Ditto. I worked through Aerotek for a year (which is related to TekSystems). The company I worked for paid $55/hour for me, and I only got $25/hr from Aerotek.

0.00001% * 320 million people = 32 people. Methinks there are a few orders of magnitude more than your proposed count.

Varying degrees of focus are required for various procedures. Think of brushing your teeth. Are you 100% focused on the action of brushing your teeth? Probably not. Now turn around and hand-solder some surface mount SOT-23 chips. More focused? You betcha. He specifically stated that he chose a very simple and straightforward procedure to test the setup with. He wasn't performing an organ transplant or anything of touchy nature. I doubt the surgeon was actively fiddling with the Google Glass and the HO setup throughout the procedure. Set it up, hit play, come back when the surgery is done.

So, if the NSA is working so hard to fight terrorism by violating our rights, why couldn't the government work just as hard on something that saves more lives in the long run? Vehicles kill tens of thousands of people per year. If the government is going to trash my civil liberties, at least save more lives in the process.

I worked in the medical device field for a while. The level of paperwork and documentation required for validation activities is staggering, plus the medical field in general doesn't have as good a handle on fulfilling government requirements as well as, say, the aviation industry. The path to take a device from concept to validated, sellable product is a long one. Adding cybersecurity (while a worthy endeavor) will only exacerbate the arduous and hair-tearing experience of developing a product.

I don't get why internships were ever unpaid in the first place. In the course of training someone to do the job they are interning for, they end up providing some form of valuable work, even if it is at a lower level of effectiveness/efficiency than a highly-skilled employee. As an engineer, I have the good fortune of being in a field where internships are almost universally paid, and paid well for that matter. (Many engineering internships run from double to triple minimum wage.) Even my most basic intern experience (which is barely considered "engineering" by my standards) paid over double minimum wage (back in 2006). I can't fathom a sort of situation where an intern provides absolutely no useful work. Can anyone provide an example?

The military doesn't have to recruit robots, it just builds them. Robots don't get tired, don't complain, perform better & more consistently than humans, don't get PTSD, and don't cause public uproar when they're destroyed (vs. bodybags).

Oops, bad math. 30 a minute

Would you then have to apply such penalties to wide-sweeping automated systems that monitor for piracy and other violations? (Kind of like "If an automated car commits a traffic violation, who do you send the ticket to?")

If a piece of software flags & sends notices about 300 items a minute and even 10% of them are false, that's 4320 false claims a day. If it is a $500 fine per false claim that's on the order of 2 million dollars lost a day. Hmmm...this is sounding better and better all the time...

I hope the Barbara Streisand effect snowballs this from here.

One of the bigger problems with accreditation is the scope of examination needed to determine suitability for official certification. If I were to certify someone as an electrical engineer without any knowledge of what their education was, I'd want to spend a full week working one-on-one with them to fully evaluate their knowledge and skills. This is why universities get accreditation from a group like ABET. Now you can tell graduates to have several years of work experience, take the FE and PE exams, and be able to tell with a reasonable amount of certainty whether or not the individual is worthy to be called a Professional Engineer with a good efficiency in the process (vs. the aforementioned one-on-one situation). Does anyone have any better ideas for large-scale, education-irrelevant accreditation?

Drone baby drone? Yeah yeah, it's Norway and not the US...

I am routinely a bit confused as to why datacenters aren't predominantly located in places with colder climates. Free cooling from the outside during the winter and whatnot. Is there simply a lack of infrastructure to make an ultrahigh-bandwidth line out to...say...northern Montana?

For stupidly small lengths of yellow lights it becomes nigh impossible to stop in time. Not only does this cause more unintentional red-light-running, it also increases wear on vehicles from hard braking. If they actually cared about safety and the environment, they'd lengthen yellow light times to give people more warning. Sadly, money drives their motivations (pun intended).

This shouldn't be any surprise. It happens all the time in politics across the nation (heck, across the globe). This is yet another prime example of the perversion of impartiality through the channel of lobbying. I certainly agree that such tactics are underhanded. Perhaps we should change the term "lobbying" to "legalized bribery"