It does have a humidity sensor: http://support.nest.com/customer/portal/articles/181007-what-kind-of-data-does-the-nest-learning-thermostat-track-or-measure-

I'm pretty amazed at all of the negative responses here saying that we should just hire our unemployed engineers. I've worked several big-name tech companies including, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, and we couldn't find enough qualified engineers at any of them—US citizens or H1Bs. You'd think that these top companies would be able to easily hire good engineers, but it's really tough to find good people, even when we were in the depths of the recession.

At Apple we would go months without filling some critical positions because we couldn't find anyone qualified. After interviewing 10 or 15 people on site, none of them made the cut. I'm constantly amazed at how poorly the people I interview do—and they're the top 1–5% that make it past the resume screeners.

Maybe we don't need more engineers, but from what I've seen, we definitely need more good engineers.

--Bruce

PS—I've never seen any evidence that the companies I've worked for preferentially hire H1B employees. It's a lot of red tape for the company, and they get paid the same as US-born employees. The fact is that they're often simply more qualified than Americans.

I don't think it's so much about embarrassment; it's more about providing a stable target for other developers. Google doesn't want to have to deal with people building software on top of a foundation that they're just going to rip out and replace with a better one in the next version. They don't want to support APIs that aren't solid yet.

--Bruce (who is not speaking for himself, not for Google)

Um, they did. From the article:

it would take a good desktop PC (Intel Nehalem, four-core, 2.8GHz) 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 CPU years, to perform this calculation

You joke, but there's actually quite a bit of truth to that statement.

Actually, autopilot can land a plane without any human help, and in some cases it's even required to. I was talking to a pilot for United (friend's uncle) a couple years ago, and he said that in high winds or poor visibility, airline regulations prevent the pilot from landing the plan manually. The pilot is required to allow the autopilot to land the plane. Pretty crazy stuff.

--Bruce

Not really.

--Bruce

An interesting, relatively unknown fact that I picked up while working on telephony systems a while back: carriers get paid (by other carriers) for incoming calls.

Not only do you pay more to your carrier to listen to the inane voicemail prompt (since you might use more minutes), but your carrier also pays more to your friend's carrier. For example, if I'm an AT&T customer and I call a Verizon customer to leave a voicemail, AT&T has to pay Verizon for every second that I'm on the phone. This (perverse) incentive makes more sense than charging people for more minutes, since often the company charging for minutes (AT&T in this case) is not the company that controls the recorded message (Verizon).

--Bruce

This sounds a lot like the 40-year-old Carterfone decision, where AT&T argued that allowing people to connect third-party devices to their network could disrupt or degrade service. I'm pretty sure that modems and Panasonic phones didn't ruin the telephone system, and I have a feeling that jailbroken iPhones wouldn't be the end of the world, either.

--Bruce

That's a pretty dismal view of human nature. I, on the other hand, believe people can change.

--Bruce

I don't the think the publishers are just going to give their content to Amazon for free, even if Amazon gives it away free.

--Bruce