There is research into using iPad controlled quadcopters and image processing to monitor crop conditions - I saw a demonstration of a quadcopter system at a research station in Idaho last week. You can quickly find areas of a field that need more water, etc. You can't say iPads (or equivalent) will _never_ help.

I see it more as:

1. robot ships carrying seeds and frozen embryos to be developed when a suitable planet is found.

2. or life evolves to a mechanical form that can stand space radiation, long duration voyages.

I'm over 60 and still working in software. My trick is to never leave home, never let them meet me face to face - the opposite of what you did. I work as a contractor by telecommute, etc. Never bring up the issue of your age. Find an excellent sales person with an existing customer base to come up with ideas and projects, that's been a very good way to go. This is a very interesting time to be in software.

This is a quote out of
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/25-7

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

        The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act â" the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

        No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

        When I saw this list â" and especially the last agenda item â" the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

Very good interview done within the last few days. Why can't we have this guy running the country, not the bozo teams we get over and over?

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/30/noam_chomsky_wikileaks_cables_reveal_profound

Google Groups is horrible. They totally ruined DejaNews. They couldn't and can't monetize it so they just fuck with it -- but they will still copyright it to within an inch of it's life. They had no respect for the value of usenet. It was the #1 source for programming information during the 90's and I still miss it. We are living in Orwellian times, and "He who controls the present, controls the past". I would vote you up a million times.

Agile's appeal to the corporate world is understandable. Turn an anarchic, creative, random process into a measurable machine operation. Developers now become robots in the clone army. And there is buy in at many levels. Now imagine your group's most obnoxious administrative assistant becoming your scrum supervisor. It's a way for the non technical to make themselves relevant.

I'm sure someone has thought of this: use the same email client framework at sender and receiver. The first time an email is sent to someone using this system, there is a handshake between the 2 clients before the real payload is encrypted and sent. The handshake, using ordinary email, establishes the identity and provides the public keys. No 3rd party services are required other than typical email transport through the tubes. There would be a delay for the first email to go through, but none after that. The main thing I want to thwart is the data mining of all my emails that can be intercepted en route or stored on servers.

There is a killer app out there waiting to be written for this. I want automatic encryption built in to email, without the end user having to mess around with keys, key registrys, pgp, or any other encryption framework. I think there is way to do it.

I only use the model M keyboards. They were the most reasonable approximation to the selectric typewriter that I own. IBM knew how to make a good keyboard.

Another thing I liked about the model M was that it had very low radiated EMI -- they thought about what they were doing. Test a cheapo plastic keyboard vs. a real IBM model M. If you are using a radio or sensitive equipment it's a big deal..

I found by accident years ago that my WPM goes UP if I use earplugs or headphones. For some reason, if there is no sound, I can fly. I would like some feedback on this. I had a product design psychologist comment on this and he thought there was something to it.

I've mentioned the apparent loss of older microsoft documentation before and was smacked down... but I think it's true. Combine that with what I think is a degradation or loss of deja news archive software postings from the 90's and it gets to be a real problem.