>I think what should happen is that we should streamline OUR lives and be rid of Sony.

Done. Bought a PS3 in around 2008, and won a killer Vaio notebook in a contest around 2009 - severely disappointed in both for multiple reasons. Sony is off my approved vendor list, I just don't consider products with their brand anymore. Haven't encountered anything since the PS3 that is a "Sony exclusive" that I remotely care about owning.

I do give the PS3 credit for one thing, video games are essentially a way to waste time, and PS3 has taken that to a whole new level, wasting tons of time without even having to play the game at all. Update required x 100, only plays media in very specific formats, Alternate OS takes an inordinate amount of time to install, Alternate OS pulled as a feature after spending an inordinate amount of time giving it a chance to "own" my living room TV. Done.

I have an Intel NUC running the TV now, and instead of PS3 games, I have Steam. Instead of a crappy Media cataloging and playing experience I have Kodi and VLC. Instead of a gimped up web browser, I have Gimp and Chrome. Much better now.

Yes, but the Mars colony will be globally communicated in (near) real-time, and recorded for posterity.

In 1988, I was passed over for a D-base job because I "didn't have D-base experience." Two weeks later, the position was still unfilled. What the hiring manager didn't grasp was that, in 2 weeks, I could have learned enough D-base skills to do what they need... but, not everybody can learn like that, and the hiring manager wants a "sure thing" instead of trying one and having to can them and find another one a month later.

What OP is bitching about is that "general principles and skills" translates to being able to learn new stuff quickly, which is all that programming is about, anyway. Any particular skill you have today will likely be less important than another skill within 5 years - what really matters is the ability to learn the next thing.

As for your "engineering" friend who can't be bothered with the minutiae, "engineers" like him were likely responsible for events like this:

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/i35...

I met a retired, highly successful CEO when he was about 70. The two quotes I remember from him are: "Hey, wanna go to the bar and pick up some babes." and "Hiring people was the hardest part of the business, if I succeeded 50% of the time in picking a person who didn't make things worse than they already are, I considered myself to be doing well."

Personally, I've "picked" about a dozen people out of the hiring pool, some with a little more pressure to "fill the positions yesterday" than others. People are consistently surprising, often better used for something other than what they were hired for. If you can recognize that, and work people into roles where they contribute the best, that is the true skill of management.

As for getting your foot in the door - it sucks, there's just not another word for it. Before the internet, it was about personal contacts and first impressions. Now, your hiring gauntlet is crammed full of so much noise that it is amazing that anybody gets found. I was "panned" for a gig that I am supremely qualified to do, 2 decades of experience doing exactly what they want and rave reviews from everybody I've ever worked with, people taking me to lunch 3 months after I leave a job trying to get me to come back. These people made up their mind about me based on 5 minutes of poor audio quality phone interview. The job is programming, not verbal knowledge regurgitation based on garbled descriptions - but, that's their hiring criteria, and I suppose they communicate with their people through crappy phone lines all the time, so it is an important skill, for them.

Keep looking, don't be afraid to take an offer and then move on if something better comes along: your employers will be tossing you to the curb the next time they screw up sales and economic climate forecasting, with "employment at will" you have every right to move on to better things when the opportunity comes your way.

Go on.

>Raising the gas tax isn't a great solution, because people with low MPG are often those who can afford it least

Used vehicles 30mpg are plentiful:

http://www.autotrader.com/cars...

If you can't afford your low mpg vehicle, that's a message that you need to change.

I'd much rather live in a country that taxes its gasoline heavily than one that puts GPS trackers in all my vehicles and makes me pay per mile driven.

In one sense, I totally get the traditional "learn to think for yourselves" approach to education.

In another, I have seen "Smartboards" used very effectively by several teachers in different situations.

Elementary kids "signing in" to class on the smartboard - not exactly deep thinking, but a basic life skill of making your presence known at a place you are required to be - reducing workload on the teacher for attendance taking and reporting, and getting the kids at least minimally engaged before morning announcements.

Virtual field trips via Google Images. Let's visit Scotland today - multimedia presentation put together by an elementary school teacher with minimal prep time and very high student engagement. Ability to go interactive on questions "Anybody know what hagus is?" Do you want to learn more about the highlands or the cities?

Life skills: let's check the weather... what does this mean, how would you dress, let's see some videos of people in these weather situations...

I did a Masters Thesis in 1990, just before the Internet became "a thing." My access to research materials was dismal. I was driving to various libraries and finding different stuff at each one, none had anything approaching a complete picture of the subject (basically, any subject specific enough to do a Masters Thesis on). My access to communicate with colleagues in the field was equally dismal. I'd spend hours on microfiche, in a library I had to drive to and pay to park at, to find the name of an interesting person, look that person up with directory assistance, find out that he's dead and I'm talking to his son, long distance at $20 an hour when minimum wage was $3.35/hr. His son was cool, it was a great 15 minute conversation, but it was tremendously expensive in time and money to have that conversation and gain that bit of knowledge.

In some ways, the quality of communication was better than what you get today with e-mail and blogs, because once you engaged with someone, you usually got a lot more of their attention. But, you could die of old age before finding the kind of depth of information that's available via internet on virtually any esoteric subject today.

You don't need special anything. You can make more progress with special considerations, and this is true of every student, everywhere on the bell curve. It's just that the differences are more dramatic for the anomalies.

How about an object with internal features that cannot be determined without opening it up?

At 12 years old / 1980, my school bus was dropping me off 3/4 mile from home - closest stop on the route (through a typical suburban neighborhood.)

At 10 years old, I was riding my bicycle 5+ miles from home, alone. It wasn't even imagined to be a CPS involveable issue.

Could I have been kidnapped? Sure. Just like every other unsupervised kid, everywhere in the world, 35 years ago, and today.

Rich Columbians are moving to the US so they can let their kids play on the street without fear of kidnapping, but, if you don't make yourself a target like that (1% wealthy in a poor and relatively lawless country), you shouldn't have to worry.

Here, I think the pendulum has swung to the other side, where we are now fearing the government that is "protecting us" more than the people they are protecting us from.

2000 satellites sure does sound like a much denser constellation - bandwidth is likely more limited by regulations than technology.

If you produce value so far in excess of the cost of the equipment that it doesn't matter what the equipment costs, then, yes, that can be a very intelligent thing to do.

This isn't a common commuter vehicle, but it serves its owner's purposes very well:

http://www.motorsportsetc.com/...

Solar energy is actually flabby and watered down as it is typically delivered, especially on shoestring budgets.

When you have access to "mains" 110 or 220 VAC at 10+ amps, you trim it down and deliver it exactly as desired to charge your cells (within the budget constraints of how "smart" you can make the charger) in this scenario, the aged cells can probably be handled safely.

When you have 0.1sqm of budget solar cells delivering your power, and an aged LiIon cell as your storage medium, the electronics between those two are going to have to eek out every possible bit of power delivered by the solar side if you want a chance of the LED light lasting for more than a couple of hours after sunset. The saving grace here is that the solar cell _probably_ won't have enough power to make anything exciting happen in the battery, regardless of how you transform the voltage/current coming from it. The downside is that whoever is making the charger will probably scrap any cell safety considerations and just dump whatever they've got into the cell as "efficiently" as possible - and sooner or later the infinite number of users will hit on an operational scenario that makes it burn.

So, these recycled batteries are being charged with what kind of charging controller, using what kind of input power?

If it's something creative like solar, I'd be very surprised if we don't get an impressive fire out of the first 100 unit-years of use...

Even if they have "grid power" to charge from, the charge controllers had better be good enough to sense a damaged cell, and when those sophisticated chargers refuse to charge the pack anymore, some genius level electrical engineer will hook up a "dumb" NiCad charger to the pack and get some more life out of it - the practice will spread and it won't be long before somebody sets the shanty town ablaze...