Well said. The whole point of education is to build core principals which requires hard work.

well informed comments like this is why I keep reading Slashdot comments. thanks

"Most programmers think something should be a certain level of difficulty. And when a project turns out to be easier than they think it should be, they add artificial complexity until it reaches the expected level of difficulty"

I like this. seen it a lot never seen it expressed so clearly. mind if I re-use?

shared insurance liability could be a great way of getting over what are likely to be a small number of high profile law suits in early days of adoption. as you say works great for vacination.

on side note people always quote the deaths from auto accidents. don't forget to multiply the figure by about 3 for accidents resulting in serious injury where long term care and support needed.

1) I call meeting in which case have screen up and lasts no more than 30 min to get clarity
2) big 'status meeting' leave when last action with my name on comes on.
3) get bored or have something to do so walk out.

got called out on 3 loads of times never actually harmed career.

don't hide from our data collection overlords just confuse the hell out of them.

you are on a glow I dark, ice warning, lots of warning for bends road and get used to it; then you hit one without expecting then to be there.

a 2tbytes attached to router costs about $200. I then mount desktop and my documents on pc we have to it.

the Mac can also mount drive but sadly not as fluidly as above.

for pads and phones use ' es file explorer' folk can decide which video ,music files they want offline.

I have separate 2tbyte attached to nas via usb so backup using rsync every month ( then pop into loft ).

in home use cabling around house so heavy duty editing of video and raw photos don' t suffer lag.

key principal is everything on nas is ' safe' ( but see loft thing) everything local is copy.

figured out how to share music playlists between devices with a partial view of all content available. cannot recommend vlc for desktop and poweramp for android enough.

I think main challenge is the interaction between player and environment. On something like MW3 that is limited to blowing up the odd chicken, window or set piece designed into game.

I want to swish my ( virtual ) hand through a river and see ( and feel ) the water flow around it.

Any true physics model would require awesome cpu capacity. We have at one end mindcraft ( where the atoms are decidely blocky ) and second life ( where behavioural programs can be attached to objects).

My dream would be a virtual universe with atoms large enough to fit 1000 times current cpu capacity but behaves like a 'real' experience.

By 'atom' i mean the simplist construct in this universe which satisfies greatest potential complexity but still cpu possible.

In conclusion future 'games' will not be about fps or polygons per sec but model calculations.

Agree with above. Why not record at max available then downgrade to 48/16 bit for delivery?

Every generation wishes the one before had recorded in format which at time was useless but adds oodles of additional data for future 'high fidelity'

I got first job doing COBOL back in 1995. Second code change I did I got called into managers office.

He asked how I felt about change. I stated it was easy being only 2 line change to 1 module.

That change saves us 2 million ukp a year he says.

Ever since tried to write as little as possible . Amazing what you can do when you understand the problem , understand the code and find the one change that does it.

Not sure my method of wandering through code, chatting to everyone and then submitting a 4 line commit would fit with IBM

As an ex-employee with no direct experience of this project but experience of this culture they will take great care of this data.

But mistakes are possible so any security flaws etc make sure they know quickly to correct.

If they haven't already they are probably more than happy to provide info on exactly what data points they are recording

Internet last time I checked was just a commonly recogised way of routing ip packets.

I think they security is whatever protocol you choose to use on top of that.

I hear that ssl Is a popular choice these days. Does suffer from being 'open source' rather than a nice secure private protocol you can buy but seems to be quite popular.

Never got my head around river silting before so thanks for above as makes perfect sense ( particularly bit about the race between higher levees and silt level ). Can you point me to dummies guide to river and flood plain management from engineering perspective?

Google have ones needing a hydro-electric plant to power.

Our it team call the locked cabinet downstairs as another