Yep. And, frankly, it was and is obvious that it would be. I've been saying for years that globalism was ultimately a good thing, though in the short term it was going to be painful for the wealthy countries, as standards of living equalize. If this article is correct, the pain may be much less, and much shorter, than I'd expected. Not that there isn't still pain ahead, but if we're already getting to the point where overseas labor costs have risen enough to be offset by domestic education and infrastructure, then the future looks pretty good.

At the end of the day, though, I'm no more entitled to my job than some programmer in China. If he can do the job as well and will do it for less money, then he should have it. Cost of living differences make this painful in the short term, but if we just keep competition open, the field will level -- some of that leveling may come from decreases in my standard of living but most of it will come from increases in his. That's too bad for me, but great for him, and it's fair because he's no less a human being than I am.

Manufacturing has returned (slowly) but it's been in the form of automation, not jobs.

Interesting. What do you mean by "operate the engine in private"? Who would use it? And given that information derived from what you search for is the primary source of information for ad targeting, and given that the search engine is the primary place the ads are displayed, how would that work?

You missed the point. You can make such a license if you like, indeed many people have made them. But it is a popularity contest in that unless a significant number of people agree with your priorities and therefore choose to adopt your license, you won't have accomplished anything.

And, of course, the GP disagrees with your priorities and wouldn't use your license. I see both sides, but I think I'd probably shy away from a license with such vague and potentially far-reaching restrictions.

Sure. What we can't have is the power of the sharp kitchen knife, plus the compatibility with existing code and libraries without the four years of training.

I can teach a novice to use a nice, pleasant, safe and very powerful subset of modern C++ in a fairly short period of time... as long as the novice is only working on code written in that subset. If the novice starts looking at and modifying other code, though, all bets are off until he's done his years on the mountain top.

The way I see it, C++14 is a very nice language with a bunch of baggage you should just ignore... except when you have to use because you're working with code that already does. This means given a clean, modern codebase you should be able to hire a bunch of smart novices and get them productive fairly quickly. Just keep an old salt around who can answer their questions when they step outside of the nice subset.

Non-sequiteur. X has nothing to do with the GUI, at least not any part of the GUI users care about. X is merely the tool used to draw stuff on the screen; it says nothing about what gets drawn. Everything users care about, including what windows, buttons, fonts, etc., look like, how applications interact with one another, and whether or not all of the above is nicely integrated and looks like it belongs together has nothing to do with X.

I insist on living and working in locations where I don't need an elevator... a remote tropical island would work well for this.

US courts have ruled that linking to infringing content constitutes contributory infringement. I'm not sure how "direct" the link has to be. Google search links to torrent sites which contain pointers to infringing content, for example, so that's apparently okay.

Courts in the US have held that linking directly to infringing content constitutes contributory infringement. Linking to another site isn't infringement just because the other site doesn't want you to link and benefit from their material (Tickemaster v Tickets.com established that), but linking to infringing material on another site does.

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer nor am I a Google spokesperson.)

Which would be relevant only if Larry, Sergey and Eric decided to allow it to be. As long as the three of them stay united, they outvote the rest of the shareholders combined.

Aside from the rather questionable assertion that Google is a monopoly, the company's cash reserves are nowhere near that large, or, rather, the company's expenses are much larger than you believe. Last I heard, Google has cash reserves of ~$60B (which, note, aren't actually cash; you don't leave that much capital sitting idle), and annual operational costs of about $40B. How long Google could continue to operate with hugely decreased revenues depends on just how far the revenues declined, and how much economizing the company could do, but I strongly doubt that it would be "decades". If all advertising revenue derived from the search engine disappeared and Google didn't economize at all, it would be bankrupt in maybe three years.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. Everything in this post is derived from public information.)

At this point nobody's going to be surprised if any device tested has blatant security flaws. The only interesting story would be if someone found a device with no actual flaws. That would be news.

Actually, the study in question was on freeways, and it didn't necessarily have anything to do with interchanges, which are all rate-controlled in the area. One spot they found regularly jammed was just a rise in the road. The partially obstructed vision was enough to cause a few drivers to slow just a bit, which snowballed and then created a jam which moved backwards from the rise at a fairly constant rate of precession, two or three mph, IIRC. So after the jam moved away from the rise, there was *no* cause for it. It just self-sustained as drivers bunched up when approaching the jam.

There was a /. article on it. It was fascinating.

I don't see why bricklaying couldn't be automated.

We used to just call it "pouring cement" and "laying bricks" but now that additive manufacturing is such a big hit we have to call it 3D Printing.