Just a note about how life expectancy calculations work. I'm 47, my life expectancy now is +9 years higher than it was when I was 10 because of the mass of young men who die young. I've got a fairly simple rule for this sort of guff, does it sound like a good idea? Radiation leak = dangerous = reduce danger by moving people away. Yeah, makes sense vs some guy in the UK came up with an equation that quantifies how many people we should move and places a $ value of life. A whole heap of issues with this.

There's a slightly convoluted way to answer this question, but basically if there is a market for something then the "market" will find a solution. In the case of software piracy, if people in country X can't afford to buy the software they need/want AND the company who makes the software is unable or unwilling to enforce its IP in that country then people will pirate the software. I work with software that costs in the tens of thousands per seat and I hear about this happening in low GDP / income per capita countries. The interesting thing is that the piracy is concentrated on the more expensive software and they shops there tend to use only the (relatively) highly priced software. In countries where IP is more strictly enforced there are 3-5 competitors who make similar software with more reasonable pricing. They can't sell in the low GDP countries even at a lower cost because of the piracy of "industry standard" expensive stuff which is effectively free. I've heard stories about government departments installing this sort of software routinely on workstations. The problem with this is that problems can be solved in a lot of different ways, when everyone is using the same tools and is trained from the same pirated manuals and tutorials then the solutions are going to be limited to what those tools can do. In my country I've seen prices of run of the mill software decrease as competition increased. Reducing prices by location isn't the answer. Giving the small guys incentive to create a competing local product will.

Is there an easy way for a machine or person to remotely and quickly work out whats a drone and whats a bird? Working out how to knock something relatively small out of the sky seems to me to be the easy part.

I would add If you're on grid and paying more for the electricity you consume than you are paid for exporting to the grid then the efficiency calculation needs to be the economic efficiency, which means the direction that reduces what you "import" from the grid and will be affected by the time you use the most.

I've called sales people where exactly this has happened. Always seemed crazy to me that a company that depends on sales would be so cheap / dumb to let it happen.

Great, thanks.

I agree with the poster who suggested becoming an expert in an particular package except... you may already be an expert in a particular package, market that. Also, there are a number of existing opensource packages out there in the scientific world that don't have an easy frontend. If you want to pick something to work on, learn one of those, then build some tools to make managing them easier. You can spend your time dealing with interesting complex stuff and hand the simple bits over to whoever you're doing the work for.

Can you share the wording in your contract on this. My contract has what has unfortunately become a standard "we own everything you do while you are working for us" clause which nobody I work with/for cares about but is dumped in by the lawyers. My employer is happy to change it (ie doesn't really care one way or the other) but I would need to propose the change and do the legwork. Having a template would help. Thanks.

This is a repeat of the tactics the music and publishing industries used for decades. CD's used to cost double the price of the equivalent in the US and the release of books and music would be delayed usually by months. I think it was sometime in the 90's that the govt. brought in the parallel import rules, basically cheaper CD's and books could be imported (legally) from overseas if the local distributors didn't bring them in within a reasonable time. Don't quote me on any of this, IANAL and it was a while ago. My point is that the entertainment industry have been doing this to us for a very long time and the govt. has had some impact on these sorts of practices. They just need to act. A lot of the software priced like this is technical and productivity based where there is no alternative and adds to the high cost of doing business in this country. I've got memories of walking into one of the big name brand music stores in Asia 20 years ago and buying the same CD's I could buy at home for $10 when they were $30 in Australia, they were not pirate CDs.

My gripe isn't so much that they took so long to put out a software/OS upgrade for the Galaxy S. The real problem was that the Samsung released such a crappy version of Android to start with, this isn't about OS version numbers it's about the software either not working or not working well. My HTC carrying friends weren't complaining about a lack of responsiveness from their phones or random crashes anywhere near as much as the Samsung people. I'm running one of the custom/modded firmwares now and I can see how the phone is supposed to work given it's hardware. I tell my friends to look at the HTC's or buy an Iphone if they ask me now.

Is it just me or is the repackaging of material that works perfectly well in a browser as an "app" feel like a step backwards? About 13 years ago I used a small application on my PC for internet banking. This lasted a little over a year before they replaced it with a web/browser based version and while at the time it annoyed me (the browser was slower to load etc..) I eventually got used to it. Step forward to 2011 and my bank is now offering and iphone app. It also has a mobile version of it's website which is only displayed correctly on android devices when the useragent is forced to "iphone", dwhich generally makes the android mobile browser experience better.

I'm not a modelling guru but I've delved a little into current and weather modelling and it's not simple stuff. The inputs would vary depending on the weather conditions and weather predictions change significantly over that time. The best you could hope for would by a dynamic model that updated daily and became less reliable the further away from now that you went. Having a model that predicted where the spill was headed after the spill occured so you could direct clean up to the most effective places on a daily or hourly basis would make a lot more sense to me than a model that took a theoretical set of conditions and set in stone the response. I'd suspect that the complexity of this sort of thing probably means the guys who write the software sell the service.

I'm not sure what sort of checks google does on the MAC addresses, but in my case not much. For about 12 months depending on where I stood in my house google maps reported my location as either within 30m of my house in Melbourne (Australia) or downtown London England. When I eventually bothered to try and figure out why I realised they'd scanned by SSID when they drove by for streetmap and either it or my wireless MAC address matched the one in England. I am running a version of DDWRT and I think in the flashing process the MAC was changed. Short story is that it looks like it was taking the MAC address/SSID from the strongest signal only and not the surrounding AP's or the cell phone towers nearby. I stumbled across a form where I could register my MAC address (or SSID, I forget which but I think it was the MAC) with google to correct my location and now "oh my god, they've found me" , I'm thinking that was not such a good idea now...