I am right there with you. I am in my 40s, and have a solid career as a corporate & solo dev. and I have started feeling that weight as well. You might just be describing a "modern" mid life crisis. Self reflection without the need to buy an impractical car.
For the same reasons (size) I picked up an Amazon Fire phone inexpensively, rooted and reloaded it with Cyanogenmod. It's 4.7" with decent hardware (nothing cutting edge). So far so good.
This reads much like "The Minority Report" which was written in 1956. While this author has a modern spin and is attaching it directly to a company we all know - how is it any different? Has science fiction given us these ideas and led us to this point, or has it been a neon warning we've been ignoring all this time? Maybe this path was inevitable?
I second this - and am happy to see an ipdb.org link - there is a ton of information there. I picked up an old Xenon - http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?gid=2821 - worked it over with guides online and it still runs great 10 years later. If I had the room I'd have more!
I scanned these comments and didn't see any mention of it - I used to work for a company - http://www.teletrax.tv/ - that used Philips made hardware to encode video watermarks that were not easily detectable. We would then use detector hardware in the top (n) markets of the US and "detect" whenever some channel broadcast a watermarked piece of video. This was usually used to enforce things like Sony licensing you to show a movie of theirs (n) times over a given period of time. There's competitors in that space as well like Nielsen, etc. I am sure HBO is using more than just a visible watermark to track their content.
RoboCop predicted the fall of Detroit before it happened, with Google piling money into Robotics seems like a short distance to a corporate branded police force stepping in where local assets are too thin to cover...
They are very "dog" like. Maybe a new market will be small robotic pets you can upload your old pets mind download into to have "fluffy" with you forever - or until the maintenance contract is up anyway.
We look for code examples, and usually talk through the examples with the interviewee to get them to explain certain coding choices so we can ascertain whether or not they understand what they have offered up as an example of their work. We also have a machine set up for them to code in person on. We are flexible with their choice of language but will ask them to perform some simple coding tasks in front of us. My team is mostly desktop developers so it's like "Query the DB - save the results to a file - open visual studio - write a program to import that file back into the database." For entry level I don't expect to see much relevant work. Hope this is helpful. My personal advice is to look at getting some certifications - even online web dev certs like from W3Schools or BrainBench - this helps to illustrate skills you have that you may not have job experience in.
This would look great on a big screen in an ops center. Not taking anything away from DAEDALUS though - and glad to see it mentioned, it has that slick Ghost in the Shell interface.
My last gig and my current one are polar opposites but both filled needs. I code for a very large direct mailer. It is not interesting work, but the pay and benefits are great and it's super stable. My last gig was with a start up that never really got going. Lots of R&D coding, lots of trying new things - the work was very satisfying, getting paid weeks late, months in a row was not.
Ideally my next gig would be in the middle of these - stable but more engaging work.