Funny you should ask: I just got back from a trip to London. Eight time zones worth of jet lag.

I find the first night there or back is no problem to get to sleep, because I'm so totally wasted I can't hold my eyes open anyway. It's the second night that's the killer. After that I'm fine. Getting up at the right time is a challenge on flights to the east coast, but is rarely an issue for Europe.

Unless you're making a phone call or having some other sort of live interaction, the time at home is irrelevant. Don't even think about it. The time where you are is the time that matters.

...laura

I always insist on a clean compile with the warning level turned up as high as it will go. If the compiler is cool with my code, I have a better chance it will do the right thing with it.

Once I have an application that works I see if it meets performance goals (if any). If it does, I'm done. If it doesn't, profile, find the hot spots, optimize as needed. Compiling an entire application with -O3 is idiotic, and misses the point.

...laura

I get in to the office nominally at 8, but usually get in a bit earlier, like 0740.

Since I'm on Pacific time and almost everybody I deal with is on Central and Eastern time, I consider it a courtesy to them to be in the office promptly. At one time I had a job that got me over to Paris and Brussels quite a bit, but the "engineering" folks were the sort who rarely showed up in the office before 1000. This is getting kinda late in western Europe when you need to work with somebody to solve a problem. Since I was in the office earliest I took most of the calls from Europe, and, oddly enough, was the one invited to fly over and help them figure things out.

...laura

[...] but it's not more influential than Jesus.

Well, at least Linnaeus existed; that's a major strike in his favour right there.

I don't see why causing death by a hack should have any special treatment compared to causing death by an ice pick, a bullet, high voltage electricity, or any other exotic means.

There should be no special legislation needed for this.

OpenPGP was right in all ways except one: you can't even explain what it does to your grandma, let alone get her to use it.

Never mind grandma, I can't use it. Decided I'd try it this spring. Spent an afternoon reading manuals, blog posts and howto's, until I realized this is complicated and brittle enough that I'm likely to mess things up and compromise any security as a result. Better to avoid it, and behave under the assumption that people are bulk scanning and analyzing everything i send or receive.

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.