If you are getting married soon don't spend money on extremely expensive symbols of your affection. Save your money for real things like children. In these uncertain times when we live on the edge of great change, you should put aside money for emergencies, financial reversals, and unforeseen circumstances.
Blowing a huge sum of money on what is basically a symbolic gesture will seem insane if five years from now you are married, lose your job for some reason that is not your fault, and have a child that develops a medical problem that is not covered by ever-shrinking medical insurance. Marriage is the time when people affirm to their spouses that they will stop doing insane things. If you have the money now for an rare-metal ring, then invest it in conservative Euro-denominated stocks. Give this to your new wife instead. Believe me, she will appreciate it more than an ring that costs five figures now but will only bring four figures in an emergency sale.
Does your collection of gadgets have an absurd number of power connectors? Change them yourself. Standardize on a common standard. This is what I have done both on the commercial doodahs that I've bought and everything that I design and build. My standard is the 2.1mm power connector found on modern guitar effects boxes with the center pin being ground. (I also put bridge rectifiers on my own designs so either pin-positive or pin-ground power adapters can be used in my designs.)
Weirdo power connectors is a manifestation of a brain-dead Marketing-major-mentality that believes that putting a weird power jack on the product will force the customers to buy the overpriced proprietary power supply that has been matched to the product. Unfortunately brain-dead Marketing-majors have more influence than the intelligent tech design staff over the people who have the final say in the product design.
We, the techno-elite, should take the initiative in forcing a productive solution to this problem. We have a long history in setting technical standards. This issue of power adapter connectors has been 'below the radar', but the time has come to impose reality on the brain-dead Marketing-majors.
If you are gadget retailer, then you should offer a service to replace the weirdo connectors with a standard design and demand that the manufacturer continue to warranty the product. Since there is no chance of that actually happening, consider dropping the manufacturer until they standardize on a power connector and put the inexpensive components into the power-supply front-end that will handle the wide range of power adapters in the marketplace.
Are you out of your mind? By going to the CEO with a quality problem, YOU are the one who is going to be fired when the flaws in the jury-rigged software cause a major problem in the company profits. You tell me that I'm paranoid and crazy. Well, sir, this is the way that American management works. You understand technology; they don't. They understand corporate politics, backstabbing, and manipulation of employees for their own gain. You don't. The fact that you went for a one-on-one with CEO proves this.
The only time that a mid-level technical employee goes for a one-on-one with the CEO is when you are setting up a fellow employee to get fired over a problem that you caused. It's a classic 'cover-your-ass and make someone else take the blame' type of situation. Which, if the situation really is what you say in your company, is not far in the future. By going to the CEO and discussing the situation, the CEO is going to assume that YOU caused it and are doing a preemptive bid to pass the blame on someone else. When the major problem does occur as a result of the unstructured software, the CEO is going to agree with all the other people in your group who are going to put the blame on you to save their own jobs. And you are the one who is going to be fired!
You should get another job in another company as quickly as possible. And, my friend, never go to management with a problem that has its underlying cause in someone's lack of management ability. It's corporate politics rule #1.
If you know a hack, DON'T TELL anybody! Fool... Really. What's the point of holding a press conference to point out a way for techies to save money? If you have studied for years for skills to design, program, and build a device that can defeat the automatic removal of money from your bank account, then for goodness sake's, don't tell anybody. Use this knowledge discretely for the benefit for your family and your people.
Spend the money that you save on your children. Or have some children if you don't have any. Or give it to your favorite charity. Or help someone that you know that is hurting in these bad times. Or put the money that you save under the mattress to support your own bad times that may come in the future.
No one in a giant corporation is going to give you anything for pointing out security flaws that allow people in the tech community to save money. They are going to take the money that you save them and bribe politicians to give them massive tax breaks! Don't you pay attention to the news? All giant corporations are corrupt to their very core. If you find a way to keep them from taking your money, well don't tell them.
There wouldn't be the need for toll roads if the state highway administrations had not been ripping off the funds for the past fifty years. Illinois is the third most corrupt state in the USA (after Rhode Island and Louisiana). Toll highways is only the latest and greatest scam.
Be real. The country is falling apart after forty years of absolute corruption. Take care of yourself and your family first. Then give your money to giant corporations and the super-rich tax-avoiders that control them.
Jeez, am I the only Slashdaughter that realizes that this is not meant to be a 'city in a building' or a theme park or an oasis, it's meant to be a prison.
The Wackenhut of the world. Every country in the world can send their political prisoners, their purse-snatchers, uppity minorities, and urine-test-failers to Dubai. Where, for a small fee, they will be housed in the biggest, meanest, most-escape-proof, hope-for-humanity-crushing, prison that world has ever seen.
And if the payments stop coming from the original country for the prisoner, they just get chucked outside. Naked. To die in the 120 degree F sun! No mess, no fuss, no packed airplanes dumping political prisoners into the South Atlantic Argentina-style!
Hell, Dubai will even pick-up your prisoners in their old surplus Emirate Airlines Boeings! Tell 'em that they're going to Sweden on an Amnesty International 'Flight to Freedom'! Hell, no one will ever know! (Amnesty International workers are sure to be the first 'guests').
Am I the only Slashdaughter with an evil mind? Or more mature, historically-accurate world view?
And why is Dubai building all this architectural bling in the first place?
The real test of whether a design for a 10000-year archive can work would be to find a 10000-year-old archive of a similar design. This is assuming the possibility of an advanced civilization long ago that disappeared for some reason. Books from ancient India talk about advanced technologies that disappeared. Possibly modern people are reading them wrong.
But the earth is several billion years old, and humans about 30-50,000 years old. And a lot can happen in that time. If a disease arose that killed all humans except the mentally retarded, it would have thrown evolution back at least 10000 years.
And if an archive done in an unknown and undecipherable language had been created, we wouldn't know about it.
Newspapers are paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs. This is what is causing their demise. It will soon cost too much to actually schlep all this stupid paper from the printing plant to the houses.
Newspapers traditionally do the following things:
- Inform their readers what is happening in the world.
- Inform what is happening in their city, town, or neighborhood.
- Provide a forum for information private sales and rentals, e.g. the classified ads.
- Provide a network for a common political viewpoints.
- Provide a central source for commercial ads of local retailers.
- Provide an accepted 'source of record' for local events and legal notices; weddings, bankruptcies, public legal notices, etc...
The web does all these things better:
- CNN, BBC, Digg, and Slashdot tell us what is happening in the world.
- CraigsList and eBay provide local ads and private sales information.
- Blog and political websites provide a forum for persons with shared political views.
Newspapers are still good at local city and neighborhood news and ads for local retailers. And the web has nothing for being a 'source of record' for legal notices, and all that stuff. Newspapers have permanence: once something is printed in the local paper it stays printed and accessable. It can't be changed by some cracker like web site info. Newspapers have credibility for that reason.
But their dependence on paper and gasoline to move all this paper makes them irrelevant nowdays. Soon it cost too much to distribute all this paper and newspapers will be gone, like typewriters are now. Ever used a typewriter? They were a real pain in the neck.
I can't believe this. They say that 42% of the people that they asked had used another person's password or account. And the people asked are all internet users.
It is a logical fault to assume from these two statements that 42% of all internet users have used another person's password or account for unethical purposes.
What was the sample audience? Were they all students simply using each other's common passwords to peek into each other's love notes? The article gives that impression and then posts a headline that implies that 42% of ALL INTERNET USERS are dangerous highly-advanced techno-crackers who can and would empty your bank account at any time that they would choose.
Another example of deliberate media exaggeration and fear-mongering over an activity that, when examined, turns out to be a whole lot of nothing. Is Fox News behind this? Or just some schmuck desperate for a story to file?
Crying wolf destroys the perception of journalistic integrity for everyone.
Obama's too smart to be a NASA booster. Yes, NASA's popular. But it is a relic from a distant age. NASA serves today more as a totem of what middle-class people want the society to be rather than what it actually is.
With each story about the coming new age of space exploration that appears on Slashdot, I get this underlying feeling that there is a sharp disconnect from reality at work. The reality is that we are on the edge of a massive involuntary decrease in energy use. And space exploration will be one of the first government programs to be cut as a result.
It's not that space exploration by itself consumes a large amount of energy; it's the vast complex economy that space programs depend on that will be starved for energy. Energy as in oil. Oil that becomes quite expensive as the easy-to-reach light crude is depleted.
As oil becomes increasingly difficult to get out of the ground, everything becomes massively expensive. When food prices triple, gasoline becomes rationed, stock prices tank, and house prices fall by half, people will have to make serious choices on what to buy with the funds that they have left. Space exploration becomes the lowest priority.
Space exploration only appears to be an essential component for the progress of mankind when there is plenty of food, peace, and an economy growing 5-6% a year. When these conditions change, so does the general appeal of space travel. As this appeal goes away; the funding for space disappears. NASA and its programs are more a symbol of a more-prosperous age than a program that delivers real useful solutions to everyday problems. NASA can put a man on the moon, but it can't put gas in his car.
Given this reality, NASA should concentrate only on projects that can be completed with useful results within a short time frame. Certainly no more than five to ten years total. That means no more fantasies about moon bases and Mars manned missions. If NASA commits itself to these long-term hugely-expensive but largely symbolic projects, they will most likely find the funding gone in the middle. With no lasting results to show for all the expense.
Since we are the young technological elite, Slashdot readers should be the vanguard in preparing the general population (and the NASA directors themselves) for this inevitable great change. However we talk and act like over-sugared children. We are at risk of being preceived as completely irrelevant, and incapable of providing technical leadership during the coming transformations.
Slashdot readers to a man believe that technology is going to somehow find a way to transcend the limits imposed from running out of cheap oil. This is not correct. Cheap energy makes technology possible, but technology doesn't make cheap energy possible. When the easy-to-drill oil is gone, technological progress slows to practically nothing. The basic know-how is still available, but there is no investment capital available for the massive projects needed to develop it.
Pure science remains in libaries and labs, but engineering disappears. This is the 21st century reality that is going to be very difficult for current techies to accept. But it is the coming new reality. When the consequences of global warming, oil depletion, and overpopulation become fully manifest in the next ten to twenty years, NASA will disappear faster than the Hummer in the era of $5/gallon gasoline.
With each story about the new age of space exploration that appears on Slashdot, I get this underlying feeling that there is a sharp disconnect from reality at work. Reality is that we are on the edge of a massive change in energy use. A massive decrease in energy use. And space exploration will be one of the first government programs to be cut as a result.
It's not that space exploration by itself consumes a large amount of energy; it's that the vast network of support systems that space programs depend on will be starved for energy. Energy as in oil. Oil that is becoming expensive and will continue to get more so (and not in a linear fashion as we have been seeing). If the oil becomes difficult to get out of the ground, everything becomes massively expensive. Priorities will have to be set:cruel decisions will have to be made. And the space program will be the first to go. When food prices triple,gasoline is rationed, stock prices tank, and house prices fall by half, people have to make choices on what they must buy with the money that they have. Space exploration is the lowest priority.
Space exploration only appears to be an essential component of the progress of mankind when there is plenty of food, peace, and an economy growing 3-6% a year. When these conditions disappear, so does the appeal of space travel.
Given this reality, NASA should concentrate only on projects that can be completed with useful results within a short time frame. Certainly no more than five to ten years total. That means no more fantasies about moon bases and Mars manned missions. If NASA commits itself to these hugely expensive but largely symbolic projects, they will most likely find themselves cut off from funding in the middle of the 20-30 year projects. With no lasting results to show for the expense.
Like the Soviet space program when the USSR collapsed. If the USA didn't bail them out with heavy subsidies, the Russian space program would be nothing more than an embarrassing memory now.
When the consequences of global warming, oil depletion, and overpopulation become fully manifest in the next ten to twenty years, NASA funding will disappear faster than the Hummer in the era of $5/gallon gasoline.
India announced that it added 50,000 new jobs this year.
Good God, I hope so! They have a billion people. They have a new person born every second. If they don't create jobs by the tens of thousands, they will starve.
Est-ce que une personne ne doit pas être à l'aise en français afin d'obtenir un travail depaiement dans la ville du Québec ? Peut-être c'est une condition importante qui ne soit pas mentionné jusqu'aux étapes finales du processus de recrutement. Dans mon expérience en tant que visiteur à la ville du Québec à plusieurs occasions, je ne peux pas imaginer n'importe qui pouvoir y arriver un travail sans maîtrise en français. Particulièrement dans tout secteur qui exige l'interaction avec le gouvernement.
Mon Français est pauvre (c'est une traduction de SysTran.com) au présent. Mais comme je comprends, c'est un secteur 100% de langue française du monde, exigé par loi.
=============== Doesn't a person have to be fluent in French in order to get a good-paying job in Quebec City? Perhaps this is a major requirement that isn't mentioned until the final stages of the recruitment process. In my experience as a visitor to Quebec City on several occasions, I can't imagine anyone being able to get a job there without fluency in French. Especially in any area that requires interaction with the government.
The Achilles' heel of IT industry is the fact that it doesn't scale. There is only room at the top, not the middle or low end of the economic job range for IT workers. The only people who get family-wage paying jobs are 'the best of the best of the best, sir! as you recall from the first Men In Black movie.
Other more mature industries can provide jobs for a wide range of people with aptitudes and and skills. But the IT industry (and to a lesser extent, the electronics industry) can only provide good jobs for the upper 5% of the graduates from good tech schools. This is why the so-called industry leaders can decry the lack of top talent and at the same time lay-off thousands of skilled and experienced mid-level mid-career technicians (software techs like testers and standard code-from-algorithm writers and hardware pot tweekers).
This is a defect in the industry: it doesn't scale. It's a primary reason why young people are not entering the profession in the way that they did twenty years ago.
Don't nit pick me on this. There's a whole book in each of the above paragraphs. But they're basically true.
Now I know that you don't care because if you're on Slashdot, you are the B of the B of the B, sahr! But no matter how good you are, or your ranking in the Grade Point Angel hierarchy, this inability to provide good jobs for a wide-range of workers is beginning to seriously impact the industry.
This isn't such a major issue in a place where people are actually making things for sale, a place that still has a manufacturing sector. Manufacturing by its economic structure provides a wide range of fairly good jobs. In this area you can go from an entry-level 'move things around' low-paying position to a mid-level design and test position with a two-year degree or the same period of study.
But when the IT industry allows all the manufacturing to be relocated to cheap labor countries it destroys its foundation. Information and data processing has little economic value by itself; only in conjunction with other productive industries does it create its economic wealth.
It might be well to sometimes stop thinking like a programmer and to sometimes think like an economist.
You all don't understand... No body is taking laptops to check for terrorist information. They're taking laptops because the laptops are worth $500 to $1000 each.
The forerunner of this law is not the Patriot Act. It's the Drug Asset Forfeiture laws. When you take someone's new car because they got found with 10 cents worth of marijuana in it, well then you (and your uniform) are in the car theft business. The fact that you came up with some principal that gives yourself the legal authority to do it doesn't change the fact that you are using your status as a police officer to become the perfect car thief.
Perfect, because there isn't anything that the 'perp' can do about it. Sooner or later, after 'confiscating' so many new cars and seeing how they get auctioned to very select parties for peanuts, you begin to realize that your calling in life (your ability to generate income to support your family, ect...) is more in focus with your being able to generate a steady stream of very expensive and profitable 'confiscated' (stolen by people in uniform) vehicles than it is with stopping petty crime and filling out endless police reports.
You've crossed the line that sooner or later everyone does when they are afforded the opportunity to get away with a perfect crime (in your case, Grand Theft Auto). You start carrying around a half-smoked ma*iju*na (don't want to trigger the NSA wiretappers here) cigarette to use as justification for 'confiscating' some really sweet car that catches your eye. You're corrupt in a very profitable way, now.
This is the way most of the world works. America used to be one of the exceptions. Now it is not. Things change. Learn to deal with it.
The same thing is happening here with laptops. Many if not most international airline passengers carry them now. The low-paid low-intelligent airport security guards are patrolling for terrorists when they steal your laptop; they are 'trolling for bling'. As in any other theft, it is unlikely that you are ever going to get your property back.
The best way to approach this situation is to carry an extremely cheap laptop when crossing a border. Then use a high-speed connection to download your encrypted files from an international website; where you uploaded them before beginning your trip.
Since the 'authorities' are more interested in the cash fence value that they can get from stealing your laptop, the cheaper the one that you bring across the border is less likely to get stolen by the 'security police'.
I like your current firm's approach. I'm 'classed' as an electronics technician. Which means in nearly all jobs it's almost impossible for me go anywhere near code. But I still do a lot of coding; it just has to be invisible.
I write a lot of small test fixtures with specialized embedded microcontrollers. For these tiny 'systems' to be efficient, they have to be small, cheap, very precise, and quick to program. I still do nearly all of my coding work in Assembler for controllers that cost less than $2. For example, a +5Volt/ground pulse that is exactly 40 seconds long (+/- 5 milliseconds) with a measurement of the time that it takes the voltage across an attached capacitor to fall to exactly +2.2V.
The senior engineer devised this test 25 years ago for final calibration on a piece of medical equipment. According to the old procedure, it takes about ten minutes to set up the equipment and run through the procedure enough times to get an accurate result. But with my Atmel AVR Tiny13 85-cent microcontroller, I get an accurate result within a minute. I've been using this particular design for about a year, but still haven't got the approval to make it an 'offical ISO-approved change in the test procedure'. So I have to do it in secret, and could get fired if management found out that I was using equipment and procedures that didn't exist when Saturday Night Fever was still in the theaters.
I code with lots of comments and paragraphs of text in comment blocks that explain what the code is doing. As much as possible, I want to be able to cut and paste code routines between programs in order to make the development process fast and easy.
I remove all 'magic numbers' from the code. But I don't use THIRTY_SEVEN as a constant for 37. I would use a very brief explanation instead, like FIVE_MILLISECOND_DELAY_VALUE = 37. Personally, I dislike Hungarian notation. It works only for Hungarian genius coders like Charles Simoni who have come to learn about computer programming after mastering a half-dozen languages previously, like Charles Simoni. A word is an actual icon by itself, seperated from the other word-icons by spaces. Putting random characters in front of the word that is the variable name destroys the ability to instantly look at the word-icon and know what it means. If the Hungarian notation prefix is so important, it should be in a different color of text from the actual variable name.
I wish that I had the luxury of hating the C language. I think that it is ugly, and difficult to understand. But it is slowly becoming the standard for microcontroller programming because there are so many individual types of microcontrollers in use. Each with its own assembler instruction set. So all of us 'secret-coder' electronic technician 'potentiometer tweakers' are having to become proficient in it.
All TV characters should have e-mail addresses. It's a no-brainer. It makes it possible for the creators of the characters to know exactly what their fans are like and, more importantly, what the fans want the character to be like.
It keeps the character alive after the TV show expires.
Personally I believe that figures in great paintings should have websites. Who wouldn't want to write to Simonetta Vespucci for advice on romance? The responders should be older employees who have been semi-retired by their companies.
This would be most applicable to Japan, where corporations bought Renaissance paintings for elaborate prices in the 1980s and have been keeping hidden away in vaults since then. They also have older employees that they can't fire but allocate no work for them to do, so they just sit at their desks all day. Young people from all over the world could write e-mails to their favorite art painting characters and have them answered by people who have life experience and wisdom. This would be good for everyone. And it's no more weird than people entering MUDs and Second Life programs as an alternative reality.
This is absurd. Maybe they made a typing mistake and meant to say that petroleum cars would stop being made by Mercedes by 2115.
Change happens slowly, even when it is anticipated and expected. No giant car company is going to stop making petroleum vehicles by 2015, least of all a German company. Some little schmuck (Yiddish: penis; stupid person// German: jewel) in their Press Relations department is talking out of his ass.
This is the most absurd statement to come out of German car company since Daimler announced that they had 'great syzygy' with Chrysler.
Wait.... isn't Mercedes Daimler in disguise? Are these the same bozos as before?
French has the most beautiful women...which is the most important consideration for male programmers. Plus French has the quality that it is the language used for 'diplomacy'. What that means is that when you don't want to acknowledge the inherent humanity of some sub-human barbarian culture that has managed to enter your plane of existence, you speak French to them. And they return the insult by refusing to speak the language of oppressive imperialism to you, and only address you in French. Voilà, instant diplomacy.
Plus French is a serious intellectual challenge to learn, even though half of the words are cognates of English. Due to a historical fluke, every Hollywood DVD sold in the USA has French as one of the alternative languages available at a click away. You will notice if you set the audio language to French and the subtitles to French also, that they are NEVER the same. Every movie is translated in the French twice, by different teams: once for the audio and again for the written subtitles. This is a real pain for language learners. It's only a few French original language movies that have the audio and hearing-impaired subtitles identical. I recommend "La Femme Nikita", the original French version by Luc Bresson, which is one serious kick-ass movie. Avoid the lame Hollywood remakes.
Also French is the main second language of West Africa, in case you come to find the European French insufferable (a definite possibility). And, as you may or may not know, French is the native language of millions of people living on the Northeast border of the USA.
So, when it comes to actually learning a second language for your own use, French is the best option. All the other languages can be translated using advanced inexpensive 32-bit computer technology (language translation is the killer-app of the ARM processor). Or you can reasonably expect the native speakers of these other languages to learn English.
Take note however, that there is an unconscious English tendency to assume that an American speaker of a complex third-world language is really smart. That may be, but there is a parallel tendency to assume that person who has not completely mastered all the arbitrary and bizarre exceptions of the English language is not very bright. Try to avoid this logical asymmetricity, as it is racist in nature. English is seriously difficult to learn: be glad that you don't have to master it as a foreign language.
I must respectfully disagree with the above reply. The magazine is not simply a print-out. It's an intact cultural artifact as a magazine. If not now, then in fifty or 100 years from now.
Are you primarily interested in the text of the magazine articles themselves? Or the images (such as 'Mens magazines' like Club International that are primarily images)? Or are you interested in preserving the balance in the layout between the text, the images, and the adverts?
For text primarily, use a stand for the magazine, and a 10 megapixel digital camera with a small tripod. Optical Character Recognition is the way to go in this situation. But it is hard to get the exact right program for your configuration.
Are these magazines in English or a western European language? OCR is much easier and faster with 100 or so ASCII characters than it is with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. OCR for these languages exists but the programs are expensive if you actually buy them. Personally, I believe that because the Chinese have stolen billions of dollars worth of software from the Americans since the earliest days of computers, the Americans have no moral, ethical, or legal obligation to pay for any software developed and sold by a Chinese company. But, opinions differ on this issue.
Keep the magazines intact. You'll regret cutting them up in the future when a more elegant solution to digitizing them appears that doesn't entail destroying the original materials.
I suggest paying someone $5-$10 US an hour to scan the photos on a 300DPI flatbed scanner. Try an ad on CraigsList for your area. There are a lot of unemployed people with tech skills and no unemployment checks coming in that would appreciate a job like this for a day or two. How many photos would need to be scanned? Several dozen? Several hundred? Several thousand?
Usually adjusting the brightness, contrast, and gamma setting on black/white scan makes the image look good. I recently scanned all the images of my high school yearbook, put it on the web, and received thank yous from former classmates that I hadn't heard from in forty years.
The comment gets to the core of the entire issue. Apple charges 200% more for the same components because their customers want to pay more. In an extremely wealthy society there is always a group of people who have much more money than the norm, and it is very important to these people that they are able to differentiate themselves from the rest of the population through a series of 'class markers'.
These are items that only they buy because they are much more expensive than similar items available for the general population. Yes these items are better quality, but the degree of higher price for better quality is much greater than would be justified by the cost of the components. So the wealthy aren't selecting these brand items solely for better quality. They are doing it to identify themselves to the other members of their class.
There are many companies that have always positioned themselves into this market niche. But Apple is one of the few companies that continues to insist that their excessively high prices are only a direct result of their 'commitment to high quality'. It is ironic that they have been successful at marketing their 'cool factor' by selling commodity components at such a large premium since the entire concept of 'coolness' in the USA is a set of behaviors and lifestyles designed to give dignity to people with little or no money.
The entertainment industry has been most successful at marketing this contradiction. Apple is the first technology company to do so as well. Even to the point of having their business revolve around a prima-donna rock star personality.
I've detected this about Apple ever since the introduction of the Macintosh, when this kind of mentality started at Apple. I recommend watching them for amusement, but don't buy their products even second-hand. Buy clones (for personal stereos) or functional equivalents (for personal computers).
Despite all their grandiose advertisements, Apple has always existed for only one reason: to transfer wealth from the wealthy (who need to have a non-proletariat PC) to Steve Jobs' bank account.
The USA needs reliable and cheap robots. Reliable because they are complicated, expensive, and difficult to fix because there aren't many people who are expert with robotics technology.
Cheap because the USA is shares a border with a country that millions of people who are ready, willing, and able to come here and work for about $40-$50 a 8-10 hour day. Any robot that we buy has to be able to do productive work for eight hours a day and cost less than $50 a day for energy, maintainence, and pro-rated purchase cost. Americans will continue to use Mexicans for robot work as long as it's cheaper to use Mexicans than it is to use robots.
Some things robots must do because it is unethical to induce humans to do them, such as mine-field clearing. Sure you can force some poor black kid with three 'po-session' convictions to go out and dig up mines with a spoon. But it is unethical and quite possibly immoral to do so. Historically, ethics and morality have never stopped people from doing evil things (they contract it out to people who are further down on the social-class ladder). But those days are passing as more people realise that the evil ways of the past can not continue, regardless of how convienent it was.
Oh, you are just such a racist! I hear you saying. Well flip the switch on your politically-correct-conditioning circuitry for a while. Let's drop the labels and talk straight for a few minutes.
Yes, there are millions of poor Mexican peasants in the USA working at a half or third of standard American pay. This is because NAFTA allowed American agri-business like Cargil with huge US government subsidies to flood the Mexican agricultural economy with corn so cheap that the Mexicans couldn't afford to live by growing it. And because NAFTA allowed American bio-industries like Monsanto to replace traditional Mexican corn with patented bio-engineered varieties that the Mexican farmers couldn't afford to buy. People aren't coming here from Mexico because they want to. They come because they have to, or starve. So stop modding me down and calling me a racist. It's a complex subject and the best thing that you could do to help solve it is not stand on the border with a gun, but study and master conversational Spanish (and even one of the pre-Columbian Central Mexican Indian languages (that are spoken by thousands of immigrants who don't speak Spanish very well), that is -if you're up to a serious intellectual challenge, C++ is nothing compared to it) so you can just talk to people and find out what the situation is really like without having it filtered first by the creeps in the news media. Whew! So stop modding me down!
Yeah, back to robots. We can grow a lot of food but a lot rots on the vine or ground. Especially fruit crops here in the Cascadian Republic of the former United States. We need cheap, dependable, solar-powered, and very advanced agricultural robots. Japanese ones are too expensive. Detroit robots are meaningless to us, we have no use for stationary automobile frame welding machines that cost a half-million dollars. We need a machine that can roll along the ground in the field, find the strawberries, pick the strawberries without destroying the mother plant, place the strawberry in a container with others, and move this container to a pre-set centralized location. We need thousands of these machines all working at the harvest. Then when the strawberry harvest is over, we need people who can reprogram them for the next crop.
What it would be ethical for us to do is to retrain all the millions of Mexicans that have been impoverished by misguided government and corporate policies to be our cadre of advanced agricultural robotics technicians and programmers. They know the crops and the harvests and would be willing to learn the software and electronics involved. What? Just turn a million Mexican peasants into robotics engineers? You laugh? Now who a racist?
who believes that the things that we should be pursuing in life are utterly pointless five minute flash-in-the-pan adrenaline events done purely for brief personal entertainment. ...but don't waste billions of dollars of tax-payer funds.
The entertainments you call fitting for adults strike me as juvenile pursuits. I would never seek to make it illegal for you to pursue them, but please clearly understand, I will never accept your claim that these interests make you a more mature adult human being.
Why don't you try them. Believe me there's nothing juvenile about any of them.
Bringing about the birth of living worlds from previously dead worlds may be an impossible dream, as you claim, but the beauty of its potential is stirring enough to make it a worthy goal for a mature intelligent species.
Wow. How many times did you see all the Star Trek movies? We live on earth in the 21st century and we face unbelievable challenges to survive the next 100 years. Terraforming is something that people will be doing 5000 years from now, if they survive the next century. Take the long view of history.... a worthy goal for a mature intelligent species.
is surviving on earth, not throwing away public resources on welfare projects for nerds, which is what space exploration is.
If we fail to achieve this goal on Mars, we can and should find other planets where it can succeed.
More Hollywood movie fantasy. Meanwhile here in the real world, the airline industry is disintegrating, the auto industry is self-destructing, and the rail industry is near-dead. In thirty years, you're going to find it difficult to go 100 miles, never mind a 100 light-years. The 20th century is over - there is a new reality.
because we followed your siren call to pour all our resources into repeatedly failing "solutions" for perennial problems such as poverty or disease.
It's because smart people in the past put all their resources into solving the problems of poverty and disease that a tiny group of wealthy nerds have the luxury of believing that space exploration is a legitimate scientific endeavor. The smart people in the past made a choice to spend public funds on real problems that were destroying millions of people. We should do the same....the end result might very well be a sterile, dead universe,
The universe is sterile and dead, and unbelievably huge. That's exactly why spending real money on space exploration is insane....But it may be the best place to take the first step toward opening up the universe for humankind...
So let the people who live 1000 years from now do it, after the life-threatening problems on earth are addressed. We have more important things that we must do, right here and right now. Mars isn't going anywhere. It's just a big dead rock spinning around the sun a billion miles away from here.
People (if that is the correct term for Slashdot readers) argue that we should spend huge sums of money of Mars development projects to help protect life on earth. But because they are all rich nerds from the American suburbs who never studied economics, they don't realize that you can't spend the resources needed to develop Mars and have the resources needed to protect life on earth!. Resources are limited, especially when your government is broke and survives on borrowed funds from other governments.
My message is simple. The 20th century is over... the hallucination of unlimited scientific potential induced by cheap energy sources is over. Grown up people will be making difficult decisions in the 21st century. If you want to be one of them then you must demonstrate your maturity by giving up these expensive pre-pubescent fantasies of space travel.
Grow up. Get real. Humanity needs you and your skills.
What every Mars Lander story needs is a justification for this...uh..lunacy.
470 million dollars is a lot of money. And for only one project. There are a lot more projects in the pipeline.
I simply can't understand this weird obsession with Mars. Sure it exists, but...so what? It's a bright dot in night sky. That's all it is. It's never going to be anything else. No one is ever going to go there and return alive. The United States will be gone before that happens (the USA is already bankrupt and living on other people's money, whether you accept this reality or not). There's nothing there that justifies the incredible expense when there are so many other pressing needs for humanity. And if you don't care about humanity (which most Slashdaughters don't, admit it), there are thousands of other projects that would bring more benefit to the American people than Mars projects.
The people who are doing these Mars projects are scientifically and technologically advanced but are moral cripples. They know that they are contributing nothing with all this expenditure, and as long as the public funds are spent on them, they don't care. There's no difference between them and the 'welfare Cadillac' hustlers. The best defence that they can offer for this absurd project is that if they didn't spend the funds, then the funds would be going to some insane war on the other side of the world.
Now I grew up in the USA in the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. We watched space launches in the school auditorium on TV before John Kennedy was shot (before the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, before BigMacs and Cap't Crunch and SweetTarts). I know what it is like to get excited about space. But I used to get excited about the Easter Bunny, too.
The key expression here is "grew up". The space freaks need to do that. Space exploration is really nothing more than a fantasy for children. When you get a few hundred miles from the surface of the earth, there is nothing that justifies the expense of putting humans there. And there is nothing to justify putting robots on Mars.
So they have water or ice, so what? Our world is 3/4 water. So there is dusty akaline 'soil' there? So what? It's not soil. It's sterile pulverized rock. So what? You get excited about this? My friend, you should try taking some LSD, or having sex with a beautiful woman, or skydiving, or skiing down a 3000 meter mountain or anything else that adults do for excitment.
Seriously, guys, your Mars obsession is embarrassing to the people who care about you. You should get beyond it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are getting married soon don't spend money on extremely expensive symbols of your affection. Save your money for real things like children. In these uncertain times when we live on the edge of great change, you should put aside money for emergencies, financial reversals, and unforeseen circumstances.
Blowing a huge sum of money on what is basically a symbolic gesture will seem insane if five years from now you are married, lose your job for some reason that is not your fault, and have a child that develops a medical problem that is not covered by ever-shrinking medical insurance. Marriage is the time when people affirm to their spouses that they will stop doing insane things. If you have the money now for an rare-metal ring, then invest it in conservative Euro-denominated stocks. Give this to your new wife instead. Believe me, she will appreciate it more than an ring that costs five figures now but will only bring four figures in an emergency sale.
Does your collection of gadgets have an absurd number of power connectors? Change them yourself. Standardize on a common standard. This is what I have done both on the commercial doodahs that I've bought and everything that I design and build. My standard is the 2.1mm power connector found on modern guitar effects boxes with the center pin being ground. (I also put bridge rectifiers on my own designs so either pin-positive or pin-ground power adapters can be used in my designs.)
Weirdo power connectors is a manifestation of a brain-dead Marketing-major-mentality that believes that putting a weird power jack on the product will force the customers to buy the overpriced proprietary power supply that has been matched to the product. Unfortunately brain-dead Marketing-majors have more influence than the intelligent tech design staff over the people who have the final say in the product design.
We, the techno-elite, should take the initiative in forcing a productive solution to this problem. We have a long history in setting technical standards. This issue of power adapter connectors has been 'below the radar', but the time has come to impose reality on the brain-dead Marketing-majors.
If you are gadget retailer, then you should offer a service to replace the weirdo connectors with a standard design and demand that the manufacturer continue to warranty the product. Since there is no chance of that actually happening, consider dropping the manufacturer until they standardize on a power connector and put the inexpensive components into the power-supply front-end that will handle the wide range of power adapters in the marketplace.
This nonsense really needs to stop.
Are you out of your mind? By going to the CEO with a quality problem, YOU are the one who is going to be fired when the flaws in the jury-rigged software cause a major problem in the company profits. You tell me that I'm paranoid and crazy. Well, sir, this is the way that American management works. You understand technology; they don't. They understand corporate politics, backstabbing, and manipulation of employees for their own gain. You don't. The fact that you went for a one-on-one with CEO proves this.
The only time that a mid-level technical employee goes for a one-on-one with the CEO is when you are setting up a fellow employee to get fired over a problem that you caused. It's a classic 'cover-your-ass and make someone else take the blame' type of situation. Which, if the situation really is what you say in your company, is not far in the future. By going to the CEO and discussing the situation, the CEO is going to assume that YOU caused it and are doing a preemptive bid to pass the blame on someone else. When the major problem does occur as a result of the unstructured software, the CEO is going to agree with all the other people in your group who are going to put the blame on you to save their own jobs. And you are the one who is going to be fired!
You should get another job in another company as quickly as possible. And, my friend, never go to management with a problem that has its underlying cause in someone's lack of management ability. It's corporate politics rule #1.
If you know a hack, DON'T TELL anybody! Fool... Really. What's the point of holding a press conference to point out a way for techies to save money? If you have studied for years for skills to design, program, and build a device that can defeat the automatic removal of money from your bank account, then for goodness sake's, don't tell anybody. Use this knowledge discretely for the benefit for your family and your people.
Spend the money that you save on your children. Or have some children if you don't have any. Or give it to your favorite charity. Or help someone that you know that is hurting in these bad times. Or put the money that you save under the mattress to support your own bad times that may come in the future.
No one in a giant corporation is going to give you anything for pointing out security flaws that allow people in the tech community to save money. They are going to take the money that you save them and bribe politicians to give them massive tax breaks! Don't you pay attention to the news? All giant corporations are corrupt to their very core. If you find a way to keep them from taking your money, well don't tell them.
There wouldn't be the need for toll roads if the state highway administrations had not been ripping off the funds for the past fifty years. Illinois is the third most corrupt state in the USA (after Rhode Island and Louisiana). Toll highways is only the latest and greatest scam.
Be real. The country is falling apart after forty years of absolute corruption. Take care of yourself and your family first. Then give your money to giant corporations and the super-rich tax-avoiders that control them.
Jeez, am I the only Slashdaughter that realizes that this is not meant to be a 'city in a building' or a theme park or an oasis, it's meant to be a prison.
The Wackenhut of the world. Every country in the world can send their political prisoners, their purse-snatchers, uppity minorities, and urine-test-failers to Dubai. Where, for a small fee, they will be housed in the biggest, meanest, most-escape-proof, hope-for-humanity-crushing, prison that world has ever seen.
And if the payments stop coming from the original country for the prisoner, they just get chucked outside. Naked. To die in the 120 degree F sun! No mess, no fuss, no packed airplanes dumping political prisoners into the South Atlantic Argentina-style!
Hell, Dubai will even pick-up your prisoners in their old surplus Emirate Airlines Boeings! Tell 'em that they're going to Sweden on an Amnesty International 'Flight to Freedom'! Hell, no one will ever know! (Amnesty International workers are sure to be the first 'guests').
Am I the only Slashdaughter with an evil mind? Or more mature, historically-accurate world view?
And why is Dubai building all this architectural bling in the first place?
The real test of whether a design for a 10000-year archive can work would be to find a 10000-year-old archive of a similar design. This is assuming the possibility of an advanced civilization long ago that disappeared for some reason. Books from ancient India talk about advanced technologies that disappeared. Possibly modern people are reading them wrong.
But the earth is several billion years old, and humans about 30-50,000 years old. And a lot can happen in that time. If a disease arose that killed all humans except the mentally retarded, it would have thrown evolution back at least 10000 years.
And if an archive done in an unknown and undecipherable language had been created, we wouldn't know about it.
Newspapers are paper and gasoline-based dinosaurs. This is what is causing their demise. It will soon cost too much to actually schlep all this stupid paper from the printing plant to the houses.
Newspapers traditionally do the following things:
- Inform their readers what is happening in the world.
- Inform what is happening in their city, town, or neighborhood.
- Provide a forum for information private sales and rentals, e.g. the classified ads.
- Provide a network for a common political viewpoints.
- Provide a central source for commercial ads of local retailers.
- Provide an accepted 'source of record' for local events and legal notices; weddings, bankruptcies, public legal notices, etc...
The web does all these things better:
- CNN, BBC, Digg, and Slashdot tell us what is happening in the world.
- CraigsList and eBay provide local ads and private sales information.
- Blog and political websites provide a forum for persons with shared political views.
Newspapers are still good at local city and neighborhood news and ads for local retailers. And the web has nothing for being a 'source of record' for legal notices, and all that stuff. Newspapers have permanence: once something is printed in the local paper it stays printed and accessable. It can't be changed by some cracker like web site info. Newspapers have credibility for that reason.
But their dependence on paper and gasoline to move all this paper makes them irrelevant nowdays. Soon it cost too much to distribute all this paper and newspapers will be gone, like typewriters are now. Ever used a typewriter? They were a real pain in the neck.
I can't believe this. They say that 42% of the people that they asked had used another person's password or account. And the people asked are all internet users.
It is a logical fault to assume from these two statements that 42% of all internet users have used another person's password or account for unethical purposes.
What was the sample audience? Were they all students simply using each other's common passwords to peek into each other's love notes? The article gives that impression and then posts a headline that implies that 42% of ALL INTERNET USERS are dangerous highly-advanced techno-crackers who can and would empty your bank account at any time that they would choose.
Another example of deliberate media exaggeration and fear-mongering over an activity that, when examined, turns out to be a whole lot of nothing. Is Fox News behind this? Or just some schmuck desperate for a story to file?
Crying wolf destroys the perception of journalistic integrity for everyone.
Obama's too smart to be a NASA booster. Yes, NASA's popular. But it is a relic from a distant age. NASA serves today more as a totem of what middle-class people want the society to be rather than what it actually is.
With each story about the coming new age of space exploration that appears on Slashdot, I get this underlying feeling that there is a sharp disconnect from reality at work. The reality is that we are on the edge of a massive involuntary decrease in energy use. And space exploration will be one of the first government programs to be cut as a result.
It's not that space exploration by itself consumes a large amount of energy; it's the vast complex economy that space programs depend on that will be starved for energy. Energy as in oil. Oil that becomes quite expensive as the easy-to-reach light crude is depleted.
As oil becomes increasingly difficult to get out of the ground, everything becomes massively expensive. When food prices triple, gasoline becomes rationed, stock prices tank, and house prices fall by half, people will have to make serious choices on what to buy with the funds that they have left. Space exploration becomes the lowest priority.
Space exploration only appears to be an essential component for the progress of mankind when there is plenty of food, peace, and an economy growing 5-6% a year. When these conditions change, so does the general appeal of space travel. As this appeal goes away; the funding for space disappears. NASA and its programs are more a symbol of a more-prosperous age than a program that delivers real useful solutions to everyday problems. NASA can put a man on the moon, but it can't put gas in his car.
Given this reality, NASA should concentrate only on projects that can be completed with useful results within a short time frame. Certainly no more than five to ten years total. That means no more fantasies about moon bases and Mars manned missions. If NASA commits itself to these long-term hugely-expensive but largely symbolic projects, they will most likely find the funding gone in the middle. With no lasting results to show for all the expense.
Since we are the young technological elite, Slashdot readers should be the vanguard in preparing the general population (and the NASA directors themselves) for this inevitable great change. However we talk and act like over-sugared children. We are at risk of being preceived as completely irrelevant, and incapable of providing technical leadership during the coming transformations.
Slashdot readers to a man believe that technology is going to somehow find a way to transcend the limits imposed from running out of cheap oil. This is not correct. Cheap energy makes technology possible, but technology doesn't make cheap energy possible. When the easy-to-drill oil is gone, technological progress slows to practically nothing. The basic know-how is still available, but there is no investment capital available for the massive projects needed to develop it.
Pure science remains in libaries and labs, but engineering disappears. This is the 21st century reality that is going to be very difficult for current techies to accept. But it is the coming new reality. When the consequences of global warming, oil depletion, and overpopulation become fully manifest in the next ten to twenty years, NASA will disappear faster than the Hummer in the era of $5/gallon gasoline.
With each story about the new age of space exploration that appears on Slashdot, I get this underlying feeling that there is a sharp disconnect from reality at work. Reality is that we are on the edge of a massive change in energy use. A massive decrease in energy use. And space exploration will be one of the first government programs to be cut as a result.
It's not that space exploration by itself consumes a large amount of energy; it's that the vast network of support systems that space programs depend on will be starved for energy. Energy as in oil. Oil that is becoming expensive and will continue to get more so (and not in a linear fashion as we have been seeing). If the oil becomes difficult to get out of the ground, everything becomes massively expensive. Priorities will have to be set:cruel decisions will have to be made. And the space program will be the first to go. When food prices triple ,gasoline is rationed, stock prices tank, and house prices fall by half, people have to make choices on what they must buy with the money that they have. Space exploration is the lowest priority.
Space exploration only appears to be an essential component of the progress of mankind when there is plenty of food, peace, and an economy growing 3-6% a year. When these conditions disappear, so does the appeal of space travel.
Given this reality, NASA should concentrate only on projects that can be completed with useful results within a short time frame. Certainly no more than five to ten years total. That means no more fantasies about moon bases and Mars manned missions. If NASA commits itself to these hugely expensive but largely symbolic projects, they will most likely find themselves cut off from funding in the middle of the 20-30 year projects. With no lasting results to show for the expense.
Like the Soviet space program when the USSR collapsed. If the USA didn't bail them out with heavy subsidies, the Russian space program would be nothing more than an embarrassing memory now.
When the consequences of global warming, oil depletion, and overpopulation become fully manifest in the next ten to twenty years, NASA funding will disappear faster than the Hummer in the era of $5/gallon gasoline.
India announced that it added 50,000 new jobs this year.
Good God, I hope so! They have a billion people. They have a new person born every second. If they don't create jobs by the tens of thousands, they will starve.
Est-ce que une personne ne doit pas être à l'aise en français afin d'obtenir un travail depaiement dans la ville du Québec ?
Peut-être c'est une condition importante qui ne soit pas mentionné jusqu'aux étapes finales du processus de recrutement. Dans mon expérience en tant que visiteur à la ville du Québec à plusieurs
occasions, je ne peux pas imaginer n'importe qui pouvoir y arriver un travail sans maîtrise en français. Particulièrement dans tout secteur qui exige l'interaction avec le gouvernement.
Mon Français est pauvre (c'est une traduction de SysTran.com) au présent. Mais comme je comprends, c'est un secteur 100% de langue française du monde, exigé par loi.
===============
Doesn't a person have to be fluent in French in order to get a good-paying job in Quebec City? Perhaps this is a major requirement that isn't mentioned until the final stages of the recruitment process. In my experience as a visitor to Quebec City on several occasions, I can't imagine anyone being able to get a job there without fluency in French. Especially in any area that requires interaction with the government.
The Achilles' heel of IT industry is the fact that it doesn't scale. There is only room at the top, not the middle or low end of the economic job range for IT workers. The only people who get family-wage paying jobs are 'the best of the best of the best, sir! as you recall from the first Men In Black movie.
Other more mature industries can provide jobs for a wide range of people with aptitudes and and skills. But the IT industry (and to a lesser extent, the electronics industry) can only provide good jobs for the upper 5% of the graduates from good tech schools. This is why the so-called industry leaders can decry the lack of top talent and at the same time lay-off thousands of skilled and experienced mid-level mid-career technicians (software techs like testers and standard code-from-algorithm writers and hardware pot tweekers).
This is a defect in the industry: it doesn't scale. It's a primary reason why young people are not entering the profession in the way that they did twenty years ago.
Don't nit pick me on this. There's a whole book in each of the above paragraphs. But they're basically true.
Now I know that you don't care because if you're on Slashdot, you are the B of the B of the B, sahr! But no matter how good you are, or your ranking in the Grade Point Angel hierarchy, this inability to provide good jobs for a wide-range of workers is beginning to seriously impact the industry.
This isn't such a major issue in a place where people are actually making things for sale, a place that still has a manufacturing sector. Manufacturing by its economic structure provides a wide range of fairly good jobs. In this area you can go from an entry-level 'move things around' low-paying position to a mid-level design and test position with a two-year degree or the same period of study.
But when the IT industry allows all the manufacturing to be relocated to cheap labor countries it destroys its foundation. Information and data processing has little economic value by itself; only in conjunction with other productive industries does it create its economic wealth.
It might be well to sometimes stop thinking like a programmer and to sometimes think like an economist.
You all don't understand... No body is taking laptops to check for terrorist information. They're taking laptops because the laptops are worth $500 to $1000 each.
The forerunner of this law is not the Patriot Act. It's the Drug Asset Forfeiture laws. When you take someone's new car because they got found with 10 cents worth of marijuana in it, well then you (and your uniform) are in the car theft business. The fact that you came up with some principal that gives yourself the legal authority to do it doesn't change the fact that you are using your status as a police officer to become the perfect car thief.
Perfect, because there isn't anything that the 'perp' can do about it. Sooner or later, after 'confiscating' so many new cars and seeing how they get auctioned to very select parties for peanuts, you begin to realize that your calling in life (your ability to generate income to support your family, ect...) is more in focus with your being able to generate a steady stream of very expensive and profitable 'confiscated' (stolen by people in uniform) vehicles than it is with stopping petty crime and filling out endless police reports.
You've crossed the line that sooner or later everyone does when they are afforded the opportunity to get away with a perfect crime (in your case, Grand Theft Auto). You start carrying around a half-smoked ma*iju*na (don't want to trigger the NSA wiretappers here) cigarette to use as justification for 'confiscating' some really sweet car that catches your eye. You're corrupt in a very profitable way, now.
This is the way most of the world works. America used to be one of the exceptions. Now it is not. Things change. Learn to deal with it.
The same thing is happening here with laptops. Many if not most international airline passengers carry them now. The low-paid low-intelligent airport security guards are patrolling for terrorists when they steal your laptop; they are 'trolling for bling'. As in any other theft, it is unlikely that you are ever going to get your property back.
The best way to approach this situation is to carry an extremely cheap laptop when crossing a border. Then use a high-speed connection to download your encrypted files from an international website; where you uploaded them before beginning your trip.
Since the 'authorities' are more interested in the cash fence value that they can get from stealing your laptop, the cheaper the one that you bring across the border is less likely to get stolen by the 'security police'.
The world works like this. Get used to it.
I like your current firm's approach. I'm 'classed' as an electronics technician. Which means in nearly all jobs it's almost impossible for me go anywhere near code. But I still do a lot of coding; it just has to be invisible.
I write a lot of small test fixtures with specialized embedded microcontrollers. For these tiny 'systems' to be efficient, they have to be small, cheap, very precise, and quick to program. I still do nearly all of my coding work in Assembler for controllers that cost less than $2. For example, a +5Volt/ground pulse that is exactly 40 seconds long (+/- 5 milliseconds) with a measurement of the time that it takes the voltage across an attached capacitor to fall to exactly +2.2V.
The senior engineer devised this test 25 years ago for final calibration on a piece of medical equipment. According to the old procedure, it takes about ten minutes to set up the equipment and run through the procedure enough times to get an accurate result. But with my Atmel AVR Tiny13 85-cent microcontroller, I get an accurate result within a minute. I've been using this particular design for about a year, but still haven't got the approval to make it an 'offical ISO-approved change in the test procedure'. So I have to do it in secret, and could get fired if management found out that I was using equipment and procedures that didn't exist when Saturday Night Fever was still in the theaters.
I code with lots of comments and paragraphs of text in comment blocks that explain what the code is doing. As much as possible, I want to be able to cut and paste code routines between programs in order to make the development process fast and easy.
I remove all 'magic numbers' from the code. But I don't use THIRTY_SEVEN as a constant for 37. I would use a very brief explanation instead, like FIVE_MILLISECOND_DELAY_VALUE = 37. Personally, I dislike Hungarian notation. It works only for Hungarian genius coders like Charles Simoni who have come to learn about computer programming after mastering a half-dozen languages previously, like Charles Simoni. A word is an actual icon by itself, seperated from the other word-icons by spaces. Putting random characters in front of the word that is the variable name destroys the ability to instantly look at the word-icon and know what it means. If the Hungarian notation prefix is so important, it should be in a different color of text from the actual variable name.
I wish that I had the luxury of hating the C language. I think that it is ugly, and difficult to understand. But it is slowly becoming the standard for microcontroller programming because there are so many individual types of microcontrollers in use. Each with its own assembler instruction set. So all of us 'secret-coder' electronic technician 'potentiometer tweakers' are having to become proficient in it.
All TV characters should have e-mail addresses. It's a no-brainer. It makes it possible for the creators of the characters to know exactly what their fans are like and, more importantly, what the fans want the character to be like.
It keeps the character alive after the TV show expires.
Personally I believe that figures in great paintings should have websites. Who wouldn't want to write to Simonetta Vespucci for advice on romance? The responders should be older employees who have been semi-retired by their companies.
This would be most applicable to Japan, where corporations bought Renaissance paintings for elaborate prices in the 1980s and have been keeping hidden away in vaults since then. They also have older employees that they can't fire but allocate no work for them to do, so they just sit at their desks all day. Young people from all over the world could write e-mails to their favorite art painting characters and have them answered by people who have life experience and wisdom. This would be good for everyone. And it's no more weird than people entering MUDs and Second Life programs as an alternative reality.
This is absurd. Maybe they made a typing mistake and meant to say that petroleum cars would stop being made by Mercedes by 2115.
Change happens slowly, even when it is anticipated and expected. No giant car company is going to stop making petroleum vehicles by 2015, least of all a German company. Some little schmuck (Yiddish: penis; stupid person // German: jewel) in their Press Relations department is talking out of his ass.
This is the most absurd statement to come out of German car company since Daimler announced that they had 'great syzygy' with Chrysler.
Wait.... isn't Mercedes Daimler in disguise? Are these the same bozos as before?
French has the most beautiful women...which is the most important consideration for male programmers. Plus French has the quality that it is the language used for 'diplomacy'. What that means is that when you don't want to acknowledge the inherent humanity of some sub-human barbarian culture that has managed to enter your plane of existence, you speak French to them. And they return the insult by refusing to speak the language of oppressive imperialism to you, and only address you in French. Voilà, instant diplomacy.
Plus French is a serious intellectual challenge to learn, even though half of the words are cognates of English. Due to a historical fluke, every Hollywood DVD sold in the USA has French as one of the alternative languages available at a click away. You will notice if you set the audio language to French and the subtitles to French also, that they are NEVER the same. Every movie is translated in the French twice, by different teams: once for the audio and again for the written subtitles. This is a real pain for language learners. It's only a few French original language movies that have the audio and hearing-impaired subtitles identical. I recommend "La Femme Nikita", the original French version by Luc Bresson, which is one serious kick-ass movie. Avoid the lame Hollywood remakes.
Also French is the main second language of West Africa, in case you come to find the European French insufferable (a definite possibility). And, as you may or may not know, French is the native language of millions of people living on the Northeast border of the USA.
So, when it comes to actually learning a second language for your own use, French is the best option. All the other languages can be translated using advanced inexpensive 32-bit computer technology (language translation is the killer-app of the ARM processor). Or you can reasonably expect the native speakers of these other languages to learn English.
Take note however, that there is an unconscious English tendency to assume that an American speaker of a complex third-world language is really smart. That may be, but there is a parallel tendency to assume that person who has not completely mastered all the arbitrary and bizarre exceptions of the English language is not very bright. Try to avoid this logical asymmetricity, as it is racist in nature. English is seriously difficult to learn: be glad that you don't have to master it as a foreign language.
I must respectfully disagree with the above reply. The magazine is not simply a print-out. It's an intact cultural artifact as a magazine. If not now, then in fifty or 100 years from now.
Are you primarily interested in the text of the magazine articles themselves? Or the images (such as 'Mens magazines' like Club International that are primarily images)? Or are you interested in preserving the balance in the layout between the text, the images, and the adverts?
For text primarily, use a stand for the magazine, and a 10 megapixel digital camera with a small tripod. Optical Character Recognition is the way to go in this situation. But it is hard to get the exact right program for your configuration.
Are these magazines in English or a western European language? OCR is much easier and faster with 100 or so ASCII characters than it is with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. OCR for these languages exists but the programs are expensive if you actually buy them. Personally, I believe that because the Chinese have stolen billions of dollars worth of software from the Americans since the earliest days of computers, the Americans have no moral, ethical, or legal obligation to pay for any software developed and sold by a Chinese company. But, opinions differ on this issue.
Keep the magazines intact. You'll regret cutting them up in the future when a more elegant solution to digitizing them appears that doesn't entail destroying the original materials.
I suggest paying someone $5-$10 US an hour to scan the photos on a 300DPI flatbed scanner. Try an ad on CraigsList for your area. There are a lot of unemployed people with tech skills and no unemployment checks coming in that would appreciate a job like this for a day or two. How many photos would need to be scanned? Several dozen? Several hundred? Several thousand?
Usually adjusting the brightness, contrast, and gamma setting on black/white scan makes the image look good. I recently scanned all the images of my high school yearbook, put it on the web, and received thank yous from former classmates that I hadn't heard from in forty years.
The comment gets to the core of the entire issue. Apple charges 200% more for the same components because their customers want to pay more. In an extremely wealthy society there is always a group of people who have much more money than the norm, and it is very important to these people that they are able to differentiate themselves from the rest of the population through a series of 'class markers'.
These are items that only they buy because they are much more expensive than similar items available for the general population. Yes these items are better quality, but the degree of higher price for better quality is much greater than would be justified by the cost of the components. So the wealthy aren't selecting these brand items solely for better quality. They are doing it to identify themselves to the other members of their class.
There are many companies that have always positioned themselves into this market niche. But Apple is one of the few companies that continues to insist that their excessively high prices are only a direct result of their 'commitment to high quality'. It is ironic that they have been successful at marketing their 'cool factor' by selling commodity components at such a large premium since the entire concept of 'coolness' in the USA is a set of behaviors and lifestyles designed to give dignity to people with little or no money.
The entertainment industry has been most successful at marketing this contradiction. Apple is the first technology company to do so as well. Even to the point of having their business revolve around a prima-donna rock star personality.
I've detected this about Apple ever since the introduction of the Macintosh, when this kind of mentality started at Apple. I recommend watching them for amusement, but don't buy their products even second-hand. Buy clones (for personal stereos) or functional equivalents (for personal computers).
Despite all their grandiose advertisements, Apple has always existed for only one reason: to transfer wealth from the wealthy (who need to have a non-proletariat PC) to Steve Jobs' bank account.
The USA needs reliable and cheap robots. Reliable because they are complicated, expensive, and difficult to fix because there aren't many people who are expert with robotics technology.
Cheap because the USA is shares a border with a country that millions of people who are ready, willing, and able to come here and work for about $40-$50 a 8-10 hour day. Any robot that we buy has to be able to do productive work for eight hours a day and cost less than $50 a day for energy, maintainence, and pro-rated purchase cost. Americans will continue to use Mexicans for robot work as long as it's cheaper to use Mexicans than it is to use robots.
Some things robots must do because it is unethical to induce humans to do them, such as mine-field clearing. Sure you can force some poor black kid with three 'po-session' convictions to go out and dig up mines with a spoon. But it is unethical and quite possibly immoral to do so. Historically, ethics and morality have never stopped people from doing evil things (they contract it out to people who are further down on the social-class ladder). But those days are passing as more people realise that the evil ways of the past can not continue, regardless of how convienent it was.
Oh, you are just such a racist! I hear you saying. Well flip the switch on your politically-correct-conditioning circuitry for a while. Let's drop the labels and talk straight for a few minutes.
Yes, there are millions of poor Mexican peasants in the USA working at a half or third of standard American pay. This is because NAFTA allowed American agri-business like Cargil with huge US government subsidies to flood the Mexican agricultural economy with corn so cheap that the Mexicans couldn't afford to live by growing it. And because NAFTA allowed American bio-industries like Monsanto to replace traditional Mexican corn with patented bio-engineered varieties that the Mexican farmers couldn't afford to buy. People aren't coming here from Mexico because they want to. They come because they have to, or starve. So stop modding me down and calling me a racist. It's a complex subject and the best thing that you could do to help solve it is not stand on the border with a gun, but study and master conversational Spanish (and even one of the pre-Columbian Central Mexican Indian languages (that are spoken by thousands of immigrants who don't speak Spanish very well), that is -if you're up to a serious intellectual challenge, C++ is nothing compared to it) so you can just talk to people and find out what the situation is really like without having it filtered first by the creeps in the news media. Whew! So stop modding me down!
Yeah, back to robots. We can grow a lot of food but a lot rots on the vine or ground. Especially fruit crops here in the Cascadian Republic of the former United States. We need cheap, dependable, solar-powered, and very advanced agricultural robots. Japanese ones are too expensive. Detroit robots are meaningless to us, we have no use for stationary automobile frame welding machines that cost a half-million dollars. We need a machine that can roll along the ground in the field, find the strawberries, pick the strawberries without destroying the mother plant, place the strawberry in a container with others, and move this container to a pre-set centralized location. We need thousands of these machines all working at the harvest. Then when the strawberry harvest is over, we need people who can reprogram them for the next crop.
What it would be ethical for us to do is to retrain all the millions of Mexicans that have been impoverished by misguided government and corporate policies to be our cadre of advanced agricultural robotics technicians and programmers. They know the crops and the harvests and would be willing to learn the software and electronics involved. What? Just turn a million Mexican peasants into robotics engineers? You laugh? Now who a racist?
who believes that the things that we should be pursuing in life are utterly pointless five minute flash-in-the-pan adrenaline events done purely for brief personal entertainment. ...but don't waste billions of dollars of tax-payer funds.
The entertainments you call fitting for adults strike me as juvenile pursuits. I would never seek to make it illegal for you to pursue them, but please clearly understand, I will never accept your claim that these interests make you a more mature adult human being.
Why don't you try them. Believe me there's nothing juvenile about any of them.
Bringing about the birth of living worlds from previously dead worlds may be an impossible dream, as you claim, but the beauty of its potential is stirring enough to make it a worthy goal for a mature intelligent species.
Wow. How many times did you see all the Star Trek movies? We live on earth in the 21st century and we face unbelievable challenges to survive the next 100 years. Terraforming is something that people will be doing 5000 years from now, if they survive the next century. Take the long view of history. ... a worthy goal for a mature intelligent species.
is surviving on earth, not throwing away public resources on welfare projects for nerds, which is what space exploration is.
If we fail to achieve this goal on Mars, we can and should find other planets where it can succeed.
More Hollywood movie fantasy. Meanwhile here in the real world, the airline industry is disintegrating, the auto industry is self-destructing, and the rail industry is near-dead. In thirty years, you're going to find it difficult to go 100 miles, never mind a 100 light-years. The 20th century is over - there is a new reality.
because we followed your siren call to pour all our resources into repeatedly failing "solutions" for perennial problems such as poverty or disease. ...the end result might very well be a sterile, dead universe, ...But it may be the best place to take the first step toward opening up the universe for humankind...
It's because smart people in the past put all their resources into solving the problems of poverty and disease that a tiny group of wealthy nerds have the luxury of believing that space exploration is a legitimate scientific endeavor. The smart people in the past made a choice to spend public funds on real problems that were destroying millions of people. We should do the same.
The universe is sterile and dead, and unbelievably huge. That's exactly why spending real money on space exploration is insane.
So let the people who live 1000 years from now do it, after the life-threatening problems on earth are addressed. We have more important things that we must do, right here and right now. Mars isn't going anywhere. It's just a big dead rock spinning around the sun a billion miles away from here.
People (if that is the correct term for Slashdot readers) argue that we should spend huge sums of money of Mars development projects to help protect life on earth. But because they are all rich nerds from the American suburbs who never studied economics, they don't realize that you can't spend the resources needed to develop Mars and have the resources needed to protect life on earth!. Resources are limited, especially when your government is broke and survives on borrowed funds from other governments.
My message is simple. The 20th century is over... the hallucination of unlimited scientific potential induced by cheap energy sources is over. Grown up people will be making difficult decisions in the 21st century. If you want to be one of them then you must demonstrate your maturity by giving up these expensive pre-pubescent fantasies of space travel.
Grow up. Get real. Humanity needs you and your skills.
What every Mars Lander story needs is a justification for this...uh..lunacy.
470 million dollars is a lot of money. And for only one project. There are a lot more projects in the pipeline.
I simply can't understand this weird obsession with Mars. Sure it exists, but...so what?
It's a bright dot in night sky. That's all it is. It's never going to be anything else. No one is ever going to go there and return alive. The United States will be gone before that happens (the USA is already bankrupt and living on other people's money, whether you accept this reality or not). There's nothing there that justifies the incredible expense when there are so many other pressing needs for humanity. And if you don't care about humanity (which most Slashdaughters don't, admit it), there are thousands of other projects that would bring more benefit to the American people than Mars projects.
The people who are doing these Mars projects are scientifically and technologically advanced but are moral cripples. They know that they are contributing nothing with all this expenditure, and as long as the public funds are spent on them, they don't care. There's no difference between them and the 'welfare Cadillac' hustlers. The best defence that they can offer for this absurd project is that if they didn't spend the funds, then the funds would be going to some insane war on the other side of the world.
Now I grew up in the USA in the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. We watched space launches in the school auditorium on TV before John Kennedy was shot (before the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, before BigMacs and Cap't Crunch and SweetTarts). I know what it is like to get excited about space. But I used to get excited about the Easter Bunny, too.
The key expression here is "grew up". The space freaks need to do that. Space exploration is really nothing more than a fantasy for children. When you get a few hundred miles from the surface of the earth, there is nothing that justifies the expense of putting humans there. And there is nothing to justify putting robots on Mars.
So they have water or ice, so what? Our world is 3/4 water. So there is dusty akaline 'soil' there? So what? It's not soil. It's sterile pulverized rock. So what? You get excited about this? My friend, you should try taking some LSD, or having sex with a beautiful woman, or skydiving, or skiing down a 3000 meter mountain or anything else that adults do for excitment.
Seriously, guys, your Mars obsession is embarrassing to the people who care about you. You should get beyond it.