In 90s game consoles were significantly cheaper, easier to use and more stable than computers of the day. Now you can get a steam machine for $499 or find a deal on a gaming PC at or below price of consoles. Just hook it up to TV, get a controller, run steam Big Picture and enjoy access to same games as consoles, plus many hundreds of PC-only games, frequently for $10 a pop. I can still "emulate" my Windows XP games on Windows 10 without jumping through hoops.

If there is future in console gaming, it's cheap boxes and hdmi sticks that can play casual games with a remote or do local network/cloud streaming of more demanding titles.

Let's see. To intercept a fax or voicemail from the machine in my office, you need to be physically present there or next to outside phone lines every time. Hardware to do persistent remote wiretaps is expensive and not widely available. Chances of getting caught or leaving evidence of tampering are high and you only get my future communications, not the ones I already read and shredded.

With unlocked computer I get years of your e-mail so far and your IMAP password that I can use to spy on you from now on. Plus an opportunity to install a keylogger and any other malware of my choice. Even if every single e-mail is encrypted, I instantly get valuable metadata of whom you have been corresponding with and when.

A fax machine is way safer from casual adversaries, including local police departments that can not justify spending huge resources on your case. A computer can be potentially safer than a fax machine against NSA, but only if you are very skilled and careful and never make a single mistake.

Most of OS security vulnerabilities are irrelevant for the purposes of the server running specific internal apps. The server is going to be running behind a firewall that blocks everything but a couple of ports and sanitizes anything that comes through those. Employees are going to login with 2 factor authentication before being allowed access. And you are smart enough to not browse warez sites with Internet Explorer from server console right?

Of course if you run your network like Sony, you will probably get p0wned. The thing is that it's very unlikely that upgrading to latest Microsoft software is going to make any difference. Just think what will give you best value and employee productivity for the next 3 years and go with that.

It's no surprise that big programming organizations develop new languages to better suite their own needs. If you are running a large server farm, a language that helps you have 25% fewer memory corruption crashes without sacrificing speed is a huge thing. Outside adoption may vary, but over time some will succeed and supplant C/Java as default choices for new projects.

Personally I am hoping for something that unifies memory and external resource management without leaks, crashes or perceptible GC pauses. This may be unsolvable in theoretical general case, but a language and runtime can provide many patterns for common practical needs. Even having reliably destroyed local instances that can not be returned out of the method in Java would be a huge thing for helping people remember to close files.

If the same blob was included in chip's ROM, nobody would think it's different from before right? The only difference here is that Intel is saving some money by not having a flashable ROM in the chip and instead having host OS provide the same blob on each boot. It's not like Windows driver gets a better blob or accesses some secret features not given to Linux developers.

If you are interested in open source hardware this is not in. But open sourcing all code running on main CPU is a significant step in itself and has many practical advantages (like being able to run/write whatever OS you want).

If community has done more with existing open hardware contributions like OpenSparc, I think we would see many new ones.

Not trivial to master, but that's what it takes to be highly relevant today. If that's too much, it's possible to specialize in a more narrow area such as big data implementation and make good money without writing lots of code. But most new development is mobile + web.

Stupid and lazy people are kept from voting by having to read instructions and enter numbers into a token. The ones who manage to cast a valid ballot are likely also intelligent enough to understand basic scientific facts and elect politicians capable of cooperating with other humans! Instant fix for American government!

Latency and unpredictability of garbage collection is a severe problem for any UI, and even web/database backends. Your Cassandra node can run fine for a week and then fragment its heap and go into 20 second stop the world GC, causing user requests to time out. Silly things like allocating large byte arrays and dolling out offsets and length for individual uses are done to avoid big GC pauses. It still doesn't always work, because there are a lot of VM versions and user access patterns shift over time.

For all that, memory leaks are no less common than in C++ and non-memory resource leaks are horrendous. In C++, your object's destructor is cleanly called when the object is deleted or goes out of scope. That will take care of also calling destructors on anything encapsulated, which can then close files and unregister listeners. In Java, the while 100MB object hierarchy will be still consuming heap because some leaf node's close method was not called and it's a button click listener with an indirect link back to root.

A grown up language can support stack based and encapsulated object instances that don't have to be GCed and have predictable destruction time. Large and provably acyclical objects like bitmaps can also be reference counting. In practice, GC pauses are no better than crashes, so in real life even unsafe explicit delete makes sense in many cases.

Main point of a car is to get you from point A to point B in a comfortable/fun/safe/affordable manner. Even with self driving cars, hardware is at least as important as software and people make strong emotional connection with its design and aesthetics. People will not trade their Mercedes for a Dell just because same software is available. Apple has a chance if they come up with industrial design on par with Macbook or iPad.

We do not have to make life in prison torture, it's just part of the same bloodthirstiness that drives executions. Europeans have invested in making their prisons humane while still effective at keeping dangerous people away from society.

How about we keep death penalty, but only for cases of mass murder with extensive eyewitnesses, self-incriminating statements and/or video evidence? No ballistic/arson evidence where investigator can be mistaken or science could evolve over time. No single eyewitness that leaves the possibility of mistaken identity. And if you targeted a specific person, whether because of greed or rage, it's at least a recognizable human failing from which one can be conceivably rehabilitated in due time.

I personally don't feel any less just or safe with Ted Kaczynski securely locked up for life than if he was executed. But some people believe that there is some level of brutality that deserves death. Well, maybe Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or James Eagan Holmes is it. Still a waste of money, but we will not waste too much on a couple of executions in a decade. And I would certainly would not worry much about an innocent/rehabilitated man or a victim of bad circumstances being put to death.

Actually there have been tons of progress, it's just in the areas where there is a practical need rather than what looks cool in a Sci-fi movie. There is no need to clone a human as a robot, we already have lots of humans. On the other hand, lots of work is being done on taking an image and automatically generating a short description of what it shows so people can find it among a billion others.

BSD is dying for how long again? It's still around and having monthly releases. For open source projects, popularity contests are much less important. With massive existing user base, Hadoop will be actively maintained for long time. So if you already familiar with it and it serves the needs of your project, go right ahead.

Personally, I think being oncall 24/7 without comp time off is more invasive than the GPS tracking. Left my previous job after they introduced oncall rotation without any new benefit to show from it. If I get paged at 4am I am going to have a headache the next day, so don't expect me to come to office and write code. And if I can not go to swimming pool or drink beer for the whole week, a 3 day weekend next week, when I am NOT on call, would be the minimum that would compensate for that. Other than that, when I am on call I am already not free to go on with my life, so my locations are going to be pretty boring anyway.

Since a company with large number of billions in the bank thought they can get away with uncompensated oncall in my case, I would guess chances for legal success against that are slim.

Like it or not, a lot of nasty employment conditions are technically legal or hard to prove. Really the best thing is to publicize what is happening on glassdoor and similar sites. It's not going to immediately stop entry level employees, who have few better choices, from applying. But confirmed bad practices will deny the perpetrator ability to recruit top talent for positions that have the most impact on the company's future.

As of now, Intermex is described as nice working environment on Glassdoor. If I was considering an offer and read about 24/7 GPS tracking in page after page of reviews, I certainly would not join.