What is your opinion/ideas/experience on how a ~$10K computer can generate a return for the investment for the average software developer?

Can we (the public) get access to this software?

But I didn't know about the worm. I think the more interesting story is what they did afterwards. From worm, to grad school, to viaweb, to yahoo store, to y-combinator. Someone should write that story :)

None of Prescott Harvey's rules matter to me.

My rules are more basic:

Rule 1: The audience prefers characters who are competent. Good examples are Spock, Data, Seven of Nine, Khan, Paul Atreides, Jason Bourne, etc. Bad examples are JarJar binks, Rest of Voyager crew, Prometheus crew, etc.

The Jedi Knights can free Anakin from slavery but not his mother? Wtf.

Rule 2: The "good guys" should be just as ruthless as the bad guys. In so many movies, the bad guys kill quickly and the good guys yell 'stop or I'll shoot'. That is BS. The "good guys" should be like Jack Reacher and Malcolm Reynolds.

Jedi Knights can't figure out what Count Dooku has been plotting but Count Dooku knows all about Anakin's dark secrets?

Providing cheaper internet access is helpful but there is a lot more to fixing the 3rd world that I don't really understand. The average person makes about $1/hr. I've reached out to a few people to see if I can teach them software QA. Everyone I've spoken to seems really excited about making 10+ times what they currently make. But so far no one I've approached has actually made an effort to learn and do the work. I am living here because I'm very curious to learn why it is so hard to convince someone who makes $1/hr to put in the effort to make $10+/hr. Especially when it requires them to work less than they currently do. The work week here is 6 days and 10hrs/day (only 8 hrs is paid, they get a 2 hour break). 25% of the worker's wages are typically spent getting to work. I get the impression that "thinking" is perceived to be harder than manual labor.

"They" are Indians on H-1B/immigrants that work at major software companies like google, oracle, yahoo, etc. I'm also not concerned/worried with their ethnicity or their culture. It is truly a pleasure to work with the programmers from India that I've met. I've, however, noticed that they can form work teams/groups in which there are no non-indian members (or no non-indian lead developers). Maybe it is because there are few non-indian developers applying for a position in their group but I suspect it is more than that. I've also noticed, in my conversations with them, that they feel that non-indian developers are not as smart as indian developers. In fact, there was a article a few years ago about India based software companies having to lower their standards to accept non-indian developers. I suspect that the Indian programmers I've worked with, have on average a higher CompSci GPA than the american educated software developer population because the H-1B visa selection process means we get the brightest people on average. At google, there there was a time when it was felt that the fact that most Indian people speak 3+ languages also meant (correlated) that they had higher IQs than the average amercian educated developer. When those India developers form a team/group, they can get to a state where they don't feel a non-indian developer is good enough to join them. It is not a social, ethnic, cultural conflict in that they are very respectful and enjoyable to work with. But I don't think the minority non-indian developer in majority indian group will not get the same opportunities as the indian members. This was probably true when there were large concentrations of white software developers in the top software companies. I am just curious if others have noticed this (It wouldn't be the first time I got it wrong :)

I used to see rates in the $100/hr+ in the SF bayarea. When I consulted in the dot com bubble, it was expected that consulting rates would be double a full-time salary. Not any more.
Recently, I've seen rates in the $50/hr to $60/hr range. But my 27 year-old friend has a full-time bayarea job that pays $180k so it makes no sense to take a $50/hr contract without benefits, vacation, etc.
The connection to 'Indian programmer' is that most of the recruiters I run into are indian and state strongly that a $100/hr+ rate is unrealistic. I suspect that is the case given the number of Indian programmers who are happy with $50/hr.
(I am consulting now but my long-term employer lets me work overseas so I travel a lot and I am willing to accept a lower rate in exchange for that perk).

I'm a little concerned about the growing "influence" of Indian programmers. First, like all groups, when they are the majority they can become biased against others (i.e. non-indian). Second, they are willing to work for less, so they can push down salaries; just look the consulting rates these days.
To be fair, it has been a pleasure to work with them, for them etc. I don't see any alternative to employing them. I don't want them to go away. But there is a cultural adjustment that I feel is necessary but doesn't happen when they are majority in a software organization.

The money buys things; most of which you don't really need. It takes a while to realize what you actually need to be happy. For me, I realized I didn't need to make more money to be happy. I work from home and I am traveling around the world. I live on 80K easily. In the past, when I made more money, I wasted in on cars, and other things that didn't make me happy.

We're hiring Java web developers!

That is a naive conclusion. Google's algorithm adjusts search result ranking based on popularity. If google products are popular, should google up the rankings of less popular products?
I see lots of microsoft bing ads on youtube and I don't like them. If I switch away from the ads and google's ranking adjusts so it doesn't show me more of them how is that google's bias?
I don't see how you can separate out the user's preference from google's bias without examining the google ranking algorithms. I could see if google's products were worse than their competitors and everyone widely hated them, that it would be odd to see them ranked higher than their competitors. But when the opposite is true, then there is no need for manipulation on google's part.
It seems the governments wants google to produce an inferior ranking system and it is most likely the government is clueless on the technology and is responding to lobbying. My tax dollars hard at work ...

I work from home. Many of the events, in the article, don't happen for me. I don't wake up until I want to. The only tech I care about relate to health care and food production. The luxury tech I would like to see make it are google glasses and low-cost high-speed global wi-fi. The tech that might make a huge difference to me is the d-wave quantum computer applied to AI. I suspect we need another 1K to 100K increase in cpu performance to create AI that will replace me in the workforce. I am not sure we can get there in 15 years.

google doesn't understand what information is actually in the email! "google" doesn't read the way humans "read" email. some google server turns email into a feature vector (set of numbers without meaning). some other server predicts the best ad from the feature vector. there is a feedback loop, when you click on an ad, the system learns which ads are best to display. no employees at google actually reads the user's email. the initial data for making prediction is taken from other sources. the advertiser has no access gmail users' information. with 500 million users sending 100s messages through an automated system, there are bound to be cases where ads seem creepy. no google employee can tell you why their complex system acts creepy because the feedback loop means there is data affecting the prediction that no google employee has created or can understand.

google does make money from content generated by other people. some of those people would like to be paid for the benefit they provide to google. but they are a drop in the ocean of information, google doesn't need them. In a way google does pay for that content by offering its services for free. even the ads are priced on their value to advertiser.

in the end, google is far from perfect but their benefits clearly outweigh their "evilness" unless you produce that tiny drop of information. that is life. sue because it is like buying a lottery ticket.

Tell them to create a product that is 10x better than the current product. Give them funding and support. If you can, have them work offsite.

Try to hire another Brilliant non-Jerk to manage them. Brilliants Jerks are less offensive to other Brilliant people.

There are very cheap ways to recycle water that we don't use enough now but we must in the future. Desalinization is still too expensive but the costs are coming down. Solar/wind powered desalinization could work in poor areas for drinking water but probably not fast enough for farming. Ice mining is also an option we should consider since it is going to melt anyway.