It will happen. Cars get smarter but people remain as stupid as they are now. Someone will stick a baby in their self driving car, the car will stop before reaching grandma because it runs out of power and the nearest charging station Is out of commission. It is a hot day and the baby will die. The parents will of course sue. And from there on in our cars will come with a warning sticker not to let infants or mentally incompetent persons ride unattended.

The company claims that earthquakes do not "happen fast", but that things start to happen a good while (20-30) days before the actual quake hits. These telltale signs can be picked up and (apparently) with the proper analysis be used to predict the quake. Or forecast, if you're picky. The point is that they claim that there is time to issue a useful warning.

I'm not sure if that is true everywhere in western countries, or if that gain goes to the rich, government, or a growing number of unproductive people. But the numbers in my own country (NL) don't lie: productivity has risen steadily for decades, but somewhere in the 90s purchasing power flattened out and has remained more or less the same for 2 decades or so.

Concern over ultra-fine particles may be emerging because it turns out that the "regular-fine" particles that we used to worry about aren't much of a problem. They are bad for us but the amount of them in the air has been dropping steadily for over a century. The end of the steam era, using oil or gas instead of wood and coal to heat our homes, fewer but ever more efficient coal fired power plants, and increasingly clean diesels caused the drop, and the downward trend hasn't ended yet. So we need a new scare.

Seriously, we do need to look into this. But lets do that first before taking drastic measures.

By the way, your diesel's filter does remove most of the soot. It fails to catch the ultra-fines however.

I was not comparing those professions with programming, but just wondering why it is considered normal for a lawyer to stay in that profession their entire life (becoming a better lawyer in the process), or to remain a surgeon all their life, or an architect, but not for programmers. Not all surgeons and lawyers do, but no one considers it strange if they keep on doing what they do. That's different for programmers: they are not expected to stay in their profession, but instead must move "up" into management or other activities. Programming is treated as a low level activity, something you do at the start of your career. Perhaps that is why programming is still closer to a craft than a profession.

I'm not sure that I agree with your description of the nature of programming, but it's a very interesting question and one that I don't have a clear answer to as yet.

That's just one of the next steps. If encryption is off by default, turning it on will in itself become a suspicious act in the eyes of law enforcement types like these. "If you have nothing to hide you have no reason to turn it on. So why did you turn it on?" For this reason I say that government should not be allowed to know who of us made a conscious choice to encrypt our data; that choice itself is data of a highly private nature. And I suspect that this data is of interest to law enforcement as well. If encryption is on by default, not only are people safer from wrongdoers by default, but those of us who actually care about encrypting our data can remain "hidden in the crowd", so to speak.

I don't code that much these days, but the question is familiar. Why do you still code? Yet no one asks an architect, surgeon or lawyer that question.

Did Charlie Hebdo engage in deliberately pissing on someone's beliefs? It's called satire, and those guys were taking the piss out of everyone who even remotely deserved it. Still, only one of the subjects of their cartoons got a response of lethal fire. That is no coincidence; most religious people are sensitive about their beliefs, but some a lot more strongly than others.

We had protests when "Life of Brian" was released, and the creators of that movie even received some death threats, but can you imagine the mayhem that a similar movie showing the life of the prophet would cause? It's unthinkable. And what I am seeing here (in Europe) is that many mainstream and influential politicians are doing exactly what you are suggesting: making sure that anything offensive to religion (yes, that means muslims) takes place out of sight "to maintain public order", and finally to simply ban offensive speech. In the UK, Labour leader Tony Blair has tried to get "religious hatred" speech banned, but succeeded only in banning actual threats, not insults. Their new leader Ed Miliband has vowed to succeed where Blair failed. Think about that. A criminal record for voicing critique on islam. In Europe, similar proposals have been made. Thankfully, support for "global blasphemy laws" that come up in the UN every so often seem to be running out of steam.

Religious sensitivities and public order should not play second fiddle to free speech.

Maybe they were afraid that small airports that do have controllers would start replacing those people with the remote setup. If those airports only get infrequent traffic, a couple of guys in a remote control tower can probaby handle dozens of them.

What surprises me is that the union actually has the clout to stop this.

Let's see these AA iPads and the software for what they really are: pieces of business-critical software / hardware. Which means that they have to treat it like any other combination of business critical software and hardware. The entire configuration is frozen, software, OS, patches and all, and any change is thoroughly tested before it is pushed to the production devices.

So what happened? One news item hints at a recent update causing the issue. Where did the update come from? Was iOS updated, or the app? Was this update tested before being rolled out?

The makerspaces I have visited are mostly populated by educated upper class type geeks. Many of them are doing projects that at some point will involve mechanical work: robotics, 3d printing, structural stuff, or even just making a decent enclosure for whatever electronics they created. And most of them struggle even with the basics of woodworking, welding, or machining. If you have these skills, you'll be welcomed with open arms. I haven't met a "maker" who doesn't regret not having had or taking the opportunity to learn them in school or college.

Which places would those be? Certainly not Europe...

Embarrasingly, our then prime minister (mr. Kok) wasn't much better with a computer mouse, picking it up and staring at it nonplussed on national television. Even more embarrasingly, he later told the press that he wasn't really bothered by his computer illiteracy, because "I have people for that".

Exactly. Just like computer security, there is no perfect solution, and it's not something you maximise no matter what. Safety, like security, is a trade off.

Perhaps that $11 would have raised the sticker price past the magical $x999.99 barrier, or it would have lowered the profit margin below some arbitrarily set floor. Both of these are extremely serious consequences in some companies. One of Ikea's advertising slogans rings true in many other companies: "the price tag is the first thing we design".