I started using a Commodore 64 when I was 7. All of our family was amazed when we realized how to do 'Load"*",8,1' and Load"*",8,1
So many good times were had with the C64 simply because the jump in technology from what we had before it was so huge. We got our C64 a little over half a year before the NES. Its hard to imagine so much technology jump in one year. If you look at video games today, not much changes(more polys) each console generation anymore since we already had enough computing power to do what we wanted last generation. But going from Atari2600 games to C64/NES games was such a jump that it is hard to put into words, and maybe no one will understand it unless they lived through it. It inspired some sort of awe that I couldn't put into words.

I had a disk drive, and it took me a long time to understand the message,"Press play on tape." Basically that was the blue screen of death for a C64. Restart the machine and try something different.

I think it may run Crysis. If you check its IP with a ping, it responds with,"Would you like to play a game?"

At first, I caused the quakes to see if I could. Next I caused the quakes to extort the government for money. But anymore, I just cause the quakes to make time with The Baroness more interesting.

It was probably way less than 1% that a manual person did the driving for. They probably only did the intersections which are barely 40 meters each, and swerving back on the road occasionally which again is less than 40 meters.

Education on Apps and Websites is the future. Right now you can do it if you're an active learner, but it will keep getting better and better. There will be a transition between active learning to spoonfed education over the next 2-6 years. There will be apps you can sit a little kid down on, and they'll learn English and Math without a teacher... In fact I believe at their own pace, kids will be able to learn better than in traditional school! And even more importantly, smart phones keep going down on prices and 3rd world countries are affording tech here and there now where education is really bad. So anything you can get in terms of education on Apps, that is the future. If we're over saturating the app stores, lets make it educational products. Education online might not be for everyone now, but every year that passes makes it better.

When will the roads be filled with self driving cars? All the self driving car research corporations want to flaunt,"We're researching the self driving cars, and it could be done as soon as real soon!" But I don't see self driving cars on the horizon for many many years. Even closed loop self driving cars might run into issues if pushed too soon.

PS: I've listened to enough propaganda pushing the reclassification of RC cars and planes as drones. And my only guess why they try and do this is to make the word drone sound more tame, instead of what everyone imagines,"Automated flying weapons of death." Does anyone know the other political reason for trying to reclassify radio controlled planes as drones?

Poor people have less nutrition for their body. Poor people have less access to toys and media which exercise the brains. Thankfully smart phone prices are coming down in price, and educational apps are popping up all the time. So in third world countries, people may be able to get education straight from a smart phone. We as app developers should have education in mind. Whether we're doing illustrated story books which the spoken word synched with highlighted words, or we're doing K-12-University lectures and workbook activities... We should focus more on education and helping out over directly our own pocketbooks to a degree.

Political nonsense can always sometimes be used as a tool to push down competitors or elevate yourself with subsidies. If one energy source gets cheap, all other energy sources will stop getting as much profits. So there is always some at least light effort gamesmanship to trip up your competitors, and sometimes it is fierce. Think: If everyone had solar installments and hybrid electric plugin cars, not as many people would need gasoline(demand goes down, gas prices go down). Is the president shutting down coal power plants? Well the gas driven power plants are applauding his action.

Anyone who remembers how badly #AskNeal went down as a hockey fan, I'm surprised anyone would ever post #AskWhatever ever again because it is basically taunting the trolls. Trolls will come, and trolls will go, but don't encourage them.

So many idiots get their knowledge of the candidates by scripted television ads. This is how you end up electing Monty Burns.

If instead there was a website where you could put in issues you find important (checkboxes) and get a record of voting on these issues by people in office, you could see if your incumbent did what you find important. It'd require some hard workers to simplify complex obfuscated legislation into an easy to understand format, so it is not an easy website to make, but it would be valuable.

Then people would be forced to check how their politician did against what they find important before they reelect people at the voting machines.

Twitter should have a way to disable picture tweets altogether. One main reason I left facebook was the meme spam.

The thing the C64 has on todays machines is: No matter what software you ran in it, you could boot it up again cleanly. Maybe they should work on getting back that positive trait on modern computers. Even you have to separate the boot hard disk from what can be read/written to, it would be so worth it. Virus fears are the reason I hesitate to browse boldly, or to download and run any .exe.

When you code, the most important thing to do is get your memory architecture built right, then methods just write themselves. Come back later and want to make a better method, you can use your old code as a partial refactor. It is an agile sort of run and gun approach and it works.

Refactoring for the sake of refactoring is often wasted time for the original author for there is ways of understanding code past just nice variable names and indentation. Sometimes even badly formatted code stands out and reminds you what it did to remind you of how it works. But when you code in a group, this doesn't hold true and a refactor can help.

Yahoo has a great news thread that somehow custom tailors to you without you doing anything. It knows I like hockey and video games, but I never clicked any options. Sure yahoo is distracting with all the extra content, and you can forget why you came to the search page, but distractions can be good.

I always figure more search engines are good. We don't want the web to end up with just one search engine to rule them all. The only downside I say Yahoo or Google have is its hard to tell which websites are advertisements because they normally peddle malware. You'd think Google and Yahoo wouldn't allow sponsored links to come up first if they're hosting malware, but I guess the money they get trumps them being more functional.