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Have you tried getting entertainment in the sticks?

actually, after watching 28 days later, I doubt that the zombies enjoyed having to start in the grim estates of north east London.* That just made the whole apocalypse scenario even more depressing.

* Is it me, or are all the urban levels in half life 2 set in a Birmingham industrial estate?

It's uncanny..

This is about your profession, not your economic situation so you are being irrelevant. I no a lot of Drs that work 20 hours at a time.

And yes, the 'study; is ajoke.

You need to make a plan to get to a better place. Both career wise and location.
now, about Dr. Pay:

http://mdsalaries.blogspot.com/

while more then you paltry sum, certainly not 300-700 K and mansion purchasing.
Also worth noting, Malpractice can cost from 4K to 85K depending on location and specialty.
How much insurance do you pay to code?

Depends on experience and profession.
Are you a Jr. maintaining some VB app? or are you writing algorithms for wall street trading software?
One makes a lot less then the other.

SO to lump all Drs and compare it to YOUR salary is stupid.

as a side note: 30K US? really? That was my starting salary of 20 years ago. Maybe that because I am on the west cost?
30K is about 15 an hour.

Anyways, make a plan, start you own consulting. Move. Also, stop with Graphic design, if you can't get hired by Apple, you're not going to make shit developing UI.

Sad, but true.

Make plan livebetter

Absolutely. I'm a finn and I intend to submit my idea for an intellectual property tax (that I linked to in another story a few weeks ago) once this project is online

Here it is: http://reengineeringtheworld.blogspot.com/2012/02/taxing-intellectual-property-owners-of.html

Bad decisions were made. If you have ever had to deal with PCI DSS certification then you know what the credit card processing companies expect of their merchant customers. Now imagine the standards the credit card companies themselves try to adhere to. Some developers using BitCoin need to think about the security Big Picture before creating infrastructure for their projects/businesses. Keeping a BitCoin wallet containing thousands of BTC on a little cloud server is not wise.

Having said that, there is a solution in the pipe to help with this problem. Gavin Andresen, lead BitCoin developer, had his Bitcoin Faucet Linode server hacked. While only a few Bitcoins were lost he now is using this incident to support his proposal for Multisignature Transactions.

I agree to a point. If you want some real insight, check out how the folks working on noda-time (a .Net implementation of java's joda-time library) have described the issues with .Net's built-in DateTime handling: http://noda-time.blogspot.com/

Although, nothing described there would account for this leap-day bug. My guess is that some developer decided to do his own math on dates rather than using the framework's implementation.

I think it's a mistake to say "oh, well everyone's got it wrong so don't trust a library". You probably can get more out of a library than doing it yourself. However, you have to be aware of the implications of using that library.

On the .Net platform in particular, Microsoft has made a mess of things by making developers think that DateTime, and TimeZoneInfo are "perfect". They're not.

Economists across the political spectrum- perhaps most notably Greg Mankiw, former chair of Bush's CEA- have long been saying that the US gas tax is at least a dollar lower than would be socially optimal.

Raising the gas tax would of course discourage pollution, but it would do much more than that. It would do a much much more effective job of encouraging manufacturers to make more efficient cars than the silly CAFE etc laws we keep passing. It would encourage the improvement of our nation's (generally subpar) public transit systems.

It would make it so people bear more the costs of road construction and maintenance in proportion to their actual use of the roads and the wear and congestion they cause. Right now everybody in the nation is subsidizing long commutes, traffic jams, moving all freight by road instead of rail, etc etc. Removing this subsidy not only discourages inefficient road use but also allows other taxes which presently discourage efficient behaviors (like payroll and income taxes) to be decreased, encouraging economic growth.

As a bonus, though we'd want to be careful about this kind of intervention, the tax could be temporarily lowered and only gradually reintroduced in the case of major supply shocks, keeping the price of gas more stable and easing the problem of disruptive adjustments. Post-Katrina gas prices were actually lower on average than they are now, but the suddenness of the increase meant a lot of people, especially contractors and small businesses, were in a lot of pain while overall prices and wages adjusted; this could be ameliorated by using a gas tax as a buffer.

One explanation: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-are-gas-prices-high.html
Basically, we're supply-constrained, and economic growth around the world is supporting demand.

Japan should immediately fix a badly damaged condition at this time.
disave

thks

2010 Lie of the Year: 'A government takeover of health care' - Politifact: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/dec/16/lie-year-government-takeover-health-care

After reading, quite extensively, on this topic, it is clear that there is much debate about this issue. It is quite painfully clear to people such as myself who don't qualify for medicare and can't afford private insurance that we are going to fall through the cracks in this not so well thought out government over-regulation. Some may argue that what FOX reported was a lie, but to me sounds more like hyperbole or half truth at worst. While the entire Obamacare bill may not be a government takeover of hospitals and/or doctors, it is a government takeover of my choice of how and where I receive my healthcare especially in the forcing me to purchase insurance. Hopefully the Supreme Court will shoot that aspect down when it hears this case later this year.

Beck says less than 10 percent of Obama Cabinet has worked in private sector - Politifact: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/02/glenn-beck/beck-says-less-10-percent-obama-cabinet-members-ha/

A quote by a specific news analyst who is known for his opinionated presentation, not representative of the news or news staff

White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard once served as the "right-hand man" for Bertha Lewis, who heads up ACORN - Politifact: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/30/steve-doocy/beck-and-others-repeat-claim-white-house-political/

After reading the ENTIRE Politifact, it was clear that the statement was not false until Politifact contacted Mr. Rathke where he then retracted his previous statement/blog-post:

".....Patrick Gaspard (who was ACORN New York's political director before that) didn't reach out from the White House and help make that happen, and I'll tell you to take some remedial classes in 'politics 101.'"

which IMHO sounds a bit fishy to me and probably needs a little more fact checking than asking the elephant: "Who stole the peanut butter". Rathke was the founder of ACORN and we're supposed to believe that he was mistaken about who was ACORN New York's political director? C'mon.

Says the Texas State Board of Education is considering eliminating references to Christmas and the Constitution in textbooks - Politifact: http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2010/mar/12/gretchen-carlson/gretchen-carlson-says-state-board-education-consid/

I'll give Stewart this one although there was much confusion from FOX, the Texas BOE and Politifact. A lot of back pedaling on both sides, but FOX definitely fucked up

The best evidences showing PolitiFact's liberal slant - Politifact: http://politifactbias.blogspot.com/p/annotated-principles-of-politifact.html

I'll need to do more research regarding this supposedly unbiased fact checking site. However, after perusing the last three months of articles, over 70% were anti-republican claims, many of which fall into the category of could be true/could be false depending on ideology. Mr. Adair who founded the organization is a usual suspect on NPR, the embodiment of liberal talk radio and the director of PEW, a p

Have you noticed that EVERYTHING seems to cause cancer?

It is a wonder that not everyone has cancer, with so many things causing it. (*)

I really doubt all the different classes of sleep meds are carcinogenic.

*

Too much sun
http://www.webmd.com/healthy-beauty/guide/sun-exposure-skin-cancer

Not enough sun
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2004179538_vitamind13m.html

Being overweight
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/obesity

Being underweight
http://foodforbreastcancer.com/news/underweight-women-have-higher-risks-of-breast-cancer-recurrence-and-metastasis

Too little exercise
http://m.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/health-nutrition/leslie-beck/prolonged-bouts-of-sitting-increase-cancer-risk/article2229466/?service=mobile

Too much exercise
http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2006/12/too-much-exercise-causes-cancer.html

Too little vegetables
http://www.cancer.org/Healthy/EatHealthyGetActive/EatHealthy/fruits-and-vegetables-do-you-get-enough

Too many vegetables
http://www.keytobeing.com/2009/pesticides-in-fruits-veggies-linked-to-cancer-parkinsons-more

Even chemo"therapy"
http://www.cancer-free-for-life.com/articles/chemotherapy.php

Ahh, you've ruined it. That should have been "a young girl's choice between bestiality and necrophilia". Here you have another.

Here;

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/pss/

you can read the report from the Plantary Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council, to the Science Committee.

It'd be awesome if /. posters read any of this before posting snide/uninformed/trolly comments about NASA, Obama, Space-X, budgets, etc.

The blog Future Planetary Exploration rounds up reporting on this subject;
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2012/02/ruckus.html

Or to put it simply, Amdahl's law was wrong, proved by example many times over.

Perhaps you are merely trying to be outré but what exactly is wrong about:

"The speedup of a program using multiple processors in parallel computing is limited by the time needed for the sequential fraction of the program."

The flaw is the presumption that the "sequential fraction" of a program will always dominate as processor count increases. Here is a pretty good discussion. Basically, an embarrassingly large number of algorithms that Amdahl would have regarded as having limited scalability, turned out to have alternative formulations that scale out the yinyang. Ambahl would have been embarrassed by all the embarrassingly parallel parallelism going on, contrary to his dire and arguably self serving prediction.

This is an ad. What is a "resonant clock mesh"? That's sounds really cool. So I started RTFA (I know, sorry). You don't have to chastise me that much, because I stopped reading soon. Right after

An average Google search is reported to
require ~ 0.3 watts, about the same amount of power that it takes for a 100 watt light
bulb to be lit for 10 seconds.

Which was obviously not written by anybody who has any clue what they are talking about.

I think it was a typo (or edit by someone who doesn't know what they are talking about). They should have said 0.3 watt-hours (and should have said "energy" instead of "power")

Google says they use 0.0003 kWh of energy per search.

A 100W bulb uses .1 kWh in an hour, or .0000278 kWh in a second, or .000278 kWh in 10 seconds. (or .278 Wh)

Therefore, a 100W bulb running for 10 seconds uses about the same amount as energy as an average Google search. Which is a lot higher than I thought it would be - since I use 20W CFL's, each time I do a google search, that's the equivalent of 50 seconds of light per Google search. Just while typing this reply, I did enough Google searches to light up my room for about 15 minutes.

Seems to be a gap in education of Anonymous there. If they had gone through a Catholic school they would have known:

Don't mess with the Sister in charge. She knows what you are up to.

Although it is in Spanish, this can be of your interest too, regards
Is the hypertext a blessing or a probolem?

Sure, and that's the goal. This whole "cyberbullying" / "hate crime" meme is all about an attempt to off-limit certain types of speech. The fact that the subject killed himself makes this the perfect storm of a way to promote this idea. And the idea is: "You're not allowed to criticize certain people." Sexual orientation minorities are one of those protected classes that are to get this kind of special dispensation. Heterosexuals and fat people are fair game (as Michelle Obama's campaign has made clear), as are pretty much all white people, and old people, too (ageism is never criticized as hateful or bullying, for instance).

So in spite of the portrayal of anti-bullying (and especially "cyber bullying") campaigns as an effort to end reduce suffering of the young and adolescent, the rather obvious true goal is only to protect certain groups against criticism. Note that criticism of Christian beliefs, and those of Mormons, Catholics, and often even Jews is defended as legitimate and never considered "bullying", no matter how inflammatory and hurtful the rhetoric used against them.

Even politicians and law enforcement have started using the terms, claiming that they are being "bullied" by citizens simply for criticizing their public policy actions and decision, and initiating law suits to stop them. This latest movement, to conflate any criticism of government overreach with "anti-government" anarchists or even "paper terrorists".

This is a truly frightening development, that will lead inevitably to the erosion of free speech to such a degree that the only thing recognized as "free speech" will be a narrowly-defined set of "approved speech".

Maybe I am being a little over-reactive

No, you're being over-the-top stupid. Not liking some of Harper's policies (I don't like a lot of them either) doesn't justify this kind of hyperbole.

There's a fable about a boy falsely shouting about a wolf that a whole lot of people need to learn before they start tossing verbal grenades.

-Zirbert
http://zirbert.blogspot.com/

I dont't like Harper either, but let me assure you that you have absolutely no right to detemine who is or is not a real Canadian based on their political beliefs.

-Zirbert, real Canadian no matter what some arrogant douchebag on the Internet may claim
http://zirbert.blogspot.com/

Prohibiting use of "var" is gross over-kill.

There are times where it's use is not recommended, certainly. But even in those cases, it can lead you to the point that there's a "bad code smell" where methods aren't named well, variables aren't named well, classes aren't named well.

var x = foo(); is definitely less readable.

But var x = new ComplexObject(); is every bit as readable, if not more so, because you don't have a redundant "ComplexObject" in the declaration. You always know exactly what type "x" is. It's also very useful in cases where the return type is a complicated generic. it saves a lot of typing, and is definitely more readable.

Here is a very good discussion on the benefits and uses of "var":

http://resharper.blogspot.com/2008/03/varification-using-implicitly-typed.html

Oh rubbish! There is an excellent description of the "behind the scenes" technical detail that goes into /. editorial management here.

But did you call it "email"?

The first NYT reference I can find is William Safire's On Language column November 27, 1983, where it is presented as a fairly new term.

If you are cynical about Rep. Cissna's change of heart, you should hear how Sen. Nick Begich flip-flopped on the issue (warning: shameless plug to my blog). In fairness, we don't know Rep. Cissna's stance before her run-in with TSA in Seattle...but Begich basically told me I was wrong (diplomatically, of course) before Rep. Cissna's encounter, and then publicly criticized TSA (again, diplomatically) after Rep. Cissna took a stand on the issue. Besides, I'd rather someone have a come-to-Jesus experience and finally see the light than take a wrong stand and stick to it.

>> The official count is 4 deaths

No, the official is now 573 deaths.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T120204003191.htm

As you may know, this number is probably underestimated due to the jap gov. lying daily to their citizens.

Also, you may know that many cancers take much time to develop, and that the large scale food contamination is ongoing. an example of future cancers :
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2012/01/1117-children-over-30-of-3739-tested.html

Because as everyone knows, Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it.

Bill Gates (1955–) Cofounder and chairman, Microsoft Corporation Born: October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. Education: Attended Harvard University, 1973–1975. Family: Son of William Henry Gates II (attorney) and Mary Maxwell (teacher); married Melinda French (Microsoft manager), January 1, 1994; children: three. Career: Lakeside Programming Group, 1968–1969, founder; Traf-O-Data, 1970–1973, founder; Microsoft Corporation, 1975–, founder and chairman; 1975–2000, CEO; 1992–1998, president. Awards: U.S. National Medal of Technology, 1993; Chief Executive of the Year, Chief Executive, 1994; President's Medal of Leadership Award, New York Institute of Technology, 1995; Louis Braille Gold Medal, Canadian National Institute for the Blind, 2002; Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 2004. beach wedding dresses Publications: The Road Ahead (with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson), 1995; Business @ the Speed of Thought, 1999. Address: Microsoft Corporation, 1 Microsoft Way, Building 8, North O, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399; William Henry Gates III cofounded the Microsoft Corporation in 1975, built his software company into the one of the most successful businesses in the world, and established himself in the process as the world's richest man. Although Bill Gates started Microsoft as a small business based on a single innovative software program that he had helped to develop, his real genius was his business acumen. As the long-time CEO of Microsoft, Gates was able to borrow and integrate other computer programmers' innovations and sell them to a new and rapidly expanding home computer market. In 1985, 10 years after Microsoft was founded, it had $140 million in revenue, which grew to $28 billion by 2002. One of the pioneers of home computing, Gates proved himself to be a technological visionary and software applications guru. According to industry analysts, he also demonstrated that he was a shrewd marketing strategist as well as an aggressive corporate leader. mdd3958504

I believe it was opt-in for a long time, but then it became opt-out for (new?) accounts. The change was announced here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html

But then again, so is rocket technology. Pushing stuff out the back (propellant or elevator cable) in order to move forward is lame. We need something better, much better. We are certainly not going to colonize the solar system, let alone the stars and galaxies beyond, with a bunch of cockamamie rockets or space elevators that will never be built. But there is no need to despair. We are on the verge of a breakthrough in physics that will make every current approach to energy production and transportation obsolete.

There is clear evidence that we are swimming in an ocean of clean energy, lots and lots of it. This is a consequence of a reevaluation of our understanding of the causality of motion. It turns out that Aristotle was right to insist that motion is causal. As a result, we are immersed in an immense lattice of energetic particles without which nothing could move. Soon, we'll learn how to exploit the lattice for propulsion and energy production. We'll have vehicles that will move at tremendous speeds and negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring any damage due to inertial effects. Space elevator? Bleh. Floating sky cities, unlimited clean energy, New York to Beijing in minutes, earth to Mars in hours... That's the future of energy and travel. And it will happen in your lifetime. Click on the link below if you're interested in this new exciting science of motion. You don't understand motion, even if you think you do.

The Problem with Motion.

Still, though, 'space nutter' will never become a catchphrase, and nobody will ever use it except for you. Sorry; that's a lot of wasted posts you've made. One a day for a few years, I guess.

May I suggest Goodspaceguy as a possible alternative to "space nutter"?

I have been writing a blog advocating changing the transportation system. The blog gets zero comments and it has been a very lonely writing experience. And every day I dwell on the irony that I am stuck driving an energy wasting car 12,000 miles per year and I am trying to develop the ideas for a low energy low CO2 reorganization.

So I see the General Transportation File System as a brilliant data structure that makes an expanded world of transportation solutions. The late bus update schemes are interesting problems that can be worked out. I had noticed the bus scheduling application in Google Maps but I wasn't able to figure out how to write programs that accessed that data, and I wasn't able to prototype a data structure like it.

I think the GTFS should be enhanced by using the electronic bridge toll sensor devices in cars to make transportation node maps for people commuting. Suppose you set up a bridge toll sensor at the entrance to a Junior College Campus with 2000 cars commuting daily. If you could get 1/3 of the commuters to pick up two students on the way to school...you could cut the gross CO2 emissions by about 50%.

  What a great benefit... use existing transportation technology and get CO2 emission reductions of substantial scale with no capital investment.

http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/

Science would not exist without Catholicism. It takes a certain knowledge that God won't change the rules at random to provide the philosophical basis for science; and it is on that belief that Santorum rejects global warming, which requires a change in physics to believe in.

At a $10K price point, you could afford to do what I've long been expecting to see widely adopted: online activation, with the serial number / key validated against a whitelist of known good (i.e., paid-for) keys.

The cycle is always the same: require key to install or activate; hackers determine algorithm and make keygens; keys known to be used in the wild get blacklisted. Validating against a whitelist breaks this cycle, but normally wouldn't be cost-effective. At $10K, you can go for it.

Yes, there will be some hiccups (what to do if / when a *second* user tries to validate using the same key and you need to determine who's legit, etc.), but they should be solvable in low volume / high price-point scenarios.

-Zirbert
http://zirbert.blogspot.com/

That depends. For example, people with Russian/US dual citizenship can legally enter Russia without a passport (though it would be somewhat complicated) or visa because constitution guarantees that Russian citizens can't be denied the right to enter the country.

What you seem to be saying is that Russia is now more free than the US? I wander how things will be in next 20 years.

http://stateswithoutnations.blogspot.com/2009/04/us-citizen-deported-to-mexico-shipped.html

http://abcnews.go.com/US/14-year-american-citizen-deported-colombia-assuming-false/story?id=15298238

US citizens reported from US

It most definitely is sarcastic, but is still a problem because some people, most notably the **AA executives, will not understand it and think it's a good idea.

I've written a proposal for a copyright tax which I think would alleviate lots of the problems that are caused by the copyright laws of today, without requiring hard-to-get changes to copyright law itself. Please leave a comment:

http://reengineeringtheworld.blogspot.com/2012/02/taxing-intellectual-property-owners-of.html

...and for balance, here's a slightly more sceptical take on the announcement:

http://www.omespeak.com/blog/?p=507

'Until ONT demonstrates actual sequencing of a more complicated genome (a microbial one at minimum), there will be a healthy degree of skepticism,'

See also:

http://omicsomics.blogspot.com/2012/02/oxford-nanopore-doesnt-disappoint.html

'So, Oxford has unveiled an amazing pair of sequencers. Not one which completely clears the field of everyone else, but one which will offer a host of new opportunities for genomics. Now it is up to Oxford to deliver the instruments to the field, and for Oxford and its early access sites to start pumping out data for all to evaluate. '

and:

http://www.bio-itworld.com/news/02/17/12/Oxford-strikes-first-in-DNA-sequencing-nanopore-wars.html

'...he nanopore war is about to start.'

It serves results from Google. And that sites been up an awful long time for any errors, misconceptions and ... FUD to have been discovered and corrected by now, so we'll just leave it to the astroturfers to mod down the truth whilst enjoying their hugely entertaining comedy squirming around having been caught red handed. This happens every time that link is mentioned on Slashdot. Why, its almost like the $5 per handset Android extortion - there's clearly no way to deal with such disgusting behaviour other than paying shills to bury it.

I would prefer to have a splash screen with a progress bar than to sit and wait with no notification at all that my app is loading components into memory while I wait.

Exactly. (Others have noted it in this thread.)

Thomas says

When I fire up Photoshop (or OpenOffice, or any other pathetically oversized mountain of bloatware), it should just violently start, before I've even raised my coffee cup to my mouth. Or appear to start, at least. Show me a screenshot that looks like Photoshop. Trick me into thinking it's running. Cache my UI gestures until the world has finished bootstrapping. Run my gestures against an image in the cloud. Make my gestures appear to do something interesting. Fool me into thinking the damn thing is running. Better yet, make it so.

About the only non-bogus part of that is "Better yet, make it so." I don't want the gestures to "do something interesting", I want them to do what they're intended to do; if they're cached and replayed later, I'm not getting immediate feedback, which is going to Really Suck if I find that, once all my cached gestures have been replayed, I've done stuff to the document that I didn't expect to have been done. If your app can really respond to input that quickly, no splash screen is needed, problem solved. Otherwise, I want at least some sort of feedback, even if it's just "this is going to take a while, be patient". Effort spent on "[appearing] to start quickly" is better spent speeding up startup.

But the author is also confused when he says

When I turn my computer on, it should just be on. Ready to go. Kind of like—well, like my phone, for example. Which is, after all, my real computer.

When I "turn my phone on", I'm not booting it from scratch, I'm just waking it up. Yes, waking up happens pretty quickly, but it happens pretty quickly on my laptop, too. Booting my phone takes, well, 44 seconds or so (and it takes a while to shut down and power off) - maybe that's what I get for running iOS 3.x on an original iPhone (yes, the original model), and a newer phone would boot faster, or maybe Android boots faster than iOS (from "Which is, after all, my real computer.", he presumably has a smartphone, so I won't discuss featurephones, but they might not come on instantly - I seem to remember some old Nokia phones taking a little while to boot). I.e., his phone might like that because he's not booting it, he's just waking it up, and if he left his computer up and running and just let it go to sleep, he might have the same experience when waking it up.

In fact, several commenter pointed that out.

Other commenters indicated that one way to "make it so" is to run with an SSD.

I would prefer to have a splash screen with a progress bar than to sit and wait with no notification at all that my app is loading components into memory while I wait.

Exactly. (Others have noted it in this thread.)

Thomas says

When I fire up Photoshop (or OpenOffice, or any other pathetically oversized mountain of bloatware), it should just violently start, before I've even raised my coffee cup to my mouth. Or appear to start, at least. Show me a screenshot that looks like Photoshop. Trick me into thinking it's running. Cache my UI gestures until the world has finished bootstrapping. Run my gestures against an image in the cloud. Make my gestures appear to do something interesting. Fool me into thinking the damn thing is running. Better yet, make it so.

About the only non-bogus part of that is "Better yet, make it so." I don't want the gestures to "do something interesting", I want them to do what they're intended to do; if they're cached and replayed later, I'm not getting immediate feedback, which is going to Really Suck if I find that, once all my cached gestures have been replayed, I've done stuff to the document that I didn't expect to have been done. If your app can really respond to input that quickly, no splash screen is needed, problem solved. Otherwise, I want at least some sort of feedback, even if it's just "this is going to take a while, be patient". Effort spent on "[appearing] to start quickly" is better spent speeding up startup.

But the author is also confused when he says

When I turn my computer on, it should just be on. Ready to go. Kind of like—well, like my phone, for example. Which is, after all, my real computer.

When I "turn my phone on", I'm not booting it from scratch, I'm just waking it up. Yes, waking up happens pretty quickly, but it happens pretty quickly on my laptop, too. Booting my phone takes, well, 44 seconds or so (and it takes a while to shut down and power off) - maybe that's what I get for running iOS 3.x on an original iPhone (yes, the original model), and a newer phone would boot faster, or maybe Android boots faster than iOS (from "Which is, after all, my real computer.", he presumably has a smartphone, so I won't discuss featurephones, but they might not come on instantly - I seem to remember some old Nokia phones taking a little while to boot). I.e., his phone might like that because he's not booting it, he's just waking it up, and if he left his computer up and running and just let it go to sleep, he might have the same experience when waking it up.

In fact, several commenter pointed that out.

Other commenters indicated that one way to "make it so" is to run with an SSD.

I would prefer to have a splash screen with a progress bar than to sit and wait with no notification at all that my app is loading components into memory while I wait.

Exactly. (Others have noted it in this thread.)

Thomas says

When I fire up Photoshop (or OpenOffice, or any other pathetically oversized mountain of bloatware), it should just violently start, before I've even raised my coffee cup to my mouth. Or appear to start, at least. Show me a screenshot that looks like Photoshop. Trick me into thinking it's running. Cache my UI gestures until the world has finished bootstrapping. Run my gestures against an image in the cloud. Make my gestures appear to do something interesting. Fool me into thinking the damn thing is running. Better yet, make it so.

About the only non-bogus part of that is "Better yet, make it so." I don't want the gestures to "do something interesting", I want them to do what they're intended to do; if they're cached and replayed later, I'm not getting immediate feedback, which is going to Really Suck if I find that, once all my cached gestures have been replayed, I've done stuff to the document that I didn't expect to have been done. If your app can really respond to input that quickly, no splash screen is needed, problem solved. Otherwise, I want at least some sort of feedback, even if it's just "this is going to take a while, be patient". Effort spent on "[appearing] to start quickly" is better spent speeding up startup.

But the author is also confused when he says

When I turn my computer on, it should just be on. Ready to go. Kind of like—well, like my phone, for example. Which is, after all, my real computer.

When I "turn my phone on", I'm not booting it from scratch, I'm just waking it up. Yes, waking up happens pretty quickly, but it happens pretty quickly on my laptop, too. Booting my phone takes, well, 44 seconds or so (and it takes a while to shut down and power off) - maybe that's what I get for running iOS 3.x on an original iPhone (yes, the original model), and a newer phone would boot faster, or maybe Android boots faster than iOS (from "Which is, after all, my real computer.", he presumably has a smartphone, so I won't discuss featurephones, but they might not come on instantly - I seem to remember some old Nokia phones taking a little while to boot). I.e., his phone might like that because he's not booting it, he's just waking it up, and if he left his computer up and running and just let it go to sleep, he might have the same experience when waking it up.

In fact, several commenter pointed that out.

Other commenters indicated that one way to "make it so" is to run with an SSD.

Honestly, I fucking hate CAPTCHA and will cheer on its demise. Good luck typing this shit in...

Gilbert Shelton had a similar idea ages ago.

Africa has more cell phones than toilets. http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/more-cell-phones-than-toilets The entire infrastructure was built on "e-waste", used cell phones were imported and hacked/jailbroken, which created enough subscribers for private sector companies to erect the towers. The free market bypassed the entire government-infrastructure track. Of course, there is evidence of a second crime here.... http://archive.basel.int/industry/mppi/gdfd30Jun2010.pdf Cell phones are labelled "e-waste" in Europe http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-world-order-interpol-calls.html and Africans who buy them have been declared "criminals" by Interpol.

http://dicka-berbagi.blogspot.com/2012/01/sewaruangkantorjakartamurah.html

I wasn't aware that anyone watched Sun TV.

6000 viewers over supper hour!

And worse, it's mainly over-50s that the advertisers don't pay as much for.

There are different rationale for subsidies. One is to offset externalized costs such as environmental damage. In that light, nuclear power is deserving. But another is to promote technologies that are not yet economical but may become so. Solar scores on both counts, because it almost defines "sustainable," and because (largely due to government investment) the cost of solar has dropped by about 97% since the mid-70s. In contrast, nuclear is getting more expensive (perhaps not for any reason inherent in the technology). Some claim that solar is now cheaper than nuclear. (Of course nothing can be as cheap as coal - pretty hard to beat "dig it, burn it," if all you care about is short-term expenses and place no value on the air you breathe).

Joe says that he plans to have his house built within the next 18 months, at which point his mother will move in upstairs and he will take up residence in the basement with his computer.

Knock him all you want, but at least his hobby/models *do* something. I know tons of guys that spend $$$$$ on RC that do nothing but drive/fly around and crash.

In that interview someone posted he said he doesn't want to stop. Hey Joe, when you run out of dirt in your basement you can use my backyard to dig a hole for an inground pool. At 2-3 cubic yards a year it should take awhile and I'm in no hurry, I won't even charge you much for use of my backyard :)

Follow-up article (but to related to the parent joke): a interview of Joe.

goood goods ilike its My Blog

"They're fantastic writing, "

no, it isn't

Maybe I missed it, but I was surprised that no one mentioned this WoT review.

Will take me a little while to find it again but Harper had funding cuts for the CBC put into his budget back when they were reporting on some scientists that harper was gagging.

CBC folded, they removed the story from their web site, the only place you can find it now is on independent sites.

http://asweweresaying.blogspot.com/2010/10/scientists-defy-harper-gag-rules.html

The above is the story.

The CBC has been saying "How high" every time harper says "jump" ever since.