In the 1940's, my grandfather ran his rural house and dairy farm on 12 volts DC, because utility power hadn't yet reached his location. Now we have utility power everywhere, but we don't like it any more, so we're going back to batteries. Funny how things go in cycles.

Lollipop is to Android what Windows Vista was to Windows: Nice looking, but slow and buggy. It lags a lot, sometimes to the point of entirely freezing up. If they speed it up and clean it up, I'll be very happy.

Interest rates have been so low that nobody wants to invest in bonds or other interest-bearing funds. Where else are people with money going to invest? Once interest rates start coming up, the picture is going to change dramatically.

It doesn't seem as bad as it was in the late 90's, when investors were throwing money at anyone who could do something "on a computer." At least this time around, most of the companies with high valuations actually do something valuable, even if they don't yet know how to make money. Still, there are a lot of crazy stock prices out there.

In my first encounter with Agile back in 2001, our management decided to follow Scrum.

We did the daily meetings, of course. Then we divided our project into sprints:

Sprint 1: Design
Sprint 2: Coding
Sprint 3: Debug
Sprint 4: QA
Sprint 5: Release

Needless to say, it didn't work out too well. Since then, I've seen agile done a lot of ways, some worked, some did not. Frankly, most waterfall proponents simply don't get Agile. Managers who DO get agile are able to deliver far better quality, in far less time, than any waterfall model.

Nobody is using it yet!

C++ isn't the only one. COBOL is still around, and even has object-oriented extensions these days. Fortran, RPGII...I can't think of a single outdated but widely-used language that has every gone away.

Tablet sales have slumped this year. Why? I'd guess that it's because everybody who wants one, already has one...and new versions of tablets aren't that much different from the previous versions.

Desktop sales are down too, but that's in large part because they last longer these days. We used to replace them every three years, now a computer can last 5-7 years or more. The desktop certainly isn't dead!

Nexus 7's are GPS-enabled whether or not they are equipped with cellular.

It seems a lot of people don't know about half their GPS devices. Of course, smartphones...and what about the drawer full of old ones? Tablets often have them. Cars too!

If you simply have intellectual curiosity, why not? But if you want to use your knowledge commercially, you might want to focus on languages that businesses actually use. A language is much more than a set of syntax, it's an ecosystem. Try finding code snips on StackOverflow for your new language...good luck with that! The majority of the benefit of using a particular language is not the syntax, but the community support.

This gives me an idea...

Let's hold a hearing on scientifically driven politics, and don't invite the politicians!

Better still, let's just leave out the politicians altogether. Only problem is, then suddenly scientists would become politicians.

...it's probably the student's fault. When the whole class fails, it's probably the teacher's fault.

Exactly. Neither does Google. It's more that older people no longer want to put up with the stuff Google wants from its workers.

...has to be pretty low too. They hire any teenager who will show up and punch a clock. But who is complaining? Should we sue McDonald's because they create opportunities for people who need that very first job? (Wait, somebody probably IS suing them for this.)

This isn't about hiring integrity, it's pure and simple, about extorting some money out of deep pockets.

Biometrics are only good so long as the device that reads your pattern is "honest." If you have to inject a device to read your biometric patterns, you could just as easily inject a device that pretends to read your biometrics, but actually copies someone else's.