Stenberg is working on QUIC, so it's not a surprise that the chair for the QUIC Working Group would stand up for him. This kind of thing has been a problem for the IETF before, and looks like it will be a problem again.

Those other utopian nations don't hassle people travelling there for meetings. That means that their nationals have easier access to technical conferences, and more of 'em can go. Helping set the standards for the Internet is important, both financially and politically. Let's not screw this up.

Because when you get a job at a company like Uber, you usually get a fat sign-on bonus. If you leave before a year's up, you have to repay it. If he used that money as part of a down-payment on a house, or did anything besides keep it in the bank, then quitting would've been really tough.

Sure, it would've been smart to throw that money in the bank, but it's not always easy to do the smart thing, especially, as other people have pointed out, when you've got kids, etc. If Uber is like the marquee companies I've worked at, the company culture doesn't encourage that kind of caution. Instead, it's more like, "If you're good, we're sure you'll do great. You *are* good, right?" Even though there are lots of reasons why different people excel in different environments.

And, let's face it, it's tough to look for work when you're putting in 60 hours a week. You just don't have a whole lot of time for anything else. And maybe you'll succeed if you only put in more time? Argh. I feel sorry for this guy, and for his family.

A team at USC/ISI has been working on this kind of thing for quite some time (there are subsequent stories showing successful-ish results, but I figured you wanted something early):

http://www.isi.edu/news/story/...

I think that this is the crew I've seen out at Baylands Park in Sunnyvale, testing away. The drones seemed to by flying fine, but they were following dudes who were pretty much standing around in a field, not skiing or kayaking.

Weird, I kinda woulda figured that UCB robotics folks would be able to get this going, especially since the DJIs seem to be able to come pretty close to this already.

Wow, I've been working on network protocols and performance for nearly 20 years, and I've only encountered a little calculus in a handful of research papers. It's never been necessary for my work. In fact, I have a hard time imagining the kind of work that would require calculus.

Numerical analysis? Sure, but you'd probably want to bulk up on the math for that kind of work anyway.

I was required to take three semesters of calculus for my CS degree. I think that any educated person should have a basic understanding of calculus, so one of those was not a waste, but I sure wish that I'd spent those two extra semesters learning more graph theory or computability or information theory or just statistics, any of which could've come in handy. As it is, meh.

Right on!

If businesses really needed more STEM graduates, they could send a very clear signal, and we've yet to see that signal.

(We *are* seeing surging enrollments of CS students, but you're absolutely right that making the argument that way is far sounder than talking about mere rhetoric from business.)

Last I checked, the department was rated 39th nationally, and it brought 17% of the money to the College of Engineering while only costing 10% of the budget. It's not that the department wasn't delivering, it's that there is some ugly internal politics going on:

http://saveufcise.wordpress.com/

Did you read the original article? The CS program at UF is ranked 39th in the country. Not amazing, but certainly not worthy of being shut down. I see plenty of employers begging for more H1B's because we can't produce enough software folks for industry, so I'd say that, yeah, we do need just as many CS programs as we can get.

Ummm, it's home base for a whole bunch of the companies (and the engineers) that built the space shuttle? I mean, I'm sorry Houston didn't get one (and New York did?), but sending one back to the folks who built 'em makes a certain amount of sense.

And, yet, you should be careful about which academics you listen to, as well. Many folks go straight from undergraduate work to graduate work to a post-doc, and so on, without ever experiencing industry (and if you're gonna protest, "What about that summer I spent working for IBM?" then you're part of the problem) or, often, any part of the world of work as the rest of us understand it. (And, again, "I worked in the library shelving books for work-study," ain't it.)

Given all that, "Gee, the work's not so hard and the rewards aren't so slight," might not be very accurate. Asking the rest of us, who've actually worked in the "real world" (for some definition of "real world") and also watched academics in action from close range (parents and partner and working at research institutions), might be useful.

It's possible to find a rewarding (and not just financially rewarding) job that let's you use your skills and brainpower to change the world for the better. I'd argue that it's not even that hard to find one, depending on your skills and talents. If you want to get a PhD, more power to you, but make sure that you understand the tradeoffs you'll be making.

If you do go for it, go in with the understanding that academia as we know it is facing a bunch of significant challenges -- funding, distance learning, etc. -- and it may go through some pretty radical changes in your lifetime.

Ack, "that risks becoming abandonware?" How do you know?

It might be pretty insulting for the current maintainer to find out that you think the software is not advancing quickly enough. I mean, if there's really nothing going on, new patches aren't being incorporated, etc., then, yeah, it might be a good time to look at some options. If it is just that the current maintainer isn't doing what you want, working hard to support your current platform, is doing this on weekends when they have some spare time, etc., then perhaps you should think about ways to encourage and help the current maintainer. Getting them a set of patches for whatever functionality you want to add is a lot more effective than posting to Slashdot.

Again, there aren't enough details to know which kind of problem you have (real abandonware or a cranky user), but it would be good to think about this before proceeding.

Meh, folks should also realize that Ken Thompson is almost certainly writing proof-of-concept research code, where it would be pointless to get a code review. He's trying to get a demo working to show that his idea works, then he'll throw it over the wall and move on. He'll get his code review when somebody else builds on his code to make a production-quality product.

Do you sell your car every year to buy a new one? There's a cost to converting, so you have to make an engineering decision about making the conversion. The automated tools don't always work with old and complex repositories.

If you by "laissez-faire approach", you mean, "created it from scratch with millions in DARPA, and then NSF, funding," then, yeah. And, if you'll remember, there were pretty strict content restrictions on the NSFnet. Thank goodness some small part of the government "got it" and fostered the Internet, or the scenario outlined in the (really crappy) Slate article might've been more likely.

I can just imagine the birth of WarPrinting -- folks driving around the neighborhood, looking for an open printer to spew out Tubgirl or Goatse. Somehow, WiFi-equipped printers don't seem like the perfect idea, after all.