This offering looks like the Microsoft Organization? If it does, is this good for its customers?

Oil subsidies should have been included in the article for comparison. One might expect the amount of oil subsidies to dwarf the amount of money Elon Musk is getting. If we were to do a Nate Silver on the economic, cultural and social benefits from Elon Musk's use of Federal subsidies, what would it look like?

The power of a device to do massive good means we will use it, as the good will far outweigh the risks. For a stunning example of how much we value such devices, even though they are dangerous, look at the 2010 statistics for car crashes.

In 2010 car crashes in the USA caused over 32,000 dead and over 2,000,000 injured.

See more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Longmont Colorado is rolling out a municipally owned fiber network as a utility, with fiber to every home and business. The cost for 1 gigabit symmetric is $50/month.

Read it again: Municipal Fiber at 1 gigabit symmetric for $50/month, if you sign up in the first 30 days. It will probably be $60-100/month after that.

All of America's modest sized cities can do this, it is neither technically nor financially difficult. For a city of 90,000, the bond was $42 million, requiring only 30% uptake to break even. Uptake beyond that simply shortens the payoff and turns everything into community profit, lowering all utility bills.

State regulation created by lobbyists could not stop the Longmont project, and seven more Colorado cities voted in November 2014 to do the same. Montrose CO has already voted the same as Longmont. Boulder voters voted an overwhelming 84% YES to overcome the Colorado legislature's laws preventing them from doing this.

AT&T is afraid of Municipal competition, and they should be. Comcast did not even speak at the Longmont City hearings, though they were there. CenturyLink did speak, and threatened both the Mayor and City Council of Longmont.

"Longmont will pay the price!" - CenturyLink

CenturyLink really did say this. Over and over and over.

Once up a time when Russia left a United Nations meeting in a tiff, the rest of the nations quickly adopted resolutions they could not veto. America's cities should do the same while AT&T has left the room.

Every single city where AT&T has "paused" should pick up the Municipal Fiber mantra. The point is not to make AT&T come back to the table. The point is to tell them "you may go away now, you have extracted enough of our community blood while returning nothing."

Please do this, you must do this: tell your City Council what Longmont, CO, Chattanooga TN, Cedar Falls, IA, Wilson, NC and Lafayette LA are doing. The plan is simple, own all of your own utilities, with fiber paving the way for lower bills all across all utilities, while keeping the money in your own community.

Taking action is remarkably easy. If you don't, you have no one to blame for your ISP choices.

"They're not wrong, they're just assholes."

Murdoch is desperately trying to learn the lessons from his Myspace debacle. Has has publicly stated it was a disaster he does not want to repeat. Anything that gets him "closer to the kids" is a good thing from his perspective. Having Gates pay for it, in this form factor and political cover, is simply outrageous.

It's probably not the right time to change everything in your shop, but you could learn a lot from Geocouch and CouchDB. The technology for mobile and remote collection is very powerful using these tools, and it's worth beginning to learn how the NoSQL databases work in any case. MongoDB also has a GIS facet. For further discussions on Public Data please see Max Ogden's work: http://govinthelab.com/diy-open-data-how-to-start-a-public-data-catalog-in-your-city/

What you are describing is vocational training. And others have said this, but you are completely missing the point of a University education. The process of going through "other classes" is what enables you to BE a better programmer. Higher education, all of it, transforms the way you think and interact with people and society. What do you think "social networking" is about? The new (smart) hiring trends seek those who are just plain good at programming, but much better at people skills. I know highly successful consultancies hiring History, Economics and Music majors to do 80% your job. They dominate the development process, even though they don't code. They save the real time because they produce the really usable products. Get your head on straight, you are missing the boat, utterly.

You are one well rounded fellow. I wonder what your resume would look like applying for another position. Better, I wonder what the reaction of any recruiter would be upon seeing it.

See Caedium, which also implements a version of OpenFOAM. In the simple screencast tutorial, you can see how quickly a Wing model can be put together, with simple visualizations of flow and turbulence. This can be done in 5 minutes. http://www.symscape.com/product/caedium Not sure of the licensing costs for education, but this is MUCH simpler and easy to use and it is fully cross platform, including Mac. I would simply ask for educational terms and see what you find out. I think it's effectively a one-man shop. And I completely agree with other comments that we are talking about teaching, not about becoming overnight engineers. You are to be commended for reaching out to do this for your students.

Well spoken!

The Vyatta open source system works very well, and it has a very good community. These two things are required imho for success in open source. They have appliances or you can byobox, including any of the very small, nearly hand held low power server solutions now out there.