You are correct that automation will create new jobs in the future but there are major issues you are not taking into account. The most glaring is that automation takes away unskilled work (no college) and replaces them will skilled work (college required). The other major issue is that the automation removes many more positions than it creates (e.g. an assembly line process that was not automated required 25 people to run but after automating the process only 1 or 2 people are required to run the process). Replacing unskilled work with skilled work is not ideal because it creates barrier of entry into the workforce. Workers have to obtain and pay for training and/or a degree before they can enter the workforce. With the cost of secondary education being so expensive fewer people are obtaining secondary education causing the rate of unskilled workers to increase. Unfortunately, these workers job prospects are ever diminishing because we are automating the positions they could have worked.

I had this thought a number of years ago but I found that voting on laws is best for Congress to do. Instead once Congress passes a law the citizens should vote to veto the law instead of it being a presidential decision. This way the citizens do not constantly have to vote for laws; this way citizens only vote on a fraction of the laws congress votes on.

I recently left working for the biggest financial exchange in America. I was a member of the team that developed the algorithms that made high frequency trading. I do not know of any software developer at the exchange making over $150,000. The only way to make the salary that is being discussed was to give up developing and become a manager. In fact until a year the promotion path only led to management, so your options were limited promotion wise if you only wanted to be a developer.

Kindly inform the client that the developer who is maintaining the code is plagiarizing the code you created for them by putting his name as the author of the code. Normally, in the header of the code there would be a section stating the client owns the copyright to the code, a section stating the name of the person who originally created the code (who in this case is samzenpus), and the name of anyone who edits the code for new development or maintenance purposes along with the dates and areas/lines the person edited. Since the individual whom is maintaining the code has change the author line to their own name, the individual is plagiarizing the code the original developer created (samzenpus). Because the developer who is maintaining the code is in violation of plagiarism, samzenpus has grounds to file a lawsuit against either the client or the maintenance developer (a lawyer should be able to clearly tell you whom a lawsuit can be filed against). If I were in samzenpus' position, I would inform the the client or the maintenance developer (whomever your lawyer says you have grounds to sue) that the maintenance developer is in violation of plagiarism and that the code creation/authorship must be restored to samzenpus or he will have no other course of action but to file a lawsuit. There is an article on legalzoom.com about plagiarism that should be helpful (http://www.legalzoom.com/intellectual-pro perty-rights/copyrights/plagiarism-what-is-it-exactly).

I fully agree that companies should update there systems on a regular basis but often times redevelopment costs more than maintaining an old system. There are risks associated by not upgrading but the people who make the decision to upgrade generally do not understand the risks, partially because those advocating for redevelopment often do not show all the risks and the costs associated with those risks. Additionally, most of the risks associated with running old systems are less expensive that redevelopment and are not likely to occur. An example would be, the current system currently costs $25,000 a year to maintain and is only supported on IE6 and there is a 5% chance that a major security threat may occur each year costing $100,000, redevelopment will cost $1,000,000 to be done by next year and it will take 5 years to see a return on the investment. Even if the company had a security threat costing $100,000 for the next 5 years running the old system it would only cost $625,000 which is still significantly less than $1,000,000. Taking into account that there is only a 5% chance of a major security threat each year a truer estimate would be that the old system would cost $131,250. I realize there is no scenario that is as cut and dry as above and that there are a lot of costs to review but I just wanted to use this as an example. There are so many factors it is difficult to calculate, Additional risks to look at the current and redeveloped systems may include, maintenance, upgrades, development, security threats, legal fees, hardware, redundancy, third party software, employees, knowledge, time, user issues, etc. Each of these has a cost for both the old and the new and this will help you calculate how much each is going to cost and how much money can be made off of both.

I do not argue that this research is correct about the overall STEM results but when you look at engineering the US is lacking (especially in electrical engineering). The problem started when many US companies in the 1980's decided to manufacture their products in Asia. Over time these Asian companies started hiring their own engineers so that they could design and manufacture their own electronics. Normally you would think US companies would fight these Asian companies new competition but instead they decided to get rid of their own engineers and let the Asian companies engineer their products. This has continued to this day and continues to be an issue. Electronic engineering is not the only issue there are other types of engineering that we have let go to other countries.

We already have 1000 page epics about cats (LOL Cats), they just aren't in ePub. The only editor I need is myself. It is great that there are works on the Internet that only five people will read, but if editors edited the Internet than those five people would have nothing to read. The only reasons editors need to exist are to save the publishers money from publishing expensive books that few will read. With relatively low cost of electronic documenting they become obsolete and it is up to the reader to decide if they want to read a 1000 page epic about cats. Also, it is quite easy to allow your source to be edited by the masses like Wikipedia so that you get the best of crowdsourcing.

All I would like to say is that while we do not know if these world have water looking at our own solar system there is probably a good chance these world at least had water on their surface at on point in time. We know from erosion patterns that Mars had water on its surface because there are erosion patterns of rivers and lakes/seas on the surface. We also have evidence that Venus in the past had liquid water on its surface before it became a blistering inferno. This is three planets in our own solar system that used to have water on there surface (with Earth and occasionally Mars) having liquid water on their surface. In addition, we rarely hear about the fact that each of these worlds (including Venus) have liquid water under the surface in the soil and rock. A majority of Earths bio-mass is actually contained in the soil and rock as bacteria, insects, roots, etc. We also have a number of moons in our solar system that we know contain liquid water under their icy exterior, we don't know how deep this liquid water is but we have a good idea that it is pretty much an ocean. We also have a moon in our solar system which has ice mountains that allow rivers and lakes of liquid methan. Who knows this world might allow for lifeforms that use liquid methan instead of water. In fact, because it has an icy exterior it may as well have an interior water ocean that allows for life like on planet earth. We have an abundance of water in our solar system liquid and ice, while we do not know how it got on the surface of Earth or other planets it did. And since it has happened multiple times in our own solar system wouldn't it be a safe bet that it probably happened elsewhere in the galaxy. Yes these planets in question may not have liquid water oceans and rivers like Earth does but it is a pretty safe bet that there is or has been liquid water on the surface of these planets.

How bull headed are you. A senior system admin should not have the expectation of having to write in-house tools. A good system admin will not only look at building in house tools but also look for pre-existing tools out in the market. It is not in the system admin's job description to build in-house tools, that is what a developer is for. I realize that in many situations it seems like it is easier to build your own solution, but in many accounts that is the worst path you can go down. If you use pre-existing tools you may not get a solution that is 100% perfect for your situation but the aim is usually for a 90% perfect solution. The major benefit of using pre-existing tools is that the development team is dedicated to that product whereas a system admin can only spend a small percentage of time on a tool. This usually causes custom tools to become outdated quickly because there isn't enough time to fix bugs, build new features, etc. between all the other system admin tasks. I am not saying that a custom tool is not the option but it is usually not the best option when you consider how quickly a custom tool can become outdated. There is one instance where a custom tool is an ok option, when you have a development team that will be devoted to developing your application than it is ok to build a custom tool. The benefit to this is that you have resources that are 100% dedicated to your tool and you can mold the tool so that it is 100% perfect for you situation. There are problems in this case though because it is the responsibility of the customer to make sure that the product that the development team is churning out fits the needs of the problem being solved. Now when I say development team I do not necessarily mean a separate team from your IT staff, I just mean you need someone or a group of people on your staff that is dedicated to developing tools. I have seen far to often where people try to mix development work with their other primary tasks and all to often development gets put on the back burner because it is not priority because you have to keep the business's computers running. You may be coding like a mad man when Linda on the fifth floor calls for assistance because she can't login. And one of the worst things when developing is losing your steam to another task, there have been times where an hour distraction will cost me hours in gaining back the steam I had before being distracted. When you are in the zone you are in the zone.

There is only one thing to do - Nothing. Just continue going about business as usual, just make sure the time spent manually doing the task is documented. With enough documentation and reported correctly (especially the costs of not doing anything vschanging the process) can get manegement to change their tune. The hard thing is figuring out how to report it because you have to make it seem beneficial to the people that have the power to take action. I have seen many excellant ideas that would save millions but it wasn't reported properly so the powers that be skipped passed those ideas for other less favorable ideas but one that were clear on what the benefits are.

Companies like NewEgg could survive if mobile manufacturers would start developing modular parts. The problem with that is that the entire mobile industry is following Apples lead. Apple basically says that we don't want you to change our devices hardware (or software) because your messing around may cause you a bad use experience which you may blame on us which neither of us want because Apple is perfect and never does anything wrong. Because Apple has this philosophy then pretty much all mobile device makers do. If these manufacturers would start creating modular devices then consumers could essentially upgrade the processor, increase memory, change the graphics, etc. There are problems with modular designs because generally speaking you can create smaller devices if everything is on a single circuit board where as modular systems have to many separate chips that lock into the mother board. In addition, they have to make methods of accessing the parts for humans big clunky hands which have difficulties working with delicate parts like would be found in a mobile device. There are some companies that have tried and are planning on trying modular parts for phones. Microsoft for example just submitted a patent for a mobile device that provides a mechanism to attach a myriad of other devices including an additional screen, keyboard, HDMI, network card, etc. It appears to work similar to the PC Card that you find in laptops so anything that you could normally with a PCI slot in a computer there may possibly be similar counterparts for a phone like this. The thing I would really like to see from a mobile device like this is an attachable touchscreen E-Ink display because there are times when no matter how bright you put your phone you still can not see anything.

This is a good step for UK school children I just wish the US would require similar courses. I have worked in a college for several years now and have been amazed how little the students know when they start their first programming, networking, hardware, etc. I once had a class of 20 students and on the first day I asked if anyone knew what binary was and not a single student was able to answer, though my expectations were not high in this class because it was a group of Business major students who were required to take an Intro to Computers course for their major.

Computers have become such a fundamental part of our everyday lives that I just find it amazing that students are not required to learn programming or other computing fundamentals. Even if they never program again in their lives the logic processing that students can learn from programming is essential in many positions. When facing issues in their positions it is often beneficial to take similar steps to what you would in programming like in sales you would take a systematic approach to try to sell an item. Sales people have to use a lot of IF/ELSE logic to determine the best way to get the customer to buy an item. For example, my brother used to sell books and every person he went to he always started with the same greeting and depending on how the person responded to the greeting he would use a strategy based on that persons response. If the person said they did not have children so would not need the books he would ask if they had any grandchildren, nieces or nephews, or neighbor children who would benefit from a gift of my brother's books from the person my brother was trying to sell to. Heck, you can even use programming logic to try to make friends

Another useful reason to do this is to assist future programming college students to determine if that is actually the track for them. At my college we see on average 30% dropout rate after the first to programming classes in the CS major. By the time of graduation we have even had less than 45% of the original students in the program. A major reason for this is that there are a large number of students coming to college thinking that they will land a good job out of college because they have CS training, but when they start learning how difficult programming can be or realize that they are unable to grasp programming logic. This trend is even worse in our video game degree because we have many students who come thinking they will learn how to make visually stunning games but then never make any art in the game and instead have to program pre-existing art resources.

When the stock market goes up by 1% it has nothing to do with the national growth rate. It has to do with the compound valuation of all the companies within that market. When they say that the NASDAQ went up by 1% it means that the overall value of all companies in that market went up by 1%, not the value of the nation. There are many factors which go into calculating the value of the country, one of which includes the combined value of the all the markets - NYSE, NASDAQ, CBOE, AZX, ISE, MS4X, NSX, Direct Edge. Other factors include the private consumption, government consumption, imports/exports, gross investments which are used to calculate the GDP. Then there is inflation which is determined by how much and how many goods and services were sold from one point in time to another, which provides an indicator how much inflation is faced by consumers.

Also, stocks do have actual value because when you own a stock it means that you own a certain portion of the company. This means that you own a certain amount of every asset the company has and are entitled to a certain amount of profits gained. If you own a single stock in a company you own a small portion of each desk, computer, building, equipment, etc. that the business owns. A stock is similar to gold backed currency where for each paper notice you have you own a small portion of all the gold the country has in its coffers, but with stocks you own a small portion of all assets the company has.

It does seem like they are hardly worth anything because there are high frequency traders that have so many transactions in a day that it seems like they are worth nothing but you really look at what a stock entails it is actually worth more than high frequency traders seem to make it look like.

You have to be kidding me. We are in a recession currently because the equity and derivatives markets caused major issues in the market. Companies like AIG defaulted on their trades because instead of only trading with the resources they had they would also trade with resources they did not have and instead tried to make sure they would not default with trade A by using trade B as insurance for trade A. When trade A asked for the trade to finally be honored AIG went to trade B and asked trade B to honor their end of the deal, but guess what trade B didn't have the resources to honor the trade. Then it was like a stack of dominoes because trade B defaulted cause AIG to default which most likely cause trade A to default with another company. There were tons of these types of deals between companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, etc. And an even better example is the Great Depression which was cause by an initial drop of 200 pts. in the market which freaked many traders out and they all started selling which started a domino affect. It can seem daunting but you really need to pay attention to the state of the market because it can help you plan for times ahead. Though you cannot just look at the stock/equity markets but you also must look at the derivatives/futures markets which deal with things like commodities, metals, oil, natural gas, etc. My company, CME, is one of the largest exchanges on the planet and when you see things like gas prices go up I can guarantee you that events happening on my exchange help affect that change, though some outside factor is usually what causes wide variation in gas prices like if a new oil source is found that can be drilled into. Lastly, I want to correct you on the iron. If someone has three times as many iron contracts it does mean that they own three times as much iron than they did before. Iron is traded on futures markets where you pay a set price now so that on a set date you will receive the physical (unless you trade the futures contracts before taking delivery, which is what 95% of trades are). Southwest Airlines actually became very successful in the futures market because they bough tons of oil futures before oil prices sky rocketed and kept the oil futures contracts until final delivery. By doing this they were able to buy oil at $35 a barrel instead of $55 a barrel like everyone else was. This allowed them to provide extremely inexpensive flights which they are still seeing gains from to this day.

Any market does not have a winner and a loser but a buyer and a seller. People lose a trading the same way they lose at the casino, they don't know when to cut their losses. You can make money in both directions by buying or selling. The market is not like a football game where there is a definitive winner and loser. In fact, one person on the trade may make more money than the other but still lose because their total sum from all trades is still negative they just made money with that specific contract. Don't make wild statements on matters you don't have enough knowledge in to make a sensible answer.