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User: peter303

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  1. early cars lacked steering wheel on Google Unveils Self-Driving Car With No Steering Wheel · · Score: 1

    They used a "tiller" the first couple decades, like a rudder on a boat.

  2. Minksy said this in 1969 on The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net · · Score: 3, Informative

    NN technology is 60 years old. Some A.I. pundts disliked in the beginning such as Minsky in his 1969 book Perceptrons. Many of these flaws have been LONG known.

  3. HFT places use microwaves or fiber for this reason on Grace Hopper, UNIVAC, and the First Programming Language · · Score: 1

    They are 2x - 3x faster than copper signals. Those millisconds add up in financial trading.

  4. "computer" mean person before 1948 on Grace Hopper, UNIVAC, and the First Programming Language · · Score: 1

    Insurance companies and some science labs used clerks to make long calculations. The majority were woman. The "electronic computer" was a futuristic machine to emulate such people.

  5. whole China & India are like that on You've Got Male: Amazon's Growth Impacting Seattle Dating Scene · · Score: 1

    At least a 15% imbalance for 30 and younger after better family planning technology came along. I've heard of unrest in some of China's factories by bored young men. I dont know about India.

  6. 20-somethings dont worry about ageism on US College Students Still Aren't All That Interested In Computer Science · · Score: 2

    Being 40 is so far off! If you are retraiinng for anew career in 30s you may consider skipping professional baseball and IT.

  7. Zuckerberg has to fire himself! on US College Students Still Aren't All That Interested In Computer Science · · Score: 1

    he turned 30 yesterday

  8. water is a decent shield on Interviews: Ask Former Director of JPL Edward Stone About Space Exploration · · Score: 1

    You'd store the ships water in a clyndrical wall whihc would become the "safe room" during a storm.

  9. over 20 orbits around galazy since formation on Astronomers Identify the Sun's Long-Lost Sister · · Score: 2

    Of Sun, Earth and sister stars. They may have been separated somewhat in that time. One revolution = 1/4 billion years.

  10. tech giant Oracle wote Oregon health care site on How Dumb Policies Scare Tech Giants Away From Federal Projects · · Score: 1

    And it still isnt working 8 months after due date.

  11. no ribosomes to translate into protein on Scientists Create Bacteria With Expanded DNA Code · · Score: 2

    This would be most inert DNA.

  12. 7%, but below national ave 29% on Stanford Getting Rid of $18 Billion Endowment of Coal Stock · · Score: 1

    Chart here . 50% if you include other carbon.

  13. Re:$18.7 billion?! on Stanford Getting Rid of $18 Billion Endowment of Coal Stock · · Score: 1

    A charity trust is requre to spend 5% of its assets each year. With good investing and continuous donations, this should be perpetual. No one would "run out in 40 years" under these conditions

  14. plus they call every 3 months for more! on Stanford Getting Rid of $18 Billion Endowment of Coal Stock · · Score: 1

    Perils of being a Stanford grad!

  15. Outer Limits: create universe in lab on Astrophysicists Build Realistic Virtual Universe · · Score: 1

    But it runs thousands of times faster than ours. Eventually they evolve intellignece, discover our universe, and break into it.

  16. valued almost $1M per car sold on Tesla Logged $713 Million In Revenue In Q1 and Built 7,535 Cars · · Score: 1

    down from last years 1.3M

  17. cyclic economy: will be down cycles on Places Where the Silicon Valley Bubble Could Pop · · Score: 1

    Even Silicon Valley has had some in past. Teh dot.com/9-11 downturn vacated lots of SoMA property. A dozen years before that th post cold-war demilitarization and dud products like A.I. and pen-OS slowed the market. If you could time the next downturn you'd be rich. All we can say is it will happen again.

  18. I didnt feel normal until attending MIT on What It's Like To Be the Scientific Consultant For The Big Bang Theory · · Score: 1

    Then I was average there. And my intellectual hobbies were accepted.
    I am still a nerd. I'll attend a scifi convention this weekend and science festivals tthis year.

  19. less lively social life in real life on What It's Like To Be the Scientific Consultant For The Big Bang Theory · · Score: 1

    75% of the guys in show have steady girlfriends and love lives. Certainly was not that high when I was at MIT.

  20. 2nd most stupid Bush failure ending shuttle early on US Should Use Trampolines To Get Astronauts To the ISS Suggests Russian Official · · Score: 0

    The shuttle program could have kept going until the US has developed a replacement, now figured to be around 2020. (I double the time estimates of big engineering programs.) Most of the shuttles were only into 1/3 of their 100-flight rated lifetimes.

  21. is "coding" for trade schools? on Coding Bootcamps Already 1/8th the Size of CS Undergraduates · · Score: 1

    Back in 1970s thereabouts computer programming was mainly considered trade school training. MIT resisted offering it as a major or even practical courses.

  22. remember the dreaded "ABEND dump"? on One-a-Day-Compiles: Good Enough For Government Work In 1983 · · Score: 1

    Sometimes your printout came back a hundred pages thick when you were expecting ten. IBM computers would print the contents of all registers and core memory when "ABnormal END" occurred. You could sometimes diagnose your problem from this. I think you bypass this with a proper JCL/DDL command.

  23. maybe 4 hour turnaround at MIT early 70s on One-a-Day-Compiles: Good Enough For Government Work In 1983 · · Score: 1

    You keypunched, submitted, and picked up yourself. Rates were like 1/3 during night hours, so you got more bang for your buck working overnight. They'd give you like $500 funny money for class homeowrk or a research project. This might be 2 day hours or 6 night hours. A compile and small test run might consume five computer minutes. The final project runs would use most of the time.

    We got a lab mini-computer with CRT terminals around 1976 and ended this pain.

  24. we got terminals in 1975 on One-a-Day-Compiles: Good Enough For Government Work In 1983 · · Score: 1

    You needed enough "cheap" memory to hold 5x7 raster character set in permanent memory (ROM). That would be five bytes per printing character or 360 bytes at minimum. Thats three 1K ROM chips. New memory generations started at $50 - $100 per chip, then falling to about $5 once they became commodity. So terminals became "commercial" at about $1000 where a third of that was memory. This would be about $5000 in 2014 prices.

    I remember one of the clever thing about the Apple II three years after that was using spare bits in a byte for storing color imformation. That made graphics programming somewhat contorted.

  25. good story first and foremost on Star Wars: Episode VII Cast Officially Announced · · Score: 1

    I also wait for most comic movies to the dollar theater or Redhat. But sometimes I am pleasantly surpised if there is a creative story. For exmple the Nth remake of superman last year the backstory about Zor having good intentions, but msiguided, was novel.