Is this what that $2.3billion request for immigration is all about...we're going to shoot illegals into space rather than back to where ever they sneak in from?

+1 Mod this comment up

Don't expect me to call 911 on my iPhone when you have a heart attack and fall at my feet...

While I share your pessimistic outlook for the foreseeable future, forever is a really long time. Are you willing to say that absolutely nobody will be living in a permanent space colony in 100 years? 500 years? 10,000 years? If so, what makes you so certain?

This is what happens when you don't read the directions on the package...

And how did you learn to write good code that's efficient and make sense to others? Maybe you're the rare case of a person that can just intuit what is good code and what isn't, but I think most developers (including myself) learn how to write good code by first writing lots of bad code, and then suffering the consequences until they learn from experience what works and what doesn't.

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.