Microsoft's Metro interface design predates Google's Holo interface design by several years. Holo was probably greatly inspired by Metro.

With that said I don't think you can blame flat user interfaces on any one particular company. It's just a fad. Microsoft's flat UI looked ugly when Microsoft unleashed it back in the 00's. Give it five more years and it will look ugly again, ugly and dated.

True, but if you're not visiting the Play Store you're probably either not using your phone for anything that would benefit from an OS update, or you're using Cyanogen or some other custom build.

If you look at the distribution of people who actually download your app from Google Play it will be even more skewed towards newer versions of Android, because people download a lot more apps in the days and weeks after they buy a new phone.

I have an app that currently sees about 20% Lollipop and 45% KitKat in new installs.

Uh, are you aware that Google owns AdMob, the main mobile ad provider?

They would probably not want to make it easy for users to block ads by turning on and off internet access on a per app basis.

The most common version is now KitKat with 39.8%. Jelly Bean is second with 39.2% and Lollipop has just under 10%.

https://developer.android.com/...

Keep in mind that a lot of Android users have low incomes and/or live in countries where an over the air OS update would be a significant cost to the average person. We might think that a smartphone is useless without at least a 1GB per month data plan, but hundreds of millions of users in the developing world think otherwise.

Yup, and it is actually much more difficult than that. We're talking really exotic stuff in terms of technology. Centuries off from anything that we have today probably.

You need lifeforms, or self replicating machines, that can survive in places like Mars and make useful byproducts for the colonizers, like oxygen, nutrients, etc. Either that, or some sort of replicator machine that could make anything, including copies of itself.

There is one massive problem with that idea and that is that this planet has all of the habitable land in the solar system and we don't have a clue how to create habitable land elsewhere.

The US government could easily fund outposts all over the solar system, but separated from habitable land and the natural services that such land provides, like air, potable water, topsoil, nutrients, etc, none of the outposts would survive without continuous supplies from Earth.

Even if we could come up with a magical technology that instantly terraformed all of Mars, that would only give us a few decades of breathing room, assuming exponential population growth. Mars is really small compared to Earth and exponential growth is really fast. If we could somehow magically terraform all asteroids in the solar system then that maybe would buy us another decade or two. In the longer run, barring faster than light travel, the best we could ever hope for is V^3 rate of expansion, since we would be colonizing 3-dimensional space at some constant speed V.

It's usually not that luck doesn't strike, because it generally does if you're doing something right. The problem is that you also tend to get struck by bad luck.

Based on the article I would guess that a random unexpected setback could easily have brought Tesla out of business in late 2008. Those sort of things happen all the time.

Chome for private use, Firefox for work, Opera for communicating with my wife, Safari for the girlfriend on the side, Explorer for the other girlfriend...

Okay, I'm over-exaggerating, but you get the point. There is probably a plug-in for Chrome or Firefox that achieves the same effect, but in practice I find it easier to just use a bunch of different browsers as sandboxes for different situations.

Oh, he's sighing at himself. That's fine then.

If you recall Thermodynamics 101 / Highschool physics, gaps function as insulators, which is helpful when you're trying to keep something cool or warm.

Sigh... back at you.

1. Don't let safety-critical decisions be based on unreliable time sources.
2. Let each device tag incoming messages with its own timestamps, which never leave the device. Due to the laws of nature messages can safely be assumed to have been transmitted no later than the time of reception.

I wonder if I should patent this...

Dual core should be fine for most day-to-day use. An SSD is almost a must-have. But most importantly: a good high-res display for looking at stuff.

This should be about right if you're going for a mac: http://store.apple.com/us/buy-...
This is more lightweight, but the CPU might be too slow: http://store.apple.com/us/buy-...
This should be OK if you can live without the apple: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-1...

Most of these people will not be able to get good enough fast enough to keep up with people who are already in the field.

In the long run we're all dead, so I wouldn't worry too much about the truly long-term prospects in any field of work unless I'm giving advice to kids.

Boss: What paradigm should we utilize to synergize our efficiencies and provide sustainability to the cloud?

Smart Programmer: We need to use the best paradigm for each sub-problem. I would recommend the Python programming language, because it has a large number of libraries that address the sustainability in the cloud.
Boss: That doesn't sound very innovative. We really need to think outside the box on this one and future-proof our social media content. Big data is a real value add here and I'm telling you it's a game changer. We should reach out and ping some subject matter experts on industry best practices.
Smart Programmer: Python really does allow you to think outside of the box. You can switch gears really quickly with all of the libraries that it has for things like social media content and big data. Many experts would say that using Python is currently a best practice when working with big data.
Boss: That's interesting, but I would prefer Java. We have to deep dive and figure out the most dynamic way to add value and monetize this opportunity.
Smart Programmer: Java is a great choice, but we could cut our development time in half if we use Python, which would save us a lot of money and let us address our big data potential faster.
Boss: Al right, I'm going to ask some other experts about whether we should go with Java or Python. Thanks for your input.

Yes, but in addition to that the trade-offs are inherently different for re-usable rockets. Embrittlement is probably a pretty big problem if you intend to re-use your fuel tank many times, like SpaceX intends to.

If SpaceX fails to make their second stage re-usable I would not be surprised to see them switch to hydrogen for that stage at some point down the line.