If that is a thing you can adjust, I think there are organisms other than the yeast that would be better served by that improvement.

So, no super speed, or strength, or other abilities, no synthesizer music.

For our $6,000,000, all we get is a "yeast endowed with special properties other yeasts don't have"? This will not make a compelling television drama. Perhaps a bland sitcom, but not much more.

You joke, but that was my first thought when I read this gem about 2/3's of the way down:

When this happens, think of the convenience! All you'll need to do is look at the nearest camera and give a thumbs up, and Facebook will automatically mark that you Liked [whatever you're standing near].

Two people could become friends by finding the nearest Big Brother station and doing a thumbs up together.

One of (many) problems will be how they contextualize all that data. You know, this started as a joke, but seriously, if Facebook had a feed of this kind of data, it would be interesting to see the hypothetical profile they build based on what they would see an individual near vs. what they claim to like on their public page.

I've considered all kinds of snarky ways to respond to this, but I have this sinking feeling that the context would be lost, and all people would remember is my comment about how much pornography I force my kids to watch while educating them about quality and relevance.

Oh, crap.

I will be interested to see if the next CEO is so arrogantly out of touch with what people want, or will continue with the standard party line of "we can do no wrong and people really want these things" even when nobody is buying them.

Just so we're clear - the only choices for a successor are those who are either misguided or ignorant?

What about other wholly valid choices, like malicious, insane, or sadistic? I mean, I understand that "brilliant grasp of what consumers desire and need" is probably right out, but we shouldn't limit the field where unsuitable choices are concerned.

I've done this as well - but I don't like effectively misleading management by saying that we need to do X in order to achieve what is only a loosely related Y. Yes, X would make Y easier, or improve Z and W, but it isn't truly essential.

That's not to say things are entirely bad. I've also had management see the true value of some stuff that isn't technically being requested at that very moment, and push things upwards by tying the work to something else in just this manner.

I guess the moral is that I don't want to mislead project owners, but I'm okay if my boss does it for me?

This.

And not just bug hunts. I have a laundry list of things that need to be refactored, but every time we think we might have a chance to do so, project management decides something else is more important. We have people complaining about things being slow, but when told that we need to spend time to make it faster, we instead get directed at new features or, worse, tweaks for the sake of a single non-representative customer that happens to have the ear of the project owner.

This Google insider obviously doesn't understand the problem.

I did a Google search for "google", and the Google homepage showed up 7th on the list (under some news articles and links to Maps and Analytics). Clearly Google doesn't know what they're doing, and needs to use better SEO so that Google will rank them higher.

The bottom line is - if Google showed up higher in the Google search results, more people would use Google.

Forgive the puerility, but... Hot golden rods?

And even if they did...what's the value? Please explain to me if I'm missing something, but if I can't decrypt it, then my having a copy is just to protect his "insurance policy", in which case I'm aiding and abetting. I assume additional risk with zero potential benefit, except perhaps helping "stick it to the corporate blah blah blah"?

I have a Scooba (Roomba for mopping). If its ability to navigate is an example of the "Autonomous Navigation" described in the summary...well, it's not particularly reassuring about the future of telepresence.

I initially misread the headline as "Cemetery impacts..." and assumed that this was going to be a nice discussion of zombies and/or how to be successful with necromancy.

Unfortunately, once again, it's only a discussion of how to set up abiogenesis.

So, let me get this straight...
The artist looks at it and sees art, without any insight into interpreting the data.
The environmentalist looks at it, and doesn't understand what it's actually showing.
The aviation consultant looks at it and accurately relays exactly what it was intended to represent, with some limited interpretation.
The data visualization expert understands the data, and provides some suggestions for allowing this format to provide more information.
The philosopher is insane

So the intended interpretation of the story is that we each see what we want to see in information. The meta-interpretation is that I should only hire an expert in an appropriate field to analyze my data.