Truly optional. It's very informal, employees kind of organize themselves into teams centered around ideas they've come up with: what you're working on for the hackathon won't generally have anything to do with your day-to-day work, so if your manager is at all concerned with your hackathon project it will likely only be a matter of personal curiosity, not to evaluate your performance. And it's pretty much a given that you're not going to be in any shape to get a significant amount of work done the next day (the all-nighters have typically been Thursday nights), so it's not like you're being pressed to squeeze in an extra day of work, it's more like rearranging your existing working hours.

The sensor isn't physically larger. The specs say it's a full-frame 35mm sensor, and the photo of the prototype camera shows it with a standard EF lens mounted: a larger sensor would need medium or large format lenses, and it would be pretty much dead on arrival in the market if you had to go out and start buying medium or (God forbid) large format lenses to feed the thing. Half of the allure of Canon for video, after all, is that you can reuse your still EF lenses, and demanding huge format glass for HD video would be absurd.

The reason the photo sites are so much bigger in this sensor, presumably, is because the resolution is much lower than Canon's still SLR cameras. It doesn't give the resolution, but since it was only described as capturing "HD video," I wouldn't be surprised to find that the sensor's native resolution is that of 1080p video: 1920x1080 pixels, or about 2 megapixels. The 1Dx, on the other hand, has a native resolution of 18 megapixels.

So far, Canon (and more recently Nikon), have been allowing users to record HD video on their SLR cameras by scaling their massive native resolutions way down to a size that you can reasonably encode and cram onto a memory card in an SLR form factor. This approach, on the other hand, seems to be to build a sensor with a lower native resolution suitable for HD video at the same size as the larger SLR sensors, so you don't have to do any down-scaling and you get massive photo sites, which gives you a huge advantage in sensitivity.

If you're that worried about obscenely uncommon edge cases, you might as well just lock yourself up in your house (the location of which you'll presumably permit no one to know) and never see the light of day again. Every time you go out in public people get the chance to see you, to interact with you, to find out who you are. And you know what? The vast, vast majority of the time that's exactly what you want: community is the most basic element of our existence, and we thrive on being connected to other people.

Facebook is just one more means to share information that I want people to know. Is it remotely possible that some creep could end up using information shared on Facebook to stalk or harass me? Sure. However, it's an absolute fact that being able to rapidly share photos, events, even just amusing little quips for friends to see, respond to and comment on is a great boon. For the price of a couple minutes spared glancing through my newsfeed every now and then, I can get a quick overview of what the people I care about (and even ones that I only peripherally care about) are up to. Instead of contacts going stale when people move away and get preoccupied with their new lives, I'm able to keep in at least light contact with dozens of people from my past who would have otherwise been all but forgotten by now, keep track of what they're up to and find out when our locations happen to coincide.

Is listing your home address on FB next to photos of your children and setting your privacy level to "public" a great idea? Certainly not, but taking a reasonable, measured approach to social networking certainly is. If someone on the Internet is able to somehow find a photo of my face with my name attached to it, I'm sorry but it just doesn't seem like too hefty a concern to me.

Is that supposed to be sarcasm? They're perfectly capable of detecting pedestrians. Google has been driving these things all over the place with only occasional human interference and they're certainly not leaving a stream of dead pedestrians in their wake...

I don't know why everyone seems to be under the impression that these things are just going to blindly follow maps and GPS, but that's not how it works at all. They're equipped with all kinds of sensors and cameras that let them examine their environment, and they're not going to turn onto a "road" that isn't actually there. Will there be some freak accidents that could potentially have been avoided by manual controls? Sure there will, but they'll be far, far outweighed by the avoidable accidents that will result from letting humans take control.

Once you get autonomous cars driving safer than humans on average (and I would be surprised if we haven't already passed that point, because humans get themselves into an awful lot of trouble operating motor vehicles), a manual override would be one of the worst possible things you could add. Think about it: when is a human driver most likely to override the car's AI? In a situation that they perceive as an emergency, say a pedestrian jumping out into the street, getting cut off at an intersection, so on and so forth. And when would the ultra-fast computational abilities of a computer be the most important? You guessed it, those same situations. If you give humans the option to take control, you can be sure that more often than not they're going to use it at the worst possible moments.

If the people were left unscathed, then they'll be free to cancel the alert. It's a problem easily enough solved with a "Don't send the paramedics, please" button.

They don't just blindly follow GPS directions, that would be absurd. They're equipped with sensors and cameras that collect more than enough data to let them detect and avoid dangers like railroad tracks. When you look at the immense amount of injuries and property damage done by human drivers on a regular basis, it becomes pretty well apparent that one of the best things we could possibly do for public safety is to get humans out from behind the wheels of cars as soon as possible. Will there still be some freak accidents? Sure there will, but they'll be a heck of a lot less common than distracted, impaired, clumsy, or just plain not-fast-enough human drivers getting themselves into wrecks.

You can do that with any free software license, and I would assume anything approved by OSI as well. Being allowed to redistribute binaries isn't a unique feature of the GPL.

Yeah, going to college on GI Bill money is far superior to government aid!

The analogy doesn't hold. When you take out a loan for a car, you put the car up for collateral. That's an arrangement between you and the loan issuer, in which the car dealer has no stake (unless, of course, they're the one issuing the loan). A more correct analogy would be the car dealership repossessing the car even though you don't owe them any money and they have no claim to it. Of course that's also a flawed analogy, though, because there is no proper analogy between a service provided by an educational institution and a physical good, and it's not possible in any meaningful sense to take a college degree from somebody.

In effect, what this means is that even though you've completed the educational requirements to hold a position and you're perfectly qualified, an arbitrary third party is allowed to step in and prevent you from getting that job because you owe another third party money. This is not only detrimental to you, but also to the employers missing out on potentially productive employees, and in the long run the loan issuers who aren't going to get paid back when the students can't find a decent job. It's a drag on productivity for the entire economy, and it's not in the public interest to allow practices that forcibly underutilize skilled labor.

It was an agreement not to cold call. The distinction, however, is one of how unethical the agreement was, not whether it was ethical or not. Either way they're conspiring against their employees to keep wages down.

It's still an illegal agreement, and it still harms employees. Poaching employees isn't being a dick, it's a perfectly legitimate business practice: if your competitor is hiring someone you want, and you think that offering them a higher salary to come work for you will result in a net profit, the only economically sensible course of action is to make the offer. Those prohibited cold-calls could have driven developer wages up significantly, and that would apply to all developers being hired, not just the ones being poached. The basic idea is this: you can either make sure you keep your wages and benefits competitive enough that your employees will want to stay (obviously best for the employees) or you can make an agreement with your competitors not to poach employees so you don't have to worry about keeping them from wanting to leave if given the chance (obviously bad for the employees, and also illegal). These companies made the latter, unethical choice.

I'll just leave this here. The much publicized cases you're thinking of are parents starving their children and then trying to blame it on veganism, not children just spontaneously dropping dead because vegan diets are inadequate (they aren't).