will cave in to a few whiners who will have the ear of some two-bit fool politicians. And basically all the local politicians are two-bit fools. How will my local fools manage to deal with automation of transit systems?

Basically cooperation is the best strategy as long as there is also a built in punishment system for the selfish. For instance if a disease wipes out too many hosts then it will fail to spread very quickly. If it wipes them all out then it won't spread anymore.

But evolution often will sacrifice to deal with the selfish. So our immune systems are sitting here primed and ready to have a go against all kinds of invaders; our immune systems are fantastically costly. But in a pristine system evolution might eliminate our immune system and then we would be wiped out by the first disease to come along.

The same with having the police. Police are expensive but we keep them around to deal with those who won't cooperate in ways that we find so egregious that we make laws.

But just as we have seen with our bankers there are those diseases that will subvert our punishment systems to not only ignore them but to actively abuse the us. AIDS would be an example of this (and yes I am saying bankers are as bad as AIDS).

So I would think that if you look carefully I think that what you will find is that what evolution will do is to evolve systems that punish the non-cooperative(bad diseases), reward the cooperative (things like digestive bacteria) and then continue living just fine.

Even within animals that group together there are often many systems for punishing animals that don't play by the rules.

But there is one huge problem with evolution from the standpoint of the individual. It might take a 95% die off for evolution to develop a way to fight off a disease, or the disease might end up being just deadly enough to continuously hurt individuals while not killing enough to drive evolution.

But this is where we might have just jumped some kind of hurdle. We demolished smallpox, we have polio on the ropes, malaria might have a bullet heading its way, and other diseases are lined up in the crosshairs. But taking out diseases to the point of extinction takes global cooperation. In Pakistan they recently killed 4 polio workers which will now probably dissuade polio workers from going back into that area and I suspect that if they were there then polio was there as well.

The key is that when gaming any relationship like evolution there are a huge number of rows and columns to work with. But quite simply we have way too many animals that cooperate in pretty magical ways for it not to be a key evolution friendly solution.

Using tools like Openframworks and especially cocos2d-x you can make things for iOS in C++ that are extremely easy to port to Android, or Windows, Mac desktop, linux, and the Windows mobile OS.

You don't have to do things the way apple tells you to do things.

For around $150 you can ebay yourself a drone. Frame ~$25, motors $30, controller $25, RC stuff $40, ESCs $20, battery $15, and maybe $20 more in bits and bobs to hold it together.

This will get you a very powerful drone that can easily carry a camera. After this a primary expense will be more and bigger batteries as you will probably want to fly more than 7 minutes.

I was watching these two paramedics do all kinds of sort of half assed things on this collapsed old guy when they were literally 2 blocks from a hospital. I would have thought that it would have been far better procedure to just heave him into the ambulance like a sack and then get him to the hospital in the 60 seconds (again literally) that it would have taken. My simple medical thought was that I could hold my breath for the trip to the hospital as opposed to where I would easily be dead in the time it was taking them.

In some cases like this one I even see the stretcher as extraneous and time wasting.

My friend had an even better comment in that it would have been better for one of us to just throw him over our should and run him to the hospital with the over the shoulder resulting in a bit of CPR. We may very well have done this had we not arrived at the same time as the paramedics.

So often I see developers and often their managers being loaded down with things that have exactly zero to do with the project's success. For instance I have seen companies that had an 8am meeting every morning at a company that claimed flexible working hours. These meetings were nothing beyond empty platitudes from a manager.

Many companies that I have visited had sales dictating what needed to be built in that they would chase every whim of every potential client resulting in 100's of features being built for nobody (didn't get the client) but slowly turning the projects to crap. Then sales would regularly blame the programmers for letting them down by not developing an AI driven natural language database over the long weekend.

The single worst that I saw was a company where the president's wife suddenly started dictating features. These features were completely unrelated to the core product. It would be like a VW engineer suddenly getting instructions on adding a flower arranging module instead of working on a recall where the cars can catch fire. This had the entire project's staff leave one by one until the project just died.

But if I had to pin project failures down to a single consistent problem it would be that really terrible programmers who are complete blowhards often get way ahead of their co-workers leaving a trail of fuming resentment in their wake; the primary result is that the most skilled programmers are the first to leave resulting in a rapid plummet of the average level of talent as once the best go often the next best are soon to go, and so on until you are left with only duds who don't dare to find another job.

As for what system is in place it doesn't really matter much as a talented group will make it work. But if that system is encouraging any of the above disaster scenarios the project will suffer.