so, it's not good enough that the phone was used. big shit, the phone was used. did it cause the accident? Let's even go so far as to say that if it was being used during the accident then it can be held at fault anyway. Sure. Let's pretend that it's my responsibility to actively avoid other bad drivers. Quite frankly, I'd even be okay with that.
So how does the officer know if the phone was being used during the seconds of the accident, and not twenty-five seconds prior?
And if the phone is at fault, then clearly so is the radio, the cruise control, the climate control, adjusting the seat belt, and fiddling with sun visor. Bring it on. I want to see the headline: "crash caused when driver rolled down the window on a summer's day.".
Again, police don't modify cultures. That's exactly your cultural problem. You're thinking way too late.
And lots of people have thought of this before. I live in a country that does exactly that. Which is why my neighbourhood lives with doors open and alarms disabled.
You might want to try looking outside of your screwed up country for a change. You'll find that a lot of people don't have your problems at all.
In a suburb 50km outside of toronto, in a small city with 150'000 people, adjacent to another small city with 125'000 people, outside of the big city with 6 million people, on a street where I know everyone's name. The way we stiffle crime around here is by hiring your neighbour's children to do odd chores like garden work and snow shovelling before he reaches the age where he might decide to annoy his neighbours. That's about it. We rarely even lock our doors.
Again, the U.S.A. is a totally screwed up culture. Instead of making the phones resist theft, perhaps, just perhaps, you ought to modify your culture so your people don't choose to steal phones in the first place. You're not talking about an individual here. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of persons!
Try fixing the problem for once. You don't want hundreds of thousands of criminals in your city. You really don't want hundreds of thousands of criminals with nothing to steal, by the way.
the classic arcade experience involved being in public, with spectators around, lots of noise, and an undefined number of quarters. it involved a new game, or an unknown game, or a popular game. It was loud. In every way, it was loud. It was a machine bigger than the player. And it dragged you into a place that you otherwise wouldn't have gone that day -- like a mall or a convenience store.
I'm suggesting that if you try, and then fail, you should give up. There's nothing wrong with suggesting what others should do with their money. But you can't be surprised when they don't agree with you.
I have zero interest in funding computers for poor children. I don't think it's a good use of anyone's funds. Clearly, others agree with me.
If you don't have funds of your own to donate, I'm saying that you should focus on building yourself to the point where you can actually contribute. It's a big deal to contribute to society. Taking someone else's money isn't contributing. Using someone else's money also isn't contributing -- it looks like contributing, but really you're just contributing on their behalf. So you've added nothing nothing to the system.
It's basically along the same lines of all of those businesses who over-distribute someone else's product. That's only contributing when there's no other realistic way to get that product. Obviously I can't drive to the refinery every time I need to get gas. But when the shopping mall has seven places to buy the same cellphone, I'm not interested in protecting the rights of the eighth to compete with the seventh.
If you've got no money of your own, then that's the problem that needs solving. Not the poor children. Get your own poor children, stop stealing someone else's.
You give away computer for free, and you can't afford computers of your own. So you want someone else to buy you a computer, in order to help manage your give-away-free-computers business. Ptysician, heal thyself?
Perhaps, just maybe, you should select a mission that you can actually achieve; you know, on your own: with your own skills, and your own money.
the odds that you'll wind up choosing an area of CS that is actually dependent on advanced mathematics is nil; those that do find themselves in such an area do so because they already love the math.
there are literally thousands of areas of CS, you can choose from the 90% that don't use any math at all.
and judging by my GPS's refusal to use the elevation number, that it already shows me, to calculate my actual speed and distance using basic trig, there are virtually zero consumer products where the math matters at all.
the only reason you need math is, as you've said, to get through the degree. so drop the math, drop the degree, and stop worrying about what people from six decades ago thought was important then. run your own business, sign your own paycheck, and do whatever the hell you want. no client has ever asked me about my CS education. It's been twenty years of running a successful business, and no one gives a damn.
stand by your own work, guarantee your own efforts, and be responsible. no one cares about anything else.
every little bit doesn't help. there's no use in having a rubber padlock. in this case, there's no use in resisting the amatuer hacker who won't be able to find me in the first place.
and the government does have those penalties, that's why we're complaining now. things like making it illegal to NOT lock your car doors when it's parked on the street. what the hell?
you're talking about detective work. "go get them". It's the penalty afterwards that's supposed to act as a deterant to others in-advance of those crimes. As an individual, I can't really deter future criminals. That's what the judicial system is for -- long after police are done with the man-hunt.
But it's not a personal choice. I don't get the choice to spend $50K / year on security and still stay in business.
The fact that I'm small means that I'm difficult to see, difficult to target, and not worth targeting. Those that really want to target me, and have a reason to do so, I can't secure against. Welcome to Ethan Hunt.
the original idea of augmented reality was to bring more to life -- more information about your surroundings, more interaction, more history, more detail. But this thing does none of that. Instead, it removes your environment, placing you back into the all-too-familiar calendar/e-mail/message/cat-video world.
I'd love to be sitting on a beach, looking out at the waves, and get information about the height of the waves, the times of the tides, the type of fish swimming beneath the waves, and that poem that poet wrote when he first discovered this beach.
I have zero interest in replacing my view of the beach with my e-mail messages, my friend's recipe for hamburgers, and the thousands of photographs random strangers took of what I can see with my own two eyes in front of me.
and what would you call individuals who hack into and steal from multiple systems routinely? Last I checked, someone who commits crimes is a criminal. English is funny that way.
Yeah, I live a neighbourhood where I don't need to use the locks on my doors, the alarm system, bars on the windows, neighbourhood watch, guard house, nor a private security company.
And how dangerous is your neighbourhood? Ever thought of living somewhere safer?
It'd probably cost the equivalent of $50'000 per year for my small business to implement all of those. Thanks for the suggestions. I can't do any of them and remain profitable at all. So I'm going to do none of them.
Instead, I've got a suggestion for you. How about making it illegal to hack into my property; and then why don't you go about aresting and prosecuting criminals? In other words, how about you, my government, go about doing your job, instead of making me into a security task force unto myself.
Sure, it sucks getting hacked. It CAN mean losing money, losing clients, and losing my business. It sucks more to spend so much time and money securing against getting hacked that I WILL losing money, clients, and my business.
Welcome to laws. You don't want me to protect myself against criminals. That's not what we call a civilized society. I don't keep a suit of armour in the garage. I don't have a shield on-hand. I don't have chain-mail shirts -- ok, I do have one, but it's a halloween costume, and it's heavy.
I'm in the exact other boat, so I can see the same problem from the other side. I run a web development business, I don't write specs, I do everything in my languages of choice, I also market being able to handle any technical project for my clients. In my case, however, I specifically don't charge them for bugs. Everything's either project-based pricing or feature-based pricing. Bug fixing, cosmetic alterations, and cursory data field/presentation changing is free. I do all of that in order to justify not writing specs in the first place -- because I'm not you.
I tried paying contractors to work for me. I tried paying employees to work for me. And even paying them proper salaries I got the same results as you're getting from contractors. As employees, instead of running away, the work effort got sloppier and sloppier as bugs and client changes were hacks ontop of hacks. Their speed dropped to nill, and it basically sucked me dry to the point where I could easily lose all of my personal take-out when bug repairs ran longer and longer. And you can't tell a client, especially before they've signed off on a project, that a huge expense is to fix bugs that don't exist yet in something that should be written properly the first time, especially in their minds.
So my advice to you is going to be different. My advice to you is to find contractor developers like myself who do fix bugs for free. But I'm going to tell you that the only way to make that fair to them is to let those developers choose the tools -- i.e. the languages they use. I've spent two decades building up my own tools, to the point where now I can easily handle bugs and after-the-fact client changes so it doesn't cost me anything to fix bugs -- and if you're telling me that you'll produce the test case, then you've saved me 80% of the work. And if I know that you're the one doing it, then I can upgrade my platform to show me exactly what you tested, which will ultimately point me to the very code itself, and that's a total of 90% of the work 90% of the time.
Find the right contractor who knows how to appreciate your policy. I can guarantee he exists, because I'm one of them. There must be others.
Here's why it won't work. It's really very simple. Currently, today, in many big cities, people are starving. Call them homeless, call them poor; some are even starving to death.
And yet, there is protein available all around them. Insects are phenominal nutrition, and easily found.
It would seem that many people would prefer to starve rather than eat insects.
Where does a cartridge of complex carbohydrates rank on your list? On mine, it's way below carrot; it's below tomato. On my list, it's somewhere down around bean sprouts. To be clear, I don't eat bean sprouts except by accident. Which I guess places it above mushrooms, which I actively seek out and avoid.
The whole "40 years old" thing was never about the 40. That's just people labeling quickly. The reall issue is the "forty years old" thing. See the difference?
You're motivated to learn programming, you're motivated to program. So are 20-somethings. The issue with "forty" isn't the "40", it's the house, the family, the mortgage, the problems, the settling, the vacations, the health, the long hours, the weird hours, the focus.
You've already said that you were motivated, that your entire life was changing. Everyone's got some illness, but yours pushed you into programming, not out of it. I'm not saying that you were a charity case, but clearly someone saw that you used to be a very dedicated and hard worker, and simply needed a new focus for health reasons. So your illness actually worked in your favour.
If you play your hand correctly, you'll promote the fact that you're a responsible, mature, and dependable adult, and you'll easily beat out the younger competition.
The only reason that older programmers have trouble is simply because it's a industry with an easy burn-out. If you learned to program professionally when you were 20, and you became proficient at 25, and you settled into your preferred languages/toolsets/environments at 30, then by 35 you aren't interested in new languages and new techniques, none of which are better than the old ones but they are more popular.
For example, I fit that bill. I'm nearly 35, and I refuse to switch to new languages. I haven't even heard of half of the languages that you listed. So I'll continue with what I enjoy, the way that I enjoy it. In my case, it's my business, so no one's going to fire me. But over time, I'll lose more and more opportunities simply because my language of choice isn't being taught in schools.
At the same time, I'll eventually get bored with my same-old-perfect-techniques after, what, 20 years of doing them? That seems reasonable. And I really won't be interested in starting from scratch learning new ways of doing old things and being at the bottom of the learning curve again.
So that's when I'll likely choose to throw out absolutely everything and pick a different career. In my case, having already paid off the house and the car and such, I'll probably jump around through really weird jobs, because "I always wanted to do..."
But in your case, it's all new, it's all fun, and you're right on the edge of the fore-front of the industry. That's your asset. That's where you can easily beat me too.
Why does anyone, outside of the computer industry, need to know any of that?
The basic components of a computer are the computer, and the keyboard. There may be a box under the desk somewhere, about which no one cares. They have a gas pedal, and a steering wheel. The car goes, and it goes in the direction that I steer. Everything else is optional -- including the gas itself.
Networking is a term that's meant nothing for decades now. The same document can be viewed from multiple computers. That's networking. That's it. No one cares about the speedometer networking with their brakes. No one knows what ABS means.
Software, unless you're creating it, buying it, selling it, or testing it is meaningless. Computers can do things. They can be upgraded to do more things. No one cares about the software in their car.
Proprietary vs open source is industry jargon. There are six types of each, and unless you understand all twelve types, the only thing you can do is get screwed by someone who does. This coffee maker takes coffee. This coffee maker only takes little cups and no one knows what's in the cup. This coffee maker takes these puck-like things. This one has more buttons. This one filters your cheetah-anal-coffee through tampons and the flavour really comes through -- by the way, that exists, seriously.
Just teach them how to read a computer screen in general, if they don't already know how two-dimensional rectangles can overlap -- it's a "three-dimensional-surface", a cool physics paradox. Then teach them that each rectangle is a scope, and how to determine which one they're "in" at any given moment, so they don't always start reading from the top left of the monitor, instead of the window. Then teach them how to explore any random interface, so they feel comfortable browsing drop down menus and lists of links and right-click menus. Then you're done. Let them explore. As long as they don't take out their credit card for anything ever, they're good to go.
Oh, I've done that. It's an interesting number. In my case, it's about $150'000 of stuff, plus the house -- the mortgage includes fire insurance on the house anyway.
But have you ever read your plan? Replacement's covered, but not clean up of the rubble. Carp like that.
So by the time it's all said and done, the insurance still doesn't cover everything. And some catastrophes have other solutions -- like holding someone criminally accountable in court. It's annoying but it's there. And some insurance companies don't make it easy to claim anything. It's annoying but it's there.
And at $10'000 per year anyway, if you house burns down once every fourty years -- all the way to the ground -- then it still isn't worth the insurance! After-all, half the value of your house is the land, and it didn't burn down at all.
So sure, if you've got six children who play with matches alone, and you do your own amateur electrical work, then you might want to mitigate your risk. But if you're a person like me, with a modern house, the odds really are in my favour.
And should everything go horribly wrong, I've got friends and family to help me out too.
I've said it for decades now. Each and every single piece of insurance or warranty or extended warranty is always worth having. Each one makes sense and each one is beneficial. However, all of them is a dumb move, for everybody.
Look at your entire year. Look at every insurance you have, and every warranty you purchase, and every extended warranty you purchase. There's a great chance that you're spending over $10'000 per year on such things as a household. Think about mortgage insurance, life insurance, disability, health, car, washing machines, computers, televisions, carpets, couch stains, kitchen appliances, toilets, furnaces. Travel insurance. Dental.
Yes if your furnace breaks, you'd rather have the insurance cover it rather than spend what could be $3'000 to repair the furnace. Absolutely. But you've spent $10'000 that year on insurance and warranties. $3'000 is smaller.
Yes, everything can go wrong every time. But do they? Are you really worried that you'll have $10'000 worth of damage each year every year? That's a pretty sucky year! Think about it. My tvision broke, I needed medicine for a month, I couldn't pay my mortgage one month, my dryer broke, my furnace broke, my air conditioner broke, my fridge broke, my computer died, and my toilet cracked. I had two car crashes. My third car was stolen; my watch too. Oh yeah, and I died.
Hey, you can insure every second of your life, and never have any financial risk for anything. But really, I don't think that was ever the plan.
There is a lot between the countryside and the megalopolis. That's why I said 30 minutes not an hour.
And moving away from heavily-populated areas doesn't negate the 95%, it stretches out the 95%. Most cities are built on the water, or at the river, or on an island, or around some natural geographical item that limits how big the city can actually sprawl. So it grows inwardly and upwardly. Spreading the population out solves this problem because it allows the growth to be arranged geometrically.
And eventually, when you've got that many more people, you move again.
Slashdot Mirror
so, it's not good enough that the phone was used. big shit, the phone was used. did it cause the accident? Let's even go so far as to say that if it was being used during the accident then it can be held at fault anyway. Sure. Let's pretend that it's my responsibility to actively avoid other bad drivers. Quite frankly, I'd even be okay with that.
So how does the officer know if the phone was being used during the seconds of the accident, and not twenty-five seconds prior?
And if the phone is at fault, then clearly so is the radio, the cruise control, the climate control, adjusting the seat belt, and fiddling with sun visor. Bring it on. I want to see the headline: "crash caused when driver rolled down the window on a summer's day.".
Again, police don't modify cultures. That's exactly your cultural problem. You're thinking way too late.
And lots of people have thought of this before. I live in a country that does exactly that. Which is why my neighbourhood lives with doors open and alarms disabled.
You might want to try looking outside of your screwed up country for a change. You'll find that a lot of people don't have your problems at all.
In a suburb 50km outside of toronto, in a small city with 150'000 people, adjacent to another small city with 125'000 people, outside of the big city with 6 million people, on a street where I know everyone's name. The way we stiffle crime around here is by hiring your neighbour's children to do odd chores like garden work and snow shovelling before he reaches the age where he might decide to annoy his neighbours. That's about it. We rarely even lock our doors.
you already tried that. it failed.
Again, you need to solve that cultural issue too. And effective policing isn't where crime is eliminated.
And, you can always just leave. It's not like new york city is underpopulated.
Again, the U.S.A. is a totally screwed up culture. Instead of making the phones resist theft, perhaps, just perhaps, you ought to modify your culture so your people don't choose to steal phones in the first place. You're not talking about an individual here. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of persons!
Try fixing the problem for once. You don't want hundreds of thousands of criminals in your city. You really don't want hundreds of thousands of criminals with nothing to steal, by the way.
the classic arcade experience involved being in public, with spectators around, lots of noise, and an undefined number of quarters. it involved a new game, or an unknown game, or a popular game. It was loud. In every way, it was loud. It was a machine bigger than the player. And it dragged you into a place that you otherwise wouldn't have gone that day -- like a mall or a convenience store.
I'm suggesting that if you try, and then fail, you should give up. There's nothing wrong with suggesting what others should do with their money. But you can't be surprised when they don't agree with you.
I have zero interest in funding computers for poor children. I don't think it's a good use of anyone's funds. Clearly, others agree with me.
If you don't have funds of your own to donate, I'm saying that you should focus on building yourself to the point where you can actually contribute. It's a big deal to contribute to society. Taking someone else's money isn't contributing. Using someone else's money also isn't contributing -- it looks like contributing, but really you're just contributing on their behalf. So you've added nothing nothing to the system.
It's basically along the same lines of all of those businesses who over-distribute someone else's product. That's only contributing when there's no other realistic way to get that product. Obviously I can't drive to the refinery every time I need to get gas. But when the shopping mall has seven places to buy the same cellphone, I'm not interested in protecting the rights of the eighth to compete with the seventh.
If you've got no money of your own, then that's the problem that needs solving. Not the poor children. Get your own poor children, stop stealing someone else's.
This would be the definition of irony.
You give away computer for free, and you can't afford computers of your own. So you want someone else to buy you a computer, in order to help manage your give-away-free-computers business. Ptysician, heal thyself?
Perhaps, just maybe, you should select a mission that you can actually achieve; you know, on your own: with your own skills, and your own money.
the odds that you'll wind up choosing an area of CS that is actually dependent on advanced mathematics is nil; those that do find themselves in such an area do so because they already love the math.
there are literally thousands of areas of CS, you can choose from the 90% that don't use any math at all.
and judging by my GPS's refusal to use the elevation number, that it already shows me, to calculate my actual speed and distance using basic trig, there are virtually zero consumer products where the math matters at all.
the only reason you need math is, as you've said, to get through the degree. so drop the math, drop the degree, and stop worrying about what people from six decades ago thought was important then. run your own business, sign your own paycheck, and do whatever the hell you want. no client has ever asked me about my CS education. It's been twenty years of running a successful business, and no one gives a damn.
stand by your own work, guarantee your own efforts, and be responsible. no one cares about anything else.
every little bit doesn't help. there's no use in having a rubber padlock. in this case, there's no use in resisting the amatuer hacker who won't be able to find me in the first place.
and the government does have those penalties, that's why we're complaining now. things like making it illegal to NOT lock your car doors when it's parked on the street. what the hell?
you're talking about detective work. "go get them". It's the penalty afterwards that's supposed to act as a deterant to others in-advance of those crimes. As an individual, I can't really deter future criminals. That's what the judicial system is for -- long after police are done with the man-hunt.
But it's not a personal choice. I don't get the choice to spend $50K / year on security and still stay in business.
The fact that I'm small means that I'm difficult to see, difficult to target, and not worth targeting. Those that really want to target me, and have a reason to do so, I can't secure against. Welcome to Ethan Hunt.
the original idea of augmented reality was to bring more to life -- more information about your surroundings, more interaction, more history, more detail. But this thing does none of that. Instead, it removes your environment, placing you back into the all-too-familiar calendar/e-mail/message/cat-video world.
I'd love to be sitting on a beach, looking out at the waves, and get information about the height of the waves, the times of the tides, the type of fish swimming beneath the waves, and that poem that poet wrote when he first discovered this beach.
I have zero interest in replacing my view of the beach with my e-mail messages, my friend's recipe for hamburgers, and the thousands of photographs random strangers took of what I can see with my own two eyes in front of me.
and what would you call individuals who hack into and steal from multiple systems routinely? Last I checked, someone who commits crimes is a criminal. English is funny that way.
Yeah, I live a neighbourhood where I don't need to use the locks on my doors, the alarm system, bars on the windows, neighbourhood watch, guard house, nor a private security company.
And how dangerous is your neighbourhood? Ever thought of living somewhere safer?
It'd probably cost the equivalent of $50'000 per year for my small business to implement all of those. Thanks for the suggestions. I can't do any of them and remain profitable at all. So I'm going to do none of them.
Instead, I've got a suggestion for you. How about making it illegal to hack into my property; and then why don't you go about aresting and prosecuting criminals? In other words, how about you, my government, go about doing your job, instead of making me into a security task force unto myself.
Sure, it sucks getting hacked. It CAN mean losing money, losing clients, and losing my business. It sucks more to spend so much time and money securing against getting hacked that I WILL losing money, clients, and my business.
Welcome to laws. You don't want me to protect myself against criminals. That's not what we call a civilized society. I don't keep a suit of armour in the garage. I don't have a shield on-hand. I don't have chain-mail shirts -- ok, I do have one, but it's a halloween costume, and it's heavy.
I'm in the exact other boat, so I can see the same problem from the other side. I run a web development business, I don't write specs, I do everything in my languages of choice, I also market being able to handle any technical project for my clients. In my case, however, I specifically don't charge them for bugs. Everything's either project-based pricing or feature-based pricing. Bug fixing, cosmetic alterations, and cursory data field/presentation changing is free. I do all of that in order to justify not writing specs in the first place -- because I'm not you.
I tried paying contractors to work for me. I tried paying employees to work for me. And even paying them proper salaries I got the same results as you're getting from contractors. As employees, instead of running away, the work effort got sloppier and sloppier as bugs and client changes were hacks ontop of hacks. Their speed dropped to nill, and it basically sucked me dry to the point where I could easily lose all of my personal take-out when bug repairs ran longer and longer. And you can't tell a client, especially before they've signed off on a project, that a huge expense is to fix bugs that don't exist yet in something that should be written properly the first time, especially in their minds.
So my advice to you is going to be different. My advice to you is to find contractor developers like myself who do fix bugs for free. But I'm going to tell you that the only way to make that fair to them is to let those developers choose the tools -- i.e. the languages they use. I've spent two decades building up my own tools, to the point where now I can easily handle bugs and after-the-fact client changes so it doesn't cost me anything to fix bugs -- and if you're telling me that you'll produce the test case, then you've saved me 80% of the work. And if I know that you're the one doing it, then I can upgrade my platform to show me exactly what you tested, which will ultimately point me to the very code itself, and that's a total of 90% of the work 90% of the time.
Find the right contractor who knows how to appreciate your policy. I can guarantee he exists, because I'm one of them. There must be others.
Here's why it won't work. It's really very simple. Currently, today, in many big cities, people are starving. Call them homeless, call them poor; some are even starving to death.
And yet, there is protein available all around them. Insects are phenominal nutrition, and easily found.
It would seem that many people would prefer to starve rather than eat insects.
Where does a cartridge of complex carbohydrates rank on your list? On mine, it's way below carrot; it's below tomato. On my list, it's somewhere down around bean sprouts. To be clear, I don't eat bean sprouts except by accident. Which I guess places it above mushrooms, which I actively seek out and avoid.
$14
The whole "40 years old" thing was never about the 40. That's just people labeling quickly. The reall issue is the "forty years old" thing. See the difference?
You're motivated to learn programming, you're motivated to program. So are 20-somethings. The issue with "forty" isn't the "40", it's the house, the family, the mortgage, the problems, the settling, the vacations, the health, the long hours, the weird hours, the focus.
You've already said that you were motivated, that your entire life was changing. Everyone's got some illness, but yours pushed you into programming, not out of it. I'm not saying that you were a charity case, but clearly someone saw that you used to be a very dedicated and hard worker, and simply needed a new focus for health reasons. So your illness actually worked in your favour.
If you play your hand correctly, you'll promote the fact that you're a responsible, mature, and dependable adult, and you'll easily beat out the younger competition.
The only reason that older programmers have trouble is simply because it's a industry with an easy burn-out. If you learned to program professionally when you were 20, and you became proficient at 25, and you settled into your preferred languages/toolsets/environments at 30, then by 35 you aren't interested in new languages and new techniques, none of which are better than the old ones but they are more popular.
For example, I fit that bill. I'm nearly 35, and I refuse to switch to new languages. I haven't even heard of half of the languages that you listed. So I'll continue with what I enjoy, the way that I enjoy it. In my case, it's my business, so no one's going to fire me. But over time, I'll lose more and more opportunities simply because my language of choice isn't being taught in schools.
At the same time, I'll eventually get bored with my same-old-perfect-techniques after, what, 20 years of doing them? That seems reasonable. And I really won't be interested in starting from scratch learning new ways of doing old things and being at the bottom of the learning curve again.
So that's when I'll likely choose to throw out absolutely everything and pick a different career. In my case, having already paid off the house and the car and such, I'll probably jump around through really weird jobs, because "I always wanted to do ..."
But in your case, it's all new, it's all fun, and you're right on the edge of the fore-front of the industry. That's your asset. That's where you can easily beat me too.
Why does anyone, outside of the computer industry, need to know any of that?
The basic components of a computer are the computer, and the keyboard. There may be a box under the desk somewhere, about which no one cares. They have a gas pedal, and a steering wheel. The car goes, and it goes in the direction that I steer. Everything else is optional -- including the gas itself.
Networking is a term that's meant nothing for decades now. The same document can be viewed from multiple computers. That's networking. That's it. No one cares about the speedometer networking with their brakes. No one knows what ABS means.
Software, unless you're creating it, buying it, selling it, or testing it is meaningless. Computers can do things. They can be upgraded to do more things. No one cares about the software in their car.
Proprietary vs open source is industry jargon. There are six types of each, and unless you understand all twelve types, the only thing you can do is get screwed by someone who does. This coffee maker takes coffee. This coffee maker only takes little cups and no one knows what's in the cup. This coffee maker takes these puck-like things. This one has more buttons. This one filters your cheetah-anal-coffee through tampons and the flavour really comes through -- by the way, that exists, seriously.
Just teach them how to read a computer screen in general, if they don't already know how two-dimensional rectangles can overlap -- it's a "three-dimensional-surface", a cool physics paradox. Then teach them that each rectangle is a scope, and how to determine which one they're "in" at any given moment, so they don't always start reading from the top left of the monitor, instead of the window. Then teach them how to explore any random interface, so they feel comfortable browsing drop down menus and lists of links and right-click menus. Then you're done. Let them explore. As long as they don't take out their credit card for anything ever, they're good to go.
Oh, I've done that. It's an interesting number. In my case, it's about $150'000 of stuff, plus the house -- the mortgage includes fire insurance on the house anyway.
But have you ever read your plan? Replacement's covered, but not clean up of the rubble. Carp like that.
So by the time it's all said and done, the insurance still doesn't cover everything. And some catastrophes have other solutions -- like holding someone criminally accountable in court. It's annoying but it's there. And some insurance companies don't make it easy to claim anything. It's annoying but it's there.
And at $10'000 per year anyway, if you house burns down once every fourty years -- all the way to the ground -- then it still isn't worth the insurance! After-all, half the value of your house is the land, and it didn't burn down at all.
So sure, if you've got six children who play with matches alone, and you do your own amateur electrical work, then you might want to mitigate your risk. But if you're a person like me, with a modern house, the odds really are in my favour.
And should everything go horribly wrong, I've got friends and family to help me out too.
I've said it for decades now. Each and every single piece of insurance or warranty or extended warranty is always worth having. Each one makes sense and each one is beneficial. However, all of them is a dumb move, for everybody.
Look at your entire year. Look at every insurance you have, and every warranty you purchase, and every extended warranty you purchase. There's a great chance that you're spending over $10'000 per year on such things as a household. Think about mortgage insurance, life insurance, disability, health, car, washing machines, computers, televisions, carpets, couch stains, kitchen appliances, toilets, furnaces. Travel insurance. Dental.
Yes if your furnace breaks, you'd rather have the insurance cover it rather than spend what could be $3'000 to repair the furnace. Absolutely. But you've spent $10'000 that year on insurance and warranties. $3'000 is smaller.
Yes, everything can go wrong every time. But do they? Are you really worried that you'll have $10'000 worth of damage each year every year? That's a pretty sucky year! Think about it. My tvision broke, I needed medicine for a month, I couldn't pay my mortgage one month, my dryer broke, my furnace broke, my air conditioner broke, my fridge broke, my computer died, and my toilet cracked. I had two car crashes. My third car was stolen; my watch too. Oh yeah, and I died.
Hey, you can insure every second of your life, and never have any financial risk for anything. But really, I don't think that was ever the plan.
There is a lot between the countryside and the megalopolis. That's why I said 30 minutes not an hour.
And moving away from heavily-populated areas doesn't negate the 95%, it stretches out the 95%. Most cities are built on the water, or at the river, or on an island, or around some natural geographical item that limits how big the city can actually sprawl. So it grows inwardly and upwardly. Spreading the population out solves this problem because it allows the growth to be arranged geometrically.
And eventually, when you've got that many more people, you move again.
Heh, 30 minutes north for you!