It doesn't matter if it gets funded because it won't get built. If it flies, it's controlled by the FAA, and you'll be required to have a pilot's license to fly it. Not only that, but even if it has vertical take off you'll still have to take off from an airport or other helicopter pad or some other designated area. Your neighbours aren't going to stand for the sound of propellers spinning up every morning so you can fly off to work. And spinning props aren't very safe with kids and pets around. If you have to go to the airport and fly from there, and land at another airport, you might as well just drive to the airport, get in a real plane (rented most likely to save money), and then rent a car at your destination. There is simply no reason for a flying car to ever happen.

Actually, Tylenol has it's own set of problems. It can be quite harmful to the liver. Within the recommended dosage, it's quite safe, but the difference between the recommended maximum dosage and dangerous of lethal dose is quite small.

Not only is it hard for people to learn new skills later in life, but coding is something that requires a certain aptitude. Sure, some coal miners might be able to learn how to code, but I would think very few of them could. If they could, they wouldn't be working in a coal mine. There's plenty of people who chose programming as a career and yet still can't program their way out of a paper bag (fizz buzz), I don't think the chances of most people from non-technical fields are good at all.

Oh, they can't require that you read emails, but guess who will be the first fired when it comes time for downsizing. Will it be the guy who missed or who was unprepared for the random Monday morning meetings because he chose not to read his emails on the weekend?

But if the people are ignorant, they won't be aware of the laws that stop employers from requiring them to more hours. If they're desperate and poor, even if they know the laws, they may choose to ignore the laws, because having a job is better then no job. And even if it was possible to enforce, employers would still find other ways to take advantage of their employees.

Most Canadians I know end up getting money back at the end of the year. It's specifically designed this way because it's much easier to take the money out of people's paycheques then to get them to send you a cheque at the end of the year.

What use case is there for having two variables with the same name that only differ by case? In VB.Net, you declare a variable using the desired case, and then when you use the variable, you can just type it completely in lower case (or upper case if you prefer) and it fixes the case to what was in the variable declaration. So the variables always end up with the same original case, and you don't end up with problem where 2 variables have been defined, with the only difference being capitalization of the first letter.

Yes very much so. And VB.Net still puts people off because of that long history. Even though it's pretty much exactly the same functionality as C#. Last I checked, it has some features C# didn't have, the biggest of which is better background compiling. You can add entire classes with actually compiling your project, and Intellisense will work. Maybe C# will do that now, but VB.Net has basically always had this feature.

Very much agree on this. The newer Zelda games make it quite hard to get lost. All the bombable walls are well marked. In the old days you had to bomb walls at random to find them. The second quest was worse, where they introduced the new concept of simply walking through the walls after walking into them for a few seconds.

However, on the flip side, most games are much longer now, and it would probably take a lifetime to beat them if you had to start at the beginning each time you died.

I often wonder about those running special hardware or software that will only work on certain operating systems and hardware configurations. What is their plan when the hardware dies? Sure you can replace a hard disk (hopefully it's backed up), but in a few years, finding a new computer that is supported under Windows XP might be quite difficult. You could probably get by for quite a while buying old refurb and off-lease machines, but it still seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

But that's true regardless of the operating system being run. I could be running the newest version of Windows, and still be, even on a relatively new computer, and a hard drive dying still isn't that unlikely. You can get a 1 TB drive for $60. I don't know why you don't see more machines coming with 2 drives in RAID 1 for reliability reasons. At least a somewhat common hardware failure won't cause grandma to lose all here photos.

Software doesn't wear out. I'm still running XP on an old desktop in my basement. It works fine for what I need it for. Upgrading to a new version of Windows would cost more than what the machine is worth, and I'm reasonably sure that all the hardware wouldn't have proper drivers because the machine is so old. I have no problem getting Windows 8.1 (or whatever the current version is) when I replace the computer, but there's nothing wrong with the machine right now. It's behind a router with NAT turned on, so there's little chance of attack from the outside, and I can still use updated versions of Firefox or Chrome for browsing the web, so there's not many security problems there.

I agree on this. When you're just getting into programming, getting hung up on formatting can be frustrating. For the first simple hello world programs, formatting should not be necessary. I think that Basic is a great first language, for the first week or so, because you don't even have to worry about functions, or importing libraries or any of the other unnecessary things you have to do in other languages in order to just get things running. In C, you have to have a function called main with a bunch of arguments you don't understand just to create a hello world program. In Java, it's even worse, because you have to create that function in a class, before you even know what a class is. In Basic, you can just start typing commands. No need to have functions, classes, or anything else, because it's not necessary.

Maybe good for those starting out in the field, but I read it after a few years in the field, where I had already been through a few big projects. I didn't much I didn't really know or suspect already. It's pretty obvious working in the field that adding more people to a project, especially when it's already late doesn't make things go faster. I think that probably applies to many types of projects, not just software development. I can see how it might be useful for non-technical managers read it, because if some of the concepts may be new to people who haven't worked in the trenches before. But I also think people who haven't worked in the trenches in most cases are the best candidates for managing a big project.

Same thing goes on my Surface2. The Windows 8 interface really shines on a touch screen device. It's also worth pointing out that you don't need as many apps on Surface as you would on an iPad, because it has a lot of functionality built in. Getting videos to play off my shared folder on the main PC was a piece of cake with Surface. With iPad, it was a royal pain, and it still doesn't work well with certain videos.

If you could get a 9 inch tablet for that ran full windows, you could have a very portable computer that you could just plug into full size monitor, keyboard and mouse, and use it as a full desktop. You wouldn't need any cloud services like drop box because you could literally bring your whole desktop computer with you wherever you go. This is the main point of the Surface Pro that most people seem to forget. You have this ultraportable machine about the same size as an ipad, but that you can hook up standard peripherals to and make it work as a full fledged desktop. The Surface Pro is a little outside most people's budgets, but the ASUS Transformer Book T100 is a little cheaper, and can still run most desktop apps.