The BBC news programmes that they play on local NPR radio stations always states the time in GMT. Seems very reasonable for an international service that's based in the UK.

Agile is the ability to change the process to meet the needs of the team. There's a reason they chose the word "Agile", you know.

No, Agile realizes that software development involves chaos. It provides tools to deal with the reality of that chaos.

I think embracing reality is why Agile works so well.

• Instead of pretending that we can plan everything up front, we plan only for a few weeks. This allows us to adapt more quickly when we see that we're going down the wrong path.
• Instead of pretending that we can estimate how long it will take, we use relative story sizes/points and translate the points into time, based on previous performance. Because the fact is people are very bad at estimating, and we're best off recognizing that and compensating for it.
• Instead of pretending that we know when we're done, we automate acceptance tests to show it.
• Instead of pretending that we think our code works like we expect it to, we force ourselves to prove it with TDD and unit tests.

I'm pretty sure the product owner will be a serious point of failure no matter what methodology you use. I've been on a couple Agile teams with bad product owners/managers, and felt like we succeeded despite them.

Wow. That's weird. The Agile practices of teamwork, team room, pair programming, and collective ownership would seem to be very much about making a team cohesive and empowered. And retrospectives (to me the most important part of Agile) should have been a place to address such problems. If you were not using those tools, then I don't think you can blame the tool set.

In your car analogy, it's a lot easier to make the 2nd car than the 1st.

The problem is, I've never been asked to write a piece of software exactly like another that I've written. That's why we can't tell you how long it will take. We're not building cars, we're designing them. We could easily tell you how long it would take to make each additional copy.

Of course I care about them. Why else would I need my copyright to last so long?

I would propose this solution:

Show that the Canadian conservatives are just following what the American conservatives are doing.

If there's one thing that Canadian politicians don't want to be accused of, it's acting like (or taking direction from) Americans.

I have a saying: "a bug is just something you forgot to specify". I do TDD, BDD, and ATDD, so not meeting the specs is never an issue.

They've fallen for the sunk costs fallacy. If they were to change to something else, they'd be admitting that they made a poor decision in choosing Lotus Notes in the first place.

Your mistake is thinking that companies use rational thought processes when making decisions. An even bigger mistake is thinking that the people making the decisions are looking out for the best interest of the company, instead of their own best interests.

We have no idea what portion of the universe is observable to us. It could be a small fraction, or a large fraction, or even more than 100% (we could be seeing parts from different directions). If we can only observe a small fraction, then it's possible that the universe is half matter and half anti-matter, with the boundary beyond our ability to see.

However, science only deals with what we can observe, so there's not much point in worrying about the possibility. We also assume that there's nothing particularly special about our art of the universe as compared to the rest. That's served us pretty well, but it could be overturned by observation -- for example, our location within the galaxy is actually a bit atypical.

Science fiction is not about science.

A very good example of this is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I love this series -- it's one of my all-time favorites. But it's not about science, and doesn't even involve much real science. It's a parody on modern society. Most science fiction is more about modern times than anything.

If you want them to do book reports, then have them read real non-fiction science books. There are plenty out there, quite a few suggested in these comments.

But if you really want to inspire kids, I could not recommend anything more awesome than the Open Research thread above by jbeaupre.

I've seen many good explanations for why estimating software is so difficult. But my favorite explanation points out the fact that when we write software, most of what we write is not like anything we've written before.

Engineers in other fields don't run into this as much. Building a new house is very much like building any other house, so they've got a pretty good idea of how long it takes to build a house like that. And even then, building houses typically takes longer and costs more than the estimates.

I'm not convinced that we'll ever have facial recognition software that will be able to identify anyone in the USA. The false positive rate would have to be below 1 in 300 million to be completely automated. That's a really high bar to achieve. In addition to your points about poor quality images and various angles, there's also the fact that people's faces change as they age. Other things can fool recognition software too -- facial hair changes, facial expressions, makeup.

My guess is that something else will come along that will do a better job than facial recognition before it is "perfect". Perhaps cameras so good that they can see fingerprints or teeth. Or heartbeat signatures. Most likely a combination of several biometric sensors that will monitor public areas.

Facebook's recognition software doesn't look through its millions of users to find a facial recognition match in a photograph. It only looks through your list of friends. So it's only going through a few thousand photographs of a few hundred people. It doesn't have to go through millions of photographs.