Why does this work so hard to sound organic, when it seems more like a boldfaced ad for xbox?

A virus will always find a way.

Next thing we know, someone will find that the people responsible for tracking those vials mysteriously died from the same pox. "Gee, Professor...I wonder what's in these?"

Insurance companies shaping coverage/billing based on client data? Shocked, I say....

Can you say red-lining?

Grace Hopper?

Thanks, "Assmasher". I value your learned input.

It's always a bad idea to assume a good idea.

While attending Apple's WWDC a couple years back and looking around during the lunch break, I noticed indie devs looking at the corp devs with envy, lamenting how great it must be working for a big company with all those perks, resources, tight social connections, regular paychecks, etc.

Listening to the corp devs, they were all eyeing the indies, jealous of the perceived freedoms to set their own project priorities and schedules while eft alone to focus on whatever they liked at a given point in time.

....we've used one now for a while, and it is a great device (hardware), but the learning algos (software) need improvement, I think. Sometimes it learns too well and gets overly aggressive with predicted settings, making it difficult to re-train. Remote access is great.

To the people who hired you, the most important thing is getting the product to work reliably so they can start making money with it. It won't matter at all how pretty the chart bubbles are in the design document, if the program crashes or is otherwise unusable. So score one for the talented programmers there.

Which is not to say software engineering isn't important -- only that exactly how important it is will vary with the size of the project. e.g. for a smaller project like a script or a one-off data processing program, just about any design (or no design) can be made to work well enough. For a large program (or one that will eventually grow into a large program), detailed software engineering is necessary to prevent its eventual collapse under the weight of its own complexity.

"Microsoft is now pushing Bing Maps exclusively"

...counting down to the eventual outcry over upcoming changes to BING licensing restrictions that will further profit MS

Whatever your yearly stipend from the government will get you.

(Hey, if it works for Alaska, it could work elsewhere -- just fund it by taxing cheap robot labor instead of petroleum)

FoxConn is a leader, so take note...

That has already begun. China is already outsourcing to the US.

I remember the thimble IBM used on one of their early laptops long ago, so...no, thanks.

yet another landing concept?

How many of these does the public have to fund before NASA admits to simply trying to stay employed, for cripe's sake.