We should send robots first, to set up infrastructure

I would get 100% behind a plan to come up with robots able to semi-autonomously build up infrastructure. Let's try and get this done and working on plain ol'Earth first.

Good to see that we're still beating the shit out of the people at the end of the engineer production pipeline for picking engineers from the output stream instead of looking at the earlier stages of the pipeline to figure out why it looks that way. Seriously, Google and Yahoo are not going to be able to force more 13 year old girls to dream of becoming engineers, and even if they do, it'll be 10+ years before we see the results. You can't hire 50% women out of a pool of 20% women without making serious compromises, and you can't turn most recent graduates in other fields into good engineers without massive retraining.

To get an engineering job at a super selective place like Google, you almost certainly need a CS or engineering degree. To be noticed in their truckload of excellent resumes, it helps to have a top school on your resume, or go to a top school that lets you network with other people who might work at highly selective companies. In order to do that, you need to decide well before your 18th birthday that you're serious about this stuff. You need to take the hard math and science classes in high school and you need to do well in them. You need to prep for tests and plan for your future. Google doesn't make that happen when you're 23 years old. You make it happen starting when you're 13-14 years old, 16 at the latest. If you miss that boat, some serious magic is going to have to happen to even get Google to notice your resume. Maybe you're one of a handful of whiz kids who can make a name in a big open source project, but barring that, you're probably out of luck.

If we want women in engineering, try to get girls interested in it in middle school. Slapping Google around for working with what they have isn't going to do the trick.

"Hey, Facebook, can you give us some information about your company that couldn't possibly help you so we can almost certainly use it against you?"

"Uh, no thanks."

Those people can get plenty of technical jobs without a degree, but they'd probably never have a crack at a Google interview unless there was something particularly special about them. Google has so many resumes poured into its office every day that they could probably require a graduate degree for every position and still have way too many candidates. They have to filter on something, and that something has to be apparent from the resume. Technical education is a really good filter for technical jobs.

The numbers look like they're from the overall workforce, not necessarily the engineering sections. Do Google and Yahoo! have roughly the same sturucture, or is one of them much more engineering heavy?

That does sound really fishy. I guess if you're going to do that, you need to set the ransom low enough that the company will pay it for a "maybe he'll hold up his end of the bargain" level of assurance rather than a "problem is solved forever" level of assurance. If I said, "Give me a dollar or I'll expose your keys," it's probably worth a dollar to reduce the 100% probability of key exposure to anything marginally less than 100%. If I said, "Give me a hundred million dollars for an unkown but nonzero reduction in the probability that I'll expose your keys," that sounds like less of a good deal.

The best part of this is that the blackmailer could also sell your keys to somebody who might use them without you ever knowing. Not only did they not know beforehand whether the keys were going to be kept secret, there's no way to be 100% sure even now that the keys were left unused.

South San Francisco Bay area, PG&E. We're a mess when it comes to energy for a whole variety of reasons. My last bill was average $0.20 per kwh. Tiers here range from $0.13 to start to $0.36. You move up the tiers rapidly.

What's your threshold for "negligible" and how many negligible things add up to be non-negligible? Most households have more than one stupid electronics box that burns negligible but nonzero power 24 hours a day and would benefit from smarter sleep states.

Think of it this way: 35 watts in a household of 2 people is 3.5%. Let's say we go to 3 people per household and it drops to 2.3%. If that's a "normal" household, we could rephrase, "2.3% of your electricity bill," as, "2.3 % of all residential household energy consumption," which is a hell of a lot in absolute terms. I'd be willing to be that most utilities would notice a 1% drop in baseline consumption if it happened over a statistically significant interval.

Another thing to remember is that most households pay a progressive rate. The "20 cents per kwh" average is cute, but at my consumption level, I'm looking at 33 cents for the last marginal killowatt hours, and those are the kwh that get cut when you reduce your consumption. So it's about $100 per year. "Negligible" when compared to total household expenditures, but if you found it in your pocket at the end of the year, you'd notice. And if these devices were engineered properly, it's money that you'd get for free without having to do anything "green" like turning off the AC when it's hot or putting a brick in your toilet tank.

What are you paying for cable? If you're only watching it 45 minutes a day and it costs you, say $30 a month, we're talking about more than a dollar per hour. It seems like going with an on-demand streaming service would make a lot more sense.

The AC is a serious issue in your area. Not many good options to get around that. But you're off on the refrigerator. A modern one should average well below 100 watts over time. The vampire/suspend/idle draw of all of the electronic crap in my house exceeds the average draw of my refrigerator by a pretty notcieable margin.

I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where the air is reasonably dry and the temperature drops off pretty quickly at sunset, so even if it's 100+ degrees during the day, I can kick on the house fan at night and crash my house temperature with very little energy. If you have to run your AC 20 hours a day, your nights are probably still too hot to make that a viable option. That's rough.

I was astonished to measure mine at about 68 watts average consumption over a week. It looks like the new federal standards are less than 50 watts. That's some good design.

Is that "total national consumption / total population"? I don't think that's what people are thinking of when they think about their energy use. It's nice to know how much the factory used to make my bag of potato chips, but the direct consumption that I control in my house is a lot more limited than that. I work from home and my wife and I are gadget people, and we're at about 500 watts average continuous draw per person for our household. I'm trying to get that down and I'm starting to find that I can get the biggest gains by attacking some of the low power stuff that's on 24 hours a day. It looks like we draw about 250 watts while we're sleeping. That's 1/4 of our consumption, and the only things we really need while we're sleeping are the refrigerator and the burglar alarm. At least 150 of that is waste, which is about 5% of our total consumption.

Upgrading our AV receiver to a modern one (and one with a working remote so we don't forget to turn it off at night) made a noticeable difference. So did killing our old Sony GoogleTV that tended to stay on at night. I'm replacing the broken motherboard in our file server so that it can shut down nightly using cron and wake up using Wake On Lan, which should save us more than 33% on that device (once you account for the more efficient CPU and smaller fan).

Our DirecTV box gets shut down when we're not using it, but it's a smart DVR, so it records even when it's in power saving mode. I haven't measured what it consumes, but since I don't own the box, I don't have a lot of control over what it does.

My point is that you can reduce the amount of gadgets in your house, which is a better idea than accumulating even more materialistic crap and trying to save the planet my making it "green".

The point of the article is that by making the device greener, you can still have all of the gadgets at the same power consumption level. If we went with the "buy fewer gadgets and don't bother with energy efficiency" approach, we wouldn't have any gadgets and we'd be using the same amount of electricity, but it would all be going to run our shitty 1970's style refrigerators. Buy fewer gadgets if that's your thing, but any time you can get a 50% reduction in energy use on something that runs for many hours a day (or is always on), it's crazy not to do it. That stuff adds up.

What if I told you all that happened after Bill Gates left the company?

You gotta be shitting me. Apple is doing way worse things today than Bill Gates ever did in the 80s or 90s.