The last time there was a similar subject on /. I missed the opportunity to talk about Limitlessled LED lamps. Bought a set, and it's really good: convenient, nice, efficient, practical. Voilà.

I don't know his salary, but clearly someone like Petr, currently working at Google, deserves such an allowance (Petr is known for his genius talent in algorithmics). $3 million is 30 times what makes a good engineer - is it worth it? Or, should Google replace Petr with 30 engineers, for the same price? The thing is that at the level of Petr, none of the 30 engineers are likely to solve the complex problems that require complex algorithms. To be convinced, try to practice (or ask your best programmer friend) some of the Google Code Jam finale problems, or from topcoder...

With this, you won't be disappointed.

They should put the RIAA and all their huge means on this. That's a more interesting challenge compared to their regular cd copier.

While TFA emphasizes the correlation between "cognitive" and the previous "jeopardy success", that jeopardy program was still extremely far away from human reasoning. The answer to that questions is: Of course. The ultimate goal of computing is the human reasoning. Once that step is reached, there is no reason the computer would not be able to improve that "cognitive power" by it(him)self, providing revolutionary reasoning power, thanks to almost unlimited potential hardware extensions which is available to the computer, contrary to the human brain, limited to relatively little progress thanks to hard learning and working.

...the idiot mines asteroids. The Chinese are not going to lose this one..

Ok, so we have
- Global warming harsh effects
- Global thermonuclear war
- and now Supervolcanoes
So which is gonna happen first?

it'll be interesting when the system asks "what was that porn site you visited a lot last time?"

Actually, is the dying one being Emacs, instead? That would be sad - but I wonder how younger generations do appreciate Emacs which is quite tricky to get used to - while so convenient and still unequaled in 2014 when it comes to some features (hyper customization thanks to (e)Lisp, M-x features with completion, intra-shell/processes, apropos, ^x-( ), languages modes ...). It seems the major IDE or text editors did not even try to reproduce the main features of Emacs - do they ignore the Emacs logic because they have no knowledge of it, or do they simply feel those features are obsolete? For once, nobody reinvents the wheel, which is going to die eventually. Sad, really.

M-x move-from-bzr-to-github

What about bonuses? Stock options? Also, "merit" is not part of the equation either. So, unless you're promoted, even if you do a good job you'll get the exact same salary as the incompetent next door who has the same job, seniority and experience..