They're quite right not to allow some shimmy shammy clone to register on the merits of it's DNA, just look at what happened with the Storm Trooper fiasco. They took one incredible bounty hunter, with mad skills and fantastic aim - and churned out millions of copies that couldn't hit the side of the huge desert crawling robot factory. They also had no appreciable hand to hand skills or the same muscle tone.

They should designate an island, say Manhatten, build a wall around it and put all the criminals in there. Hey, I've just had an idea for a movie.

Android - it's just Linux with a shiny front end slapped on it. Most of the work was done by volunteers outside of Google. I doubt even 3% of the code found on any given Android device was made at Google, and that's being very generous. If you count the apps downloaded to it, it would be under 1%.

Chrome - wasn't this a fork of webkit or some other browser written by other people? They did a lot of work on it, but it's by no means a Google product.

Maps - I know they acquired some companies for this, not sure the extent of it though. Streetview might well be their own baby. I don't really see it as a killer app though, it's kinda fun.

I actually switched a little while ago to DuckDuckGo, after using Google for the last...um, when did Altavista start to suck? You're pretty much spot on about the first two result pages, they are filled with paid for placements. I can't seem to search on something without some retailer site(s) coming up willing to sell me the product, and I mean like 30 of them. Search for the manual for your television and you'll have to scroll right down past all the people wanting to sell that model of TV to you.

The reason is because Aero can take up 600MB of very precious video card RAM, depending on screen resolution and other factors. That's a *lot* of RAM to be losing access to just for a desktop you can't see while playing a game. That's 600MB out of the 1-2GB a typical card might have.

It doesn't matter whether the icons have a flat look or a sculpted 3D light sourced look or whatever, they are still just bitmaps that are blasted to the screen using a bitblit operation which is stupidly fast on any card made since the late 80s. Aero sucks for many other reasons, but flat icons in not even remotely one of them.

I'd rather stab myself repeatedly in the thigh with a fork than write web site software or boring old business apps. Web software is a particular kind of super dull hell, and business apps tend to be the same old thing every time, but without the added crap of having to triple handle all the data to get it from the database onto the screen.

These days I work with the CRYENGINE game engine and are working on making my own RPG game with it. There's a *lot* more challenge, and always something new and interesting to learn. I feel like I stagnated while writing all that business software, and am finally getting to grow as a programmer again.

As others have said, every person is different in their abilities and limits. And I know nothing about your friend's situation, so I can only tell you about the situation I've worked with.

My aunt was born with cerebral palsy, and she has always had much better control over her feet than her hands. Her solution was to place an ordinary trackball under her desk, (the large kind, not the marble sized one) and she uses her bare foot to control it.

Because it's foot operated and she can't really clean it effectively, it gets dirty much faster than a desktop trackball, and so she ends up replacing it more often than you would a mouse. But overall it's been a pretty cheap investment, and one that works for her.

 
So, the people who are in pain and reflexively lash out at others...

The people who are screwed up socially and offend others without knowing what they're doing...

The people who have no where to turn and no community to welcome them...

You will turn those people away because they're not playing well with others, because they ruin the "peace, love and pancakes" "viable, productive team" kind of atmosphere that you're going for.

And then, you will pat yourself on the back for being welcoming and inclusive?

No. You just have a different definition of what "elite" means.

It'd be pretty easy to do, really. Create a quarantine VLAN, and if someone's spewing bad packets, flip them into it. Once inside, there could be all kinds of safety rails. All DNS requests would be hijacked and rerouted to the ISP's special quarantine DNS server. Packets would only be allowed to destinations where a valid DNS request was previously made. No routing would be allowed through the network: all packets must either have a source or destination address within the VLAN. SMTP traffic would be restricted to a few per day, with only a few recipients per day. Some destination ports could be closed, such as IRC. If they were DDoSing a site, perhaps with the LOIC, the address for that site would be completely unreachable from within the VLAN. The account holder would get warning SMS and Email messages, and all port 80 web traffic would be silently proxied and injected with scripted pop-up banners. They would say something like "Some computer on your home network is attempting to damage other computers on the internet. This is likely due to a computer virus or other computer infection. In order to restore service, and avoid falling trap to an online scam, please telephone us immediately using the phone number printed on your most recent billing statement from BigISPco. Your internet connection will remain severely limited until after you have your computers repaired and cleaned, you call us to restore service, and we verify that your computer is no longer attempting to attack other computers."

Long time ago I had a co-worker who made a mistake where he lost a lot of un-recoverable data. He went in to our boss to offer his resignation. My boss said "Hell no! I just paid $100,000 for you to learn that lesson, so now I need you to make sure that kind of thing can't happen again."

Google, with all their rockrstar 10x programmers and engineers fail yet again. What's the point of hiring "only the best" through a series of day long gruelling interview processes and obscure ego inflating (for the interviewers) exams - when all the software they write ends up in the trash. Their only good products are the search engine, gmail (getting marginal), and youtube (bought from someone else). Two hit products for such a massive company of the world's best software engineers seems like a pretty big let down.

Nothing good ever seems to come out of these massive, lumbering, over managed companies. Their two decent products came at a time when they were much smaller. All the innovation is coming from small, lean and agile companies who take risks. Google is just the next Microsoft, ready to crest the wave any time now.

For about 10 minutes, yes.

Plastic gears are a bad idea whatever the application but I can't see any surviving 200+ lbft of torque being put through them.

Nope, that would be layer 8.

That's not enough. A drone could be flown autonomously using inertial navigation, or even dead reckoning, needing no external RF guidance. They have to be able to bring them down without praying that jamming all RF will work.

On the other hand, hobbyists have had model rockets for 50 years and there's been no rain of home-made ballistic missiles on the White House. Maybe it's just not a big deal.

If you want a welcoming, inclusive community, you don't get to decide certain elements don't belong and remove them.

If you want to do that, you don't really want a welcoming, inclusive community, what you want is a community of elite according to a set of standards.

So, decide what it is you're choice will be and focus in on it, then everything will become obvious.