I would support this approach. Excel is great for business users to prototype calculations and play around with data. When it is time to put what they have learned into practice, ship it off to software engineers and let them turn it into a more stable product for use by the less sophisticated user.

Of course, reverse engineering a complicated excel workbook can be a royal pain in the rear. This is where you learn just how devilish a tool excel can be, with hidden rounding and other obscure effects.

Because until every vehicle is autonomous, there will still be a need to understand the handwaving signals from some guy standing in the middle of the road - he might be a flag man from a construction blockage or maybe just some guy helping out at an accident scene. In any event, with no standardization and no training for the random dude in the street it would be very difficult for a car-bot to understand every possible permutation.

And if you remember watching the first moon landing.....

You are probably right.... for very small values of "ever". But given that there's probably at least a half-billion years before the sun begins to cook our part of the solar system, there's plenty of time to beat "never".

From the Wikipedia article on Helium-3:

They even have a whole section about mining the moon for He-3

Which is funny because the case was decided about a lawyer who wanted to expunge results pointing to news articles about court proceedings involving his personal life and finances. You know, public records that the government maintains and provides to the public.

Truly the court has a dizzying intellect.....

I think his point was valid. Sure, Google may end up having to comply. And their results will become less reliable because of it.

So what happens next? If the data is valuable, and the results from Google (and other public sites) becomes unreliable, how long before Experian or some other data aggregator begins selling their own version of uncorrupted search results and personal data that you don't get to see and edit?

Equally valid, if this really does become an issue with the big search engines, how long before everybody starts using the new startup from Indonesia or the Phillipines?

Your example is pretty much the case that came before the court. Some lawyer went through a messy divorce and it and all the financial fallout hit the news. Since it was the most newsworthy thing he'd ever done, it was the topic of the search results on his name even years later. The articles are still live at the newspaper sites. The court isn't ordering them to take them down. They are just saying that Google can't point to the articles.

This is very bizarre. I suppose they see the book burning metaphor, so they won't force the library to take the book off the shelf and burn it. But they will force the library to remove it from the card catalog.

I understand not wanting some upskirt picture from when you were 22 years old to be the first thing people see about you when you are in your 40's and your kids are in middle school, but the EU's solution is terrible.

Charles Manson might be pretty tired of being tied to events of 40 years ago. So might Roman Polanski. That doesn't mean the government should be able to force a company like Google to corrupt their search results.

I'll add to your sentiments by pointing out that at the local level business is often steered to the old boys' network. The Mayor's golf buddy gets the contract for the line maintenance, the councilman's brother-in-law gets the billing contract, etc. And the new guy in town who has a great business that competes with them has loads of trouble with the permitting process and the zoning board.

At every level, power corrupts. Even if most folks are basically good people trying to do the right thing, the constant pressure of vested interests trying to use that power to their benefit tends to move things in an unfair direction.

I tried to reform some of the IT processes in our local government - it was highly fragmented and inefficient - and got no interest at all. I finally talked to someone who had a little insight into the problem - he pointed out just how many different businesses had contracts with all these little agencies and offices. So if you try to upset that apple cart you'll have all of those small business owners complaining to their councilmen about how they are being negatively affected. Nobody is agitating on the other side at all. (well, except me). So the chance of fixing the problem is pretty much exactly zero.

It looks like there are roughly 1,000 trucks hijacked each year in the US, representing some half a billion dollars in stolen goods. I don't know if that counts as an epidemic or not. Google tells me that about 100 people die each year from the drug ecstasy. Slate tells me that 297 people have been killed in school shootings since 1980 - or roughly 10 per year. Those topics are all over CNN. State officials are eager to do something! about them. So a thousand could be a pretty big number.

The NHTSA seems to think a couple of million people are injured in car crashes each year - a steadily declining but very large number. There are nearly 4 million home burglaries each year in the US. Which makes 1,000 hijacked trucks sound like small potatoes.

I suppose a truck that doesn't have to stop so the driver can rest is probably less likely to get hijacked, since that seems to be a recurring theme in the hijacking stories.

I was going to say something similar. There are a lot of people who don't want to be kept in a box, doing only one thing all day. I used to hire those people specifically - I found it worked well for our culture. Plus, I personally get bored with too much of the same thing. I love coming up with a cool SQL trick that cuts the cost of a query by 99%. It is fun to watch something complete in 2 seconds that was taking 15 minutes before. But I wouldn't want to do that all day, every day year after year......

Different strokes for different folks. Not every developer wants to be pigeon-holed into coding web-server middleware all day, every day.

Actually, when IPO time rolls around people with "names" can add a great deal to the IPO. I can certainly believe that a former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor might have contributions to make on the "privacy and security" front, which is the focal point of the criticism. That aside, the IPO's that I have been involved in always included bringing in people with the right resume in high level posts at the last minute. That way the big institutional investors who are looking in to the company can say "Aha, I see they have big name official on the board, and look, they have the former CIO from Transamerica. They have all the right people in place to move the company forward!" And yes, it pissed me off that someone who had nothing to do with building the company made more than I did (by a couple of orders of magnitude) on the IPO. But Mr. Analyst working for the big investment group doesn't want to hear "we have this great guy who is super-bright and has been working 100 hours a week since the beginning as CIO".

But that is irrelevant to the major shareholders - they are simply asking themselves "can we make 30% more if we bring in this handful of people for the IPO?" If they can make an extra $200 million by spending 20 million, they'll do it every time. Once the VC guys get involved, loyalty kinda flies out the window.

So I guess the moral of the story is, make sure you get paid on the initial investments, because that might be the last bite of the apple you get.

Even more so due to NASA's early leadership comprised mostly of former Nazi SS officers. It takes a particularly convoluted suite of conspiracy theorist logic to propose that a bunch of Nazi scientists are under the command and control of the global Jewish conspiracy.

Shifting is a lot of fun, even in a little economy car. Even more so in a nice sports car.

Having driven a Tesla Roadster.... the "instant-on" acceleration of the Tesla is even more fun. It makes you giggle like a little kid. The acceleration is so instantaneous that it is startling the first time.

To go with it there is also a weird bit of instant-off deceleration to contend with as well, at least in the Roadster. Simply lifting your foot results in a fairly hard braking force from the electric engine. You adjust pretty quickly to leaving your foot on the accelerator to maintain speed or coast, but that first ride really emphasizes the massively different level of torque and power that you get from an electric like the Tesla Roadster.