My boss and I routinely look at new tools and technology with an eye to solving our company's problems and build cool new stuff. Our goal is not to embrace flavour-of-the-month technology. It's to identify better solutions to old problems, or find good solutions to new problems. Tools have to work, or they serve no purpose. Everything else follows from there.

We do most of our development in C on Linux, but have incorporated virtualization and cloud computing, new technologies that provide better solutions to old problems. The jury is still out on other goodies. I like python, while my boss prefers perl. I like Django, while he prefers PHP. He's the boss, so I write lots of perl and PHP... :-}

...laura

People make mistakes. Everybody makes them, everybody does it all the time, and they do it even when they should know better, when the consequences are high, and when they've received training specifically aimed at avoiding those particular mistakes.

Aviation, process and other industries know this by now, after many, many hard-earned lessons. They know you have to design your interfaces under the assumption that people will screw up, push the wrong button, or misread the situation. The general software industry, on the other hand, seems amazingly resilient against accepting this simple fact.

It's on the wall, for all to see. Inscrutable display, mysterious controls, the works. When the weather changes it tends to lag a day. So the first warm day we cook with the heat on. The first cold day we freeze with the heat off.

I prefer opening the door out on to the balcony. Fresh air is so much nicer than anything the HVAC can do.

At home I leave my bedroom window open - even if only a crack - all year.

...laura

As a software engineer that daily works on developing robot control software and algorithms for industrial robots, (yes, I love my job) I can assure you that we are very far indeed from even having robots that know they are scratching their own arses, let alone having anything like the reasoning capacity embodied in the three laws.
Robots of today are dumb - sure, there are clever planning algorithms that make them flexible enough to work in a relatively predictable dynamic environment, but we are no where near the point of having robots implement the first law.
As for the second law - wel computers (and by extension robots) are infamous for doing exactly what they are instructed - even if the result is garbage. Part two of that law is problematic given we can't really do part 1.
For the third law, actually that's almost the oppsite of what we try to achieve - we try our hardest to make sure that the robot will flat out refuse to do something that will harm it, even if told to do so by a human. if the robot gets given an instruction to start plasma cutting it's tracks or the cabinet containing it's drive controllers, it damn well better ignore that order. At bese, we can do collision avoidance of stuff in the environment to prevent harm, but I don't see us any time soon have them having behaviour programmed in to ufulfil the 'inaction" clause - for example, rush over and stop me cutting myself on broken glass, or recognising I am in danger from a falling beam and catching it (or even beeping a warning) , or something like that.

The problem with this math is that if as per your example, there is a total fixed capacity of100Mbit, @$1000 per month, and that is shared between 10 customers as 'up to 100Mbit,' then by definition, they can not all get 100Mbit 'most of the time' - infact, they can each only get 100mbit 10% of the time, and nothing at other times, or something similar. Statistically, they will each on average get 10Mbit , (possibly up to 100Mbit, but sometimes mabey only 1 Mbit) so it should be marketed as something like 100Mbit/10 to indicate it's 100 Mbit maximum speed, shared between 10 customers.

I think perhaps when we get down to the last billion or so people we can start talking about extinction then. In the meantime, what we really need to do is figure how to build an economy that does not depend on perpetual growth forever - which in turn depends on an ever growing population and ever increasing resource availability.
We need to be able to reach a stable equilibrium, or at least a dynamically stable system where the highs and lows are not too great.
Part of that is keeping people employable past the age of 65, if we want to enjoy longer lives, and not declaring anyone over 50 as unemployable.

It's easy to say we want to make the rural areas as attractive as the big cities. Notably, I've yet to see any credible ideas for actually achieving it.

Big cities are amazing. Because of network effects and the efficiencies of small distances and dense accumulation of resources, competing directly is extremely difficult. It's like deciding you want to make a new, fledging social network as attractive to users as the current big ones. The only thing you could feasibly do in both cases is to push it as a niche for special interests.

"I don't know anyone who just has a serial converter just lying around unless they're an engineer"

This is not a first project for anybody. Chances are high that you've already played with Arduino a fair bit, and built your own on breadboard as well. In which case you most likely have a USB-serial cable or board already, in order to program them.

That happened to me once after a particularly boozy sayonara party (I was in Japan) with a system password for a remote machine I only had to access every now and then.
About a week later when I was a bit foggy and hung over again from another occasion, I just sat down and logged into it "automatically" with my fingers typing the password without me really thinking about it. As soon as I realised what I had done I then re-played in my mind what I had just typed to see what the password was.
Solution: Go and have a good night out then then try and log in first thing in the morning without thinking about it too much.

"Which platforms were Java and Obj-C specific to again?"

The wording was unclear on my part; you pretty much need to use Java to develop for Android, and Objective-C to develop for IOS. Those platforms use those languages specifically, not that they are used only on those platforms. You can use a few other languages to develop Android or IOS apps if you insist, but with more pain, less support, and you'll normally still have to write minor parts in these languages to make it a complete application.

"I'd error on having 3 languages in the shop and that's about all that you'd need for most things."

That sounds on the low side to me. One low-level, hardware-linked language (C or C++); one dynamic language (Python, Ruby); a functional language (Scala, Scheme, Haskell); one for numerics (R, Matlab/Octave); one embedded language (Scheme, Lua); client-side web (javascript); database access (SQL); and of course the platform-specific major languages you can't get around: Java, C# and Objective-C. I'm sure you can add other categories to the list as well.

The endowment is there to serve the university. And the university is plenty sensitive to its public perception; that affects both enrollment as well as donations. It's not a stretch to say that a fairly large proportion of both current and former students and faculty view global warming as a threat and coal as a bad choice for producing power.

Making these people happy is vital for the universitys bottom line - not to mention that "the university" consists of people that themselves share many of these values. So yes, they are acting in the best interest of those the endowments are there to serve.

It's worth noting that while many open access journals charge for publication, so do many closed access journals. I can't find the link now, but a comparison a few years ago found that the average cost was actually higher across closed journals than open access ones. And of course, they "double-dip" by also charging libraries and readers high fees for carrying the journals.

My fave is still the original Star Wars. It was fresh, it was new, yes, it was hokey, but it worked. Check your sophistication at the door and enjoy the ride!

I find the prequel movies unwatchable.

Some things never change: when The Empire Strikes Back was imminent, they re-released Star Wars in the theatres to get some buzz going. It was accompanied by a short, a trip to the Moon, assembled from NASA footage. Some younger members of the audience expressed loud displeasure at the "fake" movie. They didn't read the credits where it said "Filmed on location by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration".

...laura

Have you ever seen a stupid driver try to merge onto a freeway with their turn signal on and their foot on the brake? Or see three cars bumper-to-bumper trying to merge onto a busy freeway as a pack?

The beautiful thing is, self-driving cars will see this, due to their extensive sensor coverage. And they will have recordings available of the whole incident for later examination. It will be completely clear who was following all the regulations and exercizing judgement (the self-driving car) and who was driving irresponsibly or dangerously (the human driver).

Once self-driving cars hit the road in any numbers, it will become really, really expensive to try to be a jerk in traffic. No speeding. No lane cutting. No tailgating. No weaving. No nothing - just follow the traffic flow and the law to the letter and spirit or you will get reported. And of course your insurance rate will like go up, simply by being a human driver.

At which point there's of course little point in driving yourself any longer; you drive in exactly the same way as the self-driving cars, and you get there at the exact same time. But you have to sit there and drive, while the people around you are busy reading the morning news or throwing irate fowl at pigs.