If they do the live CD right, it should not be terribly inconvenient. Nonetheless, I think you're correct that most people won't do this - they simply won't understand the need for it. Personally, I've been doing on-line banking using a live CD for a couple of years. But then again, I'm somewhat paranoid (but only because everyone is against me 8^).

Would not surprise me if they were using them on some of the very critical loci of their system. And I'd imagine that they would want to actually test the effects of converting to SSD so that they have useful data when trying to determine when to start switching.
A few test installations does not constitute a wholesale change in direction, but they do serve as portents of the future.

Seriously. Google is (believed to be) the largest single user of consumer hard drives. When they start replacing hard drives with SSDs, I will consider HDDs to be done. I wonder what price differential the power savings (don't forget the power for cooling) will cover?

I just have this horrible vision of the technicians upgrading the control system and having to reboot the system. Homer Simpson as the celebrity sales rep? "It's pronounced nuke-you-lar"

These days, most people cannot deal with basic algebra. Case in point: my sister, who has a master's degree in the social sciences, reaches for a calculator to calculate the sales tax on purchases (and she does it because she cannot manage without it).

Why on earth would we expect Joe Average to be able to comprehend the meaning of statistics?

Assuming it lasts 5 years, that works out to about 2 dollars a day. How much does a cup of coffee cost? Or a pack of cigarettes? Or a beer? Or cable TV? Or a DSL connection?

So perhaps this is a good reason to encourage everyone to convert their web sites to HTTPS only?

What this really comes down to is the business model - how you intend to make a profit from your work. If a programmer's business model dictates that he owns the underlying code (and can use bits and pieces to accelerate development of future projects), he will price his work accordingly. If his business model dictates that the customer owns everything, we will price his work based on that model.

Problems tend to arise when customers expect the benefits of the programmer-owns-the-code model (shorter development times, lower costs) as well as the benefits of the customer-owns-the-code model (we own the code, we can hire someone else [cheaper] to do maintenance and upgrades).

In many cases, the root cause is ignorance on the customer's part. If the customer will let you educate them, do so. If they won't let you educate them, when possible, let them be someone else's problem.

Not entirely true. Say you're protecting a billion-dollar asset. You have 10 million dollars for defense. I have 100 thousand dollars for offense. For 1000 dollars, I can mount an attack that costs you 1,000,000 to defend. You will have to beg, borrow, or steal, 90 million dollars to defend every attack that I can mount. Now you have a real problem.

Even worse, Suppose I can easily obtain and assemble the parts I need for an attack. But your, for instance, Patriot missiles take rather longer to assemble (as they are much more complex). If you have 50 missiles at hand, I only need to launch 51 attacks before you get your next shipment of missiles.

Clearly you are correct inasmuch as you won't spend 1,000,000,000 dollars to defend 200,000,000 dollars of assets. But the relative costs of defense and offense do matter.

When I worked for a major telecom equipment manufacturer in the 90s, we had a monolithic software build for our main switching product (class 4/5 switch), and the total lines of code were 20 million. I find it incomprehensible that a luxury car requires 5 times as much code. If it's true, they need to do a rethink as there's no way they should need that much code. And, frankly, there's no way they will test that code completely every time they update it.

I don't really care what device I use as a projector. What matters to me is whether the projection is bright enough for my audience to see the projected images clearly. If I can do that from my phone, great (one less piece of equipment to lug around).

The other question I would ask is whether using my phone as a projector would drain the battery, precluding me using the phone as a phone. A phone with a flat battery is not much use.

So, assuming that the IOC can require competitors to - temporarily - sign over their names as IP, what happens if the athlete already has a contract with a third party?

Let me amend that to "Learning to program well is hard."

I've been earning a living as a programmer since 1986. I'm continually learning new things about programming, from new techniques (i.e. OOP - they didn't teach that in 1982) to new languages to the psychology of the my end users. Comp Sci school is like learning English grammar. It's really useful, but just like knowing English grammar doesn't make you a great writer, neither does a Comp Sci degree make you a great programmer.

Whomever I hire has to be learning continually about his or her craft. I'm not going to hire anyone who knows it all - that person is an ass.

At least here in North America, our general aversion to unions is entirely rational. Unions here do not foster creativity - they foster group think. Did you ever want to work a couple extra hours because you were really into what you were doing? Try doing that in a union shop - you'll have a very unhappy experience. I've had unionized jobs (albeit not programming jobs). I cannot imagine a unionized programming job being anywhere near as enjoyable as a non-union programming job. Unions suck.

Or maybe not. When I did phone support (never again), most of our reps were young and not technically inclined. That being the case today, most reps probably have no idea who Steve Wozniak is. They are probably more likely to know of Steve Jobs. That said, would they necessarily believe that they were actually talking to THE Steve Jobs? Probably not.