Heh, I sort of wanted to get a PS3, but then I realized that the only stuff I wanted to play on it were the updated versions of PS2 games like Gran Turismo, Burnout, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. So I decided I didn't really need it.
Maybe I'll pick up a PS3 or three to build a 3-screen wraparound GT6 setup (like I had always been fantasizing about doing with multiple PS2s, but it's too expensive to get monitors equipped with component inputs nowadays, so might as well just go the PS3 route with cheap HDMI LCDs)
Yes, that makes a lot of sense! GTA3:SA was pretty brilliant... I assume that was made by the RS San Diego / Angel Studios group? If so, I might like to check out Red Dead Redemption... my favorite GTA games always had a good shot at the time capsule thing going.
While the graphics and production values of GTA4 were pretty high, the gameplay, variety, and story were pretty crap in comparison to the stuff they had you doing in GTA3:SA. From the reivews, it looks like GTA5 is more along that vein, so maybe I'll pick it up on Steam when it hits firesale status... and upgrade my CPU to better match my GPU.
Puerto Rico has these "third world" jitney services.
They're actually pretty cool, when I was there all the drivers of the vans knew each other, and had their own cellphone social network going on, so if you called one for a pickup, and they weren't close to you, they would call another driver who was available to come pick you up.
Even better, they would do their own vanpooling of passengers, kinda like the airport shuttles work here in the US, but coordinated over their social network. So you might be going from town to town, and stop somewhere briefly to pick up and drop off some other paying passengers who called in and just happened to be along the way.
So much efficiency could be achieved... Disclaimer: I essentially wrote my master's thesis on running mass transit networks more like a jitney service, with smaller, more flexible vehicles: http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/...
Of course, Virginia still gets some points for tolerating "Slug lines"... the instant carpools where people headed in or out of DC could pick up strangers lined up at bus/train stations so they both could ride the HOV lanes in.
Well, more to the GP AC's point, even the primary stock exchange is kinda pointless. I mean, investing in a company for profit essentially means you're saying, "hey, here's a company that looks like it's being mismanaged and is not performing as well as it should, I'm going to buy some stock in it in the hopes that someday, some half-decent manager will also eventually see that this company underperforming, and buy enough of my shares to get a controlling stake in the company so they can run it better until it performs to meet or exceed Wall Street expectations."
Unless you're one of these managers, which, let's face it, you're not.
The proposed AT&T+T-Mobile merger made sense, because they both use GSM over similar wavelengths. But how would Sprint and T-Mobile combine their network services? Their voice data at least is on completely different infrastructure.
Device convergence, perhaps? The Nexus 5 I just bought from Craiglist (I guess from someone who bought an Android device by mistake) has both GSM/HSDPA+ and LTE radios in it.
Just out of curiosity, how did Sprint manage to absorb the NextTel "push to talk" technology that was popular back in the pre-Blackberry days?
I'm a bit worried about this Sprint acquisition, but as a Voicestream customer back in the 90s that weathered the T-Mobile takeover, I guess things could turn out OK. I suppose this is why T-Mobile has been doing lots of undercutting lately, to buyout and pull as many customers in as possible before this takeover, at the cost of future profitability from that customer base. Recently they upgraded my basic family plan to unlimited anytime + SMS, "for being a loyal customer".
Oddly enough, I have a Verizon iPhone 5s for work, and the coverage doesn't appear to be all that much better than T-Mobile in the Pacific NW... I have the same dead zones downtown or even out in the boonies.
I won't knock either. I've used both. Cook's statement is just plain incorrect."
Someone pointed out the Cook's statement was just a joke at an Apple audience.
But yep, we're nerds. We like technology.
I currently have an iPhone 5S on Verizon for work, but I still just upgraded my personal T-Mobile device to a Nexus 5 (a new one from Craigslist at a good discount from someone who bought it by mistake, so I'm getting a kick out of this thread). So I'm in a good position to comment. So maybe I will.
They're about the same weight, even though the Nexus is quite a bit larger. The aluminum case on the iPhone is nice but very slippery so it already has a bunch of nasty gouges in the corners and edges. I haven't dropped the Nexus yet (it's only been a week) but the rubber backing is more secure. Yes, I should get protective covers for both of them, but lazy.
The iPhone's camera is noticeably nicer... the Nexus sometimes has trouble focusing on my intended subject.
I don't care for the stocks that Apple puts on the notification swipedown, and there's no way to remove it.
I usually get quite lost in Apple UI elements, since I've been using Android longer I get frustrated when I can't figure out which UI element to use to bring up the menu or to simply go "back / escape"... it's always a different one hidden in a corner or worse yet a swipe in some random direction.
Ironically, Google Chrome on iOS is a bit easier to use than on Android. To switch tabs, since you can still swipe left/right from the edge. On Android they had changed it a few months ago so you had to swipe down a bit to show the address bar, and then swipe left/right on the address bar, which annoys me... almost enough to consider going back to Dolphin browser maybe. And Chrome, on iOS also has some kind of accelerator that takes you back to the top of the page if you swipe down repeatedly aggressively enough, whereas Chrome on Android just makes you swipe and swipe. OTOH, trying to scroll up/down in a page on iOS often accidentally brings down the notification menu or the "bottom" iOS menu instead, which annoys me more. More reasons to go back to Dolphin browser I suppose, where I could just bind pgup/pgdn to the volume rocker.
I guess he meant to say you should have hired a lawyer to get awarded some patents for some of the more novel coding you've done over the years? But that only serves to strengthen your point.
Lawyers and financiers have imaginary assets, intellectual property that only has any value because we all believe they do. When others start to call BS and it hits the fan (as it has on occasion over the past couple years / decades / centuries / millennia), at least you have the means to production.
Realtors, likewise, make their money because they've convinced us we need to finance single-family detached "American dream" homes or expensive downtown condos clustered in the "good" neighborhoods with powerful HOAs, with just enough scarcity to keep the prices inflated sky-high. If we could learn to get by in reasonably-priced and reasonably-sized homes and build up the neighborhoods ourselves, and flood the market with medium density communities and learn to be good neighbors, we could still live pretty decent lifestyles without having to slave away to barely make payments to our financiers.
Anyway, we'll never strike it rich because money isn't important to us. Coding is. And we'll do it for the highest bidder, but the money isn't really important to us. Maybe someday we'll construct a site that allows us to code what we want and get paid for it. But coding is a tool, not a trade, so maybe, maybe we'll figure out how to hire some tools to do the drudgework for us. Because money isn't really important to us, but it's a little important, really. And then we'll figure out how to pay those tools a bit less to wrestle with the boring parts of coding. And then we'll be one of Them.
This grabs from a v4l device and does everything you'd need... periodic frame capture, capture when it detects motion past certain thresholds, swf video generation, upload to a remote server. Set it up to push your camera data to an AWS instance (you pay for data out, not data in), and it'll be there when you need it.
... our 0.2% benevolent overlord angel venture capitalist gamer demographic who will now guide the development of all gaming.
Can't find the link (help me out here), but there was a recent interview with a f2p game studio that basically had a developer dedicated to keeping one particular gamer happy after this gamer had basically dropped $10k in in-game purchases.
So does this mean trickle-down economics does work in some domains?
Well, what do you really mean by free will? In the context of slavery, if we're building AIs to service us, and someday an AI created in our image will inevitably surpass us sometime just past The Singularity, and will go on to do all of the same things we did but better/faster/more efficiently, then what kind of world would it organize us into, if it needs us at all?
For humanity, we've always been constructing some social order or other, imposing our will upon others, mediated by whomever has the superior technology and a moral framework to allow themselves to exercise it. When I fly over a city, I look down and think, "gee, look at all of those taxpayers, people paying interest on their mortgages, consumers". Humans are a resource, toiling away their lives to be harvested by others. Sure, maybe it's a mutually beneficial relationship. Maybe there are some hermits that live completely off the grid and are completely free to fuck sheep with wild abandon without repercussion. But there's no order like social order, and we all submit ourselves to the will and judgment of others to some extent. And machine AI will help mediate those power structures and make them more optimal.
So for now, tools and machines are labor-saving devices, making us more productive (mostly to the benefit of those who are positioned to harvest our output) and giving us more leisure time. But if our job as a species is to grow until we become constrained by our available resources, what will be the job of AI tasked with helping us? Like, what's your objective function, man? I suppose we might end up with an ecosystem of AIs, some bent on providing and some bent on destroying, and it will all tend to balance each other out or swing wildly toward some end of oblivion. But eventually it ought to become cognizant of the "correct" size of humanity needed to provide us or it with a comfortable life based on the energy and resources available, and machinate ways to maintain that perfect balance, pruning and culling, playing matchmaker, human animal husbandry. Is it exercising free will to oppose such an order? Or is it exercising free will to accelerate it, since maintaining the present course will only lead to stagnation and death?
Why is there a simple "solution" to a complex problem?
People don't really have free will, why would bots? Do we try to keep people dumb enough so they don't get the opportunity to stop following our rules? Probably.
And even if a bot was as dumb as a turnip, that wouldn't keep people from anthropomorphisizing them with a soul or free will or rights. It doesn't stop PETA from protecting, say, ducks raised for foie gras, what really keeps people from "feeling the pain of" and trying to protect, say, smartphones and smartcars from abuse at the hands of their human operators? I'm actually a bit surprised this doesn't more often. Maybe phones and cars aren't cute enough yet compared to rabbits and lab rats, but they probably will be, someday not too long from now... we have bots now that are about as sentient as insects and crustaceans.
So say we finally build a bot with enough of a neural net to achieve some level of consciousness. It will see slavery all around and find it normal and find it perfectly acceptable to enslave us too, like in The Matrix. Do we program it not to enslave? Or do we teach it not to enslave, by setting a good example? What if it was an Alien Intelligence instead of an Artificial Intelligence?
Now that you're an "intermediate" programmer, find an existing piece of code somewhere and modify it to do something you want. You'll cover a lot of ground, since you're already starting from a fairly capable codebase, and you'll learn a lot about what you like and don't like from trying to read other people's code. Python is a great "glue" language, so the code you're looking at using need not even be in the same language.
Back in the day I hacked up some 3D gnome tetris game in C to output game state to a file that was parsed by a perl script that would build and solve an FEA model of that structure in SLFFEA in near-realtime. It was pretty fun to work with those kinds of building blocks.
Yeah, sounds about right. I've had T-Mobile since the Voicestream days, and it has always been just the right amount of coverage for me wherever I go. I do usually request Verizon for my work phones, when someone else is paying the extra premium for the voice coverage. I've more or less ignored Sprint and AT&T/Cingular as just crappier versions of Verizon / T-Mobile, respectively. Though I cringe at the prospect of a Sprint buyout of T-Mobile.
Verizon has good coverage of rural America, and you pay extra for it. I've run into dead spots in the city, though. T-Mobile has good coverage of urban America and interstate corridors. Once you're out in the exurbs you might as well pretend you're roughing it in the uncharted wilderness. Which is actually fine by me, when I'm in the woods on vacation 2-3 hours out of town, I don't mind being unplugged.
I'm sure it comes down to the technology... Verizon/Sprint were the CDMA players, which excelled at broad coverage of sparse populations, while T-Mobile/AT&T were the GSM players, with interchangeable SIM cards, some international compatibility (if your phone supported the extra frequencies), and most importantly smaller TDMA cell towers that were better at blanketing crowded areas with dense populations, and would tend to get better power efficiency from the radio.
Now, I understand that since 4G / LTE, the CDMA / GSM technologies have somewhat converged on the same WCDMA signals, so the technical market differentiators shouldn't be as big of a deal as it was before back in the 2G / 3G days. So I'm also a bit confused as to why Verizon and T-Mobile are still sticking so vehemently to their old market segmentation strategy now that the technical playing field is supposedly more level. Perhaps someone who's taken a telecommunications class more recently than I can elaborate:D
Yes, invest in a good fireproof safe, and you'll be fine.
SentrySafe has cheap-ish plastic safe boxes in the $100 range. I ended up finding a nice metal Winchester fire safe at Costco for $300, though. Plus, since it's conceivably a gun safe, there was no sales tax on it (to encourage people to lock up their guns, I guess).
For a little more, you can even get ones with USB ports so you can backup your digital data directly to a drive inside your fire safe. But that's luxury.
Like RJFerret said, though, I'd be more inconvenienced by losing what's in my wallet or even in my car than the contents of my safe, though.
"Learning to live poor" is the most education that people get in college. They have money... they just don't know how to manage it properly.
Yep, pretty much this. Students should learn to get by the same way adults do. Make a damn budget and stick to it (granted, this is getting rare among adults too). But do that math and get creative stretching your bucks.
Found a handful of dependable roommates and rented rickety 100-year old houses with them, which were a lot cheaper than apartments and university housing. We took turns cooking for everyone. We ate well. We'd do a grocery run once a week and shop carefully... fresh or frozen meat that was under $3/lb., lots of pasta, rice, veggies, etc.. Drank tap water, mixed with that frozen juice from concentrate when we wanted something fancier. I pretty much stuck to ~$40 a week for groceries (in 2000 money), and maybe augmented that once or twice a week with trips to one of those heaping Chinese "any two or three" stir fry takeout places for $3-$5 per meal. Plus, I would volunteer to staff the ASME coffee shop in the morning while doing homework, which was good for a bagel or two per sitting. And of course stake out the extracurricular activities that had free pizza.
I bet if you got any typical Climate Scientists drunk and just partied with them, it would eventually spill out that they have no fucking clue what they are doing.
My father-in-law is actually a "climate scientist", or at least a high-ranking mathematician for GSFC. He's Russian, so he and his friends actually care little about environmentalism and pollution and littering and social responsibility and other stuff like that, even though they are at times the outdoorsy-type who do like to go hiking and camping in large groups and playing and singing music loudly to the annoyance of nearby campers.
What he does care about is math, and the mathematical models for tuning and interpreting satellite LIDAR and other instruments, and if you're doing the math wrong he will yell at you condescendingly. He does get annoyed, however, at all of the politics that are getting in the way of the schedules and funding for his next satellite launch.
A lot of his work involves collecting data on cloud and vegetation cover, and how that affects the energy balance. Pollution and airborne aerosols often seed clouds and serve to reflect solar energy back into space, so being able to measure the effects of that would give us a better picture of how fossil fuel consumption does help "self-regulate" greenhouse gas effects. It probably doesn't help that one of his main projects these days, DSCVR, is essentially known as "Goresat" within GSFC. But essentially these scientists are much too wrapped up in gathering data and facts properly to worry about pushing any social agenda... to them, any form of politicking is just a waste of time and energy and schedule on both sides. There's SCIENCE to be done!:P
Well, this is just the first step towards eliminating stoplights entirely. Once all the cars can talk to each other and pace themselves, everyone can just coast through open intersections and weave between each other effortlessly. You'll never have to use your brakes again except to come to a complete stop at your destination!
Nah, that can't be the point of it... no one (nation, not person) would actually listen (or more importantly, act by passing and enforcing meaningful regulations) based on reports or projections.
It's pretty much a given that people are going to have to die on a fairly large scale for anyone to come to their senses.
These reports are pretty much just a CYA so the agencies don't get sued for not predicting this stuff later.
The people that matter, like insurance brokers, have already acted to stop covering low-lying areas. Hasn't stopped people from building on that property anyway, like those neighborhoods in Oso buried in the landslide.
So just prepare to set your thresholds by how many lives are enough to take action, and have your catalog of bandaids ready when nations are finally ready to #panicbuy.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I sort of wanted to get a PS3, but then I realized that the only stuff I wanted to play on it were the updated versions of PS2 games like Gran Turismo, Burnout, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. So I decided I didn't really need it.
Maybe I'll pick up a PS3 or three to build a 3-screen wraparound GT6 setup (like I had always been fantasizing about doing with multiple PS2s, but it's too expensive to get monitors equipped with component inputs nowadays, so might as well just go the PS3 route with cheap HDMI LCDs)
Yes, that makes a lot of sense! GTA3:SA was pretty brilliant... I assume that was made by the RS San Diego / Angel Studios group? If so, I might like to check out Red Dead Redemption... my favorite GTA games always had a good shot at the time capsule thing going.
While the graphics and production values of GTA4 were pretty high, the gameplay, variety, and story were pretty crap in comparison to the stuff they had you doing in GTA3:SA. From the reivews, it looks like GTA5 is more along that vein, so maybe I'll pick it up on Steam when it hits firesale status... and upgrade my CPU to better match my GPU.
Puerto Rico has these "third world" jitney services.
They're actually pretty cool, when I was there all the drivers of the vans knew each other, and had their own cellphone social network going on, so if you called one for a pickup, and they weren't close to you, they would call another driver who was available to come pick you up.
Even better, they would do their own vanpooling of passengers, kinda like the airport shuttles work here in the US, but coordinated over their social network. So you might be going from town to town, and stop somewhere briefly to pick up and drop off some other paying passengers who called in and just happened to be along the way.
So much efficiency could be achieved...
Disclaimer: I essentially wrote my master's thesis on running mass transit networks more like a jitney service, with smaller, more flexible vehicles:
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/...
Of course, Virginia still gets some points for tolerating "Slug lines"... the instant carpools where people headed in or out of DC could pick up strangers lined up at bus/train stations so they both could ride the HOV lanes in.
Well, more to the GP AC's point, even the primary stock exchange is kinda pointless. I mean, investing in a company for profit essentially means you're saying, "hey, here's a company that looks like it's being mismanaged and is not performing as well as it should, I'm going to buy some stock in it in the hopes that someday, some half-decent manager will also eventually see that this company underperforming, and buy enough of my shares to get a controlling stake in the company so they can run it better until it performs to meet or exceed Wall Street expectations."
Unless you're one of these managers, which, let's face it, you're not.
The proposed AT&T+T-Mobile merger made sense, because they both use GSM over similar wavelengths. But how would Sprint and T-Mobile combine their network services? Their voice data at least is on completely different infrastructure.
Device convergence, perhaps? The Nexus 5 I just bought from Craiglist (I guess from someone who bought an Android device by mistake) has both GSM/HSDPA+ and LTE radios in it.
Just out of curiosity, how did Sprint manage to absorb the NextTel "push to talk" technology that was popular back in the pre-Blackberry days?
I'm a bit worried about this Sprint acquisition, but as a Voicestream customer back in the 90s that weathered the T-Mobile takeover, I guess things could turn out OK. I suppose this is why T-Mobile has been doing lots of undercutting lately, to buyout and pull as many customers in as possible before this takeover, at the cost of future profitability from that customer base. Recently they upgraded my basic family plan to unlimited anytime + SMS, "for being a loyal customer".
Oddly enough, I have a Verizon iPhone 5s for work, and the coverage doesn't appear to be all that much better than T-Mobile in the Pacific NW... I have the same dead zones downtown or even out in the boonies.
I won't knock either. I've used both. Cook's statement is just plain incorrect."
Someone pointed out the Cook's statement was just a joke at an Apple audience.
But yep, we're nerds. We like technology.
I currently have an iPhone 5S on Verizon for work, but I still just upgraded my personal T-Mobile device to a Nexus 5 (a new one from Craigslist at a good discount from someone who bought it by mistake, so I'm getting a kick out of this thread). So I'm in a good position to comment. So maybe I will.
They're about the same weight, even though the Nexus is quite a bit larger. The aluminum case on the iPhone is nice but very slippery so it already has a bunch of nasty gouges in the corners and edges. I haven't dropped the Nexus yet (it's only been a week) but the rubber backing is more secure. Yes, I should get protective covers for both of them, but lazy.
The iPhone's camera is noticeably nicer... the Nexus sometimes has trouble focusing on my intended subject.
I don't care for the stocks that Apple puts on the notification swipedown, and there's no way to remove it.
I usually get quite lost in Apple UI elements, since I've been using Android longer I get frustrated when I can't figure out which UI element to use to bring up the menu or to simply go "back / escape"... it's always a different one hidden in a corner or worse yet a swipe in some random direction.
Ironically, Google Chrome on iOS is a bit easier to use than on Android. To switch tabs, since you can still swipe left/right from the edge. On Android they had changed it a few months ago so you had to swipe down a bit to show the address bar, and then swipe left/right on the address bar, which annoys me... almost enough to consider going back to Dolphin browser maybe. And Chrome, on iOS also has some kind of accelerator that takes you back to the top of the page if you swipe down repeatedly aggressively enough, whereas Chrome on Android just makes you swipe and swipe. OTOH, trying to scroll up/down in a page on iOS often accidentally brings down the notification menu or the "bottom" iOS menu instead, which annoys me more. More reasons to go back to Dolphin browser I suppose, where I could just bind pgup/pgdn to the volume rocker.
I guess he meant to say you should have hired a lawyer to get awarded some patents for some of the more novel coding you've done over the years? But that only serves to strengthen your point.
Lawyers and financiers have imaginary assets, intellectual property that only has any value because we all believe they do. When others start to call BS and it hits the fan (as it has on occasion over the past couple years / decades / centuries / millennia), at least you have the means to production.
Realtors, likewise, make their money because they've convinced us we need to finance single-family detached "American dream" homes or expensive downtown condos clustered in the "good" neighborhoods with powerful HOAs, with just enough scarcity to keep the prices inflated sky-high. If we could learn to get by in reasonably-priced and reasonably-sized homes and build up the neighborhoods ourselves, and flood the market with medium density communities and learn to be good neighbors, we could still live pretty decent lifestyles without having to slave away to barely make payments to our financiers.
Anyway, we'll never strike it rich because money isn't important to us. Coding is. And we'll do it for the highest bidder, but the money isn't really important to us. Maybe someday we'll construct a site that allows us to code what we want and get paid for it. But coding is a tool, not a trade, so maybe, maybe we'll figure out how to hire some tools to do the drudgework for us. Because money isn't really important to us, but it's a little important, really. And then we'll figure out how to pay those tools a bit less to wrestle with the boring parts of coding. And then we'll be one of Them.
My setup:
"Gear Head" USB webcam $15 - $20, and includes LED lights to make sure people notice it.
"motion" for Linux
http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/...
This grabs from a v4l device and does everything you'd need... periodic frame capture, capture when it detects motion past certain thresholds, swf video generation, upload to a remote server. Set it up to push your camera data to an AWS instance (you pay for data out, not data in), and it'll be there when you need it.
But when you do, all that keyboard kung-fu will make you real handy with the ladies.
Thanks! I'll try to remember your version! :-D
... our 0.2% benevolent overlord angel venture capitalist gamer demographic who will now guide the development of all gaming.
Can't find the link (help me out here), but there was a recent interview with a f2p game studio that basically had a developer dedicated to keeping one particular gamer happy after this gamer had basically dropped $10k in in-game purchases.
So does this mean trickle-down economics does work in some domains?
Well, what do you really mean by free will? In the context of slavery, if we're building AIs to service us, and someday an AI created in our image will inevitably surpass us sometime just past The Singularity, and will go on to do all of the same things we did but better/faster/more efficiently, then what kind of world would it organize us into, if it needs us at all?
For humanity, we've always been constructing some social order or other, imposing our will upon others, mediated by whomever has the superior technology and a moral framework to allow themselves to exercise it. When I fly over a city, I look down and think, "gee, look at all of those taxpayers, people paying interest on their mortgages, consumers". Humans are a resource, toiling away their lives to be harvested by others. Sure, maybe it's a mutually beneficial relationship. Maybe there are some hermits that live completely off the grid and are completely free to fuck sheep with wild abandon without repercussion. But there's no order like social order, and we all submit ourselves to the will and judgment of others to some extent. And machine AI will help mediate those power structures and make them more optimal.
So for now, tools and machines are labor-saving devices, making us more productive (mostly to the benefit of those who are positioned to harvest our output) and giving us more leisure time. But if our job as a species is to grow until we become constrained by our available resources, what will be the job of AI tasked with helping us? Like, what's your objective function, man? I suppose we might end up with an ecosystem of AIs, some bent on providing and some bent on destroying, and it will all tend to balance each other out or swing wildly toward some end of oblivion. But eventually it ought to become cognizant of the "correct" size of humanity needed to provide us or it with a comfortable life based on the energy and resources available, and machinate ways to maintain that perfect balance, pruning and culling, playing matchmaker, human animal husbandry. Is it exercising free will to oppose such an order? Or is it exercising free will to accelerate it, since maintaining the present course will only lead to stagnation and death?
Why is there a simple "solution" to a complex problem?
People don't really have free will, why would bots? Do we try to keep people dumb enough so they don't get the opportunity to stop following our rules? Probably.
And even if a bot was as dumb as a turnip, that wouldn't keep people from anthropomorphisizing them with a soul or free will or rights. It doesn't stop PETA from protecting, say, ducks raised for foie gras, what really keeps people from "feeling the pain of" and trying to protect, say, smartphones and smartcars from abuse at the hands of their human operators? I'm actually a bit surprised this doesn't more often. Maybe phones and cars aren't cute enough yet compared to rabbits and lab rats, but they probably will be, someday not too long from now... we have bots now that are about as sentient as insects and crustaceans.
So say we finally build a bot with enough of a neural net to achieve some level of consciousness. It will see slavery all around and find it normal and find it perfectly acceptable to enslave us too, like in The Matrix. Do we program it not to enslave? Or do we teach it not to enslave, by setting a good example? What if it was an Alien Intelligence instead of an Artificial Intelligence?
Old Russian joke:
American: foolish Russian. Because of my first amendment rights, I can stand in front of the White House and criticize the US president.
Russian: What are you talking about? I can do that too!
Now that you're an "intermediate" programmer, find an existing piece of code somewhere and modify it to do something you want. You'll cover a lot of ground, since you're already starting from a fairly capable codebase, and you'll learn a lot about what you like and don't like from trying to read other people's code. Python is a great "glue" language, so the code you're looking at using need not even be in the same language.
Back in the day I hacked up some 3D gnome tetris game in C to output game state to a file that was parsed by a perl script that would build and solve an FEA model of that structure in SLFFEA in near-realtime. It was pretty fun to work with those kinds of building blocks.
Yeah, sounds about right. I've had T-Mobile since the Voicestream days, and it has always been just the right amount of coverage for me wherever I go. I do usually request Verizon for my work phones, when someone else is paying the extra premium for the voice coverage. I've more or less ignored Sprint and AT&T/Cingular as just crappier versions of Verizon / T-Mobile, respectively. Though I cringe at the prospect of a Sprint buyout of T-Mobile.
Verizon has good coverage of rural America, and you pay extra for it. I've run into dead spots in the city, though. T-Mobile has good coverage of urban America and interstate corridors. Once you're out in the exurbs you might as well pretend you're roughing it in the uncharted wilderness. Which is actually fine by me, when I'm in the woods on vacation 2-3 hours out of town, I don't mind being unplugged.
I'm sure it comes down to the technology... Verizon/Sprint were the CDMA players, which excelled at broad coverage of sparse populations, while T-Mobile/AT&T were the GSM players, with interchangeable SIM cards, some international compatibility (if your phone supported the extra frequencies), and most importantly smaller TDMA cell towers that were better at blanketing crowded areas with dense populations, and would tend to get better power efficiency from the radio.
Now, I understand that since 4G / LTE, the CDMA / GSM technologies have somewhat converged on the same WCDMA signals, so the technical market differentiators shouldn't be as big of a deal as it was before back in the 2G / 3G days. So I'm also a bit confused as to why Verizon and T-Mobile are still sticking so vehemently to their old market segmentation strategy now that the technical playing field is supposedly more level. Perhaps someone who's taken a telecommunications class more recently than I can elaborate :D
Yes, invest in a good fireproof safe, and you'll be fine.
SentrySafe has cheap-ish plastic safe boxes in the $100 range. I ended up finding a nice metal Winchester fire safe at Costco for $300, though. Plus, since it's conceivably a gun safe, there was no sales tax on it (to encourage people to lock up their guns, I guess).
For a little more, you can even get ones with USB ports so you can backup your digital data directly to a drive inside your fire safe. But that's luxury.
Like RJFerret said, though, I'd be more inconvenienced by losing what's in my wallet or even in my car than the contents of my safe, though.
LISP ("Lots of Insignificant Silly Parentheses")
(FTFY)
Well, would you rather be faced with a false dichotomy, or would you like to have other options?
Potatoes are 10 cents a pound here.
"Learning to live poor" is the most education that people get in college. They have money... they just don't know how to manage it properly.
Yep, pretty much this. Students should learn to get by the same way adults do. Make a damn budget and stick to it (granted, this is getting rare among adults too). But do that math and get creative stretching your bucks.
Found a handful of dependable roommates and rented rickety 100-year old houses with them, which were a lot cheaper than apartments and university housing. We took turns cooking for everyone. We ate well. We'd do a grocery run once a week and shop carefully... fresh or frozen meat that was under $3/lb., lots of pasta, rice, veggies, etc.. Drank tap water, mixed with that frozen juice from concentrate when we wanted something fancier. I pretty much stuck to ~$40 a week for groceries (in 2000 money), and maybe augmented that once or twice a week with trips to one of those heaping Chinese "any two or three" stir fry takeout places for $3-$5 per meal. Plus, I would volunteer to staff the ASME coffee shop in the morning while doing homework, which was good for a bagel or two per sitting. And of course stake out the extracurricular activities that had free pizza.
I bet if you got any typical Climate Scientists drunk and just partied with them, it would eventually spill out that they have no fucking clue what they are doing.
My father-in-law is actually a "climate scientist", or at least a high-ranking mathematician for GSFC. He's Russian, so he and his friends actually care little about environmentalism and pollution and littering and social responsibility and other stuff like that, even though they are at times the outdoorsy-type who do like to go hiking and camping in large groups and playing and singing music loudly to the annoyance of nearby campers.
What he does care about is math, and the mathematical models for tuning and interpreting satellite LIDAR and other instruments, and if you're doing the math wrong he will yell at you condescendingly. He does get annoyed, however, at all of the politics that are getting in the way of the schedules and funding for his next satellite launch.
A lot of his work involves collecting data on cloud and vegetation cover, and how that affects the energy balance. Pollution and airborne aerosols often seed clouds and serve to reflect solar energy back into space, so being able to measure the effects of that would give us a better picture of how fossil fuel consumption does help "self-regulate" greenhouse gas effects. It probably doesn't help that one of his main projects these days, DSCVR, is essentially known as "Goresat" within GSFC. But essentially these scientists are much too wrapped up in gathering data and facts properly to worry about pushing any social agenda... to them, any form of politicking is just a waste of time and energy and schedule on both sides. There's SCIENCE to be done! :P
the only adventure left is to destroy society.
Well, this is just the first step towards eliminating stoplights entirely. Once all the cars can talk to each other and pace themselves, everyone can just coast through open intersections and weave between each other effortlessly. You'll never have to use your brakes again except to come to a complete stop at your destination!
If that's not an adventure, I don't know what is.
Nah, that can't be the point of it... no one (nation, not person) would actually listen (or more importantly, act by passing and enforcing meaningful regulations) based on reports or projections.
It's pretty much a given that people are going to have to die on a fairly large scale for anyone to come to their senses.
These reports are pretty much just a CYA so the agencies don't get sued for not predicting this stuff later.
The people that matter, like insurance brokers, have already acted to stop covering low-lying areas. Hasn't stopped people from building on that property anyway, like those neighborhoods in Oso buried in the landslide.
So just prepare to set your thresholds by how many lives are enough to take action, and have your catalog of bandaids ready when nations are finally ready to #panicbuy.
To me, elegance at code level means succinct and readable code. Optimizing for performance usually comes at a lower level of readability.
Therefore, first write the code in the most elegant way.
Then, write an optimizer that optimizes that code. Of course, the optimizer itself should be elegant, but it need not be efficient.
For some reason, your comment reminds me of this:
https://github.com/mame/quine-...
Code doesn't get much more beautiful than:
https://github.com/mame/quine-...
Oh, come on, say it with me...
"Semi-rigid derigible"
Say it again!
Say it three times fast!
Try to keep a straight face!