I am fairly confident that if Amazon could replace all of the people who work for them with robots they would have done so long ago. They are not a company known for caring for their workforce and they are not keeping people around out of the goodness of their hearts. Amazon employees people because that is the best way for items to get packaged up and sent out.

My first job was developing in C on a Sco Unix server (yeah, those bastards). Within a year we had totally switched over to Redhat. We were a small shop, but I bet that happened all over once Linux became stable enough. So while commercial Unix may not ever be "dead", I think linux sure as heck put it on life support.

How great it is to play the Hitchhikers guide again (it took about 20 minutes to find everything needed to play on a windows machine. I am guessing it would be similar for a Linux server). Finally news for nerds again :)

It isn't "NASA's" telescope. It is a joint venture between the ESA and NASA.

If you NEED a senior person and don't have 1-2 mid-level positions that are learning what they need to be senior developers at your shop, you are probably doing it wrong. And 1-2 junior developers for each mid-level position. If we continue to not train and mentor and teach from the junior level on up, we are not going to HAVE any senior developers.

The only way this would affect my retention at a company is if they went to the open office layout after I had already started working there, because there is no way in hell I would take a job where I am expected to do my coding in an open office environment. Cubes are bad enough, an open office would just kill all of my productivity.

The United States tax payers are going to foot the bill for this if it happens. Apple is allowed to bill the F.B.I. for reasonable costs. So we get to pay for our own screwing.

Android studio (http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html) is your friend. I am a hard core vs user (hey, it pays the bills) and was tasked with whipping up a proof of concept android application. Android Studio made it every bit as easy as using vs. And on the plus side I get to work with Java again (call me odd but I kinda like that language).

Is your company hiring? :)

Ah, but don't you know, all YouTube music is pirated. Even the butterflies.

If you meet their requirements, you can register and download data from http://archive.eso.org/eso/eso_archive_main.html

I process data from the Hubble and also from the ESO Southern Observatory. And that images (and hence data) from the Hubble are still very much clearer than what the ESO SO can take. Not having to look through an ocean of air makes a huge difference.

In time we will probably have too few people: http://news.yahoo.com/next-challenge-not-too-many-people-too-few-112046879.html/

I think it should make a difference if that famous person is doing something that the government totally paid for. The camera used, the space suit, the ride up were all financed by all of us, so any of us should be able to use any of the images for whatever we want.

Although it isn't actually looking at the objects with your own telescope, all of the data that the Hubble Space Telescope creates is free to the public. To use the data you will need a copy of Adobe Photoshop, but once you have that it can be great fun to create the same sort of images you see from the Hubble Heritage site. To use the data (that you get in fits format) in Photoshop, you need to download the "Fits Liberator" from the http://www.spacetelescope.org/ site (check the projects tab). You can then get the data from http://archive.stsci.edu/hst/search.php (you will have to create an account).