I don't necessarily mean "space" technology, but more along the lines of reliable robots that can assist in creating dwellings and working the land. It's hard to get a lot done in a spacesuit.

Mikimu Mousajan

I can't go on the "small small world" ride now without thinking of it as their sourcing plan.

We are far from ready to colonize space. It's my opinion we need to wait for technology to catch up to make it practical. We are prematurely blowing our wad.

It's the Death Star's aiming laser. The damned thing has to be re-categorized yet again...

A meteoroid scraped off the first "A" in the probe's "NASA" logo

When America loses a few astronauts, they shut down the program...

Actually that may be a good thing. Robot probes are far better science for the buck. Let other nations do the costly and risky "tests" on humans in space.

With the same money, we could have soon* had robotic probes visiting nearby stars and their planets by now traveling in nuclear powered rockets going 15% the speed of light.

And a boat probe on a Titan lake, a submarine bot in Europa, rock samples from Mars and Venus, etc. etc. etc.

We'll be watching a Titan cruse on our living room TV's in our pajamas while their x-nauts are roasting on a wayward re-entry or suffocating during an oxygen mishap. Few care if a bot occasionally dies.

* If we had launched such a probe in the mid 70's, then it could just about be arriving at the nearest stars at 15c.

You have to learn to walk before you can run. SpaceX experience with unnamed launches will hopefully build up to manned launch quality.

But 7 astronauts didn't die due to the snafu; only their dinner.

A preventable problem will occur, such as something that could be caught with a background check.

Good technology requires planning for about 5 to 7 years out. If you burn the future to get profits NOW, then you'll eventually burn your reputation also. I don't exactly know the best corporate management strategies to optimize solutions for 5 to 7 years out, but IBM's "profits now!" program clearly failed.

Focus far more on customer satisfaction and loyalty. If you don't give them IT headaches, they'll pay a premium and/or more projects. And listening to your engineers helps also. They want to feel like they are working on something useful instead of being pawns in marketing or financial gimmicks.

You can screw some of your customers all of the time and screw all of your customers some of the time, but you cannot screw all your customers all of the time. (My apologies to Mr. Lincoln.)

It gets hard to get everyone necessary to attend sessions...

Getting stakeholders and users to put in the time necessary to think things out is always going to be tricky. Timely feedback is a scarce resource no matter what methodology you use. For this reason, the practical thing is to assume you'll get crappy feedback and have to redo a lot because of lack of feedback. Thus, it's probably better to optimize the rework process rather than obsess on preventing it.

Standardizing GUI and CRUD interface standards is one area that may help. The web browser stack in current use is a fricken mess. I'd like to be able to focus on business rules rather than details of scrolling or drag-and-drop bugs.

At the current time, techies are in enough of demand that the outsourcing and visa-sourcing will not tick off enough techies to create a movement. But for the rest of the population, things may be different during the next slump.

Most the benefits of "internationalization" and automation are going to the 1%, and the 99% are starting to really notice. A tipping point may come. True, consumer products may be cheaper, but most males value jobs over stuff because it's what they are judged on.

(I had been replaced by a visa worker during the post-dot-com IT slump, so I hear you on that. I'm partly okay with the visa program during the up-times, but they don't draw them down during slumps.)

1) Use agile NodeJS in the cloud with Hadoop. It will allow them to synergistically provide access to economically sound catalysts for change to allow them to conveniently monetize high standards in holistically motivated mindshare opportunities.

2) Don't be a dick.

At least my word-processor has verbs