I agree, this seems to be a fine art that has been lost no matter what language was used. Putty is the only significant program that I know of that doesn't require a huge install. Heck, even MinGW got complicated along the way somewhere. You can't even install a printer driver under 100 MB anymore.

Exactly. This is not an apology. I read TFA. Somehow, they want to put the horse back in the barn. There was a time that they had a mission to develop technology that was useful to US government agencies, industry, banking interests, etc. I truly respect people who were doing honest work at securing US interests. But there is just no going back, all that work is forever tainted.

Doesn't work anymore. In the 20th century the 'wise men' (educated) were the first to be marched off... Then the 'undesirables', etc. They already were identified by the time the situation arose.
Not sure what the 21st century holds for us. But considering how much information is recorded about all of us going back who knows how long, it is probably too late already.

You will have to do more than just keep quiet, you will have to be 'useful' as well.

Silly rabbit! :)
We were certain of our liberties as codified in law (mistakenly.) Now, we are not sure of anything. It is no longer paranoia, now there is precedence.

Even in case #1, there is sometimes things that can be done. For example, speculative execution. If you can boil down to a small number of choices as a result of the first operation, then it may make sense to compute both outcomes. Or there may be some other intermediate value that might be needed in only some outcomes. But this requires application-specific knowledge usually to know exactly what is allowable and what the payoff would be. You wouldn't want to create a situation where executing both cases affects a global resource. So you would need a language expressive enough to hint this information to the compiler.

Telecommuting: I work for a company that is fairly traditional. I have co-workers in Germany, Japan, the other side of the USA, 3 co-workers working out of their homes in different cities. I work with them on a daily basis. The only reason I work in an office is because we work on physical hardware and need to share some resources. The irony is that talking with co-workers over phone, email, or shared screen is often more efficient than with the person in the same office.

Translation: translate.google.com works as well as anything. The only real limitation is that technical jargon in German doesn't pass through to an equivalent US English expression. But that is the same thing that happens when German people speak English. They have very good grammar and accent in English, but they are not taught our technical words or colloquialisms. So technical documents have a lot of instances of "Module", "Technology", etc. referring to different things using the same words when there were more specific words that meant something in German.

Cryptocurrency: true, I think that is a lot of work to do there. But not the least of which will be institutional barriers deliberately intended to regulate the flow of currency over borders.

I'd be happy calling December 25th "Santa Claus Day." Christians still refer to Christmas and go to midnight mass on the 24th and such.

The "Christmas" tree, lights, Santa, gift giving to each other, ham or turkey dinner, having the day off are definitely the norm in this country, and they are not spelled out in the bible as far as I know.

Happy Holidays offends _me_ only because it is so damn generic and politically correct. It is equivalent to say "Happy Holidays" on any holiday such as the 4th of July because we don't want to be exclusive of other nations' dates of independence.

So I think I will just go with "Have a merry Santa Claus Day and a happy new year" (Unless we don't want to offend people following other calender new years.)
Then maybe "Have a merry Santa Claus Day and a happy rollover of the Gregorian calendar"

Kodak diversified into many areas. The problem is that they were always expecting the high profit margins in every product line. And they needed that due to the large R&D, worker benefits, big management, and quality control process that they tried to apply everywhere. Secondarily, they were always chasing the razor-blade model and that just doesn't work everywhere. I agree that led to some wasteful ventures like batteries and such. But in general, they preferred to sell off a company for one-time cash rather than try to operate it. For example: Carestream, Eastman chemical, Exelis, etc.

Many of these companies are able to expand in new directions. Formerly, they were constrained under the vertically-integrated structure within Kodak because they only focused on photographic products.

The good news is that many of the industries Kodak spun off are still employing people and operating in the same physical plant that Kodak built. In fact, many new food-processing operations have moved into former film-handling facilities due to the superb climate-controlled buildings that Kodak built up.

People here in Rochester have a lot of resentment that Kodak didn't pursue digital cameras sooner. But the plain fact is that there just isn't as much market to monetize even if they did beat out Sony, et al. for the camera market. Nevermind that even digital cameras have lost market to smartphones. Electronics are low-margin, especially if produced in the USA. Film was very high-margin and high-volume. If you are over 30 years old, you probably remember that using a few rolls of film a year was a big deal due to the cost. Now picture-taking is virtually free; only rarely do I pay money to print out a photo.

Does Tyson regularly tweet on the birthday of other significant scientists besides Newton?

What should the rest of us do in the meantime while we are waiting for the answers?

Seriously. I'm not anti-science, I'm just against the arrogant viewpoint of some scientists that science will give us the answers we need in a timely manner to create perfect public policy that brings us to utopia.

This is a really good point. Science depends on reconciling competing world views through peer-review. Eventually, one must withdraw their line of research for a variety of reasons. This is not as decisive as some would purport it to be. Statements like "the science is settled", are hardly ever true.

But both are examples of deliberately refusing to acknowledge what is obviously a significant cultural event (in the USA.) By definition, this is counter-culture and that alone is enough to offend many people.

An exercise left to the student?

200 Gigatons *2000 pounds/ton / 2 lbs per board foot / 16000 board feet in average house: 12.5 billion houses?
http://www.idahoforests.org/wo...
http://www.osbornelumber.net/w...

I guess I'm pretty lucky then. Management where I work actively supports the concept of directing customers to the customer support department and to leave Engineering busy with their own work.

Yes exactly. We have this strange concept that anyone in the world can call me, send me a text, IM me or include me in a long email thread. Worse is when they expect an immediate response, or think I should stay at my desk to keep replying to their IM messages. Maybe I'm too busy and my primary job function is not to deal with instant communication.