Detect vandalism and other "unapproved" activity and take the accused directly to a transit station or worse a police station for processing. They aren't driving so "big brother" can enforce a disciplinary detour to discourage unwanted activities.

The beauty of these "pods" is that one is at the station waiting for you whenever you show up. You don't have to match your schedule to the train/bus schedule.

The issue is integrating the tracks into current urban settings so that you only have to walk a couple blocks between the station and your destination. Elevated or submerged tracks and stations seem like the only feasible solution but both have enormous investment costs.

These pods will never work over longer distances which might be what you are referring to with door-to-door travel. But people would be far more likely to take a train from LA to SF or NY to DC if they could count on a pod being ready at the station to take them to within a couple blocks of there destination within the city.

I've only been working the 9/80 schedule for 4.5 years but I LOVE it. I'm looking forward to 4 days off this weekend.

I haven't had any trouble with working off-Fridays. Our entire company works the same schedule which probably helps. In fact I'd rather (and have) come in on a Sunday instead of an off-Friday.

They have an advantage of using the technology "the West" developed to reduce their pollution. Just like African countries can skip the copper stage of telecommunications and deploy cellular. China should be able to steal^H^H^H^H^Hutilize the technology available to limit their pollution. They just need an incentive or mandate to spend the extra money to install and maintain it.

Every language has a grammar (of some sort) that determines how the code is to be broken down and ultimately executed. The problem is that there are multiple 'sentences' of grammars that produce exactly the same result when executed (e.g. the parse tree is exactly the same), because there are parts of the source code that have no effect on the execution (e.g. whitespace in many languages). Coding standards are really then about adding additional rules to the grammar to reduce the many exactly equivalent 'sentences' to one.

The problem with these additional rules is that the often times there's nothing in the tool chain that enforces the standard. The ultimate result is that programmers bitch at each other for not following the standard, bitch about having to manually apply the standard, or the standard is simply ignored.

What I want to know, is why does this all matter so much? Why isn't there tooling that will structure the source code to the way a particular programmer wants to see it rather than someone else's standard? It is structured data after all. Does anyone know of tools that do so? I personally haven't run across any (though I've also not spent tons of time looking, either...).

No, actually it is hard to find a job as an EE, esp if you have NO EXPERIENCE. It looks like the field really opens up once you have 5 years experience. That is probably any profession though. I've had my first job for about 6 months now, and going back out to look for a job would be a nightmare. I agree with you about not only looking at well known companies. Big corporations are over rated.