Very wise words.

I'd add to that: write unit tests for your code (preferably before you write the code). You'll understand how it works and where it's broken quicker and better and free up your brain cycles more for the creative design part.

You will learn and improve much more quickly with much less stress.

Back in the day (80's 8-bit micros) I started on BASIC and Z80 machine code followed by a little FORTH.

The one thing I really wish I'd known about - or understood - was what LISP really is. It was often described in the popular computing press as a language "for processing lists."

How very wrong. The reality is so much better.

I didn't seriously look at the lisp family of languages until about 6 or 7 years ago. I really wish I'd looked 25 years sooner.

There is no such thing as "optional" work. If you don't "voluntarily" use your phone to get more work done, then you'll be replaced by somebody who does. You won't be fired for not using your cell phone - you'll be fired for being the slowest person in the department.

If this were blue-collar work then we'd be talking about people "voluntarily" not using provided safety equipment because it slows them down. The only way to regulate this sort of thing is that if an employee gets injured due to deliberate disobedience of corporate policy that says they had to use safety gear, you have to fine the company millions of dollars anyway. Then the employer will actually ENFORCE the policy, and not just let 99% of their employees ignore it, and fire the 1% who follow it.

If the company doesn't want employees using their personal cell phones, then they should forbid their use to do work, and take steps to ensure access is blocked (not actively facilitate their use).

Lithium is a metal.

Oops. Right. Sorry.

"lithium is in the upper left-hand corner of the periodic table. Only hydrogen and helium are lighter on an atomic basis."

  I'm wondering if this is a non sequitur for electric batteries.

Not a non sequitur at all.

An important factor for batteries is energy density: How much energy is stored per unit mass. This is particularly important for electric cars: The higher the energy density, the less mass you havce to haul around for a given amount of "fuel", which means the less "fuel" is spent hauling your "fuel" around, so it's a more-than-linear improvement.

Lithium is both extremely light and a very reactive nonmetal. So you're talking about a lot of energy per unit mass for the lithium-based electrode's contribution to the reaction.

That, and introducing a suspected carcinogen into your underwear.

Saying that something is a liquid/solid/gas/etc is a bit of a simplification. The reality is that substances exist in equilibrium between various phases, and this shifts based on temperature/pressure.

If you spill some water on a sidewalk in the summer and come back an hour later, you won't see any water, because it will evaporate - probably fairly quickly depending on the humidity.

Carbon tetrachloride is much more volatile than water in practice. The boiling point isn't all that much lower, but unlike water there is almost none of it present in the atmosphere to start out. That greatly facilitates evaporation per Le Chatelier's principle.

Oh, and I don't think anybody uses carbon tetrachloride in air conditioners. Old ones certainly use CFCs though, and most of those boil at a lower temperature. Carbon tetrachloride has been a known carcinogen for ages, so industrial uses have been shifting away from it for a while.

It does require the complainant to make a statement under penalty of perjury. In theory false takedowns could be pursued in court.

The real problem here is automated takedowns. How can you have a computer system make a statement on your behalf under penalty of perjury? It would be like sending a computer to testify on your behalf in court.

Simple - a prosecutor didn't go after them for it. People commit perjury on DMCA takedown requests all the time. The problem is that perjury is a criminal matter, which means a prosecutor has to pursue the matter. I don't see the Attorney General's office all that busy going after false DMCA claims - they're too busy going after the alleged copyright infringers.

Agree 100%. I recall buying software licenses and doing the dog an pony show about a decade ago. We had four vendors come in. Most sent a team with one sales guy and one technical guy. One vendor had the sales guy get sick at the last minute and they just sent a technical rep. We ended up selecting that vendor, and even our local management commented vocally during the meeting that they appreciated that we were digging into the meat of the discussions and not spending two hours talking about how great their company was.

I also know somebody else who was doing technical sales support in a completely different industry, but again involving the sales of fairly technical equipment primarily to engineers. They basically clinched a sale but then their VP found out and got involved, and then they nearly lost the sale.

Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus,
Where the three-body problem is solved.
Where microwaves play down at three degrees K
and the cold virus never evolved.

Home, Home on Lagrange
Where the space debris always collects
We possess, so it seems two of man's greatest dreams
Solar power and zero-gee sex ...

The average person isn't going to be setting up rsync and a cron job. I personally use duplicity to cloud storage for the most important stuff (measured in GB), and rsnapshot to normally-unmounted storage for the less-important stuff (measured in TB). It requires near-zero oversight, but it isn't the sort of thing that just anybody could/would set up. For family I'd probably recommend something like Carbonite - it isn't any better than what you and I are doing but it is at least targeted at the consumer.

Just letting viruses loose on your system is not wise. Besides the risk of data loss, you could have compromise of financial and other personal information. And, anybody can come along and write another cryptolocker/etc.

My point though was just running something like Linux out-of-the-box doesn't really solve your antivirus problems. I'd rather start from that than a retail Windows DVD, but we could do a lot better.

In my experience there are a bunch of skills needed to get the job, and individuals vary in how much of any of these skills they have. On average you find different skills in business analysts vs managers vs engineers. When you look at individuals I have no doubt you find people any any role who could do any other role, or people in a role who really aren't competent to do any of them.

The division of labor sometimes makes sense simply so that all the bases are covered and the job takes more than one person. Sometimes a lack of roles results in neglect, which hurts down the road.

I'm a business analyst by job title, but the last thing I'd want any software engineer to do is not talk to the customer. Likewise, I view engineers AS one of my customers, so I'm always interested in feedback about how my work is useful to them - I'm not big on producing deliverables for their own sake. I don't think I can do my job without being fairly knowledgeable about how the technology works, though I will confess that I don't have the standard class libraries of every language at a moment's grasp. I like to think that I add value.

But, I fully get what you're saying. The thing is, most people are average. I've had really good managers and I've had lousy ones. I have nothing but respect for the really good ones and I can appreciate the things that they do that make my life a lot easier, and I don't think I could fill their shoes. On the other hand, I have had poor ones that honestly I don't think I'd have trouble replacing. The same goes for "engineers" - I've had to deal with some where frankly I'd have been better off doing the work myself if I had the time to do it on top of the job I was supposed to be doing.

A really good team has a diversity of skills, they understand each other, and they work together so that they're producing far more than what you'd get if you took one member of the team and cloned them a half-dozen times. They know when to trust each other, and when to step in. And nobody really gets a pass on having at least a sense of how to do everybody else's job.

Who determines what positions are and aren't OK to take?

This is actually a good illustration of the fact that people making decisions for a corporation rarely put the shareholder's interests first.

If you're hiring and the interviewee looks like they are homeless, but for whatever reason they demonstrate that they are the most competent candidate for the job, then your choice is to either toss them for their appearance and hire a less competent candidate, or hire them. Now, if they absolutely reek of body odor perhaps you'll have to have them work from home or sequester them into an office with self-contained ventillation or else half the rest of the department will quit. All of those concerns are legitimate business concerns if your sole preoccupation is with making your shareholders as much money as possible.

However, a lot of other factors weigh into the decision like what people will think of you as a manager if you hire a "bum" and those tend to take priority over making your shareholders money.

This is just one example, and dress code isn't a particularly strong one. Managers don't make decisions to make companies money - they are motivated primarily by self-interest, and to some extent corporate policies help to align that self-interest with making the company money.

This is part of why start-ups tend to put little emphasis on things like dress code, tend to be much less rigid, etc. The owner knows everybody, and for a company where the decisions are made by the owner, self-interest and making money for the shareholders are almost perfectly aligned. Even if there is a layer of management or two involved, the shareholders aren't some disconnected and abstract force - they're people just down the hall who check in frequently and know everybody's name.

I once had to buy dry ice and bought it from a small business which clearly wasn't retail-oriented. I walked into the office door and asked if they would sell to private individuals. They responded that as long as the money was green that they would take it. I work for a company that employes 50k people. If somebody walked up to the security gate and offered $10M cash for 1 pound of dry ice (which could be obtained from a building 100 yards away easily) nobody would give them the time of day or have any idea how to make that work even if they were inclined to do so. Most likely they would be turned away, or if they had a desperate need they might just be given it free of charge. The idea of actually selling something for outrageous profit is so abstracted away there just isn't any process for doing it. The company certainly sells product, but completing a single sale probably involves 100 people doing 1/100th of the task each across two continents with ERP systems and financial systems and the works. If you walked into a software start-up and told them that you're desperately in need of a laptop so if they could just hand them one (wiped/new/etc) they'd pay $200k cash for it, they'd figure out how to make it work.