Eh, we got a bunch of LED lightbulbs on discount through our power company.
Compared to compact fluorescents, they're pretty nice... less fiddly without the ballast issues and dimmable. The light appears warmer and flicker-free.
Compared to incandescents, they use a lot less power, and feel a lot less fragile. Haven't had one burn out on me yet.
I suppose if I wanted to use it for heat, I'd prefer an incandescent or halogen bulb.
... or, you know, you could just print the damn thing in metal. It's not like it's going to take that much longer for 3D printers to be capable of printing in metal.
Ironically, I finally gave up running Linux on my main home machine about a decade ago so I could play Left4Dead, which was one of the first "big" Valve titles ported to Linux. Now I'm sorta addicted to World of Tanks, which works under Linux with wine/PlaysOnLinux but isn't a very good experience.
I have 2 kids, though, and I'm not going to buy them each a Windows gaming PC, so I set them up with a multiseat Linux box for their minecraft: http://trumblings.blogspot.com...
Steam works pretty well, so my son has started playing other stuff... TF2, War Thunder, and I think I'll gift him my extra copy of Portal 2 and Goat Simulator.
So yeah, maybe still have one Windows PC as the gaming box for the "Windows exclusive" titles, but Steam on Linux will certainly open a broader market for them for secondary / multiplayer LAN setups.
Well, FTFA, they suggest a more realistic number might be in the 60,000s. Anyone who has been in the job market knows that for every unfilled IT job position, there are at least 10 contracting and headhunter firms like Dice vying to fill that job req for their "special client". So it's perfectly reasonable that we could see 10x as many job postings as actual positions available.
And even then, they say that with the inflated numbers, 17% of the IT workforce is unfulfilled. Which actually sounds about right since roughly about a fifth of all of my engineering teams in recent memory have been open job reqs to replace people who just left.
Anyway, contracting and headhunter firms are a big cottage industry grown up around IT nowadays, we're gonna have to hire more developers to make sense of all of this IT hiring data. Like the banks making more money by loaning each other money, we could make the IT job market even bigger by trying to optimize the IT job market! You should use Dice to help you sort through it all!
Yeah, but it's not like we look to "Revenge of the Nerds" as any kind of cultural identity.
But speaking of which, was there supposed to be a joke for the Nerd Frat being "Lambda Lambda Lambda" ? Some kind of recursive functional programming reference, or just a simple pun on "lame" / "sheep"?
Nah, Dice is just inciting fear and confusion. It's good for their business to make hiring seem like an insurmountable challenge.
Seriously, there's an entire cottage industry set up around tech contracting. It used to be individual headhunters running around doing this stuff, but now it's much more organized and... permanent?
It makes sense in some respects... there's more flexibility in the workforce if you can contract out a lot of your labor for exactly what you need when you need it, and then send them back to the contracting pool when the project is done. No one really makes long-term investments in their employees anymore, since anything they learn they'll use to jump ship for higher pay elsewhere.
From the employee perspective... at least you're not fiddling with changing your insurance and junk every few years when you switch employers... and... well, that's pretty much it. But if things are more fluid, ostensibly the workforce can be better optimized between skills and jobs than if everyone were locked into a single employer / home mortgage / etc. for umpteen years.
eh, I find my own favorite music too distracting, then I start thinking about other stuff and skipping forwards and messing with the playlist. So I find it the least effort to just have a good internet radio stream going on in the background.
Most of them I discovered here on Slashdot, even.
Groove Salad on http://somafm.com/ (many other streams there worth trying too, most of my favorite songs are from Lush, but GS is the best coding stream)
Sleepbot on http://sleepbot.com/ for a wide variety of background ambience that's not necessessarily music
Ha, thanks, awesome insight coming from "Ungrounded Lightning"!
On some of the systems we put a neutral current eliminator to try to "fix" the 60Hz buzz coming off of improperly grounded computers. I think it was overkill for what we were doing, because by that point we had given up trying to use internal audio cards for some of our rackmount computers and were using SoundBlaster Live! USB audio dongles where we couldn't use digital audio, which made most of our system noise problems go away. But it would be nice to have an affordable NCE for some applications, like being able to run amplified speakers from my phone or laptop while they're charging.
In my car I get alternator noise if I try to charge my phone while it's playing music to the aux input. I can make it go away by using a Qi wireless charger instead of plugging in the USB directly... with the added bonus that I'm not fiddling with trying to plug my phone in while I'm driving. Another way to make the alternator noise go away is paradoxically plugging an inverter into the accessory port and using a standard 120V AC wall wart USB charger with the phone. (shrug). Next car will probably have a bluetooth head unit, which I'm sure brings on another set of annoyances.
Heh, I used to do multi-conference room / theater AV integration for large defense companies. The number 1 problem was always audio.
1. Test. Test test test. You can get almost any cheap thing working well if you bother to test and tune everything BEFORE the meeting. The most expensive thing can fail for silly reasons if you don't bother to test everything BEFORE the meeting (usually because some executive schlupp dials into both the audio bridge and VTC MCU at the last minute). Then freeze the configuration. Yeah, good luck freezing the configuration with engineers and tinkerers running around.
2. POTS sucks. Maybe some telephony devices are able to negotiate better than 8kHz 8-bit audio sampling if their codecs match up, but you're better off going with something with VTC-quality audio using H323. Most VoIP teleconferencing lines don't bother trying to beat POTS audio quality. So even if you have a nice Polycom phone that does good AEC and NC, you're still going to strain to hear what's going on.
3. Speakerphones suck. Most of them don't bother doing good AEC and NC. Get a good bluetooth or USB headset. Gaming teamspeak headsets are relatively cheap. As long as it's digital, so they don't introduce any analog amp noise from the system.
4. PC/laptop microphones suck. I don't know why no one bothers to test them to the same level as your average cheap dumbphone speakerphone. They pick up all kinds of system electrical noise, and rely on software to do any AEC or NC, which adds more latency. About a quarter of the people in our daily standup have laptop microphone fails on Google Hangouts or Skype each day. Most end up dialing back in from their smartphone when that happens.
Anyway, all that said, our current standup room setup consists of a Google Hangouts room on a permanently-fixed Mac mini with a $50 "Blue Snowball USB Condenser Microphone" and Logitech USB camera attached to it (the USB audio coming in from the Logitech camera was deemed insufficient, even for the small room we had it in.). For remote participants, I've had good experiences with extended use of the $200+ Jabra PRO 9470 Mono Wireless Headset, which is switchable between PC and POTS/VoIP phone use, but a simpler/cheaper bluetooth headset would probably work just as well paired with smartphone/PC.
I'm also looking forward to someday playing with Amazon's Echo thingy someday, since for $200 it seems to have a lot of the technical audio features of more expensive audio conferencing systems: http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo/ assuming it will be able to act as a simple bluetooth speakerphone instead of only for all of the other AI junk they're cramming into it.
Yes, this. Actually, we already have that right now. Minecraft for XBox is already full of licensed DLC for XBox, Dr. Who, etc. http://www.cinemablend.com/gam...
Minecraft as a cash cow is complete, there's no need to do any more development. It's all business dealings from here on out.
Some Slashdotter put it best a few months back... "Microsoft didn't buy a game, they bought a generation"
Hey, LOOK everybody, Clinton supports PRIVACY rights from the prying eyes of the NSA!
nmap clintonemail.com
Starting Nmap 6.47 ( http://nmap.org/ ) at 2015-03-03 07:50 PST Nmap scan report for clintonemail.com (208.91.197.27) Host is up (0.083s latency). Not shown: 996 filtered ports PORT STATE SERVICE 53/tcp open domain 80/tcp open http 554/tcp open rtsp 7070/tcp open realserver ... and... transparency through old video streaming technology.
curl -vi clintonemail.com... says it's an apache server, so there's that.
Well, if anybody else in government did this, they'd get fired, lose their pension, and possibly face criminal charges.
When the people at the highest levels of power decide that the law doesn't apply to them, nothing at all happens.
So, on behalf of the rest of the world... when the political leaders ignore the law and face no consequences, the rest of us want to send a big collective "fuck you".
This has nothing to do with her politics. If Bush or Cheney had done this, we'd want them prosecuted as well.
Laws which are selectively applied are crap. Assholes in power who believe the law doesn't apply to them need to be punished.
These laws exist so there is a public record of activities, not some place where you can sidestep that and conduct business elsewhere away from oversight.
So you're saying Clinton should maybe be fined for something other than violating recordkeeping policy?
On March 6, 2007, Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and two counts of perjury. He was acquitted on one count of making false statements. He was not charged for revealing Plame's CIA status. His sentence included a $250,000 fine, 30 months in prison and two years of probation. On July 2, 2007, President George W. Bush commuted Libby's sentence, removing the jail term but leaving in place the fine and probation, calling the sentence "excessive."[43][44] In a subsequent press conference, on July 12, 2007, Bush noted, "...the Scooter Libby decision was, I thought, a fair and balanced decision."
Just out of curiosity, what email systems does she use? Hopefully not Yahoo mail, that was the one that the Alaska governess had gotten hacked with, right?
I assume her official US government email would have been similar to the system I used while working for a DoD contractor: Outlook / Exchange, where you had to use your smartcard + PIN to encrypt or at least digitally sign every email sent, and there was a 50MB limit on your server-side inbox, 2MB limit on attachments, and no zip files or Office documents or anything else the virus scanner couldn't recognize. And accidentally hitting Ctrl-Enter-Enter would automagically send your mail off prematurely unless you were permitted to change that option.
This seems indicative of sense that the rules do not apply to me.
Nobody who would vote for Hillary Clinton will care about things like this. There might be some hoopla on Twitter and Fox News for a few days, and then there will be some stragglers like with Benghazi, but it will mostly fade out of the mainstream media within a few hours from now.
Plus, they've known that Clinton's been doing this since the Benghazi investigation, when Clinton staffers rifled through those personal email accounts to provide 50,000 messages for the investigation team. That this issue makes headline news now, the day after she officially announces her presidential election campaign, is pure politics to control the narrative.
Yeah, not really possible to put politics aside for the moment, since that's exactly what this is.
I would put down Java as a good language for learning how to do OOP stuff in the most verbose way possible. But at least it works as documented, and is well-documented. I find myself spending less time fighting the compiler and obscure memory allocation problems, and more time fighting the shear volume of code. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Otherwise, I think I'd have more fun doing something in Python, with some modules implemented in C++ to optimize the performance-critical parts.
Oh, I'm not trying to blame anything on the U.S.... I love this country, and just enjoy taking notes on how it works in case I ever find myself in charge of a fantasy island somewhere.
Yeah, the European imperialists have a long history of causing turmoil by running in and carving arbitrary boundaries, like in Africa. http://peterslarson.com/2011/0...
Keeping your opponents locked in regional wars is a great way to be left alone so you can get ahead in Civilization. I'm kinda surprised they haven't added those kinds of territorial boundaries meddling to the gameplay yet, though I guess gifting weapons to the "independent" NPC city-states in Civ V so they can grief your enemies probably does the job just fine.
...and Saddam existed because we put him there to fight a proxy cold war against Russian-backed Iran. http://www.democraticundergrou...
ISIS exists because we need another set of boogeymen to stir shit up with neighboring Syria and Iran on our behalf. http://scgnews.com/the-covert-...
We read a lot about how ISIS somehow keeps getting access to US-funded weapons sent to the region to help Libyan rebels topple Qaddafi or the Iraqi army "keep the peace". They'll get their Twitter feeds back again when we need them to resume looking evil to the rest of the world so we can justify going back in there to "clean the place up". That time just isn't now.
heh, back in 2000 I had an old greyscale Compaq laptop like that without a floppy drive or CDROM or USB. I managed to get Debian bootstrapped on it through the serial port!
Used a DOS zmodem program to transfer a minimal linux rescue image to it and launched it with loadlin.exe . Then used that to re partition and resize the 120MB hdd with a 80MB partition for Debian. Then some how managed to loadlin the Debian installer image and convince it to install a few packages at a time from the little DOS partition. Once that was working nicely, I got lilo installed to the MBR, and finally got rid of DOS/Win3.11 .
I think I eventually got the PCMCIA NIC and X working as well, but it was only really decent at running emacs from the console. I wrote a few reports on it and graphed stuff in octave and ran stuff through latex to produce ps2pdfs to print on campus. It was actually fairly effective at preventing me from wasting too much time playing Quake:P
Heh, I get your point, but the google search on "Fareed Zakaria oil" is pure comedy...
Zakaria: Why oil prices will stay high – Global Public Square... globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/.../zakaria-why-oil... Fareed Zakaria GPS Jan 15, 2012 - By Fareed Zakaria, CNN The next time you pay $3.50 dollars for a... So why is oil trading high at $113 a barrel, more than twice the price it was...
Zakaria: 2015 the year of America? - CNN.com www.cnn.com/2015/01/05/opinion/zakaria-year-america/ CNN Jan 5, 2015 - Falling oil prices and a vibrant society could help make 2015 America's year, says Fareed Zakaria.
There are some good graphs of US production vs. imports at: http://cassandralegacy.blogspo...... but having trouble finding a good graph showing that US oil consumption also fell due to the recession, and that's just as much responsible for the reduction in US imports as the increase in US production.
Anyway, by all reports, US gas consumption will shoot up again since everyone's been out buying gas-guzzling these past couple of months: http://www.wsj.com/articles/oi...
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, we got a bunch of LED lightbulbs on discount through our power company.
Compared to compact fluorescents, they're pretty nice... less fiddly without the ballast issues and dimmable. The light appears warmer and flicker-free.
Compared to incandescents, they use a lot less power, and feel a lot less fragile. Haven't had one burn out on me yet.
I suppose if I wanted to use it for heat, I'd prefer an incandescent or halogen bulb.
The files are out there, find the torrent!
http://fortune.com/2015/01/13/...
... or, you know, you could just print the damn thing in metal. It's not like it's going to take that much longer for 3D printers to be capable of printing in metal.
Oh, look: http://www.gizmag.com/3d-print...
Ironically, I finally gave up running Linux on my main home machine about a decade ago so I could play Left4Dead, which was one of the first "big" Valve titles ported to Linux. Now I'm sorta addicted to World of Tanks, which works under Linux with wine/PlaysOnLinux but isn't a very good experience.
I have 2 kids, though, and I'm not going to buy them each a Windows gaming PC, so I set them up with a multiseat Linux box for their minecraft:
http://trumblings.blogspot.com...
Steam works pretty well, so my son has started playing other stuff... TF2, War Thunder, and I think I'll gift him my extra copy of Portal 2 and Goat Simulator.
So yeah, maybe still have one Windows PC as the gaming box for the "Windows exclusive" titles, but Steam on Linux will certainly open a broader market for them for secondary / multiplayer LAN setups.
Nope, thanks, that makes sense! :P
Fun Stuff that I must have missed when I saw it decades ago... and just makes it more relevant to TFA
Well, FTFA, they suggest a more realistic number might be in the 60,000s. Anyone who has been in the job market knows that for every unfilled IT job position, there are at least 10 contracting and headhunter firms like Dice vying to fill that job req for their "special client". So it's perfectly reasonable that we could see 10x as many job postings as actual positions available.
And even then, they say that with the inflated numbers, 17% of the IT workforce is unfulfilled. Which actually sounds about right since roughly about a fifth of all of my engineering teams in recent memory have been open job reqs to replace people who just left.
Anyway, contracting and headhunter firms are a big cottage industry grown up around IT nowadays, we're gonna have to hire more developers to make sense of all of this IT hiring data. Like the banks making more money by loaning each other money, we could make the IT job market even bigger by trying to optimize the IT job market! You should use Dice to help you sort through it all!
Dice! (am I doing it right?)
Yeah, but it's not like we look to "Revenge of the Nerds" as any kind of cultural identity.
But speaking of which, was there supposed to be a joke for the Nerd Frat being "Lambda Lambda Lambda" ? Some kind of recursive functional programming reference, or just a simple pun on "lame" / "sheep"?
Nah, Dice is just inciting fear and confusion. It's good for their business to make hiring seem like an insurmountable challenge.
Seriously, there's an entire cottage industry set up around tech contracting. It used to be individual headhunters running around doing this stuff, but now it's much more organized and... permanent?
It makes sense in some respects... there's more flexibility in the workforce if you can contract out a lot of your labor for exactly what you need when you need it, and then send them back to the contracting pool when the project is done. No one really makes long-term investments in their employees anymore, since anything they learn they'll use to jump ship for higher pay elsewhere.
From the employee perspective... at least you're not fiddling with changing your insurance and junk every few years when you switch employers... and... well, that's pretty much it. But if things are more fluid, ostensibly the workforce can be better optimized between skills and jobs than if everyone were locked into a single employer / home mortgage / etc. for umpteen years.
Plus, if it was legitimate AGW, the Earth would have natural ways to shut the whole thing down.
eh, I find my own favorite music too distracting, then I start thinking about other stuff and skipping forwards and messing with the playlist. So I find it the least effort to just have a good internet radio stream going on in the background.
Most of them I discovered here on Slashdot, even.
Groove Salad on http://somafm.com/ (many other streams there worth trying too, most of my favorite songs are from Lush, but GS is the best coding stream)
Sleepbot on http://sleepbot.com/ for a wide variety of background ambience that's not necessessarily music
Nectarine http://scenemusic.net/ for video game / tracker stuff
Those are my go-to options for keeping my tempo up through the long nights.
Did he have a ticket?
Wow, cool story. Still, the cynic in me wonders if that manager was fired because he didn't manage to take both of your passports :P
Ha, thanks, awesome insight coming from "Ungrounded Lightning"!
On some of the systems we put a neutral current eliminator to try to "fix" the 60Hz buzz coming off of improperly grounded computers. I think it was overkill for what we were doing, because by that point we had given up trying to use internal audio cards for some of our rackmount computers and were using SoundBlaster Live! USB audio dongles where we couldn't use digital audio, which made most of our system noise problems go away. But it would be nice to have an affordable NCE for some applications, like being able to run amplified speakers from my phone or laptop while they're charging.
In my car I get alternator noise if I try to charge my phone while it's playing music to the aux input. I can make it go away by using a Qi wireless charger instead of plugging in the USB directly... with the added bonus that I'm not fiddling with trying to plug my phone in while I'm driving. Another way to make the alternator noise go away is paradoxically plugging an inverter into the accessory port and using a standard 120V AC wall wart USB charger with the phone. (shrug). Next car will probably have a bluetooth head unit, which I'm sure brings on another set of annoyances.
Heh, I used to do multi-conference room / theater AV integration for large defense companies. The number 1 problem was always audio.
1. Test. Test test test. You can get almost any cheap thing working well if you bother to test and tune everything BEFORE the meeting. The most expensive thing can fail for silly reasons if you don't bother to test everything BEFORE the meeting (usually because some executive schlupp dials into both the audio bridge and VTC MCU at the last minute). Then freeze the configuration. Yeah, good luck freezing the configuration with engineers and tinkerers running around.
2. POTS sucks. Maybe some telephony devices are able to negotiate better than 8kHz 8-bit audio sampling if their codecs match up, but you're better off going with something with VTC-quality audio using H323. Most VoIP teleconferencing lines don't bother trying to beat POTS audio quality. So even if you have a nice Polycom phone that does good AEC and NC, you're still going to strain to hear what's going on.
3. Speakerphones suck. Most of them don't bother doing good AEC and NC. Get a good bluetooth or USB headset. Gaming teamspeak headsets are relatively cheap. As long as it's digital, so they don't introduce any analog amp noise from the system.
4. PC/laptop microphones suck. I don't know why no one bothers to test them to the same level as your average cheap dumbphone speakerphone. They pick up all kinds of system electrical noise, and rely on software to do any AEC or NC, which adds more latency. About a quarter of the people in our daily standup have laptop microphone fails on Google Hangouts or Skype each day. Most end up dialing back in from their smartphone when that happens.
Anyway, all that said, our current standup room setup consists of a Google Hangouts room on a permanently-fixed Mac mini with a $50 "Blue Snowball USB Condenser Microphone" and Logitech USB camera attached to it (the USB audio coming in from the Logitech camera was deemed insufficient, even for the small room we had it in.). For remote participants, I've had good experiences with extended use of the $200+ Jabra PRO 9470 Mono Wireless Headset, which is switchable between PC and POTS/VoIP phone use, but a simpler/cheaper bluetooth headset would probably work just as well paired with smartphone/PC.
And set up an echo server for everyone to test their setups. https://support.google.com/cha... . Or at least go to http://www.onlinemictest.com/ or something. Did I mention you should test?
I'm also looking forward to someday playing with Amazon's Echo thingy someday, since for $200 it seems to have a lot of the technical audio features of more expensive audio conferencing systems:
http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo/
assuming it will be able to act as a simple bluetooth speakerphone instead of only for all of the other AI junk they're cramming into it.
Oh, looks like I skimmed some other summary of this WSJ article from 3/1 that made it sound more definite
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hi...
Yes, this. Actually, we already have that right now. Minecraft for XBox is already full of licensed DLC for XBox, Dr. Who, etc.
http://www.cinemablend.com/gam...
Minecraft as a cash cow is complete, there's no need to do any more development. It's all business dealings from here on out.
Some Slashdotter put it best a few months back... "Microsoft didn't buy a game, they bought a generation"
Oh, she just uses her own domain, which someone registered for her the week before she was sworn in as Sec of State. clintonemail.com
whois clintonemail.com | grep "Registrant Name"
Registrant Name: PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC
Hey, LOOK everybody, Clinton supports PRIVACY rights from the prying eyes of the NSA!
nmap clintonemail.com
Starting Nmap 6.47 ( http://nmap.org/ ) at 2015-03-03 07:50 PST
... and ... transparency through old video streaming technology.
Nmap scan report for clintonemail.com (208.91.197.27)
Host is up (0.083s latency).
Not shown: 996 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
53/tcp open domain
80/tcp open http
554/tcp open rtsp
7070/tcp open realserver
curl -vi clintonemail.com ... says it's an apache server, so there's that.
Well, if anybody else in government did this, they'd get fired, lose their pension, and possibly face criminal charges.
When the people at the highest levels of power decide that the law doesn't apply to them, nothing at all happens.
So, on behalf of the rest of the world ... when the political leaders ignore the law and face no consequences, the rest of us want to send a big collective "fuck you".
This has nothing to do with her politics. If Bush or Cheney had done this, we'd want them prosecuted as well.
Laws which are selectively applied are crap. Assholes in power who believe the law doesn't apply to them need to be punished.
These laws exist so there is a public record of activities, not some place where you can sidestep that and conduct business elsewhere away from oversight.
So you're saying Clinton should maybe be fined for something other than violating recordkeeping policy?
On March 6, 2007, Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and two counts of perjury. He was acquitted on one count of making false statements. He was not charged for revealing Plame's CIA status. His sentence included a $250,000 fine, 30 months in prison and two years of probation. On July 2, 2007, President George W. Bush commuted Libby's sentence, removing the jail term but leaving in place the fine and probation, calling the sentence "excessive."[43][44] In a subsequent press conference, on July 12, 2007, Bush noted, "...the Scooter Libby decision was, I thought, a fair and balanced decision."
(from the Valerie Plame wikipedia article)
Just out of curiosity, what email systems does she use? Hopefully not Yahoo mail, that was the one that the Alaska governess had gotten hacked with, right?
I assume her official US government email would have been similar to the system I used while working for a DoD contractor: Outlook / Exchange, where you had to use your smartcard + PIN to encrypt or at least digitally sign every email sent, and there was a 50MB limit on your server-side inbox, 2MB limit on attachments, and no zip files or Office documents or anything else the virus scanner couldn't recognize. And accidentally hitting Ctrl-Enter-Enter would automagically send your mail off prematurely unless you were permitted to change that option.
This seems indicative of sense that the rules do not apply to me.
Nobody who would vote for Hillary Clinton will care about things like this. There might be some hoopla on Twitter and Fox News for a few days, and then there will be some stragglers like with Benghazi, but it will mostly fade out of the mainstream media within a few hours from now.
Plus, they've known that Clinton's been doing this since the Benghazi investigation, when Clinton staffers rifled through those personal email accounts to provide 50,000 messages for the investigation team. That this issue makes headline news now, the day after she officially announces her presidential election campaign, is pure politics to control the narrative.
Yeah, not really possible to put politics aside for the moment, since that's exactly what this is.
I would put down Java as a good language for learning how to do OOP stuff in the most verbose way possible. But at least it works as documented, and is well-documented. I find myself spending less time fighting the compiler and obscure memory allocation problems, and more time fighting the shear volume of code. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Otherwise, I think I'd have more fun doing something in Python, with some modules implemented in C++ to optimize the performance-critical parts.
Oh, I'm not trying to blame anything on the U.S. ... I love this country, and just enjoy taking notes on how it works in case I ever find myself in charge of a fantasy island somewhere.
Yeah, the European imperialists have a long history of causing turmoil by running in and carving arbitrary boundaries, like in Africa. http://peterslarson.com/2011/0...
Keeping your opponents locked in regional wars is a great way to be left alone so you can get ahead in Civilization. I'm kinda surprised they haven't added those kinds of territorial boundaries meddling to the gameplay yet, though I guess gifting weapons to the "independent" NPC city-states in Civ V so they can grief your enemies probably does the job just fine.
...and Saddam existed because we put him there to fight a proxy cold war against Russian-backed Iran.
http://www.democraticundergrou...
ISIS exists because we need another set of boogeymen to stir shit up with neighboring Syria and Iran on our behalf.
http://scgnews.com/the-covert-...
We read a lot about how ISIS somehow keeps getting access to US-funded weapons sent to the region to help Libyan rebels topple Qaddafi or the Iraqi army "keep the peace". They'll get their Twitter feeds back again when we need them to resume looking evil to the rest of the world so we can justify going back in there to "clean the place up". That time just isn't now.
heh, back in 2000 I had an old greyscale Compaq laptop like that without a floppy drive or CDROM or USB. I managed to get Debian bootstrapped on it through the serial port!
Used a DOS zmodem program to transfer a minimal linux rescue image to it and launched it with loadlin.exe . Then used that to re partition and resize the 120MB hdd with a 80MB partition for Debian. Then some how managed to loadlin the Debian installer image and convince it to install a few packages at a time from the little DOS partition. Once that was working nicely, I got lilo installed to the MBR, and finally got rid of DOS/Win3.11 .
I think I eventually got the PCMCIA NIC and X working as well, but it was only really decent at running emacs from the console. I wrote a few reports on it and graphed stuff in octave and ran stuff through latex to produce ps2pdfs to print on campus. It was actually fairly effective at preventing me from wasting too much time playing Quake :P
Heh, I get your point, but the google search on "Fareed Zakaria oil" is pure comedy...
Zakaria: Why oil prices will stay high – Global Public Square ... ... So why is oil trading high at $113 a barrel, more than twice the price it was ...
globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/.../zakaria-why-oil...
Fareed Zakaria GPS
Jan 15, 2012 - By Fareed Zakaria, CNN The next time you pay $3.50 dollars for a
Zakaria: 2015 the year of America? - CNN.com
www.cnn.com/2015/01/05/opinion/zakaria-year-america/
CNN
Jan 5, 2015 - Falling oil prices and a vibrant society could help make 2015 America's year, says Fareed Zakaria.
There are some good graphs of US production vs. imports at: http://cassandralegacy.blogspo... ... but having trouble finding a good graph showing that US oil consumption also fell due to the recession, and that's just as much responsible for the reduction in US imports as the increase in US production.
Anyway, by all reports, US gas consumption will shoot up again since everyone's been out buying gas-guzzling these past couple of months:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/oi...