"Hey we've got some upcoming technical challenges for future missions that need us to deal with pressurizing and heating liquids"
"Okay, what are the parameters?"
"A lot like coffee actually"
"Well then...let's trial our technology by building an espresso machine."

Today's attempt, they expected a 60% chance of clear enough weather. Tomorrow they expect 50% chance, so...fingers crossed?

I don't see anything wrong with one country being focused on one thing for a decade or two. It's efficient.

Mars takes ~260 days to reach, with a payload that could theoretically bring humans...maybe 130 if we do some pretty crazy stuff. Europa takes three years minimum for a much smaller payload. Actually getting humans to Mars is already a big technical challenge, let alone living once we get there...it's going to take a heck of a lot more practical experience before we can get them to Europa.

Say what you want about the pointlessness of living off-world, but Mars is great practice. It's closer, it has more solar power available, and we can send bigger things with our current technology. Same with the Moon...great practice, but even less practical reasons to be there than Mars.

That experiment is already running in many work environments, where developers can choose between a Windows machine or a Mac for their workstation. It's not coming out of the dev's pocket, so it's as free of a choice as you're going to get. Where I work there's about 10-20% Windows usage, and I'm one of them...just can't get the hang of that awful, awful Mac wrapper around the supposedly Linux core.

When I used my Mac, my documents had a file actually named ~/foo.txt because I tried to save something to a path in Chrome. Ugh. I miss working somewhere that ran Ubuntu natively.

You want a dead language that's also amendable...sounds like you'll need a central authority that decides what concepts are worthy of becoming words, and we all read that book in school. Concepts have emotional baggage, and there's some interesting research showing that words for an apparently identical concept in multiple languages has very different emotions attached to it, and that's probably true across different regional dialects as well.

Consider the word "marriage", and legal battles all over the place about whether it's defined as one man-one woman or not. Either you can force that precise interpretation on all users of the language, which is only possible if you alter the way people think, or your language is not static and the meaning will shift over time for different people, so...failure.

I guess it might be possible to version a language, so you can label a document or sentence or a single object as being the 2000-2009 interpretation. That could work for historical legal documents, but for a living language, people aren't going to keep up with new definitions all the time...and again, some people will disagree whether should have a changed meaning or not, so when you're in the pacific northwest when people say "marriage" it's locally assumed they mean the 2010 build, and when people in North Carolina say it, it's locally assumed that they mean the 1980 build. That, and you still have the problem where one central authority defines words. Maybe if you allow language forks that anyone can publish as an authority, as long as they are precisely defined, and all legal documents need to be tagged with what fork and build they're using?

And yet despite all those other options being available, people still use plain old cell phones to do it in other countries, which is one big reason why sandy places with a much higher rate of terror attacks already have these plans in place. I used to see news stories about them shutting down cell service to stop attacks every once in a while, and I suppose it probably worked sometimes, in that weird confluence of intel that's good enough to know an attack is coming and how, but not where.

Yeah, anyone doing an attack here would have much better resources available. Cell phones are still the most desirable option though because those radio options, unless you programmed them to detect a specific signal, could get set off by random noise pretty easy. (Remember hearing about that attack somewhere in east europe I think, a few years back where a guy was prepping a bomb and got blown up by a telemarketer?) Cell phones are dead simple to use, much like alarm clocks or other things where you don't care what the signal is, just that there is now voltage / a closed circuit / whatever.

People keep making the mistake that someone who's going to go through the trouble to do this, has technical knowledge or the support of someone who does. Just because YOU could rig up a raspberry pi to set something off when it gets an email, doesn't mean a terrorist is going to go through the trouble to learn. He'd probably prefer to spend his time learning to make things go boom larger, not smarter.

That's (Windows) (Express Settings), not (Windows Express) (Settings). I'm pretty sure it applies to the small number of settings you're forced to click through when you first configure your machine, and the presence of a setting in that set doesn't mean they're hiding other settings in the system.

It also means that the content sites they visit make a hell of a lot more money. 10x as much is not an unreasonable estimate, and is sometimes low. Generally means that the sites are higher quality. But that's more tragedy-of-the-commons, and less of a direct effect.

In practice, once you pay people enough that they can stop worrying about money day-to-day, more money doesn't increase employee happiness much. What it can do is encourage unhappy employees to stick around, and that's not always good. People are more effective when they get along well with their coworkers and that includes conning them into social events once in a while. The guy who doesn't want to socialize with coworkers at all, just wants more money, isn't someone I'd enjoy working with.

"Fun" events are good for morale...not just because oh hey minigolf is fun (or whatever), but because they say "we care enough about making our people happy, that we're canceling a day of work just for that". Acting like you care makes a difference. Again, it doesn't do the job for everyone, but the people it doesn't impact can be pretty toxic on a team.

This AC's kind of right, though. You don't want to make people stay late if you can avoid it. Morale building events should take the place of work, instead of tacking more time onto the end.

You know I really really want a Sims game that's specifically office management now. Theme Hospital was the closest thing and it's old as hell and not even that similar.

Yes, god yes, this. The most valuable TPMs and managers I've ever had, were valuable because they got between business/marketing and us. You should know your team well enough to know what they can realistically do, and then do everything humanly possible to set expectations of people outside the team to match. Devs should never, ever, ever get a requirement, even a simple task, from someone that is not a direct manager...one of the worst things that can happen to a dev is getting tasks from four different people, all of which are pri 1, all of which will only take a couple hours, just a couple hours. At the same time, you need to be able to give meaningful status updates to people, because devs usually can't. "When will this feature be done" means something completely different to the developer and to the guy selling it to the customer.

Devs should be accountable for their work, but you're the person they should be accountable *to*. They don't have the time to understand all the business realities outside their team, that's a fulltime job, so do it for them and keep other teams from demanding unreasonable stuff.

I have no idea how to actually do that job...which is why I'm happy to stay in development forever, but this one thing is probably the biggest factor controlling my happiness and productivity across different places I've been. Learn how to be your team's shield and do it well.

Aside from that--daily standups. SHORT daily standups. I don't care if you're doing agile or scrum or whatever, or how you're managing tasks. There need to be in-person status updates, and people should be encouraged to vent a little about what's blocking them on a daily basis. Figure out a video conferencing tool to use so that people who are working from home can participate, there's some really good free ones to use.

Jesus, you're paranoid. If I was put in that situation, aside from reading a lot of books, Slashdot's one of the first places I'd go for advice...considering we're the same kind of people he'd be in charge of. Remember when comments here used to be valuable?

Okay now, hold up a second. Almost everyone here is complaining about how they assume every company ignores DNT, because it's easy and profitable to ignore. Key word "assume".

I don't see a lot of horror stories, or any evidence that any major company at all really is ignoring DNT (except like...with Chrome, or Facebook, but then that's Facebook and what do you expect). I do see people who actually know the industry saying otherwise, and the TOC for the big networks agree with them. Advertising is mostly big companies these days, it's not the Wild West it used to be, and it sure seems like the big professional companies run the majority of ads on the majority of non-porn, non-torrent sites. When you look for articles about DNT, it's full of big companies grousing about how DNT is costing them money. Content providers don't like DNT because their ads are worth less, and if DNT wasn't actually being followed, you wouldn't think they would have a problem.

Who exactly is ignoring it? Who's the bad guys? I'd really like to know.

Thanks! That's exactly what I was hoping to find in the article. I haven't played with that hardware before, and I got my hopes up when the preface said it was "very technical".