So as a consumer already paying for cable (because I have an outlet to connect to, unless I've gone to heroic effort to run my own in from the street,) I choose to pay money to one guy's company to get internet access for free instead of paying an incremental increase in service fee for internet access that's "legitimate?" Seems like a fair amount of work and money to "steal" something.

I'm all for sticking it to the man, especially cable companies, but this seems to make not a whole lot of sense.

Google has deep pockets, and has been known to do good things for their own sake (no, I don't buy the whole "don't be evil" thing, but there's a decent track record there) Setup or fund existing mesh networking systems to allow a grassroots network (with a new name) that is decentralized completely. I know research is going on in this area for a variety of reasons, put more brains and money on it and make it happen. "Work toward saying to the UN: You can have the Internet, we're done with it now."

I understand the desire to eject and focus on the new work, and certainly that there may have been more than one reason to want to make your move in the first place. I work at a university as well, and understand the challenges and difficulties in moving up inside them.

That said, recognize that if you've done what many sysadmins do and hacked together a bunch of tools to make everything hum without excellent documentation (I certainly have) then you owe your replacement (if not your former bosses) some assistance. You are part of institutional memory and even if you documented your solutions well, you likely didn't document the reasons behind them, or the politics that surrounded them. The new guy/gal will need that context.

Give your one-day hand-over, and in it, set a very clear protocol with boundaries that everyone can agree on (including your new bosses) for providing assistance to the new sysadmin. Make it clear that off-hours is out of bounds, or create a process that avoids you hiking across campus on no notice. Questions will arise over the next several years, though they should taper more or less exponentially. Expect it and be prepared. The value to you of not being a dick about it will be enormous, especially if you plan to stay there for a substantial period of your career (and as a fellow uni employee, why would you not?) will be substantial.

Nope.

Energy use per cm^3 has risen dramatically over the last 20 years. By your stated measures it should be dropping. Datacenters no longer have space budgets, they have power budgets, waste heat is one THE big problems with computers and datacenters right now.

At least not explicitly. They both live on the same side of a road that most of us here chose never to cross, but they aren't the same thing.

Also important in this discussion though is the fact that engineers have been implicated as a group as being especially good violent extremists. (Viz. one , two , three , and of course, four.)

Probably also suited to running authoritarian, quasi-market-based state. Just a thought.

As an example, we run our production servers on EC2 East; they have load balancers failing them between zones. The Database and webservers are fine, and have been fine today.

The dev servers do not have load balancers running on them, and they have been choking in a miserable hell all morning.

Coming from someone who might be criminally liable for HIPAA compliance issues based on your server, this was pretty damn polite.

I'd suggest you give it to them, and ask if they have any securing suggestions for you.

Microsoft is dominated by high-end market-consuming business strategists at the top. Bill could do both; Ozzie stepped down because he couldn't replace Bill in that role. There's just no way that there's an internal tech person with the force of will to push the business guys around and all he or she needed was Ballmer's okay to make more impact.

Much less five of these folks. I just don't see it -- in my opinion, Microsoft needs to acknowledge it's becoming IBM, and move on gracefully to another stage in its corporate development.

I have helped organize and judge science fairs at my kids' school. I've moved on, and my younger son doesn't participate any more, because we do cool stuff instead. Built an arc light. Had a mythbusters-themed birthday party with liquid nitrogen fun and thermite. All the while learning how the stuff worked. We take apart things and try (emphasis on try) to put them back together.

In elemantary school, when little science is being taught in school, and the scientific method isn't at all, it ends up falling on the parent to emphasize the paper aspect of the science: a hypothesis, collecting data, recording data, control groups, etc., and if the parent isn't a scientist, or inclined that way, its just not going to go well. Frankly, at that age, important as process is to real science, it's terribly boring (and often it's boring at any age.)

I personally think that a maker faire with a long lead time and a strong effort to get parents involved with their kids would be much more meaningful to many of these kids, and likely incent the kids to further pursue these activities more than the science fair from our collective youths.

I worked for a railroad electronics company that at the time (~1999) was the last place making 8-track tapes for use in locomotive data recorders (like the black boxes in planes.) And then we quit and went to solid state memory, and quit making tapes, which of course meant the industry would have to buy new recorders.

They already do call for depopulation. While most of the world has decried the huge unjust deprivation of China's population to procreate ad infinitum, radical environmentalists have long hailed the policy as green, and in need of spreading.

The planet is a tool, and a resource. As it is also our primary residence, it should be kept pristine for our habitation. But it has no purpose beyond our sustinance, and without human life is meaningless (at least insofar as "meaning" is something humans provide.) People, please get a life.

I'll throw in for Jamie and Adam, since they are both really well known and worthy of the adulation.

Far better to have your children live the life of math and science, makers and doers, and let him come on his own. Expose him to your (our) world and let him decide for himself.

Finally, remember that there is no reason he couldn't also like Hockey, or football, or anything else that the muggle world indulges in. We do our children (all of them) a huge disservice when we act like to be a geek you can't also play a sport, or be interested in something outside of the traditional geek pursuits. Geekdom is creeping ever farther afield to encompass more and more (geek cooking, geek fashion, etc.) Heroes need to be something one chooses organically, so take him on a journey, don't hand him one.

What nobody has mentioned so far is the intense physical pressure you experience at a Tufte presentation. It's like you're being pushed in on all sides, pressed incredibly strongly... by his ego.

There is no US auditorium large enough for you and Tufte's ego.

The ego is self-referential, and almost certainly will compare Tufte's books to Galileo's at some point, and also smarmy, self-confident and smug.

All that said, I loved going -- GO! You'll learn a lot. But then, I'm fascinated by huge egos, so whenever I got bored hearing a rant, I could switch over and admire the size and quality of the ego.

I think this will lead many of us to run dual monitors (as we often do now,) but to stack them vertically instead of placing them side-by-side.

Of course, bezel-free monitors would seem to be even more important in this confguration.

The issue here is not just that Amazon might want its own app store, a reasonable desire. The issue is that the current Android market really sucks. Google does not have good expertise in the curation methods that an appstore needs; right now, you have two options browsing the appstore: you can look at top, all-time sales. Games that have been out for two years top these charts, not surprisingly.

Or, you can look at the raw feed of 'newest'. In games, that would be 64 underwear puzzle games, three things in Japanese, and a tech demo of rotating lines, controlled by some sensor or other.

Google's traditional approach to this sort of problem is search, but search does not work well here, and there's significant market opportunity. Hence, Amazon.