This is the fallacy of small numbers, a.k.a. hasty generalization. There weren't many CS majors (of either gender) in the 80s, so the gender ratio will be less representative of a real trend (consider flipping ten coins. Your probability of getting 50% heads isn't as good as it would be if you flipped a thousand coins). Most of my software engineer peers who got degrees in that era actually studied other fields, such as math or electrical engineering.

That said, the drop from 10-15 years ago is completely valid and this is indeed a problem.

(disclaimer: I did not listen to that story and I don't have stats at the ready to prove my observations)

They had one of these (not necessarily this vendor) on the floor of one of the wings of the Burlington Mall in Massachusetts 5+ years ago (it may still be there). It's a fun toy, but it has little practical applications beyond games and promotions. There's no reason this couldn't be on a wall or table though.

Restaurants: I see this technology as the future of table service at restaurants; consider your white tablecloth as your touchscreen, capable of breaking down into one screen per patron (the camera notes where people are seated) or one big screen for everybody to watch a video presentation. This becomes your menu. The camera can also note when you are running out of drink, when it's appropriate to bring out your next course, and when to clear your plates, which allows the wait staff to better optimize their time. Perhaps the bussers are even drones.

Gaming: A ceiling-mounted camera and projector are far cheaper than a coffee-table sized tablet, and you don't have to worry about spilling drinks on your tabletop destroying your system. This can replace board game equipment and other tabletop games and activities. Giant jigsaw puzzles and multi-day wargames can be saved and cleared to make room for something else, then resumed on demand.

It does not appear that this drone operator was making money himself. The FAA doesn't want a cut of the profit (even 100% of $0 is zero), so this is perhaps more complicated than it may seem.

That said, even if they were to demand a cut of Google's profits from the YouTube ads, the collection process would cost the FAA more than the take-home.

The FCC says this is "commercial" because the drone's videos were posted to YouTube and because YouTube has advertisements, even though the drone operator gets zero profit from those ads.

... what if the drone were flying a banner (and not recording a video)? Is that an advertisement? What if the banner said "Vote for Joe Candidate" and nothing else?

Hm, I hadn't realized that Nevral's Lobster was exclusively a Dice.com sock puppet. That's fine for the submissions, but not so fine for the accepted stories, which an editor (ideally) more affiliated with Slashdot than other Dice holdings should have curated and appended the standard disclaimer after Nevral's Lobster's quote.

Dear Slashdot editors,

Don't forget your journalistic rigor. I know it's so very often forgotten these days, but I've chosen Slashdot as one of my last "traditional" news outlets (in the sense that it the editors, including Nevral's Lobster, are paid to curate the content) because it used to be better about this. It is irresponsible of Slashdot to omit the fact that Dice owns Slashdot in the article summary.

I can't find references to the actual license text, but the expectation of paying royalties back to Epic certainly makes it non-free with respect to software freedom. This makes it incompatible in the same sense that the Creative Commons License's "noncommercial" clause is incompatible; most copyleft licenses insist on unrestricted redistribution (which would be broken by a requirement of paying royalties).

The video notes that this is "unprecedented," yet Epic's competitor Id Software used to release all of its engines as GPLv2 once they were ~two generations obsolete (e.g. Doom 3). No royalties expectations necessary.

All studies I've seen have suggested that more intervention, as early as possible, is ideal. The idea of play groups and other less formal types of socialization seems pretty good to me, perhaps it would serve as a better control for future studies (I'm not that well read, perhaps some research paper has already done this?).

The main point to all of this is that your son needs as much social opportunity as possible, and it needs to be NOW. That said, you can't really afford not to use as much of each option as you can. There is no opportunity to "fix" this later.

Firefox Hello bundles this kind of thing right into the web browser. I kind of like this idea for allowing basic functionality (think of the browser-based IM in Google and Facebook) and even extending that to voice and video (the way Google Hangouts does), but I'd ideally like to see a more powerful stand-alone client for people that want more than just a few casual conversations here and there. (This is an even better idea for Thunderbird, since your contact list lives there.)

Fortunately, we have pidgin, a stand-alone IM client with a great feature set and wonderful cross-platform support (Adium is merely an OS X implementation of Pidgin). Pidgin desperately needs help, as it hasn't successfully had an easy-to-use voice (let alone video) capability. I'm hoping that WebRTC (which powers Firefox Hello and, I think, Google Hangouts) can provide this, at least for using Firefox Hello and/or bridging between two Pidgin/Adium/Libpurple users.