I read the article. Don't bother, the slashdot conversation will probably be more informative. The guy has a paragraph on nuclear arms which is totally wrong, thinks the industrial revolution didn't kill off a lot of jobs, and totally underestimates the human ability to find shit to do when bored.

I used to work at a company that made WAN equipment. One of our interview questions asked people to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on their networking knowledge, where 10 is an expert. The idea was that we could skip the simple networking questions for higher numbers. The reality was people only picked a few numbers, but it turned out to be really reliable which ones. Experts were 4, average was 6, very little knowledge was 8, and totally clueless was 10.

Streaming just refers to the fact that the content is downloaded faster than it plays, allowing a video to start immediately without buffering. Of course the file has to go through my computer for me to see it, but if I can watch it as it downloads then we call that streaming.

You can take precautions against lightning, other than getting immunized there's really fuck all you can do against measles. It has an infection rate around 90% for unimmunized people, can live in the air for hours, and something like a 0.1% fatality rate. It is incredibly hard to stop and outbreak once it starts. Anyone doing risk assessment would take the vaccine, why take any risk you don't need to?

The doctor also makes the decision on if bloodwork or a CT should be done. Most patients don't question a doctor's recommendations. Which leaves the door open for eugenics with this ruling, but we'll see what kinds of regulations the various governments enact in the 12 months before the ruling takes effect.

As someone who is a developer, no, you don't learn a language in half a day. I know academics think they can, but academics write the most obfuscated, unmaintainable, bug-ridden code known to man. And no, people interviewing developers at tech companies are pretty much never management. It's almost always a mix of developers and team leads.

3D Printing is a lot like inkjet photo printing. It will change some industries, but in the end there are way more efficient ways to manufacture most things than printing them one-by-one, and lots of things that can't be reasonably printed.

And then the US will say 'you list 80% of your company on the dow/nasdaq exchanges, so we're going to tax you as though you were 80% an American corp'.

If they were investing it then it wouldn't be profit and people would care less. They're sitting on massive cash reserves, which ties up the money needlessly. It's bad for the country, bad for the stockholders (since it isn't being invested or used for dividends) , and ultimately bad for the companies since they should be investing to grow. But since it looks good on a balance sheet and a lot of investors can't be bothered to look past a quarterly report a lot of companies with crappy executives and boards will keep doing it.

There are lots of routine, day-to-day things that police are required to do that necessitate a staffed front desk during business hours. Police checks, parole check-ins, and taking deliveries, for example. If their lobby is decent size then offering it as a public space for craigslist exchanges isn't costing them any time or money.

2km for a building full of usable space like offices and hotels. A space elevator only requires a cable. That said, no, no space elevator any time soon.

To me it would make sense to separate traffic enforcement from policing. Create a traffic patrol that has only very limited police powers to enforce the traffic laws, and let them call in the police if there's something they can't deal with. They have less power so can be paid less, and it may lower the risk of violence at a traffic stop if the dealer in the car knows the worst the person pulling him over can do is write a ticket for speeding. Then the police are free to deal with crimes that people actually care about and can work on improving their image.

Source?

Google sells ads, I haven't heard of them selling any info, and I suspect doing so would be illegal in many countries they operate in.