Maybe we can fix a few bugs as a community, eh?

The movie suffers from the compression of the novel -- the audience deserved more of the battle room, if nothing else, and a better idea of how grueling the schedule there and in Command School really was -- it looks like a couple days at most.

But the biggest issue with compression is moving command school to near the Formic homeworld. I couldn't figure out why, especially as they kept with the concept of instantaneous control with the ansible (FTL communication). But it was mainly so that they didn't have to break from Ender's shame at his destruction of his enemy to the hope of restoration by finding the last queen's egg.

Ok, I can see how that helps streamline things, until you realize that, uh, he just stepped off a military base, brought something alien back with him, and now he's going to traipse across the galaxy to find a place to put it? Um, no. That can't happen until he's already been out of the military.

They should have split it in two: Battle school, maybe up until the first victory of Dragon Army (going any further leaves too little for a second movie), then the rest. That would have let the characters breathe, let them have a decent epilogue reuniting Ender and Valentine, and the Hive Queen, and maybe even some way of bringing in Locke and Demosthenes.

Long since documented by our buddy Randall: http://xkcd.com/927/

at 6'7", economy on most airlines is beyond tolerable: the seat pitch is less than the length of my knee to butt.
Last night I was on a United flight that theoretically had "economy plus" but was given the lame excuse that it's a brand new airplane and "hasn't been reconfigured yet" -- never have I heard such refined bullsh*t.

Sure, it's only 720p, but a $90-ish Roku will add most of the features an $800+ Smart set would have (except for the 1080p), and I'm still getting better black and contrast than the new thin LCD/LED sets.

The Android software works like a charm (except for the occasional forgetting that pages that require logging in won't be logged in -- your receipts, for instance, aren't so simple to print).

On the other hand, HP's software, which only operated while I am on the WiFi, never worked to print a web page (I could print photos). I'd get a blank page, or worse, a black page.

... to bankrupt the Chinese government by convincing them they need to build aircraft of matching capabilities.

Hey, that's how we won the cold war against the Soviet Union, but with missles

1) A decent ergonomic chair that works for people 2 meters tall
2) A door
3) A manager who will
      a) go to the meetings on my behalf and send me the 3-line email with the one detail that I needed to be there for
      b) find interesting work for me to do
4) A bonus program that has clear, achievable objectives that pay out at least something if I beat my goals -- don't pull the rug out from under my feet if I've been slaving, just because Sales can't get in the door

I'm guessing that a fair part of the readership here are creative developers, who specialize in finding solutions, elegant code, clever hacks, etc.
For those of us, testing sucks. The "fun" is in finding that it can be solved, actually solving the problems to the satisfaction of happy users is deadly dull.

What a degree or certificate in Software Testing would do is help properly select for the type of nit-picking douchebags that are capable of sinking their teeth into an intractable bug, and making sure it gets found, characterized, and fixed or warned against (e.g. don't tell anyone that if you switch games you can get a 10X payout).

It's a similar case to Project Management -- a different class of nit-picking douchebag that has to wheedle us into getting work done on clear goals, rather than exploring the interesting parts of the APIs or rasterbating a stylesheet into getting those prompts to line up in a more pleasing way.

This year, they're not quite good enough.
Next year, they'll show some impressive results... but still not yet.
When it gets to the point that the software and hardware is safer than a human driver, the insurance companies will lobby to mandate it in every car.

Then comes the fun:
1) Your car won't drive until *you* clean the ice off the cameras.
2) Will you still get arrested for drunk driving if the car is doing the driving?
3) Can your car drive your kids without you? Will it if you let them get ahold of the key even if you don't want it to?
4) No more "come pick me up" -- just phone your car
5) Will you even need a car, or will you just whistle for Uber's robo-cab service for anywhere you need to be?

At first glance, I just want to say, "Hey, Basic Interpreter from the 70's, you're finally getting some respect!"
But there are some deep issues that are, even with these techniques, going to be very hard to debug:
1) Large I/O situations -- real time data collection and display. Weather reporting, gaming, etc. How is debugging on the GPU going to be helped by this, would be one of my first questions.
2) Networked, distributed code -- with clients on multiple platforms (CPU, browser, Java version, etc.), and clustered virtual servers, where do you debug? Just locating which side is in error (wrong message being sent, wrong message being heard, wrong result being stored/displayed) is a challenge, and real-time transactions (for instance, race conditions on a resource that could be anything from an interrupt bit to a piano in inventory) further complicate this.

If they ever come up with a debugger that will let me hook into both the client and the server at the same time, that would be brilliant.

I've been trying to come up with the all-time best "Not to sing along to in the TSA line" playlist. Amongst the top songs:

* Janie's Got a Gun - Aerosmith
* Boom Boom Boom Boom - Dr. John
* If I Had a Rocket Launcher - Bruce Cockburn
* Shot With His Own Gun - Elvis Costello (actually about consequences of sex, which makes it doubly good for this list "No, sir, I'm singing a song about a girl getting pregnant!")
* I Don't Like Mondays - Boomtown Rats
* Tear Down the Wall - Pink Floyd
* Rosalita - Bruce Springsteen ("You pick up Little Dynamite, I'm gonna pick up Little Gun")
* Crash Into Me - Dave Matthews Band

What else? No rap please, it's just too easy.

Around that time, I got into geocaching. I'd walk into the woods with a GPS the size of a paperback book, a digital camera, my flip phone, and a Palm Pilot. Maybe an MP3 player.

Now that's all one device, but...
Now everything on my house is on the net: printer, home media server, satellite TV, Blu-Ray, home theater receiver, tablet, media streamer, Twine sensor box

Interesting trade.

I've been using Netvibes for several years now, and am mostly pleased, partly due to its "widget" mode, which lets me separate posts by feed rather than seeing them piled up by time. It will aggregate facebook, twitter, email (subject lines only), and has various widgets for just about anything: google news searches, ebay bids/sales, stock tracking, etc.

It's mobile interface, however, has some serious flaws: it reports the wrong feed name when you select a post (I think it's showing the one you previously selected), and some feeds don't display at all (TechCrunch and MAKE, I'm looking at you) -- it might just be a matter of selecting a different version of the feed, though.

It's the good ones. The bad ones can't set up a back door, or subtly corrupt data, and haven't frobbed any SSL keys.