Great idea... but that's just not going to work either.

Very few projects can simply open up their code without getting into all kinds of legal trouble. Third party libraries, distribution agreements, confidentiality agreements, licenses, employment contracts, etc ad infinitum. Some of this can be negotiated around, some can't. None of it can happen without people willing to put in the time and energy (and money) to do it.*

And I don't believe the government should be intervening in business to place them in a Catch-22. (The Catch-22 here is being forced to either support a money-losing product or pay to provide a public version.) This would have a deeply chilling effect on business and innovation. Who would go into a business they knew they could never get out of no matter how bad it got? Answer: Assholes looking for a government bailout.

The correct solution is that the market (ie: you and I) should punish the companies that favor lock-in and don't make fault-tolerant equipment, and reward those who don't create dead-end products.

*Source: Having been on the inside of companies that try to take private software open source.

No, about the only place I could see unionizing happen is at some place like Zynga.

Zynga would simply can everyone at the first sign of unionizing. Most of their workforce is fresh, gullible, college grads, and there is always a new crop of them.

I keep waiting to see the Captain Sulu adventures aboard the Excelsior.

We only get a glimpse of him in Star Trek VI, but in that camero he's a badass on a badass ship. He'd be more action /adventure than Picard, more nuanced and thoughtful than Kirk. And funnier than both.

But we all know Hollywood can't have an asian guy be a lead.

Everything you're shipping has been on a container ship or equivalent before, when it was shipped from China to you. Don't over think it.

However, having done several moves across the Pacific I would say this: Mail your valuables. You get tracking, you get insurance, and someone just might read the "FRAGILE" sticker on the outside. Better yet, travel with them. If it's truly valuable, a carry-on bag is the best way.

(Note: Depending on your country of destination you may have import especially when mailing tech. Can't help you with information on that since you didn't say where your final destination is.)

Some things, especially displays, may cost more to mail than to buy new. Consider this a chance to get a new monitor.

Moving across an ocean is a great way to reconsider how important things are. My last two moves between the US and Asia I pared my belongings down to less than a cubic meter and I was happier for it.

He found that as a hemetless woman, cars gave him the greatest amount of room, and as a helmeted man, the least amount of room.

That works great, if the car sees you. If the car sees you they're not going to hit you.

I've been hit by a car. It cracked my pelvis, took lots of skin off me. Oh, and my helmet was cracked too. But I was alert enough after the impact to hear the distraught driver saying "I didn't see you!" over and over and over.

I would almost certainly not be able to post this if I hadn't been wearing that helmet.

Don't make helmet laws mandatory. But if you don't wear a helmet and you get into an accident you have to pay 100% of your medical bills. No one else should pay for your stupid.

When I need to evaluate some new tech, be it an API, language, tool, or just about anything else, the first thing I look at is the documentation, after that I look at the community support. Because I know I'm going to get stuck at some point and I need to know that there will be a way out. Even if another tool will technically be a better fit for what I'm trying to do, I'll still give it a pass in favor of a tool that I know what it can and can't do.

Not that good docs are easy, they're not. They take lots of time, even for bad ones, but if you want to see adoption you need docs that include usage examples. This is primarily why Open Hardware companies have been growing like crazy while Radio Shack stagnates. They don't just sell a 555 timer, they provide dozens of free tutorials showing all the cool shit you can make with it.

In fact is says right on the announcement page that "Beam is no robot". So no need to be 3 laws compliant.

I'm still looking for a use case for telepresence robots. It needs to be a situation where all of these things apply:

1) I need to "freely" move around where I'm not. There are lots of situations where I would want this. However the situational awareness of these things is very poor. I drove one around and ended up rolling around the Y-Combinator offices without knowing it. For a tour of a place, office, factory, photos and handheld video would be preferable. (It's very difficult to "look around" with these thing. turning is slow.)

2) I don't need to touch anything. This is sort of the breaker. If I don't need to touch anything, why not just teleconference? Yeah, teleconferences kind of stink, but they do work. (And I can screw off during the parts that don't concern me. Try doing that in person!) If I actually need to do things then I need to be there in person with my arms and hands and fingers.

3) Movement is completely unrestricted where I need to be. Doors are all automatic. No stairs. No elevators.

4) Someone has the money to spend on these. They're expensive. People tend to abuse them, which makes them a maintenance problem.

5) No one cares about the Uncanny Valley. These things are deep in it and people react not positively to them. People hit the Emergency stop button to make the telepresence go away, people sit their drinks on them. Or push them around, pick them up. Drop them. Or just ignore them. People don't react to them like they're people. And there's really no way in the near future to get them out of this valley.

The closest I get for this is a factory tour in China. (For people who live a long distance from China.) But frankly if I need to take a factory tour I have the money to do it, and it would be worth my time to fly there and do it in person.

For anything else it seems like "Skype on a stick" is more than good enough. Does anyone have a legitimate (ie: not "it's cool!") use case for telepresence bots like this?

But are the 'users' becoming products?

Becoming? They always were.

Repeat this until it sticks in your head: If you're not paying for it you're the product not the customer.

The thing I I do want it. I would love it if I was only shown ads which were for things that I was truly interested in. It would be wonderful if ads were a product discovery service.

Except they're not. There's not enough margin in that and that's not how advertisers want to reach me.

Take for example and of the music streaming services. Pandora, Spotify, Last.fm, etc. They know exactly what music you like to listen to. So it should be a slam-dunk to target ads to you for stuff you're interested in. Sell you the album you're listening to, sell you tickets to a local show of any of your favorite artists. Hell, alert you some TV show, movie, or game that uses your favorite music in the soundtrack.

But no. You get adverts for songs, artists, and genres that you've explicitly told you never want to hear again. The service that can have surprisingly good accuracy when suggesting new music and artists is quite literally tone deaf when suggesting ads.

The only explanation is that the record labels are dumping so much money to promote X that they buy up all the available slots, whether its appropriate or not. They still think we're listening to the radio and are not an infinitely fragmented audience, so they throw money at it to keep the little guy out. The little guy who would most benefit targeted ads. And the streaming services let them do this, even though it's a disservice to their listeners because the listeners aren't their customers, the record companies are, and they're already on thin ice with them to begin with. So they'll do what it takes to keep them happy.

Now that's just streaming music, but the same factors apply in other areas where targeted ads could work if the players had any interest in playing that game.

Yes, obviously an idiotic statement. But it will sell well. I can't say how many times I heard from clients variations on "Can you make my [software I have to use for work but don't want to learn] work like [software or web site I like]?"

This includes:
"Can you make the inventory management system work like Outlook?"

"Can you make the system we create marketing materials in work like Amazon?"

"Can you make our senor network reporting work like Facebook?"

But if you're the company that actually gives into these morons then you have even bigger problems.

I feel after an investment of only 15 minutes I finally figured out what openstack "is".

"Only"? If it takes a knowledgable person 15 minutes to figure out, in the most basic terms, what a product is then that product has a serious problem. It might just be a marketing problem, but it might be simply a useless product.

Condensing your description to three words: ("CPANEL for VMs") is incredibly helpful. It's probably not 100% accurate, but it gets me far enough that I can evaluate if I need to know more or not. Which is completely different from the buzzword full, fact free website that is OpenStack.org.

Sadly I'm betting the people running OpenStack.org are seeing a huge number of hits on their site today and thinking "Sweet! look at all the interest!" when it's really just a bunch of smart people trying to figure out what the hell they're talking about.

Practicing law is fun BECAUSE it is complicated and too big a field of knowledge for any one person to know everything

I can't tell you how sad this makes me. Law's only purpose is to serve the people. If the people can't understand it then we're fucked.

Its costs more than the $50 filing fees, you have the paper work and filings for the organization. If you don't do those your corp or LLC will be invalidated and they'll come after you anyway.

As an individual you probably don't want incorporation, you likely want a Limited Liability Company. (LLC) Corporations have a lot of overhead that LLCs don't. However once you start making 6 figures a Corp starts making more sense

This all depends what state you're in. Talk with several accountants and tax attorneys to find out what your options are. They'll likely consult for free. And do go through a person. Don't use one of the "Corporation In A Minute" web sites. It's not that they're a scam, it's that they don't prepare you with the information you need to run your new business entity properly. Not that it's complex, hard, or time consuming but this is what outside experts are for. If you're going to take steps to protect yourself do it right. You wouldn't buy a security system and then fail to install it correctly, right?

But yes, as soon as possible.

For me, without kids or a mortgage, and with a significant other that will support whatever wage I earn, I can make job satisfaction the primary, and in fact only reason for having a job.

However that would change if I had kids or debt or a dependent. Making sure the people you're responsible for are taken care of is your #1 priority. Being fiscally responsible is your #2 priority. Fit "fun" in after those are taken care of.

So, you know, make your life choices wisely if you think you'd like to have more fun.

Do you know how much money promotion costs? How hard it is for anyone to notice a new project? And here is Jazan Wild giving out free promotion for anything with that title! I certainly wouldn't have known about Melissa Marr's book any other way.

Keep up the stellar work, Jazan Wild. I'm sure it's getting you the results you're after.