After 9/11 there were things done that made sense such as equipping airliners with armored cockpit doors, not allowing knives or axes or chainsaws in carry on, but collectively we should have kept a stiff upper lip, rebuilt the damn towers 1 story higher and said "It's going to take more than that to change us". Instead we went whining and cowering to the corner and those seeking more power ceased the opportunity telling us "they'd make us safe". I've read that line in enough history books to know whenever those in power start making that claim, bad things happen. Really bad things.

If you want to live in a free and open society the consequence of such is that sometimes people do bad things. That is the price of such a society. I think in my parents and certainly my grand parents generation they understood this. I put a lot of people off when I say this: but 3000 people die when bad guys crash planes into buildings. Well maybe we should look at things like the cockpit doors and explore air marshal programs. But the Patriot Act? No thanks. If it means 3000 people have to die now and then compared to having to live in a surveillance state, then so be it. 3000 people have to die. It's the price of the very freedoms we claim we so desire. So when bad guys do bad things, lets as a society help those directly effected the best ways we can, but we're never going to be safe. It's a dangerous world. And we as a society in the US don't seem to want to wake up to that reality.

Now I look around and wonder if Hobbes wasn't right: people are stupid and need to be ruled over by Kings. Because that what it seems like people have been "wanting" these past 12 years...

There are RoR developers left? Seriously? I've not heard much about RoR after the $500k I made circa 2009/2010 coming in and cleaning up the mess on a few projects. Ironically enough it often involved rewriting projects mostly in PHP, but others in C# or Java, and even sometimes even with Perl. Granted most of the problem was non-developers reading how RoR does all this stuff automagically for them, they don't have to think or know, and turning out a blog in 15 minutes some how makes them a "developer".

Truth be told, I still prefer Perl for a great many web-based tasks. Granted I spent the first 6 years of my career as a system admin who could code enough to make it work. I still use Perl today, especially for a lot of unsexy backend tasks. Hell I have scripts written circa 2001 that still work. Granted a lot have to do with log parsing, backups, *iux base load monitoring and other unsexy stuff, but they still work.

I remember starting a project circa 2007. I was the oldest of the developers, really I was the server/networking guru of the team, there in my late twenties, the others were "hotshots" under the age of 25. They spent a week debating which PHP framework they should use to build an API. I got pissed, went home that weekend, and wrote version 1 in Perl on a Sunday Afternoon, granted with lots of help from CPAN. Long story short, two weeks later we turned out a working API in Perl. In 2009 we added JSON support in a couple days and as far as I know that API is still in production, still being used to process 100,000 transactions an hour.

If I were a betting man I'd be placing my money behind the gas-electric hybrid technology like the Volt. GM has volume of production as the technology trickles down into more models and improves. I'm getting close to replacing my current car in the next year, maybe two. What has limited my options is the fact I live in a loft and can't install a charging station. But that is changing as our company is moving out of Downtown and into the county next year and I'm also moving into a house closer to the new offices later this year. On a daily basis I could drive the Volt and probably fill up once a month. I do own farms about 180 miles from where I live that we rent out. So if I would need to go down there on a weekend to check and see how things are going, I just stop at the nearest QT, fill up and go. Same with visiting my Dad who lives 50.6 miles from my loft's garage to his doorstep.

At this point what keeps me out of a Volt, or Hybrid of any kind really, is that I can't justify the price difference. The Chevy Cruse Eco is $20k less than the volt, similar sized car, and gets over 40MPG. That calculation has been the same for every Hybrid I've priced. I could go in tomorrow and write a check and walk out of the dealership with either. I could do the same for a Tesla or BMW or whatever under $100k.

So this round is likely to once again be a gas powered car. But my planning on the car 8 - 10 years after that will be a gas-electric hybrid similar to the volt. I figure by that time the technology will be proven and will have come down in price enough that it will be an affordable option or hell maybe even standard in a dozen models.

I left PC gaming over 10 years ago when I switched to my first Mac. There wasn't a lot of titles and I was working mostly in Perl and later standard LAMP or LAPP stack stuff deployed on *iux servers.

A few years ago I wanted to get back into gaming and the GMA 950 in my MacBook at the time was fine for running XP for work stuff, but was never going to be for gaming.

So I ended up getting a 360 about the time Halo Reach came out. Part of it was the titles I wanted to play were on 360, not PC, the other part of it was I didn't feel like maintaining a PC anymore. I dealt with other peoples computer problems, often clients with our software running on windows, 50 - 60 hours a week in those days. Last thing I wanted to do was come home and fuss with my own machine. I wanted to turn on the TV, turn on the console, play for 15 minutes or at most a couple hours and that was about it. In fact the 360 has spent more hours streaming the likes of Netflix to a TV than video games.

Well this generation of consoles are coming and I'm torn. I have a MacBook Pro with decent enough graphics card. I downloaded Battlefield 3 for PC for $5 last weekend. Instantly it was try to find updated windows drivers for my MacBook Pro, problems with punkbuster that required spending half a sunday trying to download and reinstall the program to stop an error and I instantly remembered why I went to gaming on the 360. And even then life has changed with wife, kids too young to play on consoles, and different stage at work that means the time I get to play a week is now limited maybe a couple hours a week at most.

But I will say this much about the kids, they may be a little young yet for the consoles, but have mastered iPad games & Netflix.

A few years ago I hated Wordpress. At that time the project I was on chose MovableType for the basis of its CMS/blogging platform. Well recently I was asked to put the backend into place for another company that was producing content. We looked at several options, but Wordpress was the one that as we checked off the list of required features had basically what we were looking for item for item. And frankly I've been rather impressed with Wordpress this go around. Many of the complaints I had from a few years ago have been addressed. After all, the content is what is driving sales and revenue for this project, not the technology platform.

What they did was confuse the hell out of people. At first Microsoft was touting a tablet that could run Windows Apps called the surface. What they meant was the Surface pro. Instead the device that got released first was the RT and it still had the name "windows". Most people looking at them, and I know of one business that bought a couple, did so thinking they could run existing windows programs. They got 'em home and learned they couldn't.

At least Apple makes it clear that while underneath the hood, both MacOS and iOS share many of the same parts, they are entirely different OS's designed for different purposes. Microsoft failed to do that with the Surface.

The next problem is that the Surface Pro is $1000. At that price what is the incentive to buy it? You can buy a convertible ultra book for just a few dollars more.

Last job we had AT&T. When I left and started my own company, Sprint was the only one with sensible deposit as I wasn't going to do a personal guarantee on advise of the attorney filing the incorporation paperwork. AT&T wanted $1,000 per line deposit and Verizon was $700 IIRC. Sprint was $150 per line (phone & mobile hotspot). I forgot about the deposit until my phone bill arrived this year and it had a negative balance. I had a year of good payment history and this year they credited those deposits. Furthermore my iPhone & Mobile hotpot was still $40 a month less than Verizon or AT&T's iPhone with tethering.

Is data speeds as fast, well the 3GS on AT&T I had was much faster than the 4S on Sprint's network. But the mobile hotspot is fast enough and comes in extremely handy it's saved the day a couple times before a presentation to clients.

And days like today where I'm meeting my fiancé for later for Spamalot at the Muny. So instead of being stuck in an office and slacking off on slashdot I'm slacking off on Slashdot from the Grand Basin in Forest Park St. Louis with a good parking spot.

We may have missed the boat on having fibre owned by local city/county governments and leased to whatever ISP gives you the best deal, but we what we have is a massive legacy network in POTS. We all had home phones when many places in the world did not thanks to copper. That was a huge advantage for a number of years and took a massive amount of infrastructure and time to build.

The other problem is that we get compared as the entire USA vs say Sweden. It's not really a fair comparison given geographic population distributions. Generally I'm going to have more options and faster internet in say in Boston or San Francisco than St. Louis or Little Rock. Now if you start comparing Internet service throughout the entire EU and the United States I wonder how it would start to look. I know that internet options in Poland are very similar in terms of speeds and price as say St. Louis with St. Louis actually a little cheaper.

Run an internal network with no access to the internet. Limit the internet to certain devices or terminals.

Because they got blindsided by Boeing. Boeing was publicly showing off their "SST" designs and hinting at a new supersized 747. Meanwhile someone at Boeing was doing their market research and saw the need for a new generation of planes with lower cost per mile for medium/long haul to replace aging fleets of 757, 767, and 777's.

Airbus was more interested in proving they could "build the biggest plane" more as an ego measure than a design that addressed a real need to their customers (airlines).

When Boeing announced the 787 they completely caught Airbus off guard as they had just spent billions and a decade on the A380.

Problem is the "tablet" that does it costs as much as an ultrabook.

I think it depends. We've been using Keynote on the iPad for over a year now. Keynote works well enough for our purposes and most of our field people are carrying iPads instead of Laptops.

Usually they aren't the ones creating the presentations. While it's not always ideal to work on, it's can be extremely handy if you need to make last minute tweaks to a presentation. It works extremely well for that.

Still, given the choice, most of our people would prefer powerpoint over Keynote. We've been experimenting with Office365 & SkyDrive in the office and so far their only wish has been, "If only I could make edits to a presentation on the iPad". Which you could sort of with Office365. We looked into the Surface, but the RT sucked and the Pro's are so expensive you might as well buy an ultrabook.

Last year when I bought this MacBook Pro the situation went like this:

Me: I want the 15" with anti-glare/matte screen.
Clerk walks to the back, comes out, I add Apple Care, swipe my card, and leave.

For the first time I didn't care about processor type or speed, anything in that model MBP was going to be enough to run xcode, BBedit, MS Office, Eclipse and Windows 7 Pro + Parallels. I just wanted the base ram as I was going to max it out after market from crucial anyway. What I really cared about was not having one of those mirror coated screens that glare like mad with the least amount of backlight. The screen type means more to my productivity than processor or video card. After all this replaced a 7 year old PowerBook & 5 year old intel iMac.

Read a headline from the 1890's in the Tribune when they estimated the horse poop would be 6ft deep by 1920 in the streets. Of course then came the automobile. That's the problem with all these long term prediction models. Things change in ways they never can account for.

Really, those two disasters are some how worse than the tonnes of crap we've been pumping into the air unfiltered the past 150 years and continue doing today and at an increasing rate (here's looking at you China).

And there is a thorium fuel cycle that would use up most of that waste while providing plenty of affordable power for next 500 years. Yes it would probably take 20 years to get the first thorium reactors up, running, and certified for commercial use, but politics happen the be the biggest barrier here, not technology. In particular non-proliferation treaties.