It's not so much getting "caught," but I have realized that I have done myself no favors by just sitting through meetings quietly for years and thinking, "Yeah, no kidding! I could have said that, why does everybody listen to them!" Staying engaged in meetings doesn't come naturally to me but it is a form of valuable work and leads to other things.

Yeah, there's one guy I always tease about pants because once he stood up and was only wearing shorts. Scared me for a second.

Anyways, that's just it... there's no social pressure without eye contact. It is too tempting to websurf during a teleconference.

So I want to have stable, low-latency, 20-way video conferencing before I hear anybody claim more bandwidth wouldn't be useful.

(Of course even then telecommuters have to download big files often enough).

I have been surprised in just the last few years how many full-time telecommuters I suddenly know, and equally surprised by how useful video-conferencing is in making my interactions with them more engaging, as opposed to just talking on the phone. So far, the experience is sub-optimal because there are frequent glitches and disconnects (whether it is the person's Internet connection, or our VPN, or Lync, I am not entirely sure). But the digital divide is no longer a notional idea for me, because I work daily with people who can't earn their living without a good connection.

You're quite right that roads will need to be upgraded to provide telemetry to autonomous cars, and this will happen gradually over many, many decades.

Didn't say that, didn't mean to imply it, and don't believe it. Other than that, no. :)

The only way a car can be designed to safely self-drive is doing it just the way we do: by creating a local, up-to-date mapping of the surrounding area in real time and working within that representation with sufficient skill to respond to anything that might appear.

Pre-existing environmental mapping simply cannot keep up. Construction, pets crossing the road, wild animals, falling rocks, pedestrians, vandalism of road signs and traffic indicators and lane painting, washouts, drunks, heart attacks, stinging insects, oversize loads swinging around traffic lights and signs, special transports, some guy at the side of the road madly waving a hand-printed sign that says "BRIDGE IS OUT!"... the list of unpredictable effects upon the local driving environment seems almost endless -- and keep in mind these things can occur in combinations of more than one type and more than one incident. Often suddenly.

Further, if the car is smart enough to be capable of updating the environmental map in real time and deal with any combination of changes, then it's already smart enough to maintain a completely dynamic local mapping and doesn't need a pre-existing mapping for anything but gross navigational purposes (route planning) and even that can require the vehicle to adapt.

Contrariwise, if it isn't smart enough to maintain a full local environmental mapping, then it is inherently unsafe.

Someone(s) at Google didn't think this one through.

Note the word "energetic". Earth's matter is not particularly energetic when compared to an active fusion reaction or the angular momentum of a neutron star. Likewise with gas giants.

Well if history is any indication, the first attempt by MS will be poor. The second attempt will be almost usable. So by Windows 12, settings will be usable again (assuming MS doesn't jump version numbers again).

I don't know if it ever went as far as trying to get rid of sysadmins (Redmond has made no lack of money off of MCSEs and the like over the years), but they certain encouraged an attitude that command prompts, scripting and of the more "traditional" methods of system administration had been rendered obsolete; or rather, would be with "the next version". I have been subjected to numerous issues over the years that required me manually altering the registry, registering/re-registering/de-registering COM DLLs, screwing around in the bowels of IIS, Exchange, SQL Server, and yes, in many cases, invoking the dreaded command line. It was always alright because "In the next version, this functionality will be added!"

And now, as of 2014, Microsoft has pretty much flipped everything on its head. The GUI admin tools are all but deprecated, viewed as the lesser way to administer a Windows server, and PowerShell is proper and appropriate way.

The worst part about all of this is neither Microsoft or its legion of faithful sysadmins see any irony in this. Unix, in their view, is still some antiquated operating system with dated methodologies and philosophies (despite having commands like Move-Item to *nix's mv).

A neutron star is a gravitationally-bound sphere of neutrons, not plasma, and yet it's still a star.

I would respectfully suggest that a good definition of a star would be, "a gravitationally bound collection of energetic matter engaged in largely Brownian motion." That covers everything from brown dwarfs (D-D fusion requiring substantial energy to initiate) up to hypergiants and neutron stars. (Even a cold, dead neutron star possesses enough energy to dramatically warp spacetime -- there's a lot of energy there to be tapped.)

This definition would also exclude black holes, as a singularity isn't really "matter" per se -- matter requires volume, and a singularity has none of that.

It would also exclude galaxies and accretion discs, as those are not engaged in Brownian motion.

So?

Replace "terrorists" with anything from "transvestite midgets that want to fondle my feet" to "billionaires that want to patronize my painting career" and the statement still has no bearing on your life if you don't ever come into contact with them.

He's not claiming that terrorists don't exist. Only that he has never, and is not likely to ever, interact with one in any meaningful way. Structuring your life around incredibly improbable events is a waste of time. Ordinary citizens who make any changes to their routine in anticipation of a terrorist attack in Canada (or the US or most of the world) are very likely in need of therapy.

I would add "And then refined them."

There is no doubt that Xerox was instrumental in GUI development. However Apple will be remembered because they brought it to the masses. While Xerox had great ideas about GUI, it lacked some refinement. They may have done it if the company had backed the researchers and fully embraced the idea of computers. Instead management was stuck on being a copier company.

I think the other side of the problem here is because people read or hear a few stories like this -- they feel persecuted. There''s 24 hour news and 24 hour blogs and writers have to get people to notice them.

it's just filler -- and it will be until the mainstream media stops making news a profit center. There are important issues in this world and our media is studiously avoiding them. So what's safe to talk about that doesn't risk hurting the economic interests of an increasingly influential series of interlocking companies? Rehash the same stale discussions that we've been gnawing on for 30 years.

There are men who listen to talk radio and think they are persecuted, there are women who think they are being ignored -- and the rest of us who are sane and wise know that everyone is being ignored and persecuted because we live in a hostile free market world that isn't handing out any free passes unless your dad's name is on the building.

I'm sorry to SOUND misogynistic, but whenever I hear a rant like; "It's there fault, and they should be more X, but on the other hand not too anti-X," I interpret what they are saying as "Blah, blah blah, DO ME, blah blah blah HARD, blah blah-blah NOW."

I could pepper this comment with a lot of psychology, thoughtful hemming and hawing, or some sort of shared responsibility. I am after all a feminist and I think Gloria Stein is awesome. But the difference here is that men recognize when they just need to get -- SomEthing eXactly appropriate -- and are OK with admitting it.

At NPR, they are all sponsored by companies they formerly used to challenge with cutting edge investigations. Now their legacy nod to anything Liberal is to whine about issues that Liberals used to champion. It's got to be difficult coming up with material that pretends to challenge the status quo -- but in acceptable ways inside of the "free speech zone" they've been quarantined in by sponsors and overly sensitive donors. I'm not Professional, but I'm willing to bet that everyone at NPR is in dire need of SomEthing eXactly.

Consumers are becoming aware that FTDI is breaking their stuff and will hopefully be replacing it for free...

What can't kill or otherwise impair the health of people? If we start down that road, Surgeon General's warning labels will become as helpful as Prop 65 warning labels are now.