And yet, if you let strangers borrow a screwdriver, a cup of sugar, your lawnmower, a paintbrush, a book, a pencil, or any of a million other things, there's absolutely zero chance that you'll ever have any problems at all (other than maybe getting the item back, or the lawnmower being out of gas when you next want to use it). Selectively picking 1) a weapon, and 2) an extremely expensive licensed item, and 3) a dwelling that you pay a deposit on as examples is going to skew expectations. You'd need to demonstrate that it's common sense for someone to equate wireless with any of those things, rather than with a common tool, or a basic utility like electric or water, except for most people it's not even metered like electric and water are.
So true. Ten minutes before an article is being published, it's in the hands of the last line of defense, getting the final copy edit or fact checking. Is it crazy that a fact checker would google for and visit some sites that might corroborate the things being claimed in an article? Doesn't seem weird to me. If I'm researching stuff, I'll often check multiple sources. This should not be construed to mean that the last page I visited is the sole source of all of my materials.
On the other hand I haven't been in journalism in a few decades, and with budget crunches I also thought they'd thrown out most of the copy editors and fact checkers along with anyone else, so it's impossible to say for sure. Still, a page hit on one site is not proof that the site was the sole source of information.
Well, yeah, that'd be a problem. But 1) it's a game, so I've got almost zero sensitive data. Real name and email address is as sensitive as it gets. 2) I keep even that small bit of data out of the development server where anyone else might have access to it.
The only way the pension funds work is if you're in the middle-to-upper class (>$250,000/year income) and can contribute easily a good $1000/month into your own managed investment funds.
If you make $100k/year and contribute 12% (aggressive, but not unheard-of; my financial guy argues for 15%) that's $1k per month.
$1k per month on a salary of $250k isn't even putting 5% toward your salary, which is a pitiful percentage for investment.
Also, postponing your retirement one year is not always possible, for a lot of reasons. You may not be able to work for one thing, due to health reasons, in old age. And sometimes the recovery may take more than one year. It actually took about two years for the market to recover from the lows in march 2009.
You can also have health issues that keep you from working when you're much younger than retirement age. Adding them into the mix muddies the picture. For most people, if they're working this year, they can work an extra year (or two, as you rightly point out) until things bounce back.
A useful conclusion to that story would be to relay how that couple felt at the end. Did they feel like they'd wasted their lives working, as you seem to be implying? Or were they happy they'd managed to scrape together a good legacy for their daughters, to help make up for the relatively short time they could be around and provide for them? Dying young is tragic, but so is starving when you're old, and I don't know that any number of stories of one way or the other would convince me I shouldn't try to plan for the most contingencies, which means planning for retirement, whether I get there or not.
Like the guy you cite, I do also work two jobs, and it eats up a lot of time. The first pays well and is moderately enjoyable, but admittedly feels like work. The second, though, is a dream job building a computer game, and the most fun I can think of doing anything for money. It may eat up a lot of evenings and weekends, but at least I won't ever regret the time spent working on it.
Claiming that, having taught yourself, you are now a great programmer and don't need a university degree is generally a sign that you probably do need that degree, you are being too arrogant to actually be as clever as you think you are.*
I definitely agree there's fantastic value in receiving balanced and thorough instruction from outside sources, simply because they know about things you don't know you need to learn. I'm not entirely convinced a degree itself is essential--a lot of the CS classes at my school were more theoretical and may not have actually geared one to be a better programmer, per se. But I can't tell you how many times I've struggled with something only to have someone suggest "why don't you use X?" where X is something I've simply never heard of, or didn't know how it applied to my situation.
As an example, a web site I run was struggling with slow page loads and lots of lag. An experienced coder was helping me troubleshoot, realized I didn't have proper indexing on some key database tables, and in minutes we transformed the site from slow and cranky to blazing fast. The worst page (not triggered often, but very intensive) would take upwards of a couple of minutes to run in some cases, and now never takes more than 5 seconds. All other pages went from being laggy to loading basically instantaneously. All of that by having a blind spot pointed out to me.
My stance is a little different, but I frequently recruit hackers (in the positive sense) to help me with the game I run, though it's frequently more in a testing and advisory capacity than coding. But I have done both.
My game a web-based RPG programmed in PHP, and started out mostly as a solo project. I'm pretty conscious of security, because I have to be to keep people from exploiting the game. But I regularly rely on good-natured testing from the players to identify functionality problems and security holes, and I definitely reward those who discover and report flaws. Some have done some coding for me, others just get an early shot at testing and trying to break new code before it goes live.
I can't say that the hackers are definitively better coders, but it does seem pretty clear those who can manage to exploit vulnerabilities in my custom code tend to be able to understand programming well enough to know what to try and how things might break.
In my case it also means the hacker is interested enough in my game to be interested in exploring it and trying to improve it, and both of those are key reasons to recruit the hacker as a tester or adviser, too.
Excellent story, and good sleuthing! I know my wife and I have had weird moments where, say, the TV was off but the stereo was accidentally left on, and mystery sounds were occasionally coming out. I've also tracked down mystery sounds that turned out to be my iPod headphones, where I'd accidentally bumped it and caused it to play. And in another case I think I had headphones plugged into my computer but didn't know it, didn't realize I'd visited a web site with background noise, and was a bit weirded out by the faint noises leaking out several feet away from me. Never had noise coming out of turned-off speakers, though. That's a good one.
Was that shadowlands post below supposed to be your stories? I'd be entertained to hear about the experiences from someone who at least claims to want to have science applied.
Never heard this one before. I suppose it would be pretty easy to set up an experiment inside a Faraday cage and verify that those recorders no longer capture EVP, right? Has anyone done that before?
Might also be interesting to do EVP tests very near a device broadcasting in the AM spectrum, also listening in on a radio, so you know exactly what's being said and can tell if the sounds the EVP recorder is picking up are what's being broadcast.
I know a guy who plays the lottery and is otherwise quite smart. I asked him why and he said that $1/week is a very cheap price to get his mind daydreaming about what he'd do with the money. He's not stupid or gullible, he just likes to get his juices going.:)
I include myself in that category. I can do the math, I accept that I'm throwing away my dollar, but it's fewer calories than junk food and just insignificant in my weekly budget. The entertainment is worth it. Also, I have a step-uncle who actually won a major powerball a few years back, which forever taints my knowledge with a bit of "maybe it really could happen" wishful thinking.
Yeah, that's what gets me, too. I've got family and close friends who swear by their experiences, and who I'm 100% sure they're being honest about what they *think* they experienced. Sure, I could just dismiss them as delusional, but I'm not quite that hard-hearted, and the total sum of experiences relayed would amount to a huge pile of delusions from people who don't seem to have that many non-ghost delusions in other aspects of their lives.
I also know people who are downright nutty, and people who like to make stuff up, and I treat both categories with significantly more skepticism.
Part of the issue for me, though, is I've never had that many weird or inexplicable things happen to me, personally. One television used to turn itself on occasionally (a little disconcerting when you're sleeping in the room at the time) but I'd be inclined to blame old electronics or a cranky remote before deciding a ghost was a factor.
In your shoes I'd totally set up a night-vision camera to watch your bookshelves, though. Whether it's a sleepwalker or unseen forces (or just you being tired and forgetful at the end of the night), it'd be a fun revelation to see how the book got on the floor.
I think you may have just sold me on trying this game. I've stayed away from many other MMOs because real-world time is a huge barrier for me (and also because I can't stomach monthly fees, though part of that comes back to feeling like I need to play to get my money's worth). But this sounds like something I can enjoy casually, or in depth, as time is available and the mood strikes.
Drifting offtopic, but a friend got mad at me when I called her a belligerent drunk, because she thought I was calling her dumb, rather than argumentative. Even when the real definition was given to her, she maintained that I was at fault for using a word she thought meant something else. While this story demonstrates that she's both argumentative AND dumb, I was only trying to say one of those two to her face.
I remember hearing stories about someone who started putting a teensy little dot on the sleeve of any bad Netflix discs, because he was convinced they were just sending him the same ones he'd just returned, and indeed sometimes they were.
Meanwhile I struggle repeatedly with "brilliant" adults who want to join some forums I run, understandably don't want to put in their real birthday, but then decide picking a sub-13 fake age is the way to go. At which point the account is locked, they yell at me, and I've got to go clean up so they can re-register and keep their preferred user name.
I feel your pain. I used to live in Chicago, and regularly joked that "the airplanes are really bright tonight" because that was often the only thing you could see.
Luckily I now live 10 minutes outside of a small mountain town. The trees and mountains limit what I can see around the horizon, but overhead I can pick out the milky way, even if a couple of neighbors in my cul-de-sac leave their front lights on.
Yep, that's pretty much what I keep thinking. Let Google scan all the books they want and negotiate this deal, but require that any other print-on-demand shop or would-be publisher have access to the files. Then it's not a Google monopoly, Google's just doing the groundwork for the entire industry.
And yeah, tracking down copyright holders for older works may be difficult now, but if we establish a better communication system, it'd be a minimal problem going forward. I get pinged once a year to affirm that my domain registration information is correct. That's not necessarily a perfect system, but it's a workable enough framework. Authors who want to maintain their rights needing to check in once every 5 years just isn't a hardship. Furthermore, if this same system allowed Google and other publishers to automatically collect and transfer royalties to the copyright holders (I'm assuming in-copyright but currently out-of-print books here) that's basically a win for everyone involved.
I keep thinking this every single time this issue comes up, and I can't tell if I'm simply missing something really obvious, or if the entire rest of the world is just so wrapped up fussing about Google in specific that they can't see this obvious solution that'd work just great for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you live in a moderately large metropolitan area, of course.
would have been funnier if your correction was "ever hear of fare youse"
And yet, if you let strangers borrow a screwdriver, a cup of sugar, your lawnmower, a paintbrush, a book, a pencil, or any of a million other things, there's absolutely zero chance that you'll ever have any problems at all (other than maybe getting the item back, or the lawnmower being out of gas when you next want to use it). Selectively picking 1) a weapon, and 2) an extremely expensive licensed item, and 3) a dwelling that you pay a deposit on as examples is going to skew expectations. You'd need to demonstrate that it's common sense for someone to equate wireless with any of those things, rather than with a common tool, or a basic utility like electric or water, except for most people it's not even metered like electric and water are.
So true. Ten minutes before an article is being published, it's in the hands of the last line of defense, getting the final copy edit or fact checking. Is it crazy that a fact checker would google for and visit some sites that might corroborate the things being claimed in an article? Doesn't seem weird to me. If I'm researching stuff, I'll often check multiple sources. This should not be construed to mean that the last page I visited is the sole source of all of my materials.
On the other hand I haven't been in journalism in a few decades, and with budget crunches I also thought they'd thrown out most of the copy editors and fact checkers along with anyone else, so it's impossible to say for sure. Still, a page hit on one site is not proof that the site was the sole source of information.
I was wondering if that was a 640k joke, but then I thought I was being crazy and didn't want to ask.
Parts per million? Pages per minute? Parachutes per metronome?
Well, yeah, that'd be a problem. But 1) it's a game, so I've got almost zero sensitive data. Real name and email address is as sensitive as it gets. 2) I keep even that small bit of data out of the development server where anyone else might have access to it.
The only way the pension funds work is if you're in the middle-to-upper class (>$250,000/year income) and can contribute easily a good $1000/month into your own managed investment funds.
If you make $100k/year and contribute 12% (aggressive, but not unheard-of; my financial guy argues for 15%) that's $1k per month.
$1k per month on a salary of $250k isn't even putting 5% toward your salary, which is a pitiful percentage for investment.
Also, postponing your retirement one year is not always possible, for a lot of reasons. You may not be able to work for one thing, due to health reasons, in old age. And sometimes the recovery may take more than one year. It actually took about two years for the market to recover from the lows in march 2009.
You can also have health issues that keep you from working when you're much younger than retirement age. Adding them into the mix muddies the picture. For most people, if they're working this year, they can work an extra year (or two, as you rightly point out) until things bounce back.
Like the guy you cite, I do also work two jobs, and it eats up a lot of time. The first pays well and is moderately enjoyable, but admittedly feels like work. The second, though, is a dream job building a computer game, and the most fun I can think of doing anything for money. It may eat up a lot of evenings and weekends, but at least I won't ever regret the time spent working on it.
Claiming that, having taught yourself, you are now a great programmer and don't need a university degree is generally a sign that you probably do need that degree, you are being too arrogant to actually be as clever as you think you are.*
I definitely agree there's fantastic value in receiving balanced and thorough instruction from outside sources, simply because they know about things you don't know you need to learn. I'm not entirely convinced a degree itself is essential--a lot of the CS classes at my school were more theoretical and may not have actually geared one to be a better programmer, per se. But I can't tell you how many times I've struggled with something only to have someone suggest "why don't you use X?" where X is something I've simply never heard of, or didn't know how it applied to my situation.
As an example, a web site I run was struggling with slow page loads and lots of lag. An experienced coder was helping me troubleshoot, realized I didn't have proper indexing on some key database tables, and in minutes we transformed the site from slow and cranky to blazing fast. The worst page (not triggered often, but very intensive) would take upwards of a couple of minutes to run in some cases, and now never takes more than 5 seconds. All other pages went from being laggy to loading basically instantaneously. All of that by having a blind spot pointed out to me.
My game a web-based RPG programmed in PHP, and started out mostly as a solo project. I'm pretty conscious of security, because I have to be to keep people from exploiting the game. But I regularly rely on good-natured testing from the players to identify functionality problems and security holes, and I definitely reward those who discover and report flaws. Some have done some coding for me, others just get an early shot at testing and trying to break new code before it goes live.
I can't say that the hackers are definitively better coders, but it does seem pretty clear those who can manage to exploit vulnerabilities in my custom code tend to be able to understand programming well enough to know what to try and how things might break.
In my case it also means the hacker is interested enough in my game to be interested in exploring it and trying to improve it, and both of those are key reasons to recruit the hacker as a tester or adviser, too.
And every time you find something you lost, it's always in the last place you look. It's not weird, it's just how it works.
Excellent story, and good sleuthing! I know my wife and I have had weird moments where, say, the TV was off but the stereo was accidentally left on, and mystery sounds were occasionally coming out. I've also tracked down mystery sounds that turned out to be my iPod headphones, where I'd accidentally bumped it and caused it to play. And in another case I think I had headphones plugged into my computer but didn't know it, didn't realize I'd visited a web site with background noise, and was a bit weirded out by the faint noises leaking out several feet away from me. Never had noise coming out of turned-off speakers, though. That's a good one.
Was that shadowlands post below supposed to be your stories? I'd be entertained to hear about the experiences from someone who at least claims to want to have science applied.
Might also be interesting to do EVP tests very near a device broadcasting in the AM spectrum, also listening in on a radio, so you know exactly what's being said and can tell if the sounds the EVP recorder is picking up are what's being broadcast.
I know a guy who plays the lottery and is otherwise quite smart. I asked him why and he said that $1/week is a very cheap price to get his mind daydreaming about what he'd do with the money. He's not stupid or gullible, he just likes to get his juices going. :)
I include myself in that category. I can do the math, I accept that I'm throwing away my dollar, but it's fewer calories than junk food and just insignificant in my weekly budget. The entertainment is worth it. Also, I have a step-uncle who actually won a major powerball a few years back, which forever taints my knowledge with a bit of "maybe it really could happen" wishful thinking.
I also know people who are downright nutty, and people who like to make stuff up, and I treat both categories with significantly more skepticism.
Part of the issue for me, though, is I've never had that many weird or inexplicable things happen to me, personally. One television used to turn itself on occasionally (a little disconcerting when you're sleeping in the room at the time) but I'd be inclined to blame old electronics or a cranky remote before deciding a ghost was a factor.
In your shoes I'd totally set up a night-vision camera to watch your bookshelves, though. Whether it's a sleepwalker or unseen forces (or just you being tired and forgetful at the end of the night), it'd be a fun revelation to see how the book got on the floor.
I think you may have just sold me on trying this game. I've stayed away from many other MMOs because real-world time is a huge barrier for me (and also because I can't stomach monthly fees, though part of that comes back to feeling like I need to play to get my money's worth). But this sounds like something I can enjoy casually, or in depth, as time is available and the mood strikes.
Drifting offtopic, but a friend got mad at me when I called her a belligerent drunk, because she thought I was calling her dumb, rather than argumentative. Even when the real definition was given to her, she maintained that I was at fault for using a word she thought meant something else. While this story demonstrates that she's both argumentative AND dumb, I was only trying to say one of those two to her face.
I remember hearing stories about someone who started putting a teensy little dot on the sleeve of any bad Netflix discs, because he was convinced they were just sending him the same ones he'd just returned, and indeed sometimes they were.
The asshats wanted $30 for a DVI cable and $15 for a USB cable.
Standard rates at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and expensive local computer stores, I'd say. Absolute ripoff, of course, but not shocking.
Meanwhile I struggle repeatedly with "brilliant" adults who want to join some forums I run, understandably don't want to put in their real birthday, but then decide picking a sub-13 fake age is the way to go. At which point the account is locked, they yell at me, and I've got to go clean up so they can re-register and keep their preferred user name.
Luckily I now live 10 minutes outside of a small mountain town. The trees and mountains limit what I can see around the horizon, but overhead I can pick out the milky way, even if a couple of neighbors in my cul-de-sac leave their front lights on.
And yeah, tracking down copyright holders for older works may be difficult now, but if we establish a better communication system, it'd be a minimal problem going forward. I get pinged once a year to affirm that my domain registration information is correct. That's not necessarily a perfect system, but it's a workable enough framework. Authors who want to maintain their rights needing to check in once every 5 years just isn't a hardship. Furthermore, if this same system allowed Google and other publishers to automatically collect and transfer royalties to the copyright holders (I'm assuming in-copyright but currently out-of-print books here) that's basically a win for everyone involved.
I keep thinking this every single time this issue comes up, and I can't tell if I'm simply missing something really obvious, or if the entire rest of the world is just so wrapped up fussing about Google in specific that they can't see this obvious solution that'd work just great for everyone.