The point is still valid: if something on a car fails, there is a very good chance you'll walk away from it. On an aircraft, not so much.

"and flyers a taste of their personal pilot.". That sounds... wrong. Or maybe the deal is "ass, gas, or gras"?

Learning the concepts of coding can be incredibly useful for anyone using computers in the workplace. It's not about people writing full blown programs, but writing Excel macros or doing a little VBA scripting. Similarly, I know a little about carpentry, tiling, plumbing and electrical work, and I found these to be very useful skills to have for small jobs around the house, but I don't do any of that for a living. Learning a little coding doesn't mean you have to make a career out of it.

Sounds like a perception issue, and one that sadly is perpetuated in schools and society at large. Think of the cliche oft-heard lament in movies, parent talking to son: "You could have been a doctor or a lawyer". My brother's kid provided a nice counterexample; when they had a class discussion on interesting family members: "One of my uncles builds robots, one of them writes iPhone apps, and one of them works for Blackberry" (back then, BB still was a cool brand) which according to the class trumped the other kids with family doctors, lawyers, MPs or directors in coolness factor.

But with that said, it is true that with older kids and adults, coding carries very little glamour or prestige (which does have an impact on pay, by the way).

How many minutes and $$$ to produce the mold? It's pretty clear that 3d printing is a poor substitute for bulk production processes. It is however a viable option in case you want to quickly produce a single instance of an item (prototyping, or locations where shipping or stocking items is too slow or too expensive). It's also a good option to produce small runs of complex items. One of my clients started using a (industrial-quality) 3d printer to produce highly complex manifolds for pumps. They had trouble producing that design using injection molding, casting or milling, and they are now using the 3d printer for production runs.

Lots of advantages in having things online, or at least connected to a home automation controller. If there's a problem (fire, burglary, water leak) the system can take action and / or notify you. And sometimes there are good reasons to add a few features (adding complexity).

With that said, most home automation enthusiasts recognize that these systems are not as reliable as their more simple counterparts. Current best practice for stuff like this is to use standard smoke detectors wired into a conventional alarm panel, then hook up the alarm panel to the home automation controller. I have some smart-ish smoke detectors, they are regular detectors with a wireless (Z-wave, not WiFi) chip bolted onto the connection meant to go to an alarm panel. That means I'll be notified when it goes off, but if the HA system fails for whatever reason, the detector will still beep is there's smoke.

Exactly. I'm not against advertising, but it seems that advertisers are once again engaged in a loudness war. For a good while, online ads were pretty decent: small banners with relevant information. But it's getting worse again; animated (bouncing) ads, auto-playing movies, roll over sound effects, anything to grab your attention. Interstitials and pop-ups are back in a big way. And that's without even getting started on the "goods" being advertised.

And besides the fact hat ad tracking is an invasion of my privacy (and thus far fails to deliver me relevant ads), it can also be detrimental to the performance of the hosting website. As TFA mentions, on some pages, tracking scripts make up as much as 25% of the downloaded data, and it shows. I increasingly see pages load very slowly or even fail to load at all because of an overtaxed ad server somewhere.

A watch is a nice example of a wearable device. And today even more so than back when those lines were written, watches are worn as an accessory rather than for their function. In that light, it surprises me that most of the currently available "smart" watches are ugly as sin.

I've worked in various different work environments, but thankfully nothing as horrible as that. I do know that employees with kids and a mortgage are seen as being easier to manage than contractors with large nest eggs or even employees with a sufficiently large "f.u. fund", for authoritarian managers that is. On the flip side, people in the work force who are rich and independent enough to not have to put up with any crap from their manager, are there of their own volition, and probably like what they do. Such self-motivated, happy employees generally make for better employees.

I have certainly never come across an employer who favours or actively seeks out indebted job seekers in order to have a tighter control over their workforce.

That is exactly what rubs me the wrong way about that announcement, besides fears that FB will turn Oculus into another data mining opportunity. Gaming is barely a blip? The buzz around Oculus has been from two sides: business (who want to use VR tech for telepresence, operating ROVs etc), and gamers. We want to control our Parrot drone with the Oculus, we want to walk around Tamriel or Middle Earth wearing this thing, or immerse ourselves in virtual battlefields, or perhaps watch a movie in a virtual cinema... What we don't want, need or asked for is friggin' Second Life VR.

With that said, if the drivers / SDK remain openly available, I am sure game developers will get on board. But with gaming "barely on the radar", I fear for the undoubtedly necessary collaboration between Oculus and game developers.

Speaking of craftsmen... One of the problems with programming is that in many (but not all) shops, coding actually is a craft, rather than a profession. There's little on the job training or coaching, few common frameworks and methodologies that work well, and a lot of the job descriptions within IT seem to have been made up mostly to make life easy for project managers and HR, not to relate to the actual and complete skill sets of individuals.

Or perhaps the problem is that the nature of programming is more like a craft, while we are trying to treat is like a profession.

Spot on. Managers need (or are expected to have) a wide range of ever changing skills and traits, and if you claim that you can fill a gap or two, you'll have an easy sale. They are suckers for magic bullets. Just look at the staggering amount of management books available, not the "hard" ones on project management or business administration, but the soft ones. 7 Habits, The Art of War For Business, all with tiny nuggets of wisdom fluffed up and packaged in a bunch of crap. (I've read my share...). Hey, and everyone would like to be charismatic, so I can well believe this lady has plenty of clients.

Pro tip: since this lady has charisma covered, focus on other buzzwords to give seminars on. "Authentic leadership" seems to be popular lately... leaders are trying so hard to be authentic that almost by definition they achieve the exact opposite. But my 2 day seminar will help you to let your inner authentic self blossom forth, and I've a book on that as well. Order your copy today!

I'm not too worried about trolls, but I've seen plenty of abuse and accusations of cheating hurled at "skillers", in games like BF4. All to easy to hit the "report" button in frustration after the same guy headshoots you for the 6th time in a round. And the crowdsourcing effect will not work here to filter out abuse; I expect strong players to consistently attract such reports against them in online games.

One way to counter this to some degree is to spot-check reports, and apply heavy penalties to players making false accusations. It still is a lot of work, and I doubt whether an operator could make the distinction between a rage-report and an inaccurate report made in good faith.

Out of interest, has anyone tried to cash in amounts like these after the recent hype died down? During the hype I remember people finding some old BTC behind the sofa as it were, and cashing them in the $100k and even $1M ranges. What is the BTC to $ trading volume these days?

This function is all but forgotten by officials in the judicial system, these days (In NL and in Europe in general, it seems). "Stiffer sentences don't work" is something touted as an absolute truth backed by scientific research, but it's little more than a mantra going around in an echo chamber. Stiffer sentences do hurt rehabilitation, and after a certain point they no longer work as a deterrent, but they work wonders for insulation.

Retribution is a somewhat irrelevant aspect (though not wholly pointless!), but I disagree that insulation is more important than rehabilitation, it varies per case. If there is a good chance to rehabilitate a criminal, then it makes sense to try that; it's cheaper and there's less chance of recidivism compared to a criminal serving an "insulation" sentence. But if there's no reasonable outlook on successful rehab, better to then just keep the criminal out of society for a while. In that sense, I do not believe in "stiffer sentences" per se, but I do believe in longer jail terms for repeat offenders from an "insulation" perspective, as they have proven to be less susceptible to rehabilitation.

If Luckey and Zuck say that this changes nothing and that they aim to just sell the hardware to us without any FB strings attached, I believe them... now. I also believe that very soon after launch, there will be a boardroom meeting at FB to discuss ways to create more synergy between the Occulus and FBs core business, which is 1) suckering more people into their service, 2) retaining those people as active members, 3) mining any and all data from those customers, 4) selling that data to interested 3rd parties, and 5) serving us crappy ads. None of those goals promise any improvement (for us) over an Occulus sold "as is", on the contrary, but I can think of plenty of ways how FB would benefit from a more "integrated" Occulus.

But even if they will truly sell this device without any strings attached, I'd still be hesitant to buy it. FB is fast becoming the Monsanto of the IT world, and besides a reluctance to deal with them from a privacy perspective, I'm now beginning to have moral objections as well.