I've flown first class before, but the value proposition isn't really there. Given the choice between flying first, or flying economy and keeping the price difference, I'd pick the latter (I'll happily fly first when someone else is paying and I don't have the choice of taking the money though). Economy (well, Economy Plus, but it's United, so Economy on any other airline) on the 787 was the first time I've been sufficiently comfortable in an economy seat to get productive work done - usually I just sleep or zone out and watch bad movies. The interesting thing was that the first and business sections didn't seem any different from the 777, only the cheap seats improved.

If this works the same way that it does in Europe, then even after you've gone through this you get a code valid for 30 days that you can give to another operator to port your number. This gives them a little window to try to change your mind and is a fairly good way to protest.

Apple got a lot of bad press a few years ago for massively overestimating their battery life and is now quite a bit more conservative. They've gone from claiming 6 hours to claiming 8, but at the same time they've shipped lower power CPUs and doubled the size of the battery. There was a Kickstarter for an open source compatible laptop with very similar specs to the MBP floating around last week: they were also claiming 8 hours on battery, but they were shipping a battery half the size of the MBP. I guess they think Linux users keep the screen turned off.

Adjusting the brightness has a big impact on battery life for the MBP. Cutting it to 50% can give you another hour or two. I have gfxCardStatus installed and so disable the nVidia card if I'm going to be using it on battery for a while.

A big part of the reason for short battery lives is people who don't realise that LiIon and NiCd are not the same and think that they get the best battery life by completely draining the battery then charging it. LiIon prefers partial discharge and then full recharge, although the controller typically wants a complete discharge cycle every month or so for calibration.

The 787 has more legroom than any other plane I've flown in and this is aimed as a 787 competitor. Note that it depends a lot on the airline though - they get a lot of say in the exact layout of seats, so you'll see different amounts of legroom for different carriers and the same aircraft.

The A380 is really huge. A lot of the long-haul flights that I've been on in the last couple of years haven't been full, even when they're the one flight of the day between two points and are on a plane with half of the capacity of the A380. It's a very economical plane to fly if you can fill it up, but if it's likely to be under half full then it's very expensive. The big-planes, infrequently model doesn't really work with the hub-and-spokes model popular in the USA, because it either needs more coordination with short-haul spoke routes, or layovers (and the cost of near-airport hotels means that these can often make it cheaper to book a different airline's flight).

I flew on the 787 (LHR - IAH, both directions) for the first time this year and it was such a massive improvement over earlier models that I actually enjoyed flying for the first time in ages. Even in the cheap seats, there was lots of legroom, lots of overhead space (so you didn't feel cramped), the air pressure stayed good for the entire flight, the seats reclined comfortably without invading someone else's space. I managed to get more uninterrupted work done on the outbound flight than any other time over the surrounding few months. I'm really looking forward to airlines using similar craft on all long-haul routes.

One really good developer can, by code review, good design, and mentorship, dramatically improve the productivity of half a dozen middle-of-the-pack developers. To the point where it's actually worth a company's while to hire them. So you're arguing against the availability of jobs for you, not for it.

Sure, but it only matters when the ones in the USA are competing in a global market. How many of those other industries are contributing a lot to the US GDP from exports? Put the ones that are on the list of things to care about.

Not at all. He's saying that training doesn't create great programmers if they don't already have some innate ability. You need the mixture of ability and opportunity. Now that more and more of the world is growing up with computers, a lot more of the people with the ability are going to develop it. Graham wants those people to be in the USA.

How about some other things that are harder for people who consider moving to the USA:

• Car culture: Few places where you can live without needing to spend a lot of time commuting and long trips just to go shopping. If your time is valuable, then moving to such a place seems like a step back in terms of quality of life. If you're getting a house with a big yard, that puts you in the suburbs, where pretty much anything is 15+ minutes each way in the car.
• Healthcare: You might get good heath insurance at your job, but does it cover your partner if they move with you? Will it cover your children?
• Crime rates: San Francisco and New York don't look that safe compared to much of Europe...
• High cost of living generally: that big salary is nice while you're there, but how much of it can you put into savings?

There are lots of reasons not to want to move to the USA.

Labour costs are largely irrelevant to someone like Graham. He wants startups to increase in value quickly so that he can sell his stake and make a large profit. That means getting the best talent, even if you have to pay them more. Doubling salary costs doesn't matter much when you're looking at a 10-100 times return on investment for a successful startup.

Huh? Objective-C doesn't have garbage collection. Apple tried to add it some years ago, but it was a disaster and they deprecated it (and never supported it on iOS). Objective-C has a number of design patterns that rely on deterministic deallocation, so is a really poor fit for garbage collection.

It does (optionally, although you'd be an idiot to turn it off) have automatic reference counting, but you still need to think about ownership and explicit cycle breaking.

HP was famous for having parallel tracks for management and engineering talent. Promotion didn't mean moving to management, that was a separate skill set and managers would often be paid less than the people that they were managing. ARM does something similar now - the position of ARM Fellow is the engineering track equivalent of VP on the management track (most of their managers are also technically competent, but not as hands-on as the engineers). It's a good way of avoiding the Peter Principle: don't make people do a different job to be promoted.

CEOs maybe (and, actually, you do import a lot of those). Doctors and lawyers are a bad example, because they both provide local services. Software is a massive export market for the USA. You need a number of doctors and lawyers proportional to your population. For any industry that is primarily export focussed, you want to have a big chunk of the top talent or you'll find it hard to compete internationally.