Ever lived in a house with a built-in intercom? Find yourself using it? Don't feel bad. No one else does, either.

For long-term value, try to resist the urge to automate it today. Lasting value will come from routing high quality, shielded cables both for data and power to multiple outlets in every room as well as creating strong rooms and creating lots of easily accessible, strong mount points where you can install things you'd like to automate with whatever the latest and greatest tech is. They might be mounts for motors for pulleys for shades or mount points for light fixtures or for a robotic arm that changes your baby's diapers or a landing pad for flying bot that fetches you snacks from the kitchen. The thing is, tech is changing *so* ridiculously fast now, that no matter what you choose today, it's going to be not only obsolete in no time, but in all probability some kind of maintenance and even security liability later.

If you design those mount points in to look attractive instead of like nubs of unfinished 2x4, that's going to be the real art of making a house that a hacker can thrive in but that can improve continuously over time and that can be of value to someone in the market for a house 10-20 years later. Goes without saying, but removable wall panels are also a great way to make a house far more maintainable into the future.

Who is John Galt?

Interestingly, strong belief has been scientifically shown to have profound effects on our psyche and even our biology. You can see why religion evolved. It confers impressive "mind-over-matter" advantages. Science, for all the things it does well, has never been too brilliant at helping us blindly believing things to be true, nor can it ever be as accessible to everyone as religions are, simply because it's so much more complex to comprehend. Science in its current form is probably a better fit for computers- deliberate, slow, logical, skeptical. Religion is a much better fit for the design of humans. What would be really interesting is a religion that elegantly incorporated science into its stories and belief system and scripture, particularly one that uses all the other successful global religions' growth technique of folding in other religions, so that they feel they have a place in the new one.

If it's publicly viewable, it's archivable, which means someone will archive it, particularly if no one else is, so it's not erasable.

Nice catch, Fatphil!

Also, writing, debugging, and maintaining GPU code is a lot less fun than CPU code. Much open source GPU code do you know of that is still in use after 5 years?

The interesting thing about this debate is that whoever figures out how to extract elements and useful molecules in a generalized way from any refuse first is going to literally and figuratively be sitting on a gold mine. Countries will jealously guard their garbage as a national resource, and exporting products overseas will make a lot less sense than it does today.

One of the reasons we didn't support the iPad 1 in my last two games was that Apple put an iPhone 4 GPU in it to drive 4X as many pixels as it was driving on the iPhone, and this fill rate strain made the iPad 1 super hard to get a decent frame rate on.

If you're doing anything media-rich, particularly if it involves any kind of screen-space post processing (like deferred rendering, glow, depth of field, or one of many others), then you're really going to feel the cost of that extra resolution in both frame rate and battery life.

As with most things, balance in design is what you want.

I'm sorry, but this is just wrong, and I'm sick of hearing these theories about why JavaScript must always be sloewr. There's nothing limiting to the potential back-end performance of a JavaScript VM just because of a lack of data types. If you want to get serious about execution speed, then you dynamically profile the domains and ranges of all your operations. You don't make assumptions about them. When you know what their potential ranges given the input domains, then you use as small a datatype as you can in order to get optimal performance (cache locality, memory bandwidth, as well as auto-vectorization opportunities and even table-lookups).

This is HARD WORK to do, but it is NOT impossible, NOR is it a limitation of languages lacking a rich set of numeric datatypes. In fact, once you get serious about domain/range analysis, you can potentially pull WAY AHEAD of statically compiled languages in speed, because they are stuck performing full 64-bit or 80-bit FP operations (and moving all that bloated data around) on numbers that often doesn't need even a fraction of that precision.

Don't worry, CodeBuster. The geeks with good taste are also having and raising kids, and they're raising them right- on the command line in Linux.

If they had no concern for human life, they would have killed the drivers instead of beating them up. And it is safe to assume that one or more of thieves was doing it because of peer pressure, which can be intense amoung criminals, where your buddy can suddenly turn judge and executioner if you say or do the wrong thing.

While we're on the subject, let's talk about what white collar criminals "deserve" for the crimes they do that can hurt millions instead of just a handful.

I'm hip-shooting, but it could be that as an LA resident, you're experiencing some prejudice. They go months in Seattle with nothing but gray skies and/or rain, and you have to remain productive. The lack of interest could be due to the perceived risk that you might not be able to hack the gloomy weather.

I'm in the same boat, btw. I live in Santa Monica, and I love the weather here. I would prefer to live amoungst Washingtonians if for no other reason than higher quality conversation, but I know I couldn't handle the Seattle weather for long.

What you should take from a list of specific requirements is that they don't know how to write a good help wanted ad. Contact em (a dev, not HR), be up front that you don't have what they're listing, but that you have experience in the skills behind the tools and that you learn quickly.

What do you find to be the most promising technology for embedding electronics inside 3D prints?

While waiting for this tech to arrive, have you tried emulating electronics with mechanical equivalents?

Come on, there are only 11M car accidents a year, and less than 40k people die from them. We've got 315M people living in the US. Plenty of spares!

It's a common misconception that you need fertilization. If you plant the right crops together, they feed each other the nutrients and take care of nitrogen fixation. The catch is that with intermixed crops, it can become more difficult to harvest your crops with bulk thrashers, but robotics and image recognition can come to the rescue on this front.