Which *still* doesn't constitute success.

The term "agile development" covers a lot of ground. Much of what people mean by "agile" simply amounts to best practices (e.g. daily commits, unit testing, frequent builds etc.). But "agile" also refers to a kind of iterative and incremental approach to identifying and pursuing business goals in your project (exemplified by Scrum). That turns out to be a sensible and appropriate approach **in many but not all situations**.

Many development projects exist in a business environment where business needs evolve quickly, driven by both endogenous (management decisions) and exogenous (competition and market) factors. Likewise the software project itself, if it is reasonably successful, alters the very business conditions it is designed to address. *Under such conditions* you can't set out to build something in two years with any confidence that it will be what is needed twenty-four months from today. On the other hand, no programmer can be productive if he gets a different set of marching orders every day. You are forced by circumstances to adopt a flexible, iterative approach that allows the programmers to actually complete useful work before its specifications become obsolete, which contains the scope of *change-driven* failure and points your team in the right direction sooner rather than later.

But it is critical to remember that not *all* projects are like that. If you are writing software to control a spacecraft or a nuclear power plant, you don't sit down and bang out a little production code to figure out what it is you need to build. There's a lot more you can and should do to prepare for coding, and the classical engineering principle of discovering requirements as early in the process applies. It applies to the chaotic business situation too, but in that situation many requirements are simply impossible to anticipate.

In any case, the phrase "world's biggest agile project" should give any thinking developer pause. "Huge" and "agile" (in the goal-setting sense) don't go together. It seems to me that the idea of approaching *some things* in a waterfall manner (still using many best practices associated with "agile") and *others* in an interactive, exploratory fashion is the approach they should have been taking from the start.

Sure you can. Just put some teeth behind privacy policy violation. If a company says it will do one thing and does something else, penalize it. Defining appropriate (and scalable) penalties would require some thought; you need to make sure that it will hurt no matter how big the company is, and you also need to ensure that companies don't get slammed for the actions of one malicious or negligent employee, but that they do get smacked if there's evidence of a pattern of encouraging or even tolerating such employees. But I think that could be defined with some time and some thought.

Further, it would be a good idea to direct legislatively that the policies covering a given piece of information are the policies that were in place at the time the data was collected. No retroactive policy changes, not without specific, positive permission from users.

I think that approach would strike the right balance, assuring that individuals have the right to trade their personal information for services if they so choose, but ensuring that companies can't arbitrarily change the deal.

Ammunition is readily available in Switzerland, including for the military calibers. They no longer issue the sealed ammunition package to be kept with the rifle, but that's no obstacle. Actually, if you go to a government-sponsored gun range you can buy ammunition with a government subsidy, and without any paperwork. Technically you're supposed to use fire all of the ammunition at the range, but no one checks. Or you can buy it at a gun store, where you'll have to do some paperwork which includes a background check, but it's not at all difficult.

I'm also expecting to see some hybrid designs that use cheap, readily-available steel parts that require little to no modification plus 3D-printed plastic components for the more intricate bits. With that approach, you can fashion something that has the strength to be safe but is considerably more sophisticated than could be constructed out of metal without the services of a good metal shop and significant gunsmithing skill.

Suppose, for example, that you used a steel pipe for a barrel and maybe a block of metal for a bolt face, then were able to print a reliable fully-automatic action and a high-capacity magazine. You could easily assemble the rough equivalent of a machine pistol. It would be less reliable, less durable, bigger and in many other ways not as good as a manufactured gun, but could be created at home with minimal skill and expense (other than the printer... but those are going to get much cheaper) and would be reasonably safe to operate.

You experience is very different from mine. I wonder if something is wrong with your car.

You say you get 4.9 mi/kwh -- with a 24 kwh battery that means you should get 118 miles on a full charge. If you're only getting 70 then your battery is only holding 14 kwh, 60% of its rated capacity.

Personally, I routinely get 120 miles out of a charge when I stay off the freeway and don't need climate control. Just yesterday, for example, I made an 80-mile round trip to the airport using just over half of the battery, driving on surface streets, averaging about 45 mph. The car says I averaged 5.4 mi/kwh which should get me nearly 130 miles.

I do agree that at 90 mph you're not going to get 70 miles. I didn't mean to imply that, though I can see that's a reasonable conclusion from what I wrote. One of these days I should test my range at 80 mph (freeway speed around here). Rarely do I drive more than a few miles on freeways, though, so it's not all that relevant to me.

Anyway, I think you've suffered some really serious battery degradation, and you should get it looked at.

Except there's nothing to say that a CF process would necessarily yield ridiculous amounts of energy at affordable prices. In fact the first proof of concept, if it ever comes, is likely to be just a barely measurable hair's breadth above break even. And scaling the technology to generate megawatts might well prove to be prohibitively expensive. What if a MW plant required thousands of tons of nickel? There might not be enough nickel in the world to supply a significant fraction of the world's energy supply.

Then there's the flying car problem. There is no doubt that practical flying cars are physically possible. The reason we've never seen one is that it's a fool's investment in the short- to mid-term. Any flying car we can come up with over that time scale is going to be a lot worse than buying a dedicated plane and renting a car at your destination. If there were some immediate niche application for a near-term flying car where it beat a dedicated plane and car combo, we might *all* be driving flying cars in twenty years. But there's no such niche to pay back investors. Even if CF is physically possible, if it doesn't quickly reach a stage where it beats some conventional power source economically (e.g. replacing solar panels in remote applications), it might never become practical.

Looks blocky, like they were modeling after a small Lego model kit rather than an X-Wing as portray in the movies.

I am also German and I am joking (mostly). The comment about German's loving rules and regulations is a stereotype, but even Germans will make jokes about it, because it applies to so many of them. A phrase you have no doubt heard "Das geht einfach nicht". Which roughly translates to "That is simply not done" with respect to any sort of non-conforming behaviour. They have bureaucrats who will tell you, for example, if the name you have chosen for your child is acceptable. If it isn't you will have to pick again. No "Moon Unit" or "Lemongello" in Germany. The thing with not liking normal child behaviour - they have a word for it Kinderunfreundlich. It is actually a cause of some soul searching, my cousins who still live there talk about it.

"I believe rules are rules and you break them, you should be punished, not rewarded." - Congratulations, you have met the requirements for German citizenship.

Her being punished for an "unauthorised" science experiment will tend to discourage curiosity and scientific inquiry in other children. This is bad for America. By rewarding her we encourage curiosity and scientific inquiry, which is good for America.

We could even get away from the mindless "zero tolerance" crap and maybe send a nuanced message. Send her to Space Camp, but have her write a paper on the risks of experimenting with homemade explosives and what safety measures she should have taken, but didn't and how it could be done more safely next time.

I am, and gas costs made me decide to pay $30K for my Nissan LEAF.

I analyzed TCO (excluding maintenance costs, which are much lower for electrics, but I couldn't quantify that so I just ignored it) for about 20 different vehicles, including EVs, hybrids and pure ICE vehicles,. My model assumed that the new vehicle was going to be an additional vehicle, and that the other (gas-burning) vehicle would be available for trips beyond the range of the EV. I assumed very conservative ranges for the EVs, for example I estimated the LEAF's range at 60 miles (it's really more like 80-120, depending on conditions). Finally, I created a statistical model of my driving habits and calculated the total cost over 8 years.

The result was that the three EVs I looked at had the top three spots... they were the cheapest to drive overall, in spite of being by far the most expensive up front. Even better, thanks to tax credits the break-even point was at 2-3 years. Without the tax credits it was about 6 years. The vehicle immediately behind the EVs was the 18K Honda Insight hybrid, then a mix of other hybrids and more-efficient gas vehicles and finally a long tail of gas vehicles trailing the pack.

Of course, your driving patterns may be different, your electricity costs may be higher or gas prices lower (oh, I assumed that gas prices would continue increasing at the same rate they've increased over the last 8 years), etc., etc, etc., but I've walked several other people through applying my model to their situations and in every single case the EVs have been extremely competitive -- and usually the very cheapest.

In practice, what I've found -- for me -- is that my model was very conservative. In fact, the LEAF is even cheaper than I expected. Partly that's because I was able to get a better deal on the car than I had assumed, and partly it's because I do most of my charging at work, so my actual energy costs are dramatically lower than my model had anticipated.

Oh, and it's a very nice car, not a "tin can" that can't keep me as warm or cool as I like. It's a 3000-pound vehicle that accelerates 0-60 in 7.8 seconds, will do 90+ mph and can easily keep the cab at 60 degrees or 90 degrees or anywhere in between, regardless of outside temperature. It also has power everything, a nice stereo, GPS navigation, XM radio, bluetooth, backup camera, and computer or smartphone-based remote control... it's loaded. Of course, stomping on the gas pedal, driving 90 mph and blasting the heat (the AC doesn't use so much, plus it doesn't have to work against the heat generated by an ICE) will drop my range from 120 miles down to about 70 -- but my model only assumed a 60 mile range. It's a compact, but the alternatives I compared it against were also compacts.

EVs are very real, and very practical, today. And it's only going to get better. If Tesla can produce a $30K car with a 200-mile range, it'll be a huge hit with cost-conscious people, because that's enough range that for most people it can be a primary car -- no need for another ICE vehicle except on the rare long-distance trips, and it's cost-effective to rent for those.

Apple did.

Make cool stuff that people want to use. It's not rocket science, it's just that there's so much dead weight in most companies living inside the company bubble with wrongheaded ideas about what the public wants and overvalued MBA degrees that it's rare.

A bit of hard data, a bit of freedom for forward-thinking designers and developers, including the realization that they need to be aggressive, not conservative, update/relaunch products at 2013 speeds (as opposed to 1994 speeds), and embrace things like the mobile ecosystem and social media, a bit of marketing, and Yahoo! could be at the top of the game again.

I have nothing against Yahoo!, just against shitty, decade-outdated products, which is what they've been making/maintaining for some time. Fix the products, make cool stuff, and I'll be happy to use it.

Drupal and Joomla do email and calendaring? Out of the box?

I don't recall Lotus Notes pre-IBM having calendaring.

Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist

Lotus Notes was awesome before IBM bought it, and before the web seemingly made it obsolete. But replacements for Notes are only just recently appearing, such as Drupal and Joomla. That's right, what was called "groupware" back in the 90's is called CMS now. And Notes was decades ahead in terms of CMS back in the 90's. But then IBM bought it and its original vision was lost.

If the Copyright Act of 1790 were still in force, the first version of Lotus Notes 1-2-3 Millennium Edition from 1998 would have become public domain last year.

Heh.

It's at the other end of the college curriculum, but I had a somewhat similar experience. I arrived at college having passed AP Calculus but without having taken any trigonometry. After a couple of semesters I realized I really needed to address my lack of trig knowledge, so I enrolled in a course. The prof who was teaching it recognized my name and asked me to come talk to her. She suggested that I drop the course and instead spend the semester grading papers for the class, rather than taking it.

I did as she suggested, and I think I learned more trigonometry than any of the students in the class.