Short answer: you're right.
Longer answer: you're right, and - our food supply is essentially based on our oil economy (industrialized agriculture, fertilizer...).
So let's talk about oil for a moment:
An optimist might say we (the Human Race) are transitioning from an oil economy to renewables.
A pessimist would say we're moving far too slowly.
What happens if we never get around to replacing oil before it runs out?
What if something (maybe a world war, or plague, or blight, or a financial crisis) upset the economy so that the transition never finishes?
We don't have much easy left to reach oil now; in a MadMax world, who is going to be building new deep-sea drilling platforms? My point is that our oil supply is probably more fragile than most people would care to think about.
Next, I think it is a fair statement that many of today's renewable energy systems are bootstrapped from hydrocarbon based economy (e.g. coal & oil). (citation needed? ok: by bootstrapped, I mean: Manufacturing wind turbines requires steel, concrete and aluminum.... It takes about 9 months of operation before the wind turbine becomes carbon neutral.).
*shrug* It is easy to take oil for granted; just imagine how many trucks & trains are involved in the shipping + mining + fabrication + construction + cement mixing for a single wind turbine? Now imagine doing it with no oil / gas / diesel. So... you're going to haul wind turbine components to construction sites with... what, horses? Your friend's Tesla Roadster? Note: I don't know much about the infrastructure necessary for creating mass-deployable photovoltaics; I suspect you need something fairly industrial-scale to make it viable. "So what about hydro? That's a great renewable." Yes today there are high output hydroelectric facilities, but how do you build those without heavy earth moving equipment + multi-ton turbines & generators? Small-scale hydro electric is swell if you're close to a suitable water drop but... what do you do if the infrastructure to manufacture and ship you a generator isn't there anymore? (Yeah you could go hack on some car alternators or something like that, but you're not going to be running a city off that any time soon.)
The story was set in future Thailand. Thailand's "calorie economy" was implied to be more prosperous than the rest of the planet in that they had enough wealth (food) to sustain a fairly large population. About your point of food being scarce, yeah - I think that was true. Which means it would really suck to be on the low-end of the economic food chain.
An implication in the story was that the "corporate superpowers" rose to power by causing a food-based economic collapse by introducing a blight in an effort to corner the market. How many psychopathic MBA's do you suppose are dreaming of a business plan like this:
1) Addict planet to 2 or 3 monoculture crops
2) Covertly release your new Super Blight that kills those crops
3) Wait for hilarity to ensue (e.g. famine, war).
4) Offer to "Save the Day" with Super Blight Resistant crops.
5) Profit!
Now revise the plan to "Say 'Oh Snap!' when Super Blight mutates and kills your "resistant" crops, ruining your business model."
It seemed that there was an evolutionary arms race between blight & crops; one of the main characters was trying to negotiate with the government to gain access to the country's "gene rights" to find new strains of plants....
Having said all that, "Windup Girl" was an interesting read.:-)
Great book; ntl;eri (not too long; enjoyed reading it).
r.e. solar: I got the impression they 1) didn't have the infrastructure to make new solar or electric things, and 2) famine was the new normal, actually eating was a challenge. Very very interesting social modeling; the book author put a Lot of thought into crafting this world.
As for a the "Reviews of two+ year old books suxorz" *shrug* 1) it is still a good book today, and 2) some geeks might enjoy reading it. (unless this is a dup and Windup Girl has already been reviewed on/. but that is a dup issue, not a "two years too late" issue).
p.s. Thanks you to Samzenpus for taking the time to write a nice, well thought out review.
I loved Galaxy Quest [Trying to explain TV to the Thermians]
Gwen DeMarco: They're not ALL "historical documents." Surely, you don't think Gilligan's Island is a...
[All the Thermians moan in despair]
Mathesar: Those poor people.
So it would help to know what your new job is. Blue-sky research? Existing install base (aka maintenance)? New product development?
How about target space: mobile? embedded? cloudy? big data?
(Tool sets & technology stacks don't matter so much, you'll find those are the easiest part to wrap your head around.)
In any event, congratulations & good luck!
Relax, you can use your retro display tech for years to come:
r.e. VGA displays? knock yourself out: HDMI to VGA converter DVI displays? knock yourself out: HDMI to DVI adapter
So does this phase-out mean I won't be able to use the 4 VGA CRTs and 1 DVI LCD I have accumulated over the years?
As for keeping CRT's around, I realize the better CRT's can have sweet color depth, nice refresh rates and are just swell when it comes to different resolutions. But I was happy to give away my heavy-ass large 21" CRT's to my friends and get a BIG chunk of my desktop back (this was about 10 years ago for me; I realize you're not there yet).
Anyway, with converters you can keep your CRT's going for a long time. Enjoy.:-)
What a waste of perfectly functional equipment.
There will be a market "of sorts" for this "functional equipment". But there is a reason we are seeing CRT monitors and televisions left out in the alley by the garbage cans.
At what point does it become unprofitable to sell them via ebay? (hint: if ship_cost > avg_sale_price then dumpster_time )
Looking ahead, how many DVI and VGA connectors will we see on tablets or ultrabooks (or smart phones for that matter); those ports are huge compared to mini-HDMI. Maybe you aren't part of the tablet/ultrabook/smartphone market. *shrug* Many people are.
(Looking somewhat further ahead, people will be asking why HDMI is going away in favor of direct retinal projection... anyway.)
But hey, if you want to talk about "wasting" perfectly functional equipment, let's talk about these:
DEC Writer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100use one of these and you get a CRT:-)
Plotter Telegraph Key Bonus points for extra retro.:-)
Sure, somewhere on our planet, today, there are some people who use each of these things.
Just not most people.
Just like in 2022, you'll be one of a handful of CRT enthusiasts. *shrug* That is cool and all.
But asking "why waste perfectly good equipment?" That is like asking "why did our species move from stone-age to the bronze-age?"
*sigh* Somewhere, thousands of years ago, Ogg was asking "Why you waste such good rocks?!"
(So why was this "+5 Duh" parent post modded "+5 Informative?")
They're using 5v over micro usb. Model-A's 300mA works out to 0.3A*5V = 1.5 watts. Model-B's 700mA is 0.7A*5V=3.5 watts. (I'd go with Model B just to double the ram (256MB) + ethernet.)
While the gp will have to account for the efficiency of their power supply as well, I'm pretty impressed w/the rPi. It looks really cool. Here is a nice nice overview, the power-suppy section links to the parent's "archives/260" reference.
From http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/260Model B owners using networking and high-current USB peripherals will require a supply which can source 700mA (many phone chargers meet this requirement). Model A owners with powered USB devices will be able to get away with a much lower current capacity (300mA feels like a reasonable safety margin).
This great quote puts "terrorisim" into perspective:
Americans have lived through civil war, economic collapse, a surprise military attack on U.S. territory, dictators and world war on two fronts, and, for 50 years, the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Through all these threats, we mostly stayed true to our values and preserved our freedom. And when we didn’t, it didn’t make us safer and we always came to regret it.
app store Re:A new OS?! This changes everything!
on
FreeDOS 1.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
I have a nice enough color laser printer that only has XP drivers (it's old: hp laserjet 1500L, about $300 new).
The machine will still likely last for years; it is still on the original toner cartridges. I just don't print that much in color.
*shrug*
So I keep an XP machine (a tired old laptop) running, just to print from.
I suppose I could look into printing from a virtual machine; I probably will do that some day.
And I probably will not be buying anything form HP - I'm more than a little upset that they dropped the support ball.
Maybe some day I'll like HP again, but between dropping driver support and hosing over Pre, and their board of directors' need to out-stupid one another...
*sigh* yeah, it is hard to imagine why I would want to give HP money any time soon.
This is what the HP support site says when I try downloading a driver:
Select operating system:
* Mac OS 9
* Mac OS X
* Microsoft Windows 2000
* Microsoft Windows Server 2003
* Microsoft Windows Vista
* Microsoft Windows Vista (64-bit)
* Microsoft Windows XP
* Microsoft Windows XP x64
My first thought is "Cool! Vista drivers should work on Windows 7..."
But then clicking on Vista (32 or 64 bit) brings up the following:
Sorry, your product is not supported in the Microsoft Windows Vista Operating System.
For more information of upgrade programs and new product information, please go to the HP Trade-In/Trade-Up Website, or HP Shopping.
We are sorry to inform you there will not be any Windows Vista operating system printer drivers available for your product.
If you are using the new Windows Vista operating system on your PC, consider an upgrade to a newer HP product that will work with Microsoft’s new Vista operating system.
To help you choose a new product upgrade, the following tool will be helpful: http://www.hp.com/support/hho/productreplacement
For more information on HP’s Trade-in-Trade-up program: http://www.hp.com/united-states/tradein/home_flash.html
Click here to see a full list of HP LaserJet and Color LaserJet products that are supported in Windows Vista.
“It could be that a few members of congress are just not tech savvy and don’t understand that it is technically not going to work, at all. So here’s some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down,” he adds.
*sigh*
T Rizk: "Excuse me, Congress? SOPA is ineffective because it has a gaping hole so just forget SOPA, ok?"
Congress: "Oh T Riz! Bless you you for enlightening us! Uh, we won't prosecute you for hacking. Really."
Yeah, then that wiki link goes on to say "The following year, a Jedi was thrown out of a Jobcentre in Southend, Essex, for refusing to remove his hood; he later received an apology."
I don't care what color your light sabre is, that's funny.
An official apology:-)
and a new law in 2010 *excludes* members of the Church of Jediism in the UK from protection against racial discrimination and hatred. wonderful.
Uh, the same wikipedia link says that law didn't pass:
"During the drafting of the UK Racial and Religious Hatred Act, as a tool for debate, an amendment was proposed that excluded Jedi Knights from any protection. The amendment was subsequently withdrawn, the proposer having made his point that defining religious belief in legislation is difficult."
This simply sounds like common sense illuminated by satire. Help me understand why we don't need more of that kind of insight from our career politicians.
Not exclusively an architecture thing. This Simonides guy came up with a systematic way of associating arbitrary facts with spatial memory.
Excerpt: Legend says that Simonides of Ceos was the inventor of the method of loci where large amounts of data can be remembered in order by placing images that represent the data into mental locations or journeys.
The story goes there was a building collapse at a dinner party, killing everyone but Simonides (who had stepped out to receive a messenger). Anyway, the bodies were unidentifiably crushed but Simonides was able to identify the victims based on where they had been sitting.
Interesting in that it uses spatial memory, something humans are pretty good at, to associate arbitrary facts.
(This stuff was cutting edge data management until the renaissance.)
Have you read anything about how stuxnet propagated?
It was "darned hard", as you say, and the attackers pulled it off.
"Air gap" means far less than it used to.
With every passing year, more and more "things" are dependent upon more and more CPU power.
You don't need to own your targets & control them, just denial of service would be enough. (e.g. suppose there was an exploit that could brick every cell phone made in the last 3 years? Or take power grids offline? Or... you know, it really is a long list of vulnerabilities; this interview gives a fair overview of the challenges).
The "hotline" thing seems like cheap insurance; why not go ahead with it?
Mrs Brown said: "We had thousands and thousands [of orders] pouring in. We had to cut it off at 8,500 orders. As soon as we were making, packaging and sending the cakes out we were on to the next order. It was non-stop.
(emphasis added)
Near the end of TFA:
Heather Dickinson, a Groupon spokeswoman, said there was no limit to the number of vouchers that could be sold. She said: “We approach each business with a tailored, individual approach based on the prior history of similar deals.”
So my question is how do I get back the enjoyment I used to have writing code?
Let me answer your question with a question:
What did you used to enjoy about writing code?
Once upon a time, there was something you liked. What was that?
If you're looking for pure enjoyment, find something on google that looks like fun and play with it.
(free link - I found this enjoyable: http://landoflisp.com/)
If you don't like whatever you're trying, *shrug* try something else.
Try going to different user groups and see what they're into; some will be excited about their hobbies - you might catch some of that excitement.
If you're looking for paid work that you enjoy, that is fine - you still have to know what you enjoy.
By the way, you have a clear awareness of some of your weaknesses.
So work on them - maybe you'll never be "good" at interviewing, but what is wrong with getting better?
(pro tip: the best time to work on getting better is before you need to get better; do it while you actually have a job.)
Hire an interview coach; pay them to critique you and give you feedback (and homework!).
Beef up your resume. Volunteer tech time for a charity.
No space-time ripping here. "Synthetic Hawking Radiation" would be a better headline - they're using lasers instead of a black hole, hence "synthetic". They're trying to make temporary Hawking Radiation, e.g. use lasers to push apart spontaneous particle+antiparticle pairs long enough to detect some of those particles before they recombine and vanish.
So really, "Temporary Hawking Radiation" would be more accurate headline than "Synthetic", but not as catchy.:-)
From the fine article:
It is hoped that the ELI lasers will also be able to pull these particles apart -- not to make them "real" (Ã la Hawking radiation) but to keep them around long enough so we can detect their existence.
Math is discovered or invented, depending on who you ask; most agree discovery is part of it, so yeah, "Discoverer of Lisp" works.
The reason "Discoverer of Lisp" works is because Lisp started life as math.
Lisp-The-Language was an accident McCarthy never intended.
How so? McCarthy was refactoring Turing Machine theory.
Then one of McCarthy's student's implemented McCarthy's findings.
This is why it matters (see bolded part).
Catching Up with Math
Suddenly, in a matter of weeks I think, McCarthy found his theoretical exercise transformed into an actual programming language-- and a more powerful one than he had intended.
...
So the short explanation of why this 1950s language [Lisp] is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort.
Excerpt from: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html Emphasis added. See the "Catching Up With Math" section.
The link is a pretty cool read, but for the "tl;dr crowd" - don't even bother, just go back to twitter:-)
For the rest of you, it covers some interesting language differences - worth the read if you have even a casual interest in theory.
I know:-) Mercola goes pretty far off the beaten path sometimes.
What I like about Mercola is he does a good job of explaining his reasoning, which gives me a starting point to learn more. (And I'm pretty skeptical about what I read in general; whenever I need to understand something, I treat most everything as another data point.)
And yeah, I could see him raging against insect repellant. (I can't say that is a good idea or a bad idea; I'd need to do more research. It just isn't something that I've needed to research thus far.)
I know if I get cancer I'm doing exactly what the doctor tells me, but that's also probably why I'm not the head of a multi-billion dollar company either.
The veneer of certainty that conventional doctors present can certainly comforting, but is - in its own way - a kind of reality distortion field.
Be careful about doing exactly what any single doctor tells you - research, be informed, get 2nd opinions, all that time consuming stuff.
For example, I've read about thyroid issues where the plan is to nuke it (literally, with radioactive iodine) to kill off the thyroid tissue. I would save that for like Plan Q, maybe - after plan A, B, C etc... didn't work out.
(if I can believe what they wrote about Jobs delaying treatment, that is simply regrettable wishful thinking - then again, I didn't know that a subset of pancreatic cancer was actually survivable - I thought it was pretty much a fatal, quick and unpleasant end).
Anyway, thankfully I haven't had to deal with cancer issues in my family... but I would research the hell out anything that did turn up.
Slashdot Mirror
I ... once had a science teacher flat out tell us that she ... wasn't going to risk her job just so we could learn
Short answer: you're right.
... It takes about 9 months of operation before the wind turbine becomes carbon neutral.).
:-)
Longer answer: you're right, and - our food supply is essentially based on our oil economy (industrialized agriculture, fertilizer...).
So let's talk about oil for a moment:
An optimist might say we (the Human Race) are transitioning from an oil economy to renewables.
A pessimist would say we're moving far too slowly.
What happens if we never get around to replacing oil before it runs out?
What if something (maybe a world war, or plague, or blight, or a financial crisis) upset the economy so that the transition never finishes?
We don't have much easy left to reach oil now; in a MadMax world, who is going to be building new deep-sea drilling platforms? My point is that our oil supply is probably more fragile than most people would care to think about.
Next, I think it is a fair statement that many of today's renewable energy systems are bootstrapped from hydrocarbon based economy (e.g. coal & oil). (citation needed? ok: by bootstrapped, I mean: Manufacturing wind turbines requires steel, concrete and aluminum.
*shrug* It is easy to take oil for granted; just imagine how many trucks & trains are involved in the shipping + mining + fabrication + construction + cement mixing for a single wind turbine? Now imagine doing it with no oil / gas / diesel. So... you're going to haul wind turbine components to construction sites with... what, horses? Your friend's Tesla Roadster? Note: I don't know much about the infrastructure necessary for creating mass-deployable photovoltaics; I suspect you need something fairly industrial-scale to make it viable.
"So what about hydro? That's a great renewable." Yes today there are high output hydroelectric facilities, but how do you build those without heavy earth moving equipment + multi-ton turbines & generators? Small-scale hydro electric is swell if you're close to a suitable water drop but... what do you do if the infrastructure to manufacture and ship you a generator isn't there anymore? (Yeah you could go hack on some car alternators or something like that, but you're not going to be running a city off that any time soon.)
The story was set in future Thailand. Thailand's "calorie economy" was implied to be more prosperous than the rest of the planet in that they had enough wealth (food) to sustain a fairly large population. About your point of food being scarce, yeah - I think that was true. Which means it would really suck to be on the low-end of the economic food chain.
An implication in the story was that the "corporate superpowers" rose to power by causing a food-based economic collapse by introducing a blight in an effort to corner the market. How many psychopathic MBA's do you suppose are dreaming of a business plan like this:
1) Addict planet to 2 or 3 monoculture crops
2) Covertly release your new Super Blight that kills those crops
3) Wait for hilarity to ensue (e.g. famine, war).
4) Offer to "Save the Day" with Super Blight Resistant crops.
5) Profit!
Now revise the plan to "Say 'Oh Snap!' when Super Blight mutates and kills your "resistant" crops, ruining your business model."
It seemed that there was an evolutionary arms race between blight & crops; one of the main characters was trying to negotiate with the government to gain access to the country's "gene rights" to find new strains of plants....
Having said all that, "Windup Girl" was an interesting read.
Great book; ntl;eri (not too long; enjoyed reading it). /. but that is a dup issue, not a "two years too late" issue).
r.e. solar: I got the impression they 1) didn't have the infrastructure to make new solar or electric things, and 2) famine was the new normal, actually eating was a challenge. Very very interesting social modeling; the book author put a Lot of thought into crafting this world.
As for a the "Reviews of two+ year old books suxorz" *shrug* 1) it is still a good book today, and 2) some geeks might enjoy reading it. (unless this is a dup and Windup Girl has already been reviewed on
p.s. Thanks you to Samzenpus for taking the time to write a nice, well thought out review.
I loved Galaxy Quest
[Trying to explain TV to the Thermians]
Gwen DeMarco: They're not ALL "historical documents." Surely, you don't think Gilligan's Island is a...
[All the Thermians moan in despair]
Mathesar: Those poor people.
So it would help to know what your new job is. Blue-sky research? Existing install base (aka maintenance)? New product development?
How about target space: mobile? embedded? cloudy? big data?
(Tool sets & technology stacks don't matter so much, you'll find those are the easiest part to wrap your head around.)
In any event, congratulations & good luck!
r.e. VGA displays? knock yourself out: HDMI to VGA converter
DVI displays? knock yourself out: HDMI to DVI adapter
So does this phase-out mean I won't be able to use the 4 VGA CRTs and 1 DVI LCD I have accumulated over the years?
As for keeping CRT's around, I realize the better CRT's can have sweet color depth, nice refresh rates and are just swell when it comes to different resolutions. But I was happy to give away my heavy-ass large 21" CRT's to my friends and get a BIG chunk of my desktop back (this was about 10 years ago for me; I realize you're not there yet). :-)
Anyway, with converters you can keep your CRT's going for a long time. Enjoy.
What a waste of perfectly functional equipment.
There will be a market "of sorts" for this "functional equipment". But there is a reason we are seeing CRT monitors and televisions left out in the alley by the garbage cans.
:-)
:-)
At what point does it become unprofitable to sell them via ebay? (hint: if ship_cost > avg_sale_price then dumpster_time )
Looking ahead, how many DVI and VGA connectors will we see on tablets or ultrabooks (or smart phones for that matter); those ports are huge compared to mini-HDMI. Maybe you aren't part of the tablet/ultrabook/smartphone market. *shrug* Many people are.
(Looking somewhat further ahead, people will be asking why HDMI is going away in favor of direct retinal projection... anyway.)
But hey, if you want to talk about "wasting" perfectly functional equipment, let's talk about these:
DEC Writer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100use one of these and you get a CRT
Plotter
Telegraph Key Bonus points for extra retro.
Sure, somewhere on our planet, today, there are some people who use each of these things.
Just not most people.
Just like in 2022, you'll be one of a handful of CRT enthusiasts. *shrug* That is cool and all.
But asking "why waste perfectly good equipment?" That is like asking "why did our species move from stone-age to the bronze-age?"
*sigh* Somewhere, thousands of years ago, Ogg was asking "Why you waste such good rocks?!"
(So why was this "+5 Duh" parent post modded "+5 Informative?")
It would look kind of like this: Vampire Hunter D.
Just take a gun with you. Seriously, I'm not kidding - Packing & the Friendly Skies (Why Transporting Firearms May Be The Best Way To Safeguard Your Tech When You Fly) by Deviant Ollam (content starts at 0:41). This looks like the best way to fly with things you don't want the TSA to mess with.
While the gp will have to account for the efficiency of their power supply as well, I'm pretty impressed w/the rPi. It looks really cool. Here is a nice nice overview, the power-suppy section links to the parent's "archives/260" reference.
From http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/260 Model B owners using networking and high-current USB peripherals will require a supply which can source 700mA (many phone chargers meet this requirement). Model A owners with powered USB devices will be able to get away with a much lower current capacity (300mA feels like a reasonable safety margin).
Americans have lived through civil war, economic collapse, a surprise military attack on U.S. territory, dictators and world war on two fronts, and, for 50 years, the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Through all these threats, we mostly stayed true to our values and preserved our freedom. And when we didn’t, it didn’t make us safer and we always came to regret it.
Does it have an app store?
The machine will still likely last for years; it is still on the original toner cartridges. I just don't print that much in color.
*shrug*
So I keep an XP machine (a tired old laptop) running, just to print from.
I suppose I could look into printing from a virtual machine; I probably will do that some day.
And I probably will not be buying anything form HP - I'm more than a little upset that they dropped the support ball.
Maybe some day I'll like HP again, but between dropping driver support and hosing over Pre, and their board of directors' need to out-stupid one another...
*sigh* yeah, it is hard to imagine why I would want to give HP money any time soon.
This is what the HP support site says when I try downloading a driver:
Select operating system:
* Mac OS 9
* Mac OS X
* Microsoft Windows 2000
* Microsoft Windows Server 2003
* Microsoft Windows Vista
* Microsoft Windows Vista (64-bit)
* Microsoft Windows XP
* Microsoft Windows XP x64
My first thought is "Cool! Vista drivers should work on Windows 7..."
But then clicking on Vista (32 or 64 bit) brings up the following:
Sorry, your product is not supported in the Microsoft Windows Vista Operating System. For more information of upgrade programs and new product information, please go to the HP Trade-In/Trade-Up Website, or HP Shopping. We are sorry to inform you there will not be any Windows Vista operating system printer drivers available for your product. If you are using the new Windows Vista operating system on your PC, consider an upgrade to a newer HP product that will work with Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. To help you choose a new product upgrade, the following tool will be helpful: http://www.hp.com/support/hho/productreplacement For more information on HP’s Trade-in-Trade-up program: http://www.hp.com/united-states/tradein/home_flash.html Click here to see a full list of HP LaserJet and Color LaserJet products that are supported in Windows Vista.
Thank you, HP.
"Ah, so THIS will be the year of the exoskeleton on the desktop then!" :-)
Fixed that for ya
“It could be that a few members of congress are just not tech savvy and don’t understand that it is technically not going to work, at all. So here’s some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down,” he adds.
*sigh*
T Rizk: "Excuse me, Congress? SOPA is ineffective because it has a gaping hole so just forget SOPA, ok?"
Congress: "Oh T Riz! Bless you you for enlightening us! Uh, we won't prosecute you for hacking. Really."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jediism#Reaction - wonderful. a jedi knight gets thrown out of a job centre for not removing his hoodie.
Yeah, then that wiki link goes on to say "The following year, a Jedi was thrown out of a Jobcentre in Southend, Essex, for refusing to remove his hood; he later received an apology." :-)
I don't care what color your light sabre is, that's funny. An official apology
and a new law in 2010 *excludes* members of the Church of Jediism in the UK from protection against racial discrimination and hatred. wonderful.
Uh, the same wikipedia link says that law didn't pass: "During the drafting of the UK Racial and Religious Hatred Act, as a tool for debate, an amendment was proposed that excluded Jedi Knights from any protection. The amendment was subsequently withdrawn, the proposer having made his point that defining religious belief in legislation is difficult."
This simply sounds like common sense illuminated by satire. Help me understand why we don't need more of that kind of insight from our career politicians.
Excerpt: Legend says that Simonides of Ceos was the inventor of the method of loci where large amounts of data can be remembered in order by placing images that represent the data into mental locations or journeys.
The story goes there was a building collapse at a dinner party, killing everyone but Simonides (who had stepped out to receive a messenger). Anyway, the bodies were unidentifiably crushed but Simonides was able to identify the victims based on where they had been sitting.
Interesting in that it uses spatial memory, something humans are pretty good at, to associate arbitrary facts. (This stuff was cutting edge data management until the renaissance.)
Have you read anything about how stuxnet propagated?
It was "darned hard", as you say, and the attackers pulled it off.
"Air gap" means far less than it used to.
With every passing year, more and more "things" are dependent upon more and more CPU power.
You don't need to own your targets & control them, just denial of service would be enough. (e.g. suppose there was an exploit that could brick every cell phone made in the last 3 years? Or take power grids offline? Or... you know, it really is a long list of vulnerabilities; this interview gives a fair overview of the challenges).
The "hotline" thing seems like cheap insurance; why not go ahead with it?
Mrs Brown said: "We had thousands and thousands [of orders] pouring in. We had to cut it off at 8,500 orders. As soon as we were making, packaging and sending the cakes out we were on to the next order. It was non-stop.
(emphasis added) Near the end of TFA:
Heather Dickinson, a Groupon spokeswoman, said there was no limit to the number of vouchers that could be sold. She said: “We approach each business with a tailored, individual approach based on the prior history of similar deals.”
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
DavidTC - nice sig. Along those lines, I thought this was good read: http://www.amazon.com/Unincorporated-Man-Sci-Essential-Books/dp/0765318997
So my question is how do I get back the enjoyment I used to have writing code?
Let me answer your question with a question:
What did you used to enjoy about writing code?
Once upon a time, there was something you liked. What was that?
If you're looking for pure enjoyment, find something on google that looks like fun and play with it.
(free link - I found this enjoyable: http://landoflisp.com/)
If you don't like whatever you're trying, *shrug* try something else.
Try going to different user groups and see what they're into; some will be excited about their hobbies - you might catch some of that excitement.
If you're looking for paid work that you enjoy, that is fine - you still have to know what you enjoy.
By the way, you have a clear awareness of some of your weaknesses.
So work on them - maybe you'll never be "good" at interviewing, but what is wrong with getting better?
(pro tip: the best time to work on getting better is before you need to get better; do it while you actually have a job.)
Hire an interview coach; pay them to critique you and give you feedback (and homework!).
Beef up your resume. Volunteer tech time for a charity.
They're trying to make temporary Hawking Radiation, e.g. use lasers to push apart spontaneous particle+antiparticle pairs long enough to detect some of those particles before they recombine and vanish.
So really, "Temporary Hawking Radiation" would be more accurate headline than "Synthetic", but not as catchy.
From the fine article:
It is hoped that the ELI lasers will also be able to pull these particles apart -- not to make them "real" (Ã la Hawking radiation) but to keep them around long enough so we can detect their existence.
petition for release: couldn't hurt to sign
http://www.change.org/petitions/gaines-center-for-the-arts-john-haught-and-robert-rabel-release-the-october-12th-debate-video-featuring-jerry-coyne-and-john-haught#
The reason "Discoverer of Lisp" works is because Lisp started life as math.
Lisp-The-Language was an accident McCarthy never intended.
How so? McCarthy was refactoring Turing Machine theory.
Then one of McCarthy's student's implemented McCarthy's findings.
This is why it matters (see bolded part).
Catching Up with Math
Suddenly, in a matter of weeks I think, McCarthy found his theoretical exercise transformed into an actual programming language-- and a more powerful one than he had intended.
...
So the short explanation of why this 1950s language [Lisp] is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort.
Excerpt from: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html :-)
Emphasis added. See the "Catching Up With Math" section.
The link is a pretty cool read, but for the "tl;dr crowd" - don't even bother, just go back to twitter
For the rest of you, it covers some interesting language differences - worth the read if you have even a casual interest in theory.
I know :-) Mercola goes pretty far off the beaten path sometimes.
What I like about Mercola is he does a good job of explaining his reasoning, which gives me a starting point to learn more. (And I'm pretty skeptical about what I read in general; whenever I need to understand something, I treat most everything as another data point.)
And yeah, I could see him raging against insect repellant. (I can't say that is a good idea or a bad idea; I'd need to do more research. It just isn't something that I've needed to research thus far.)
I know if I get cancer I'm doing exactly what the doctor tells me, but that's also probably why I'm not the head of a multi-billion dollar company either.
The veneer of certainty that conventional doctors present can certainly comforting, but is - in its own way - a kind of reality distortion field.
Be careful about doing exactly what any single doctor tells you - research, be informed, get 2nd opinions, all that time consuming stuff.
For example, I've read about thyroid issues where the plan is to nuke it (literally, with radioactive iodine) to kill off the thyroid tissue. I would save that for like Plan Q, maybe - after plan A, B, C etc... didn't work out.
(if I can believe what they wrote about Jobs delaying treatment, that is simply regrettable wishful thinking - then again, I didn't know that a subset of pancreatic cancer was actually survivable - I thought it was pretty much a fatal, quick and unpleasant end).
Anyway, thankfully I haven't had to deal with cancer issues in my family... but I would research the hell out anything that did turn up.