Now if she had got the location from the angle of reflected sunlight glinting off objects on the ground and the time of day, I would have been really impressed ;-)

Good coders don't kill projects/products. Management that promises twice as much in half the time kills projects/products.
Even if developers get it done on time, you can be sure it will not be cost-effective to adapt or maintain the software as needed,
so death / outcompeted will come soon anyway.

That said, I would settle for truly competent developers over passionate ones. It can be hard to keep passionate ones focussed on the company's product, especially if their most fundamental ideas about it are turned down. They will find another outlet for their creativity in that case.

Competence is essential however, and is very hard to find, perhaps everywhere outside of Silicon Valley's insane salaries.
In my experience, a development team is like a volleyball team. One mediocre coder working in there and the whole team drops the ball. Because you can't recover from bad code in your project. Switching metaphors, bad code is cancerous. Not only won't it do the right thing, but it will solidify into an unchangeable lump, and it will weaken everyone else as they struggle to save the surrounding tissue through heroic measures.

Not on the Internet.

So could we scale that down and get a 10kg 100 kW engine that could be used as a range extender for an EV?

Parents inbreed much in that redneck hick town you're from? Seriously get a life. Or on second thoughts...

Except for the saying sorry part?

Seriously though, can we please get over this idea that Bill Gates was a computer genius. That's the perspective of non-techies, where basically anyone that understands computers or programming is a genius and can come over and de-louse your PC or get your wi-fi working.

Gates was/is not a good programmer. I know this because he permitted an egregiously badly designed (non-orthogonal instruction set, perverse memory addressing scheme) chip architecture and operating system (CP/M was much better designed. Unix already existed, pointing the way to generality and cleanliness of design) to be his core offering since day one, and and also because he completely failed to see the import of the world wide web for like at least 3 years after it became well known.

I know this because permitted horrible usability bugs in his core office software products to exist for decades without, apparently, doing a design or code review. Anyone who understands the utterance: "Crap! My document formatting sproinged again" or "Crap! I dragged the background of my whole diagram out of place again when trying to select that object" knows what I'm talking about. Oh, and free tip: It might be time to fix Excel on Macs so it doesn't save in circa-1995 old MacOSX text file line-ending format. Good programmer with self-respect about software they release? I don't think so.

Gates was very good at business. Ruthless, and smarter than the average business competitor, both in tactics of competition and about what people want. He knew intuitively that people in the 80s did not want well-designed computers and well-crafted software. They didn't know any of that stuff (the finer distinctions) and he knew it. People just wanted *A* computer (better than no computer) and they wanted it cheap and they needed to have the same software and data formats as everyone else who was using a computer for business or writing things. That's all they thought they needed. That's all he provided. Finer points of quality? Fuggedaboudit.

Correct. That's not energy density. They need to state it in Watt hours per kilogram, or state the voltage they are assuming.

"In 2012, National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell investigated peer-reviewed literature published about climate change and found that out of 13,950 articles, 13,926 supported the reality of global warming. Despite a lot of sound and fury from the denial machine, deniers have not really been able to come up with a coherent argument against a consensus."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...

The kind of status-quo-maintaining garbage you are spouting is nothing short of deliberate evil, given what a careful read of the relevant scientific literature would tell you. If we check back in 2025 and find the warming continuing, do you give us permission to banish you to the island of Vanuatu, where you can sink or swim on the strength of your convictions?

I had a programming job in a startup where not only was it open plan but the sales team was in the same space (so you could hear in real time the lies about the product you hadn't finished building yet, and the laughter, oh god the vacuous fake forced jocular hilarity!!!! shudder) , and also, the CEO would come to ask a question about 5 times a day, and would redirect the each programmer's work at least twice a day. Hint ADHD and programming are not a productive mix.

Needless to say, I was more productive hacking in 30 minute blocks in the back seat of the crowded bus on the way to and from work. It's too bad for the company that that hacking was for my own different product. We were underpaid and no equity so there was no way I was going to hack on the bus for the company.

Bad scene altogether. Happens when anti-programmers try to lead programmers.

In fairness, the libraries aren't being closed. They're being re-purposed as public relations offices responsible for such things as communicating the need to move forward with new forms of multimodal multimedia information dissemination, on a go forward basis.

Also, the books are not being dumped, they're being converted into bio-fuel (burned in very efficient co-generation waste incinerators).

Yup. Two months is insane for such a project.

Smacks of decrees from non-technical executives who know nothing about the technology they are "leading".

Isn't this the reason the original project was such a mess? Bizarrebitrary deadlines imposed from the top with no recognition of engineering reality?

At least it will be a quick march to the death (only two months) not a protracted one.

Yes, theoretically, according to Turing, you could get by with enough gates to make a couple of registers, a goto/jump instruction and a branch if is-zero test, as long as you have some read-write memory somewhere else.

Without breaking any laws except hunting out of season, lighting a fire in forest-fire-ban season, construction of an unpermitted permanent structure, and mischief and negligence for causing an unnecessary search-and-rescue operation.

Should have thought of that, when you actually had a say.

Non-voter whiners are beyond lame.

That is, unless you can articulate a superior method of picking leadership of a very large group. I'd respect you if you are saying you won't vote until the voting method is improved to e.g. mixed member proportional rep or single-transferable vote. But if you're just one of those "all politicians are the same" non-voters or lazy-ass non-voters, then STFU about politics.

In the current system, if you don't express your opinion on policy at the ballot box, you don't have the right to get your number counted in the political policy opinion statistics.