This claims you can harness the power of the weak nuclear force while turning nickel to copper without releasing ionizing radiation. And: "In past years, several labs have blown up while studying LENR and windows have melted".
"Ionizing radiation" doesn't necessarily melt windows and blow things up. It just has an annoying habit of ripping molecules apart (particularly those giant biological molecules that contain our blueprints), and of taking far too much effort to keep it on the "right" side of a given wall for practical home use.
Releasing energy in the form of heat, however, can melt windows and blow things up. See: Torch, Dynamite, MOAB.
Nice trick there, telling us the cost based on your "wage" - which to us is an arbitrary number. How many monthly electricity payments did it cost you? How long before it pays for itself?
Not really a trick. PV systems have come way down, particularly in the last two years (the US actually punished China for making them too cleap).
You can get individual panels for $1.50 to $2 a Watt now. In bulk (such as a full pallet that you'd use for covering your roof), you can get them under a dollar per Watt.
You don't need battery banks and charge controllers and all that crap unless you want to go purely off-grid. Most people going for a whole-house installation use a 5KW grid-tie inverter in the sub-$2k range (if you want to go with a smaller "toy" installation, you can get 1500W grid-tie inverters for a few hundred bucks).
Payback time? Depends where you live, of course, but for me (in the cool cloudy high-latitude US Northeast), 3 years, realistically.
then you can compare it to other equally divided number w/o being concerned about the absolute amount.
Tell me, do you care if you pay $200 dollars for a bag of oranges that something else pays $4.50 for? Does it make everything just sunshine and unicorn farts for you, that you paid the same percentage of your income?
It's much easier for a wealthy person to buy food, even expensive, organic, hand picked food, than it is for a poor person to buy horse meat and high fructose corn syrup.
Sorry, could you cite the law of physics, or hell, even the US law, that gives everyone the right to eat expensive organic hand picked food regardless of income?
Actually we are asking people who benefit disproportionately to pay a [very] little extra for that privilege
They already pay a [very] lot extra, and don't get more roads or schools or fire protection than anyone else as a result.
15% of $100M still means they paid $15M. How much did you pay last year in taxes? Did you even pay income taxes last year, or do you count as one of the "47%-ers" (and don't give me that "waaaah, we still pay sales tax!" BS) leeching off the rest of us?
Yeah, I count as middle class and vote like a rich man - Because I can appreciate the ideal of "fairness". Making some people pay more for nothing ain't it.
Like most overgeneralizations... this one is quite obviously false. And illustrates one of the dangers about assuming that extrapolation is equivalent to actual supporting data.
Strange, I would have called it trivially true: click on the URL bar, click the keys "goo.gl/yc2lK", click enter.. Done in 14.:)
I mean, there are objects behind paywalls
I see your point, but actually feel fairly comfortable with the author excluding paywalls and the "dark" web. If I can't get there at all without special access, I just don't care how many clicks it would take for someone to jump through whatever authentication hoops it takes to get there.
Most of you have completely missed the point with all your clever tricks to get around Monsanto's arguably-legal (if unethical and immoral) IP rights and to prevent cross contamination and what-have-you.
If you think this looks ugly, c'mon geeks, project this out 50 years. We have hyperbole in this discussion already about "patenting" human offspring. Do you all really think that exact case won't make it to the USSC a few decades from now, as long as we allow slime like Monsanto to claim ownership of genetic material?
Write your politician. March on Washington. Burn the fuckers to the ground (metaphorically, of course - Though I certainly won't cry if someone does). Whatever it takes. This hasn't even started to get ugly yet, and we have the entire future of US agriculture hanging by a thread in this one petty little contract dispute.
If you get reincarnated, it is likely not in this universe anyways (there are more people alive at the moment that have died, ever, so they have had their last lives likely not here, as this will hold for any other planets as well at some time). So no worries.
Now, imagine a new universe expanding inside our own at the speed of light. It hits Earth - We reincarnate somewhere else. It hits there - We reincarnate somewhere else. And so on...
At some point, you will have every entity in the universe trying to reincarnate on the last habitable chunk of dirt in the universe. We'd better hope sentient rabbits exist out there somewhere!
I like physics and I like some quantum theory but calculating that in 10 billion years the universe will disappear hardly seems important.
I wouldn't put too much stock in that number - More like one of those things that could already have happened and we just haven't noticed yet, or might not happen for trillions of years.
As a better way to think about it, take a 6 pack of bottled soda and leave it somewhere just below freezing for a few days. About half of the bottles won't have frozen. If you then open one of the non-frozen ones... Or set it down too hard, or give it a whack with a spoon, you can literally watch it freeze over about 5-10 seconds as a wave of ice sweeps out from one spot (the cap / the bottom / where you whacked it). It does this because supercooled water exists in an unstable state but just hasn't figured out how to freeze yet.
Same idea here, except on a universal scale. At some point, one tiny spot in our universe will "figure out" how to reconfigure itself into a more stable universe. That spot will then expand through the rest of the universe at the speed of light.
It all depends on your general view of humanity. If you consider the majority of people intelligent, rational, and well informed about their political opinions, then it would make sense to give everyone the right to vote directly.
If, however, you view the average Joe as having virtually no comprehension of the actual issues at stake and essentially voting based either on fear, on what Pastor Bob tells them to do, or on who has the best hair; then yes, you would view the electoral college as a "good" thing.
The antebellum South called, it wants you back. Seriously, this issue was settled at Appomatox Court House in 1865.
Seriously, has it? Tell that to the ten times since 1872 (I won't count 1872 since Greely died between voting day and the meeting of the electoral college) we have seen "faithless" electors. Great effort goes into choosing people extremely unlikely to vote against the will of the people of their state, but it still happens.
And what does Appomattox have to do with this? Not talking about secession, but the way the electoral college works today. In the present, modern United States of 2013. You and I don't get a vote. We get to voice an opinion, that our state's electors may accept or may disregard as they see fit. Simple as that.
The whole indirect voting systems like the US Electoral College were created to deal with the logistical problems of giving every citizen the vote.
Uh, no.
We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy. The individual citizens of the United States don't get a vote for president. Our states do. We only get a vote to tell our state government who we would prefer they vote for. And, they don't even need to listen to us (and have in the past chosen to vote against the will of the people)!
In this day and age, the only purpose of indirect elections is to give undue weight to rural areas.
In this day and age, we forget that Massachusetts and New York and Virginia, etc, saw themselves basically as sovereign nations, only joining together in that pesky federal government business to give them a united front in dealing with the old European powers. We forget, in this era of "excuse anything with the Commerce Clause", that the vast majority of the constitution took great pains to refer to the states as such, rather than as mere political subdivisions of the whole.
You also forget that before that whole "one man, one vote", having a voice in government depended solely on how much land you owned. Urbanites didn't give farmers more of a voice out of charity, but rather, the large landowners graciously allowed the unlanded to have a voice at all.
Has the time come when we should realign our political system with modern perceptions? Or should we respect that we have such an archaic system for damned good historical reasons?
Personally, I think the recent gun ownership debate has brought exactly this issue to the center of attention - We have urban yuppies who've created their own violent crimes hell, trying to take guns away from rural areas with almost no violent crime. Perhaps the Founding Fathers understood something about us that we have forgotten.
Don't confuse lack of authentication with privacy, they ain't the same thing.
The vast majority of people don't give a flying fuck about whether or not someone can "theoretically" ID them. I harbor no delusions that, with Slashdot's and my ISP's cooperation, a suitably-empowered government agency could easily ID me. I've certainly said enough about myself on here to confirm even a "close enough" guess.
Most people just care that when their future employer googles their name, their postings on MyLittleFilly.xxx don't go to the top of the list.
I can accurately measure bytes. I cannot predict that you will decide to defragment your HDD halfway through the file copy.
I can accurately measure discrete steps of a process. I cannot predict that you'll start CPU-mining bitcoins shortly after starting step 3 of that process.
I can accurately measure network throughput (to date or right now). I cannot predict that, 30 seconds after you start downloading the latest Debian ISOs, you will fire up a game of Minecraft that crushes your network connection.
I can't predict that your playing Solitaire while waiting for my progress bar will consume the last of your physical RAM and the system will start paging. I can't predict when your neighbor (on the same network segment) will decide to fire up a torrent session or 20. I can't predict that your CPU fan has clogged with cat hair and the system will go into thermal throttle.
And all that, just for processes with a known end-point. Plenty of scenarios don't have a known number of steps or bytes or CPU cycles - From something as simple as searching for a file containing a given string (might get it on the first try, might need to scan 8TB of porn before we find the right one), to recursively fetching dependencies with apt-get.
As much as we want everything our computers do to appear deterministic, it might help to consider most progress bars as less of a measurement of "% complete", and as more of an indication that the program hasn't crashed after three hours of doing nothing obvious.
The difference is, with a gas car, once a week. With an all electric, every day.
A 20 gallon tank at 14MPG (aka a typical pickup) or an 11 gallon tank at 26MPG (typical passenger sedan) both have a comparable total range. You don't, however, generally drive 300 miles a day (or if you do, you know the location and hours of every gas station on the way), so you wouldn't need to "top off" your EV any more "daily" than you would that same pickup or sedan.
That said - Every night, you park your car somewhere in the vicinity of conveniently available grid power. In exchange for five seconds of plugging it in every night, you never need to stop at a gas station in the cold rain and then need to go inside to see the clerk when the stupid damned machine can't read your credit card or the ticket printer breaks.
Do I sound too much like an apologist there? Hey, the Tesla S costs way too much and I don't have one. But I won't hold things against it that apply to any vehicle on the road. Cars take a certain minimum level of basic care and feeding, whether you feed them dead dinosaurs or uranium electrons, to function properly. Simple as that.
If this initial foray succeeds, it could potentially evolve into a workable e-commerce model
Sorry, what?
I like the idea of alternatives to the traditional marketplace, but this just seems completely pointless - A solution in need of a problem.
I didn't get up today and say to myself "Gee, Self, I need #bread, if only I didn't need to actually stop at the store I drive past every day to and from work to get some". I didn't fantasize about future Twitter hacks costing me real money. And I sure as hell didn't wish I could annoy all my friends by sending them a message about every single purchase I make (what gives with that, anyway? Every time I buy something online lately, the store asks if I want to tweet it or post it to my FB wall... "Hey, thieves of the world, I just bought an expensive new TV, and tickets to Peru from March 5th through 20th!").
Then again, I don't tweet about the texture of my morning BM, either, so perhaps this "service" just doesn't really target people like me.
and sales on BlackBerry 10 are already more than they were on PlayBook.
LOL... Silly shill, that would require them to actually have customers to target with your app. But tell me - How much does plugging for Rim pay these days?
and expect to keep your current job. Employers HATE that. They pay you to do your job and keep your mind on their problem. If you aren't, they'll fire you.
Wow, I feel bad for the awful working conditions you must have. But what you say does not, for the most part, hold true in general.
Certainly, make sure your current contract (if you have one) doesn't forbid outside work or try to claim credit for everything you do 24/7 while employed by them. And don't take any work that comes even close to your employer's core business (anticompete agreement or not!). But if my current employer banned moonlighting, they'd need to fire 90% of the IT department.
That said, you should keep your outside jobs quiet. Making more than your coworkers, even if you work more for it, only leads to resentment; and when times get tough and your employer starts looking at cutting raises, benefits, or whole bodies - You don't want to stick out as the guy who doesn't "need" your job (even if true).
As for how best to get started - Slashdotters, having a heavily internet-centric worldview, will recommend places like Elance or Rent-A-Coder; YMMV, but those have a strong vibe of acting primarily as the high-tech version of a group of Mexicans standing outside Home Depot (Elance even shows whether or not the client requires a W-9 right on their main listings!). Instead, look for legitimate temp agencies in your area, contact them to see if they do any tech contracting work, and see if your availability works for them.
most of the courses I spend all my time on are far removed from the skills I need to succeed as a web developer. But on the other hand, I can't imagine another degree that would allow me to stay in a programming mindset. The fact is that web development has taken huge bounds in the last few years, and sadly most universities haven't caught up. Computer science is a field that overlaps with web development, but getting a computer science degree to become a web developer is like getting a zoology degree to become a veterinarian.
Once upon a time, I (and I think most "real" programmers) looked down on web development as "toy" development, the sort of thing a company's owner's "good with computers" nephew did as an excuse to put him on the payroll.
As you correctly point out, though, web development has very much become a form of "real" programming, in some ways more complex than doing native apps. Between communicating with a backend datastore (generally some form of SQL); controlling nontrivial UI logic and AJAX (or comparable) updates through several layers of code from native on the server to client-side Javascript; and now HTML5 has basically made the browser as close to a "native" environment that speaks Javascript as we could ask for - You very much do need a CS degree (or at least that level of understanding) to do any serious web development in the present world.
Aside from the variety of HTML5 demos Google has put together to show off its graphical capabilities, check out Fabrice Bellard's Javascript PC emulator booting into an actual 2.6.20 Linux (CLI, at this point) environment. When "web development" now includes potentially needing to write device drivers, don't think you can take a "CS Lite" degree and jump into a job. If anything, consider your specialty an extension of the core requirements for CS, not a stripped-down version.
Yo dawg, I heard you wanted some violence with your violence, so I sent you a prophet!
Believe whatever you want in private, but the sooner we start considering overt belief in a sky-friend as nothing short of a disease, the better. Religion would count as no fewer than half a dozen major diagnostic categories from the DSM (v4, anyway - who the fark knows what else they screwed up in v5), except that it explicitly exempts religious delusions.
So no, you all don't actually get a pass any more. You chat with god? Take your olanzapine like a good little psychotic! There we go. Don't we all feel less like blowing up buildings and raping Western reporters now? Hmm, I wonder if we could get it added to their water...
/ And if you consider this trolling... Well, suffice it to say I wish I meant this as a sad attempt at trolling. Not so funny that we really live in this fucked up world.
And why should bytes that don't even make it to my machine count towards my usage?
Well, it works just like cars. For every thousand cars that pass QC, one or two fail and need to get recycled into parts. So when you buy one of those cars, if it ends up not working, you just eat the cost and shrug and buy another one.
[...] Even though he is a self-starter I think he would benefit from [...]
[...] he has indicated that he'd like learn some introductory programming skills this summer [...]
[...] the CS101-type courses I've seen offered are too general to meet his needs[...]
Thuppathuppathuppathuppathuppathuppa...
No offense, but one of those things doesn't jive. Either you want him to waste his last summer of freedom learning something his uni will already present at a painfully slow pace... Or you over-estimate his degree of self-starting.
In college, I had two very distinct types of peers in my CS classes (no, I don't plan to make this into a "people who know binary" joke). Half of us already knew a few programming languages and casually discussed our latest projects (both in the "toy" and "real employment" senses). And half of "us" switched majors to Tech Writing (the "philosophy major" of STEM) after failing the first semester of Analysis of Algorithms (assuming they even made it past Intro to Programming).
Perhaps he really does have an interest in programming, perhaps you want him to have an interest in a moderately in-demand and well-paid field. If you make him spend the summer grinding to get a leg up on the other freshmen, though, you can pretty much guarantee that if he graduates in 4-5 years, he'll have a degree in French Renaissance Literature.;)
More seriously, if he wants to figure out if he really likes programming, and wants to get an edge over his peers - Have him look for an internship (probably unpaid if he can't actually program yet).
Or, just run Ghostery, which scrubs the whole lot of 'em. Anyone browsing the modern internet without at least an adblocker and a tracker/analytics blocker pretty much deserve what they get.
On the other hand, if the odds have shifted significantly in only one of those markets, that could be taken as a sign that that market was being manipulated.
Or, y'know, maybe it just reflects the fact that Americans have a teensy bit more input into who becomes the next president of the US than, say, Germans?
Slashdot Mirror
This claims you can harness the power of the weak nuclear force while turning nickel to copper without releasing ionizing radiation.
And: "In past years, several labs have blown up while studying LENR and windows have melted".
"Ionizing radiation" doesn't necessarily melt windows and blow things up. It just has an annoying habit of ripping molecules apart (particularly those giant biological molecules that contain our blueprints), and of taking far too much effort to keep it on the "right" side of a given wall for practical home use.
Releasing energy in the form of heat, however, can melt windows and blow things up. See: Torch, Dynamite, MOAB.
Nice trick there, telling us the cost based on your "wage" - which to us is an arbitrary number. How many monthly electricity payments did it cost you? How long before it pays for itself?
Not really a trick. PV systems have come way down, particularly in the last two years (the US actually punished China for making them too cleap).
You can get individual panels for $1.50 to $2 a Watt now. In bulk (such as a full pallet that you'd use for covering your roof), you can get them under a dollar per Watt.
You don't need battery banks and charge controllers and all that crap unless you want to go purely off-grid. Most people going for a whole-house installation use a 5KW grid-tie inverter in the sub-$2k range (if you want to go with a smaller "toy" installation, you can get 1500W grid-tie inverters for a few hundred bucks).
Payback time? Depends where you live, of course, but for me (in the cool cloudy high-latitude US Northeast), 3 years, realistically.
then you can compare it to other equally divided number w/o being concerned about the absolute amount.
Tell me, do you care if you pay $200 dollars for a bag of oranges that something else pays $4.50 for? Does it make everything just sunshine and unicorn farts for you, that you paid the same percentage of your income?
It's much easier for a wealthy person to buy food, even expensive, organic, hand picked food, than it is for a poor person to buy horse meat and high fructose corn syrup.
Sorry, could you cite the law of physics, or hell, even the US law, that gives everyone the right to eat expensive organic hand picked food regardless of income?
Actually we are asking people who benefit disproportionately to pay a [very] little extra for that privilege
They already pay a [very] lot extra, and don't get more roads or schools or fire protection than anyone else as a result.
15% of $100M still means they paid $15M. How much did you pay last year in taxes? Did you even pay income taxes last year, or do you count as one of the "47%-ers" (and don't give me that "waaaah, we still pay sales tax!" BS) leeching off the rest of us?
Yeah, I count as middle class and vote like a rich man - Because I can appreciate the ideal of "fairness". Making some people pay more for nothing ain't it.
Like most overgeneralizations... this one is quite obviously false. And illustrates one of the dangers about assuming that extrapolation is equivalent to actual supporting data.
:)
Strange, I would have called it trivially true: click on the URL bar, click the keys "goo.gl/yc2lK", click enter.. Done in 14.
I mean, there are objects behind paywalls
I see your point, but actually feel fairly comfortable with the author excluding paywalls and the "dark" web. If I can't get there at all without special access, I just don't care how many clicks it would take for someone to jump through whatever authentication hoops it takes to get there.
Most of you have completely missed the point with all your clever tricks to get around Monsanto's arguably-legal (if unethical and immoral) IP rights and to prevent cross contamination and what-have-you.
If you think this looks ugly, c'mon geeks, project this out 50 years. We have hyperbole in this discussion already about "patenting" human offspring. Do you all really think that exact case won't make it to the USSC a few decades from now, as long as we allow slime like Monsanto to claim ownership of genetic material?
Write your politician. March on Washington. Burn the fuckers to the ground (metaphorically, of course - Though I certainly won't cry if someone does). Whatever it takes. This hasn't even started to get ugly yet, and we have the entire future of US agriculture hanging by a thread in this one petty little contract dispute.
If you get reincarnated, it is likely not in this universe anyways (there are more people alive at the moment that have died, ever, so they have had their last lives likely not here, as this will hold for any other planets as well at some time). So no worries.
Now, imagine a new universe expanding inside our own at the speed of light. It hits Earth - We reincarnate somewhere else. It hits there - We reincarnate somewhere else. And so on...
At some point, you will have every entity in the universe trying to reincarnate on the last habitable chunk of dirt in the universe. We'd better hope sentient rabbits exist out there somewhere!
I like physics and I like some quantum theory but calculating that in 10 billion years the universe will disappear hardly seems important.
I wouldn't put too much stock in that number - More like one of those things that could already have happened and we just haven't noticed yet, or might not happen for trillions of years.
As a better way to think about it, take a 6 pack of bottled soda and leave it somewhere just below freezing for a few days. About half of the bottles won't have frozen. If you then open one of the non-frozen ones... Or set it down too hard, or give it a whack with a spoon, you can literally watch it freeze over about 5-10 seconds as a wave of ice sweeps out from one spot (the cap / the bottom / where you whacked it). It does this because supercooled water exists in an unstable state but just hasn't figured out how to freeze yet.
Same idea here, except on a universal scale. At some point, one tiny spot in our universe will "figure out" how to reconfigure itself into a more stable universe. That spot will then expand through the rest of the universe at the speed of light.
You seem to think that this is a good thing.
It all depends on your general view of humanity. If you consider the majority of people intelligent, rational, and well informed about their political opinions, then it would make sense to give everyone the right to vote directly.
If, however, you view the average Joe as having virtually no comprehension of the actual issues at stake and essentially voting based either on fear, on what Pastor Bob tells them to do, or on who has the best hair; then yes, you would view the electoral college as a "good" thing.
The antebellum South called, it wants you back. Seriously, this issue was settled at Appomatox Court House in 1865.
Seriously, has it? Tell that to the ten times since 1872 (I won't count 1872 since Greely died between voting day and the meeting of the electoral college) we have seen "faithless" electors. Great effort goes into choosing people extremely unlikely to vote against the will of the people of their state, but it still happens.
And what does Appomattox have to do with this? Not talking about secession, but the way the electoral college works today. In the present, modern United States of 2013. You and I don't get a vote. We get to voice an opinion, that our state's electors may accept or may disregard as they see fit. Simple as that.
The whole indirect voting systems like the US Electoral College were created to deal with the logistical problems of giving every citizen the vote.
Uh, no.
We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy. The individual citizens of the United States don't get a vote for president. Our states do. We only get a vote to tell our state government who we would prefer they vote for. And, they don't even need to listen to us (and have in the past chosen to vote against the will of the people)!
In this day and age, the only purpose of indirect elections is to give undue weight to rural areas.
In this day and age, we forget that Massachusetts and New York and Virginia, etc, saw themselves basically as sovereign nations, only joining together in that pesky federal government business to give them a united front in dealing with the old European powers. We forget, in this era of "excuse anything with the Commerce Clause", that the vast majority of the constitution took great pains to refer to the states as such, rather than as mere political subdivisions of the whole.
You also forget that before that whole "one man, one vote", having a voice in government depended solely on how much land you owned. Urbanites didn't give farmers more of a voice out of charity, but rather, the large landowners graciously allowed the unlanded to have a voice at all.
Has the time come when we should realign our political system with modern perceptions? Or should we respect that we have such an archaic system for damned good historical reasons?
Personally, I think the recent gun ownership debate has brought exactly this issue to the center of attention - We have urban yuppies who've created their own violent crimes hell, trying to take guns away from rural areas with almost no violent crime. Perhaps the Founding Fathers understood something about us that we have forgotten.
Don't confuse lack of authentication with privacy, they ain't the same thing.
The vast majority of people don't give a flying fuck about whether or not someone can "theoretically" ID them. I harbor no delusions that, with Slashdot's and my ISP's cooperation, a suitably-empowered government agency could easily ID me. I've certainly said enough about myself on here to confirm even a "close enough" guess.
Most people just care that when their future employer googles their name, their postings on MyLittleFilly.xxx don't go to the top of the list.
You want real online privacy? Don't use Facebook.
All of the above aside - This!
I can accurately measure bytes. I cannot predict that you will decide to defragment your HDD halfway through the file copy.
I can accurately measure discrete steps of a process. I cannot predict that you'll start CPU-mining bitcoins shortly after starting step 3 of that process.
I can accurately measure network throughput (to date or right now). I cannot predict that, 30 seconds after you start downloading the latest Debian ISOs, you will fire up a game of Minecraft that crushes your network connection.
I can't predict that your playing Solitaire while waiting for my progress bar will consume the last of your physical RAM and the system will start paging. I can't predict when your neighbor (on the same network segment) will decide to fire up a torrent session or 20. I can't predict that your CPU fan has clogged with cat hair and the system will go into thermal throttle.
And all that, just for processes with a known end-point. Plenty of scenarios don't have a known number of steps or bytes or CPU cycles - From something as simple as searching for a file containing a given string (might get it on the first try, might need to scan 8TB of porn before we find the right one), to recursively fetching dependencies with apt-get.
As much as we want everything our computers do to appear deterministic, it might help to consider most progress bars as less of a measurement of "% complete", and as more of an indication that the program hasn't crashed after three hours of doing nothing obvious.
how is the number of spaceships relevant to the question of mining rights?
A "right" you can't use, you don't have. Simple as that.
The difference is, with a gas car, once a week. With an all electric, every day.
A 20 gallon tank at 14MPG (aka a typical pickup) or an 11 gallon tank at 26MPG (typical passenger sedan) both have a comparable total range. You don't, however, generally drive 300 miles a day (or if you do, you know the location and hours of every gas station on the way), so you wouldn't need to "top off" your EV any more "daily" than you would that same pickup or sedan.
That said - Every night, you park your car somewhere in the vicinity of conveniently available grid power. In exchange for five seconds of plugging it in every night, you never need to stop at a gas station in the cold rain and then need to go inside to see the clerk when the stupid damned machine can't read your credit card or the ticket printer breaks.
Do I sound too much like an apologist there? Hey, the Tesla S costs way too much and I don't have one. But I won't hold things against it that apply to any vehicle on the road. Cars take a certain minimum level of basic care and feeding, whether you feed them dead dinosaurs or uranium electrons, to function properly. Simple as that.
If this initial foray succeeds, it could potentially evolve into a workable e-commerce model
Sorry, what?
I like the idea of alternatives to the traditional marketplace, but this just seems completely pointless - A solution in need of a problem.
I didn't get up today and say to myself "Gee, Self, I need #bread, if only I didn't need to actually stop at the store I drive past every day to and from work to get some". I didn't fantasize about future Twitter hacks costing me real money. And I sure as hell didn't wish I could annoy all my friends by sending them a message about every single purchase I make (what gives with that, anyway? Every time I buy something online lately, the store asks if I want to tweet it or post it to my FB wall... "Hey, thieves of the world, I just bought an expensive new TV, and tickets to Peru from March 5th through 20th!").
Then again, I don't tweet about the texture of my morning BM, either, so perhaps this "service" just doesn't really target people like me.
and sales on BlackBerry 10 are already more than they were on PlayBook.
LOL... Silly shill, that would require them to actually have customers to target with your app. But tell me - How much does plugging for Rim pay these days?
and expect to keep your current job. Employers HATE that. They pay you to do your job and keep your mind on their problem. If you aren't, they'll fire you.
Wow, I feel bad for the awful working conditions you must have. But what you say does not, for the most part, hold true in general.
Certainly, make sure your current contract (if you have one) doesn't forbid outside work or try to claim credit for everything you do 24/7 while employed by them. And don't take any work that comes even close to your employer's core business (anticompete agreement or not!). But if my current employer banned moonlighting, they'd need to fire 90% of the IT department.
That said, you should keep your outside jobs quiet. Making more than your coworkers, even if you work more for it, only leads to resentment; and when times get tough and your employer starts looking at cutting raises, benefits, or whole bodies - You don't want to stick out as the guy who doesn't "need" your job (even if true).
As for how best to get started - Slashdotters, having a heavily internet-centric worldview, will recommend places like Elance or Rent-A-Coder; YMMV, but those have a strong vibe of acting primarily as the high-tech version of a group of Mexicans standing outside Home Depot (Elance even shows whether or not the client requires a W-9 right on their main listings!). Instead, look for legitimate temp agencies in your area, contact them to see if they do any tech contracting work, and see if your availability works for them.
most of the courses I spend all my time on are far removed from the skills I need to succeed as a web developer. But on the other hand, I can't imagine another degree that would allow me to stay in a programming mindset. The fact is that web development has taken huge bounds in the last few years, and sadly most universities haven't caught up. Computer science is a field that overlaps with web development, but getting a computer science degree to become a web developer is like getting a zoology degree to become a veterinarian.
Once upon a time, I (and I think most "real" programmers) looked down on web development as "toy" development, the sort of thing a company's owner's "good with computers" nephew did as an excuse to put him on the payroll.
As you correctly point out, though, web development has very much become a form of "real" programming, in some ways more complex than doing native apps. Between communicating with a backend datastore (generally some form of SQL); controlling nontrivial UI logic and AJAX (or comparable) updates through several layers of code from native on the server to client-side Javascript; and now HTML5 has basically made the browser as close to a "native" environment that speaks Javascript as we could ask for - You very much do need a CS degree (or at least that level of understanding) to do any serious web development in the present world.
Aside from the variety of HTML5 demos Google has put together to show off its graphical capabilities, check out Fabrice Bellard's Javascript PC emulator booting into an actual 2.6.20 Linux (CLI, at this point) environment. When "web development" now includes potentially needing to write device drivers, don't think you can take a "CS Lite" degree and jump into a job. If anything, consider your specialty an extension of the core requirements for CS, not a stripped-down version.
Yo dawg, I heard you wanted some violence with your violence, so I sent you a prophet!
Believe whatever you want in private, but the sooner we start considering overt belief in a sky-friend as nothing short of a disease, the better. Religion would count as no fewer than half a dozen major diagnostic categories from the DSM (v4, anyway - who the fark knows what else they screwed up in v5), except that it explicitly exempts religious delusions.
So no, you all don't actually get a pass any more. You chat with god? Take your olanzapine like a good little psychotic! There we go. Don't we all feel less like blowing up buildings and raping Western reporters now? Hmm, I wonder if we could get it added to their water...
/ And if you consider this trolling... Well, suffice it to say I wish I meant this as a sad attempt at trolling. Not so funny that we really live in this fucked up world.
And why should bytes that don't even make it to my machine count towards my usage?
Well, it works just like cars. For every thousand cars that pass QC, one or two fail and need to get recycled into parts. So when you buy one of those cars, if it ends up not working, you just eat the cost and shrug and buy another one.
Right?
[...] Even though he is a self-starter I think he would benefit from [...]
;)
[...] he has indicated that he'd like learn some introductory programming skills this summer [...]
[...] the CS101-type courses I've seen offered are too general to meet his needs[...]
Thuppathuppathuppathuppathuppathuppa...
No offense, but one of those things doesn't jive. Either you want him to waste his last summer of freedom learning something his uni will already present at a painfully slow pace... Or you over-estimate his degree of self-starting.
In college, I had two very distinct types of peers in my CS classes (no, I don't plan to make this into a "people who know binary" joke). Half of us already knew a few programming languages and casually discussed our latest projects (both in the "toy" and "real employment" senses). And half of "us" switched majors to Tech Writing (the "philosophy major" of STEM) after failing the first semester of Analysis of Algorithms (assuming they even made it past Intro to Programming).
Perhaps he really does have an interest in programming, perhaps you want him to have an interest in a moderately in-demand and well-paid field. If you make him spend the summer grinding to get a leg up on the other freshmen, though, you can pretty much guarantee that if he graduates in 4-5 years, he'll have a degree in French Renaissance Literature.
More seriously, if he wants to figure out if he really likes programming, and wants to get an edge over his peers - Have him look for an internship (probably unpaid if he can't actually program yet).
[...] if you assume that withholding the truth is also being dishonest
9/10... Well played, sir!
0.0.0.0 connect.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 graph.facebook.com
Or, just run Ghostery, which scrubs the whole lot of 'em. Anyone browsing the modern internet without at least an adblocker and a tracker/analytics blocker pretty much deserve what they get.
On the other hand, if the odds have shifted significantly in only one of those markets, that could be taken as a sign that that market was being manipulated.
Or, y'know, maybe it just reflects the fact that Americans have a teensy bit more input into who becomes the next president of the US than, say, Germans?