How exactly do accountants and marketeers make money for the company? Marketeers arguably have an impact on sales even if they do not make them, and they can be an important differentiating factor in a company. But accountants surely are part of the plumbing, just like IT. And more so than accounting, IT can also be a differentiator even in non-tech firms.

"firefighters, cops, doctors, detectives". These work as role models because kids can easily relate to what these people do, even if they don't understand the details. Engineers? Not so much. Same goes for lawyers, managers and similar professions, but those grow more attractive as kids learn about the pay and social status associated with them. The engineering profession probably grows more unattractive with the years, when kids find it's a long and difficult road to a degree with crap pay and poor career opportunities.

Sure, it's better in some countries than others. Here in NL, people say you have to be mad to choose a career as an engineer. The standing joke amongst students in business schools is that it's good that engineering studies are lengthy with a jam-packed curriculum; by the time the engineers graduate, they'll be groomed and ready to be managed by the business school graduates.

Well, yes. I'd like to add that while some measure of character development for comic book heroes is nice in movies like these, I hated the recent "super deep and profound and dark" reboots of other formerly beloved cardboard cutout heroes, most notably Batman and James Bond. These rebooted movies made decent movies, but the protagonists weren't "our" Batman or Bond. This Superman at least stays closer to the original.

That's what you get with vertically integrated companies. If you buy into one part of their "stack", they will ensure you will not go to their competitors for the remainder of the stack or try and tax you if you do, if they can get away with it. In the case of ISPs who also sell content, that's why we need net neutrality.

Not just that: 3rd parties, even very small ones, may still manage to put issues ignored by the ruling party/parties on the agenda. The Dutch Partij voor de Dieren (Party for Animals, a bunch of nutters who won votes on the strength of astoundingly lavish campaign contributions) did just that, doing some good for animal rights despite having only 2 of 150 seats in parliament. Privacy, "digital" rights and civil liberties are similarly undervalued issues; all parties profess to be in favour of those, but proposals in this area are often half-hearted and poorly thought out if they even make it to the table. This is because most politicians do not really give a shit about them. I voted for the Pirate Party in the last elections, in hopes that these issues receive the attention they deserve.

To me, this is very important. I've seen a few people around me who so got in the habit of always being busy at work, that they crammed what little free time they had with activities and hobbies as well. And I've been there myself. Of course, hobbies are fine, but I am a lot happier overall after I started "pissing away" (as I used to call it) some of my free time. Just doing whatever I feel like, which includes doing nothing at all except lying on the lawn with a beer, gazing up at the sky. A little down time for the brain, no distractions, calls, or tablets near at hand, helps me perform better at work as well.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by global warming.

I'd be happier if it were touted (and designed!) as such: a tool to protect the public as well as aid the police. The camera itself might still fail to work (intentionally perhaps), but if it does work, the video should be uploaded to secure storage immediately and treated as evidence, i.e. the coppers shouldn't be able to conveniently "lose" the footage.

That might not be the best choice of hiding place, given the current talks on hacking and espionage between China and the USA. Snowden may have made himself into a bargaining chip; perhaps China will be happy to extradite Snowden as a gesture of goodwill.

The guy doesn't need copyright (which he probably doesn't even have in this case), he just needs credit for his work. I'd be very careful to even mention the word "legal" or "copyright". Imagine that you, as a manager or an employer, get a phone call about disputed copyright on a bit of software you had done way back when. What do you do? That's right, you refer the matter to your lawyer/legal department. Nothing good will come of that.

If you parted ways with your former employer on good terms, just call them and ask they they would mind giving you a nice written reference, specifically mentioning your contribution to that software.

This is an impressive achievement, and interesting even if they report a relatively low (300) number of charge cycles. Too bad the article doesn't mention some other parameters:
- The article mentions power density "after 300 charging cycles". Is that the limit, or does it actually last for more cycles, and how fast does it drop off?
- How well do these batteries retain a charge? Li-Ion is quite good on that score; if I leave my cordless drill of the charger, it'll still be ready for use after a year.
- How well do these batteries deal with half-cycles (recharge when only half empty)? Is there a memory effect?
- What is the max rate of charge?

There are already 3d printers for food. Some are somewhat frivolous, some can print confectionary, some are serious. There's a company in the Netherlands teaming up with major food producers to produce printed steaks and vegetables. These printed foods are for older people who have to eat liquidized food which isn't very appetizing, and these people are often undernourished. The idea is to provide food printed from liquidized components that looks and tastes like proper food, has to be eaten with knife and fork instead of slurped through a straw, and has a little bit of texture, in hopes that it will make for a more pleasant eating experience.

Anyone who wants a gun, but gets told by their government that they can't have one, and can't / doesn't want / doesn't dare buy one on the black market, and doesn't have the skills to construct a zipgun. Like, anyone who wants one for home defense in the better part of western Europe.

OK, perhaps they won't want this particular gun. But the design has already been improved slightly and is very likely to be improved further. Of course you'll still need ammo to go with it...

So far I found Windows 8 to be a nice improvement under the hood. And a simple little program will give you back your desktop upon boot and the start menu, and you will hardly notice the difference with Windows 7, GUI-wise.

I tried a couple of their demos on a (recent model) smart phone on WiFi, and performance was good. Not lightning fast like a native app, but certainly not slow as hell either. It was decent on an iPad 1 as well.