I write web applications in .Net, and as far as I'm concerned, nothing else I've see comes close for large projects. There was a bunch of hype about Ruby, so I tried that. For anything beyond basic CRUD applications, it was quite painful to use. The .Net API has amazing amounts of built in functionality. I can't think of any language that comes close. It amazes me how people write stuff in Java without having a decent "Date" data type. Why should I have to use a third party library to get decent date support?

That's kind of the big legal question. I remember that Nintendo went after a bunch of "watch me play" people on YouTube. The music in the background is often owned by a third party and licensed for use in the game. And I know that Youtube often takes down videos (video games and others) based on copyrighted songs being in the background.

Exactly. The only situation where the homeowner would want to optimize for the highest use time of day is if the power company was paying them an increased rate for power fed into the grid during that time period. and at that point, it might make more sense for the home owner to store all the power generated in batteries and only send power back to the grid when they are getting the best price.

Where I live there's a 5 cent difference between the cheapest and most expensive parts of the day. I wonder how cheap/efficient batteries would have to get before it would make sense to just charge the batteries at night, and use them during the day so I never have to pay the higher rate.

Obviously the panels should be motorized so that they are always facing the most optimal direction. A system that moves the panels shouldn't add that much to the cost and will probably pay for itself very quickly with the extra energy collected.

I have a Surface 2 (not Pro), and even I like that better than the iPad in just about every respect, save for the number of apps available. The entire device is done very well. I think if on the next iteration they could get a more affordable x86 tablet then they could really start to take some business away from Apple and the other tablet manufacturers. Get rid of the digitizer and go with a plain old touch screen, use a low power Atom processor, and include the keyboard in the box, and I'm sure that most people who really stopped to think about it would easily choose a Surface over an iPad or Android tablet, which is extremely limited, and would be just as expensive.

Why not just have a mechanical trigger? squeeze the grip at the end you're holding it on, and a mechanical finger is moved to press the camera button on the screen. Should be pretty easy to build different ones that automatically line up for popular phone types, or make an adjustable one that can handle a variety of phones.

Based on life expectancy, I can probably assume that I will live another 50 years, barring anything catastrophic. 50 years ago, computers took up entire rooms, and the thought of having computer at each and every desk was kind of a dream. Now it's a reality. With how much has changed in the past 50 years, I'm not going to pretend that I know what technology will bring in the next 50, but it would seem to me that quite a few jobs are going to disappear, and I don't really see a lot of low qualification jobs opening up.

It increases income for the corporation, and the fewer people who are left working there. It won't free people to work in more productive jobs, because they simply don't have the skills to do anything more productive. If they had the skills, they would already be working those jobs because they pay better. People aren't working in an Amazon warehouse because they enjoy it and the pay is good. They do it because they aren't qualified to do work that is more fulfilling (financially and personally). Getting robots to do their jobs won't suddenly make them qualified to do more complicated jobs. And it seems to me that the are a lot of people that, even given the opportunity to acquire new skills, are incapable for one reason or another of getting the skills necessary for a better job.

Automation can minimize labor costs but it cannot eliminate them because it is not economical to automate all jobs even when it is technologically possible to do so.

The only thing stopping that is that it's still too expensive to build machines to do certain jobs. But that won't last forever. Eventually, with the progress of technology, it will become very economical to replace workers with machines. Some jobs may require a robot that requires 20 years to pay itself off, that probably isn't worth it for a lot of businesses. Some jobs will pay off the machine in 2 or 3 years. At that point, as far as the company is concerned, it's economically irresponsible to not get the robot to do the job. As the cost of the machines come down, that machine that used to take 20 years to pay off, will only take 10, or 5, and eventually it will be cheap enough. The only jobs left will be thinking/creative jobs (unless there is some major advancement in AI), and jobs that people actually want to talk to a person for. As annoyed as people get with customer support personnel, they would be infinitely more annoyed at a machine who was reading off the same script.

Sure he would save an hour, and he would probably also burn a lot more gas. Engines are optimized to get maximum efficiency at certain speeds. Even if you optimized them for higher speeds, there's still the problem of air resistance which goes up as a function of the cube of the speed.

That's pretty much the problem with Linux on any machine. If you buy the machine specifically for running Linux, there are plenty of options that will run without problems. However if you pick a random machine at the store, odds are there will be some part of the hardware that has less than optimal drivers.

I believe that it was called Hotmail when MS bought it. It ran under than name Hotmail until quite recently where they renamed it to outlook.com. The biggest advantage that Google brought to the table was the amount of space you got. At the time, Hotmail offered only 2MB of storage. If I'm not mistaken, I had 11 MB with Yahoo at the time. Google started off with 1 GB, that's 500 times more storage than MS, and 90 times more than Yahoo was offering. That combined with reasonably good spam filtering, probably aided by the fact that they had good experience with text analysis due to the search engine expertise, make it a joy to use over the other alternatives at the time. Hotmail's spam protection at the time was so bad that most people I know who used it employed the use of a white list and everything else went to spam. It was the only way to not have your entire inbox full of spam. Of course you missed messages from new friends, but it was better than using the default spam protection.

Yeah, so it's great for foreign language things like anime, but for the movies that most people watch, it doesn't make a difference in the slightest.

I guess it depends where you work and how high you are in the company hierarchy for this to be effective though. Somebody like Larry Ellison, co-founder and chairman of Oracle, couldn't have a "personal" Twitter account, because he is so well known, and anything he said would be taken under suspicion as being connected to the company. Looking further down the line, you got guys like Scott Hanselman of Microsoft, who tries to maintain a personal blog and podcast, but you still see plenty of people calling him out when he pushes things like Surface Pro or Windows 10. Even if he truly believes that they are great products, some people will still call him a shill for Microsoft.

expensive drives that wear out or can mangle the tape

This is my main problem with removable magnetic media. The simple act of reading the data actually degrades the storage medium. And if you have a bad drive, it can actively destroy any disk/tape you put in there. And it's actually hard to diagnose if the problem is with the disk or the drive, so you're likely to destroy a few disks/tapes before you figure it out. I've had floppy drives, zip drives and tape drives that have all ruined the storage media. At least with optical drives, it's very unlikely that the disc will be destroyed by attempting to read it.