I'm a little concerned about the growing "influence" of Indian programmers. First, like all groups, when they are the majority they can become biased against others (i.e. non-indian). Second, they are willing to work for less, so they can push down salaries; just look the consulting rates these days.
To be fair, it has been a pleasure to work with them, for them etc. I don't see any alternative to employing them. I don't want them to go away. But there is a cultural adjustment that I feel is necessary but doesn't happen when they are majority in a software organization.

The money buys things; most of which you don't really need. It takes a while to realize what you actually need to be happy. For me, I realized I didn't need to make more money to be happy. I work from home and I am traveling around the world. I live on 80K easily. In the past, when I made more money, I wasted in on cars, and other things that didn't make me happy.

We're hiring Java web developers!

That is a naive conclusion. Google's algorithm adjusts search result ranking based on popularity. If google products are popular, should google up the rankings of less popular products?
I see lots of microsoft bing ads on youtube and I don't like them. If I switch away from the ads and google's ranking adjusts so it doesn't show me more of them how is that google's bias?
I don't see how you can separate out the user's preference from google's bias without examining the google ranking algorithms. I could see if google's products were worse than their competitors and everyone widely hated them, that it would be odd to see them ranked higher than their competitors. But when the opposite is true, then there is no need for manipulation on google's part.
It seems the governments wants google to produce an inferior ranking system and it is most likely the government is clueless on the technology and is responding to lobbying. My tax dollars hard at work ...

I work from home. Many of the events, in the article, don't happen for me. I don't wake up until I want to. The only tech I care about relate to health care and food production. The luxury tech I would like to see make it are google glasses and low-cost high-speed global wi-fi. The tech that might make a huge difference to me is the d-wave quantum computer applied to AI. I suspect we need another 1K to 100K increase in cpu performance to create AI that will replace me in the workforce. I am not sure we can get there in 15 years.

google doesn't understand what information is actually in the email! "google" doesn't read the way humans "read" email. some google server turns email into a feature vector (set of numbers without meaning). some other server predicts the best ad from the feature vector. there is a feedback loop, when you click on an ad, the system learns which ads are best to display. no employees at google actually reads the user's email. the initial data for making prediction is taken from other sources. the advertiser has no access gmail users' information. with 500 million users sending 100s messages through an automated system, there are bound to be cases where ads seem creepy. no google employee can tell you why their complex system acts creepy because the feedback loop means there is data affecting the prediction that no google employee has created or can understand.

google does make money from content generated by other people. some of those people would like to be paid for the benefit they provide to google. but they are a drop in the ocean of information, google doesn't need them. In a way google does pay for that content by offering its services for free. even the ads are priced on their value to advertiser.

in the end, google is far from perfect but their benefits clearly outweigh their "evilness" unless you produce that tiny drop of information. that is life. sue because it is like buying a lottery ticket.

Tell them to create a product that is 10x better than the current product. Give them funding and support. If you can, have them work offsite.

Try to hire another Brilliant non-Jerk to manage them. Brilliants Jerks are less offensive to other Brilliant people.

There are very cheap ways to recycle water that we don't use enough now but we must in the future. Desalinization is still too expensive but the costs are coming down. Solar/wind powered desalinization could work in poor areas for drinking water but probably not fast enough for farming. Ice mining is also an option we should consider since it is going to melt anyway.

Checkout ai-class.com to see some of the ways in which Math gets used in computer science. That class touches on just a few topics and doesn't go very deep. When you work in the machine learning field, there is a lot more math that you'll find helpful.

Maybe they will open source their code and the IP won't entirely go to waste. As for the money, well, it is in someone's bank account. It is not lost, just redistributed. Every day we make bets that seem stupid later but such is life. Sometimes stupid bets payoff (I'm looking at you instagram).

I couldn't agree more. Look at the ai-class.com lectures on probability and compare it with Khan classes and you see a very large gap. The khan class gives you a foundation but it is really just the bottom 30% of what you need to know. Then compare the ai-class.com lectures on NLP with the NLP class at see.stanford.com and you see another large gap. So we need each education site. Each one tends to focus on a different range of the education path and on a different level student. Sometimes, it just helps to hear the same fact taught in a different style.

It is hard to be competitive without funding... We need a yearly funding drive effort like NPR. The biggest problem (and strength?) is that we have a lot of duplicate solutions. We are a large fragmented democracy fighting a well-funding dictatorship with a great PR department. If only we could elect a leader for 2 years and unite against Apple and MS. The irony is that we can't beat them without becoming them...

I've interviewed at companies with a 20-something workforce and it is very awkward. They make it very clear, they only want older employees if they are in the top 5% of the workforce. You have to be a well-known expert (e.g. owing a github project with a large following, published and selling well in the app store, highly ranked on stackoverflow) to have their respect. It doesn't matter if I like that or not; the 20-something people make the decisions. It is evolve and get facebook like jobs or die at a boring company.
My solution, which isn't easy, is to start my own company. I think the 20-something crowd feels that it is so easy to start a company, if a 35+ year-old employee hasn't started one then there must be something wrong. It is a lot like high-school; you have to be hard to get for them to want you.

What is your opinion of the impact of this law? I suspect it has always been the case that the majority of people believe in creationism. I wonder if a tendency to hold religious beliefs is an advantageous adaption. We argue about the incorrectness of a belief in creationism when ironically, it may be society's tendency to hold religious beliefs that have helped our species survive. We may not need those tendencies anymore but I'm not sure they can safely disappear overnight. I don't see a need to change someone's belief creationism even though I don't share it. Science can do amazing things that will change their minds. Science is so powerful that it seems silly to worry about the misconceptions of the deeply religious. Democracy means the majority gets to create laws which are a mistake but the system allows us to fix them later when we're culturally evolved to accept it. Maybe the best way to reduce the belief in creationism is to teach it along side evolution.

There is an earlier /. article today on a new way to think about learning. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/11/1927219/a-better-way-to-program It would be great if there were interactive educational applications like the ones that Bret Victor talks about.

This article is also very interesting. http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/ It points out that, when we learn we need to focus more on recalling the information. Sites like khanacademy present the information in small chunks that are easy to understand but if the student doesn't practice recalling the information, then she/he is at a disadvantage.

Finally, there is this video by Sir Ken Robinson which talks about the issues pretty well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded#!