I thought the word careless was assumed to proceed user. I think that basically every slashdotter has been called to help some "careless" user who has 3 toolbars, 2 AV bloatwares, and countless other bits of crap that came along with all their downloads. Yet they will swear on a stack of bibles that "they never installed nothin' "

So any malware that depends on users being careless will be a huge success. The other key will be ease of use.

That being said, I generally stick with my brother's rule: "I wouldn't transmit it electronically if I wouldn't want it on the front page of a national newspaper." My niece texted me her password the other day; I pointed out the error of her ways.

I did just come up with an app for Google glasses. You send someone encrypted messages that are displayed on their screen as a QR code. Their glasses decrypt it temporarily while it is in view. The phone can't decrypt, the glasses don't store. Glasses can still get hacked though but at least you do not have a plaintext message store.

I don't know, many times things were because someone just did them after many other people fretting that it couldn't be done. Look at all kinds of inventions like the stirrup or the rearview mirror that anyone could have built after seeing one for just a few seconds. This only applies to some science but fear of failure and complacency holds many people back from many things. Setting a distant and firm goal can be great in guiding your actions as you can continuously ask "Does this get me closer to the goal." The key is the ability to be able to recognize that you might have stumbled upon something even greater. Cooking up an awesome chemical refrigerant but stumble upon Teflon then run with the Teflon.

What I feel sorry for is any researcher who wants to do some genuine research into cold fusion. To me it would cause rate up there with inventions such as fire/math/smelting ore/cooking food/clothing.

If cold fusion were invented tomorrow everything changes, world politics, anything involving oil or energy production, the environment, space travel, food production, basically everything. So while it attracts cranks by the boatload I would be happy to see huge amounts of funding going to CF. Yet I suspect that if you are a legitimate researcher and you mention cold fusion that there is stunned silence in the room. You might as well bookend it with paranormal research.

Fully Agree, I loved traveling to client locations. Even the crappy locations had something fun about them even if it was just a story about how crappy they were. The best companies have the programmers and the customers mix it up a bit. The worst hide the programmers in a vault fearing that the client will steal them away.

When you rage quit a company the remaining sheep always dish the dirt (while scouting for jobs themselves).

There are 3 possibilities: They built a quantum computer, they are completely faking it, or they invented a whole new branch of physics. Number 1 might get them a Nobel, number 2 is unlikely, and number 3 gets them at least one Nobel with them carried to the podium on the shoulders of the other winners.

My guess is that Microsoft is Angry that other companies are making money off the Internet and that they plan on putting a stop to that. This box will probably do its damnedest to charge people to access Netflix, Hulu, and the like. I am also willing to bet that MS is looking at the catastrophic failure of the Wii U with relief as it won't be a competitor instead of the correct way which is in sheer terror that it foretells their own fate if they don't get this perfectly right.

I am not looking forward to the new XBOX that much. My timeline for buying one will be around 2015 and getting a used one. There is a long list of games for my existing XBOX to keep me amused for quite some time. I am looking forward to whatever Valve comes up with and every now and then amuse myself with something on one of my mobile devices.

And there lies the rub. MS probably thinks they are going to do battle with the PS4. I bet their charts don't really show how shattered the whole market is. Does MS realize that one of their competitors is Netflix? The gaming market is part of a larger market called entertainment. People have an entertainment budget and will spend it on different things of which console gaming is just one possible thing. This is something the movie and TV industries have learned the hard way when console gaming vastly reduced people's appetite/budget for network television and movies.

So as MS realizes that people want to do other things with their money and Televisions I suspect that MS will pathetically try to position their console in between people and what they want in order to collect some rent. I love when companies pull this sort of stunt because I always enjoy the show when fantasy crashes into and is steamrolled by reality.

I fully agree with you on this. It is not the soda, "There is no soda", it is respect. One startup I worked for had a we're-all-in-it-together attitude where we happily tolerated crap computers/desks/office etc. But as success came along the owner just kept taking every perk possible. I quit when he asked me to bring him and a client coffee. (I cleaned out my desk and left).

It is not so much the perks as what they symbolize. Often the management have expense accounts and blow money 50 different ways that appear wasteful to the programmers. So if you don't give them some perks they feel slighted. Then they do an interview at some other place where they go out of their way to treat the programmers halfway human and poof the company just lost a programmer or 3 over a few thousand dollars worth of nothing.

I worked for a company where we had 100% dental for just about any procedure; it was awesome. Our company was purchased by a stodgy company run by 60 year old suits so I quit. Weeks later the first thing to go was the 100% dental. Two years later 95% of the staff were gone with only the most useless paper pushers remaining; basically people who couldn't move on.

What I have discovered with programmers is that the good ones are quite smart and don't take much crap. So a clear and fair salary system that is open works far better than the pretending that nobody blabs their and any other salaries that they know. If you want to quickly empty out a room of your best programmers reveal that some useless stump of a manger earns 3 times as much and blew at least one of their salaries on travel.

Or if you want them to quit after a few weeks of seething then just do a nepotism hire and put him in charge of "code reviews".

The key is not so much that perks make or break an environment but that they indicate a respect for the programmers. Often programmers are somewhat trapped in the office while the marketing and management get to travel and wine and dine clients. Thus throwing them some bones such as food and conference travel balances out the equation. But once management starts to act like the programmers are a bunch of undeserving brats it is game over.

One company that I particularly enjoyed quitting from would have the upper management basically give customer tours of the programmers like we were a zoo exhibit.

The best part of when they cut a perk and lose programmers is how many of the management seem to think that the pathetic losers quit because they took away the free drinks or some such. Then they get angry when they realize how development has screeched to a halt when the only 3 competent programmers just took off. I have even heard accusations of sabotage.

I love MOOCs (I hate the word mooc when pronounced Mook though) I have little doubt that many courses go into way less depth than a traditional collage course. But my motivations for learning are entirely different than your typical collage student (not all just the typical). I am picking and choosing my courses based upon what I want to know so that I can put it to use tomorrow. Passing the tests in the MOOC are motivated by the fact that if I can't pass them then I haven't really been paying attention. Your typical collage student is learning many subjects where they follow a "flip-card" learning strategy so that they can pound the knowledge into their head long enough to regurgitate it onto a test. Some material will be built upon and potentially kept for life such as the core subjects for the person's degree. So an Engineer will potentially keep much of the math that they then proceed to use over the next few years but few will remember much from their mandatory arts course. The same even within specialties. Accountants who go on to become advanced bookkeepers will most likely forget their stats course material within months of learning it. I have taken and passed 3 courses from Coursera and loved all three. In every case I have proceeded to put what I learned into action. So my guess is that in 1 year I will have taken what they have given me and run much farther than your typical student taking the same university level courses unless that student chooses a path that will put that material in to regular use. But this is the advantage of my being able to cherry-pick the courses I want and need.

But comparing MOOCs to their University classroom counterparts are like comparing Radio to TV. They are different beasties. A MOOC takes a different form of discipline to take it. They have certain disadvantages in that I doubt anyone took any of the courses I took within a 100 miles of my location making physical grouping almost impossible at this point. University courses are taught by whatever professor is at hand, be they good or bad. Eventually some of the best professors are going to do MOOCs (I wish Feynman could have cooked up one as his lectures were pretty awesome) resulting in a faster more efficient learning experience. MOOCs are bringing world class courses to my desk from institutions I couldn't have gotten into. Also the prices for many MOOCs are perfect for people in parts of the world where they have no access to higher education.

But what it really boils down to for me is that a world with MOOCs is going to be a better world for so many people. I suspect that there will be a few casualties but that overall the number of winners will be incomprehensible. Also keep in mind that this is really the beginning for MOOCs so who knows how much better they will get?

I would love to deploy some BSD machines and see how they fair in a long term A/B test against Linux machines. I hate to use the term but a TCO.

But with servers there is rarely one killer feature that make an OS way better than the others. Usually it is a bad feature that kills the OS. If you need a certain package and it doesn't exist or isn't well supported with a certain OS then that OS is dead to you regardless of all its other virtues.

Now I use Mac OS X for my desktop and Linux for my servers. I am impressed with the Bastard BSD underlying Mac OS X in that it doesn't get in my way.

So my question is: I am using CentOS because it keeps me in my Linux as Unix comfort zone but that NetBSD would be way better and every day I don't switch is a day wasted? Or would NetBSD make me angry that I left the happy easy land of CentOS?

The key here is who seems to wear the earpieces. It just doesn't seem to be a class of "Winners".

If you have seen the movie Oblivion and remember Tom Cruise's earpiece, then I could live with one of those. But the USB memory stick in my ear, those just suck. They should come with propeller hats (something I would have killed for age 9).

When the flip phone was all the rage it often reminded me of an 1890's station master pulling out his pocket watch and flipping it open/closed and then sliding it back into his pocket. The wristwatch basically put the pocket watch out of action. I suspect that history is going to repeat itself as I am now pulling out my smartphone repeatedly to quickly check various things such as the time, the weather, certain stocks, who just called, GPS, who just messaged, ebay alerts, fiddle with the audio, etc. Rarely do I pull out my smartphone to use the larger screen for things such surfing, typing, or talking.

So for at least 90% of my smartphone interfacing it would be awesome to interface with a convenient wrist watch to reach the phone in my pocket or pack. The key is that the watch does not stray into any territory where the phone excels. An example would be mapping. Don't try to put a small map on my watch; that will just drive me nuts. But a navigation app that just distance, direction, and turning instructions would be perfect for a watch.

Where I am presently confused is how to interface with my audio. I guess I could either use a bluetooth earpiece (loser) or headphones with a microphone and that would be fine.

The smartphone interface watch will be far more successful than google glasses. I think that google glasses will be cool for the most part at fulfilling our terminator fantasies but not for meeting our boring needs such as: What time is it?

I love when police gather huge amounts of data resulting in tonnes of false positives. So now every farmer (fertilizer) with a pressure cooker (most) who like Scuba (some) will be getting a visit. If that same farmer donates to a tea-party then the police will think they now have probable cause for a warrant. I really hope that judges will say, "Other than having a computer tell you to raid his house what actual police work have you done?"

Reason 587 to enshrine privacy rights and limit data gathering right in the constitution.