I reckon academia is heading towards hiring more programmers. We often have research grants where one of the employed researchers could be a statsy person with publications in the learned journals, or a computery person with lots of stuff shared in github and contributions to open-source projects and so on. The prof as PI on the grant is impressed by the former, I'm (as CI) impressed by the latter. Currently we tend to favour the statsy people, and they are often very poor programmers with little knowledge of version control, testing, Makefiles, awk, all that nerdy stuff that could make their life simpler. So I teach them...
I can only really talk confidently about statistics here (sample size = 1) but I know a bit about other places. University College London has a Research Software Development Team, for example: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/research-software-development/ and the whole development of programming skills for researchers is being pushed by the SSI (software.ac.uk) of which I am a fellow.
You might also want to look at Software Carpentry, a programme for training researchers in programming skills - there may be opportunities there.
So currently there's a few opportunities, but its getting better. A final thought though - you want to leave "the financial-obsession of the business world and would like to work for the overall betterment of humanity instead". Hahahaahha rofl. Academia is just as financially-obsessed as any trading house. I'm spending today doing paperwork for expenses claims, travel, grant proposals... Its all about the money... Oh do I sound disillusioned? Okay, I have probably stopped some people catching malaria, but not today...
For a single font and a known language the mapping can be cracked easily by computer - its just a permutation and you can crack it by letter frequency analysis. Once the computer has guessed E and T and a couple of vowels it can dictionary-scan the rest of the text for possible words and get the rest of the letters.
I suppose if you use several fonts then you could use them so that E was 21 in font 1 and 8 in font 2 and so on, and then switch fonts randomly to balance out the number counts. I still think that's crackable, you just have a two-d table of frequencies (number/font) to try.
Similar experience with netvibes - it normally starts up blank on my Android phone, I just have to hit refresh. Once in a while it'll tell me I have a negative number of things unread. It has trouble keeping a consistent count of unread items between the title, the menu, and its own 'refresh' button. Oh, and the 'Load More' button appears off the end of my screen sometimes. These are mostly minor annoyances I can live with.
I suspect the lot moving to New Hampshire have enough firepower to keep however few Egyptian soldiers visit the place out for long enough. Egypt wouldn't waste the effort. They don't claim the place.
Not sure your rant about what the US govt would do to you is relevant.
The real reason its not a reasonable place to found a community is the fact its an uninhabitable inhospitable chunk of desert with no communications links.
I went to a hackathon and found the idea of judging and prizes pretty pointless. Took up an hour of valuable hack time. I skipped all that nonsense and went for a walk and got some fresh air for the first time in two days instead.
Or if you are in the UK, watch "Dragon's Den". I guess its the same thing. Which came first, the sharks or the dragons?
For those who've seen neither, entrepreneurs parade in front of four or five potential investors sitting in comfy chairs with big wadges of cash. The entrepreneurs present their product, forget their business plan, stumble their lines and generally embarrass themselves. The investors grill them, and then one by one they all say "your numbers don't add up, I'm out", or "you've not got a product, I'm out", or "you've invested your house in this already? I'm out".
And now your web server has to do PHP processing on every page and every style sheet, so your load goes up. So you implement some caching. Now you have two problems.
Mythbusters tried to yank the axle of a car using a fixed cable but every time either their cable failed or their anchor failed. They busted the rear axle up pretty bad, but never yanked it off as seen in American Graffiti.
You work at a university and you are sorting out the email system? Well, wave bye bye to your job soon, because one day the suits will say "Hey, lets move to Microsoft's Live.EDU" and then the problem is somebody else's. [Or Google mail for organisations, of course]. Either way, the suits will wonder why university IT are doing mundane things like setting up email addresses when that can be outsourced. Cheaper.
"'Advocates of the mandate are full of evangelical zeal and are quick to portray skeptics as wicked and selfish. It's like a secular religion, based on faith in vaccine efficacy and safety.'"
What the heck is a web comic anyway? They're all on the web now. I'd rather see a poll for best non-web comic.
I'd vote for Steve Bell's If... strips as published in The Guardian, but you murkans wouldn't get the jokes. He was also meta before it was mainstream, one of his penguin characters joking in a strip about "the baggy-eyed yanks upstairs" when If... was printed underneath Doonesbury.
I bought a Sony DVR/DVD player about four years ago. It booted up with a choice of EPGs - a plain one, and one with additional functionality and adverts. Yes, half the screen was occupied by ads. After getting annoyed with that after about two microseconds I switched to the plain one.
After a couple of years it started misbehaving, as these things do, telling me that the only thing on TV was 'No Channel Information'. So I thought I'd switch back and see how bad the ad-ridden one was. So I found the setting deep in the unexplored regions of the menu system and flipped.
Same old ad-ridden screen, except this time the ads were blank placeholders. I reckon nobody wanted to advertise there, since nobody was using the annoying EPG...
I did an upgrade from a new OS via a DVD from the Sony web site and it fixed most of the EPG blankness, but the thing has been pretty flakey from day one. I think the initial flakeyness is controlled to be just enough that you don't know if its your own fault for not reading the instructions or if it is genuine faults. Products are always released when the cost in fixing the bugs is more than the cost of handling support calls, right?
I tried to find this paper online but I don't think its available as a preprint yet. But I did find that the lead author has been stuffing rats with assorted GMO foods for many years. Sometimes its kidney failure, sometimes its cancer, maybe sometimes nothing happens. The important thing is how many negative results he's had and not published. That's statistical GMO cherry-picking.
One of my diesel engine glow plugs failed on holiday so I fixed it by shorting that plug (they're wired in series) with a metal coathanger onto the terminals with a big pair of pliers! How did you know!?
Actually, no, the car started from cold with a lot of starter motor cranking until I fixed it later by bypassing that plug with a simple connector.
I'm pretty sure the army, navy, royal marines, SAS, police, mountain rescue and almost every farmer in Britain wouldn't have "rich main's toys"!
Slashdot Mirror
I reckon academia is heading towards hiring more programmers. We often have research grants where one of the employed researchers could be a statsy person with publications in the learned journals, or a computery person with lots of stuff shared in github and contributions to open-source projects and so on. The prof as PI on the grant is impressed by the former, I'm (as CI) impressed by the latter. Currently we tend to favour the statsy people, and they are often very poor programmers with little knowledge of version control, testing, Makefiles, awk, all that nerdy stuff that could make their life simpler. So I teach them...
I can only really talk confidently about statistics here (sample size = 1) but I know a bit about other places. University College London has a Research Software Development Team, for example: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/research-software-development/ and the whole development of programming skills for researchers is being pushed by the SSI (software.ac.uk) of which I am a fellow.
You might also want to look at Software Carpentry, a programme for training researchers in programming skills - there may be opportunities there.
So currently there's a few opportunities, but its getting better. A final thought though - you want to leave "the financial-obsession of the business world and would like to work for the overall betterment of humanity instead". Hahahaahha rofl. Academia is just as financially-obsessed as any trading house. I'm spending today doing paperwork for expenses claims, travel, grant proposals... Its all about the money... Oh do I sound disillusioned? Okay, I have probably stopped some people catching malaria, but not today...
Yeah, I mean it's not not rocket science is it?
For a single font and a known language the mapping can be cracked easily by computer - its just a permutation and you can crack it by letter frequency analysis. Once the computer has guessed E and T and a couple of vowels it can dictionary-scan the rest of the text for possible words and get the rest of the letters.
I suppose if you use several fonts then you could use them so that E was 21 in font 1 and 8 in font 2 and so on, and then switch fonts randomly to balance out the number counts. I still think that's crackable, you just have a two-d table of frequencies (number/font) to try.
Any chance you can bung said script on github?
Similar experience with netvibes - it normally starts up blank on my Android phone, I just have to hit refresh. Once in a while it'll tell me I have a negative number of things unread. It has trouble keeping a consistent count of unread items between the title, the menu, and its own 'refresh' button. Oh, and the 'Load More' button appears off the end of my screen sometimes. These are mostly minor annoyances I can live with.
Google Reader never did anything wrong, though.
I suspect the lot moving to New Hampshire have enough firepower to keep however few Egyptian soldiers visit the place out for long enough. Egypt wouldn't waste the effort. They don't claim the place.
Not sure your rant about what the US govt would do to you is relevant.
The real reason its not a reasonable place to found a community is the fact its an uninhabitable inhospitable chunk of desert with no communications links.
There *ARE* unclaimed areas. Gather all the 'Liberty-minded' and ship them off to Bir Tawil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil
Nobody wants it. Plenty of solar power. Bye!
I went to a hackathon and found the idea of judging and prizes pretty pointless. Took up an hour of valuable hack time. I skipped all that nonsense and went for a walk and got some fresh air for the first time in two days instead.
Why else do you think Dr Evil wanted sharks with frickin' laser beams?
Or if you are in the UK, watch "Dragon's Den". I guess its the same thing. Which came first, the sharks or the dragons?
For those who've seen neither, entrepreneurs parade in front of four or five potential investors sitting in comfy chairs with big wadges of cash. The entrepreneurs present their product, forget their business plan, stumble their lines and generally embarrass themselves. The investors grill them, and then one by one they all say "your numbers don't add up, I'm out", or "you've not got a product, I'm out", or "you've invested your house in this already? I'm out".
No, a JSON file looks nothing like a CSS file, it looks a lot like a chunk of javascript though....
And now your web server has to do PHP processing on every page and every style sheet, so your load goes up. So you implement some caching. Now you have two problems.
hhuhh huhhh he said "member" hhhh all "member states"... hhuh hey Beavis, check out the state of my member.. hhuhuhuhh
Myth... busted!
Mythbusters tried to yank the axle of a car using a fixed cable but every time either their cable failed or their anchor failed. They busted the rear axle up pretty bad, but never yanked it off as seen in American Graffiti.
Is that the idea? That the HTML behind web pages isn't viewable? That web pages can't be printed? Or can't be viewed after three days?
Just go use a PDF ffs.
You work at a university and you are sorting out the email system? Well, wave bye bye to your job soon, because one day the suits will say "Hey, lets move to Microsoft's Live.EDU" and then the problem is somebody else's. [Or Google mail for organisations, of course]. Either way, the suits will wonder why university IT are doing mundane things like setting up email addresses when that can be outsourced. Cheaper.
"'Advocates of the mandate are full of evangelical zeal and are quick to portray skeptics as wicked and selfish. It's like a secular religion, based on faith in vaccine efficacy and safety.'"
No, its based on evidence of efficacy and safety.
"I myself avoid flu shots like the plague" - so what would you do if there was an outbreak of plague and there was a vaccine for it?
What the heck is a web comic anyway? They're all on the web now. I'd rather see a poll for best non-web comic.
I'd vote for Steve Bell's If... strips as published in The Guardian, but you murkans wouldn't get the jokes. He was also meta before it was mainstream, one of his penguin characters joking in a strip about "the baggy-eyed yanks upstairs" when If... was printed underneath Doonesbury.
The Supreme Court says "any act that has no artistic merit and causes sexual thought". So that's the Daily Mail blocked...
[Source: Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcefX9TPlkY]
I bought a Sony DVR/DVD player about four years ago. It booted up with a choice of EPGs - a plain one, and one with additional functionality and adverts. Yes, half the screen was occupied by ads. After getting annoyed with that after about two microseconds I switched to the plain one.
After a couple of years it started misbehaving, as these things do, telling me that the only thing on TV was 'No Channel Information'. So I thought I'd switch back and see how bad the ad-ridden one was. So I found the setting deep in the unexplored regions of the menu system and flipped.
Same old ad-ridden screen, except this time the ads were blank placeholders. I reckon nobody wanted to advertise there, since nobody was using the annoying EPG...
I did an upgrade from a new OS via a DVD from the Sony web site and it fixed most of the EPG blankness, but the thing has been pretty flakey from day one. I think the initial flakeyness is controlled to be just enough that you don't know if its your own fault for not reading the instructions or if it is genuine faults. Products are always released when the cost in fixing the bugs is more than the cost of handling support calls, right?
Anyway, no more Sony for me.
... they gave the prize to _experimental_ physicists!
In other important geek news: Bruce Perens Still Reading Slashdot.
I tried to find this paper online but I don't think its available as a preprint yet. But I did find that the lead author has been stuffing rats with assorted GMO foods for many years. Sometimes its kidney failure, sometimes its cancer, maybe sometimes nothing happens. The important thing is how many negative results he's had and not published. That's statistical GMO cherry-picking.
One of my diesel engine glow plugs failed on holiday so I fixed it by shorting that plug (they're wired in series) with a metal coathanger onto the terminals with a big pair of pliers! How did you know!?
Actually, no, the car started from cold with a lot of starter motor cranking until I fixed it later by bypassing that plug with a simple connector.
I'm pretty sure the army, navy, royal marines, SAS, police, mountain rescue and almost every farmer in Britain wouldn't have "rich main's toys"!