Age doesn't matter - I've had multiple rather old people on my team of software engineers. Age really doesn't matter.

However, as you get older and your knowledge and experience grows, you will get parasites. Instead of applying your knowledge and experience developing software like you used to, you will be answering all kinds of questions, performing little chores etc. because you happen to know how to because of your experience... to the point that you can no longer just be a software engineer. Research has shown that after each interruption it takes about 17 minutes to get back to the job. On average. For complex coding jobs, this time may be much longer and just a single question about something important but not directly related to your job may get you out of the flow for the rest of the day.

You may need to switch jobs to avoid this; once you start getting more than a handful of such requests that are not part of your coding job, run.

Also, consistently being an asshole may prevent this. But that's probably similarly detrimental to you career...

I don't think the technological singularity - if there's such a thing - should be feared. You may, however, want to fear widespread pseudo/artificial/whatever intelligence. Or just call it plain automation. Because it's going to take your job well before there's a technological singularity. And the challenges that need to be overcome to get us there are much easier than copying an amoebe. You don't need to be able to copy an amoebe in order to be able to do just about anything a human does better than a human.

We don't need to be able to copy amoebes for technology to take over the jobs of the drivers of all kinds of vehicles, all logistics personell, most IT personell, most construction workers, most car mechanics, all fast food personell, most military personell. You name it. And we're getting there fast; in fact replacing all these people would not really be so much of a technological challenge; it's now simply a matter of economics.

Prepare for a job in entertainment, (health) care, science or automating the hell out of anything or be without one in a decade. For quite some time, humans may still compete on the job market with general purpose robots, maybe they always will, but those jobs will inevitably be plain dull; computer tells you what to do, you do it, repeat. And there's all the reason to fear that...

I don't agree. There's enormous potential for storage, either by those wind power producers themselves or by independent market parties. The situation is temporary in the sense that these storage capabilities need to be built and this takes time. Existing storage solutions (most notably pumped hydro) show that this is both technologically and economically feasible. In fact so much so that dedicated international powerlines (e.g. the NorNet cable) are built specifically to get cheap power to those storage facilities.

That's the large scale. On the smaller scale, many European countries are updating local infrastructure (e.g. electricity meters) to enable households to plan their electricity use when the most power is available (e.g. make the fridge extra cold, charge your car, start the washing machine, fill the boiler or simply charge your own electricity storage). And the other way around is possible too: at times when electricity demand is high, empty your cars' batteries or dedicated storage, turn off the fridge or increase your CHP output and and mane some money.

Also, even those large scale "grey" power plants can still be economical. However, their electricity will be much more expensive, obviously, since keeping an expensive plant on standby is not cheap. This is also a great incentive for those power companies to start working on storage.

Also note that while this may be true for some countries (e.g. Germany), "(...) make renewables profitable legislators had to massively shaft everyone else with punitive measures (...)" is not true for all countries and was not a requirement for getting all this "green" power online at all.

This can only be a temporary problem. If those guys have a properly functioning electricity market, energy storage companies will bite. Obviously, this would work much better if end-users/suppliers were actually billed the actual electricity price instead of some kind of average. That way, they could change their behavior to match it or even consider storing their self-produced electricity. This could get a major boost if the electricity prices would be available in real-time to your fridge, washing machine, car charger and solar batteries.

What could also help tremendously, is if the countries around them shared the same ambition. If not, they will keep stuffing the hole until a major electricity dip comes around sometime mid-winter and the Danes will blackout.

Sounds like you're very good in the buzzword-department but have no idea what you're doing at all.... What kind of data are we talking about? Lots of writes? Lots of reads? Is the data suitable for splitting up? What kind of queries will you need to run? Do you need uptime? Or consistency?

Also if you're looking at MSSQL or Oracle, you obviously DO NOT HAVE Big Data. Big Data is data that cannot be dealt with using regular RDBMSes. Do you really have or plan to have multiple terabytes of data? If not, you don't have big data.

Based on the information you've given us we cannot give you any advice at all apart from stopping what you're doing and hiring an expert.

Anybody can use the AED's in use in the Netherlands; they are fully automatic and tell you exactly what to do.

Thank you sir. That's exactly what we need; we just need to take the web back using open standards.

However, I think one or two major things are currently missing. The first is that the browser needs to be involved - in order to be able to properly authenticate on all your friends' walls/blogs/homepages, we need it to be automated: we need your browser to be able to tell any website you want it to where your online identify "lives". Furthermore, we need those online identies to be able to trust and communicate with each other - for example in order to access your "wall" as an RSS feed in order to show it on your newsfeed, your friends' provider will need to authenticate with yours.

Furthermore, we need a much broader protocol for those "online identity providers" to be able to fully replace functionality currently offers by Facebook/Whatsapp/Flickr/LinkedIn etc.

Without these two things, this will never work. But with them not only social network functionality can be fully replaced, but we can probably do away with logins on websites and filling out our address or payment info in webshops as well.

Waste heat already is quite a lot: 15 terawatt. Global warming equals something like 250 terawatt. If energy consumption keeps growing about 1.5% / year like it has for the past few decades, it will take about 80 years (T+80) for waste heat contribution to overtake the heat flux from earths interior. 40 years later (T+120) our waste heat will equal the total energy used by photosynthesis. In about two centuries from (T+200) now it will have risen to values comparable to what the greenhouse effect does today. Two more centuries later (T+400) we'll finally quality for our Kardashev Type I medal according to some and yet two centuries later (T+600) our energy consumption will surpass the total solar irradiation. In theory, because by then we'd be fried unless we have our giant space coolers in place. About two millenia (T+2500) later our power requirements will outshine the sun.

What's ridiculous here is that charges will not be pressed *because* the officer did not violate Vehicle Code section 23123.5 (which prohibits operating electronic wireless communication devices while driving) since it "does not apply to an emergency services professional using an electronic wireless communications device while operating an authorized emergency vehicle".

Apparently they totally failed to check whether the dude might have violated the law that says you should not kill people by driving over them with your car, which he obviously did violate.

Apparently killing people with your car is illegal UNLESS you're doing it while operating an electronic communications device in a police car; in that case you actually get a reward: the job you applied for over a year ago. How odd...

It's much more than that; the images contained in a TIFF file cannot be downloaded separately while the images contained in a picture-tag can. This way I don't have to wait for ages when browsing on my phone while I can still enjoy top quality images on my desktop. That was already possible by allowing the webserver to serve a different pictures based on the User Agent, but that's ugly and it doesn't allow the user to choose the bigger file after all. Furthermore, this new tag allows the browser to select an image based on the speed of the connection, potentially making the web much more responsive in general.

Peak phosphorus is expected by 2030. Total depletion a few decades later. This problem will solve itself and while doing so it will probably solve the overpopulation problem as well;-)

Germans have always had more of an issue with "being spied on" than others do. For example, Germany is one of the only countries in which taking a picture with others on it is illegal unless you've got permission from all subjects!

Also, Germans have major issues with Google Streeview and they were the ones that sued Google for receiving their wifi-broadcasts.

I think they've taken this privacy-thing a bit too far, though...

I bet you cannot do this on a deadline set by others in an environment you're not familiar with. You're just going to sit and wait for the researchers to come back in and announce that your "thinking" period is over. This experiment obviously fails to create the conditions that are needed to be properly alone with your thoughts.

I would absolutely not be able to concentrate in this setting even though I have no trouble at all to be alone with my thoughts for extended periods.

I really don't get this. You get a radio transmitter, start transmitting stuff en then go complaining that others are listening. Anybody, corporations like Google included, should have the absolute right to do whatever they want with any electromagnetic or other radiation that reaches their bodies or equipment. Any restriction on that would be the modern-day equivalent of prohibition to look at things. If you don't want me to see your stuff or receive your radio waves or listen to your sound waves, just don't be so rude to transmit them towards me, even penetrating my body.

So photon's act like matter at bit more often than we expected, right? How much of dark matter/dark energy problem can this phenomenon account for?