The machine might report cash being taken out; very unfortunate if that happens while you stand there shoving piles of bills into your pockets. Better to install the device and come back at night, with a hoodie over your face, grab all the cash, and run.
These machines rarely miscount, and if it happens once a day, the bank will probably take notice. There was a weird little trick on certain ATMs a while back that let you tease an extra note from the machine, but the banks caught on very quickly.
everyone just needs to accept this: BITCOIN IS A SCAM
We all "just" need to take your word for it, or did you have anything to substantiate this claim?
Bitcoin is just a mechanism to transfer tokens ("coins") securely from one wallet to another, and gradually add tokens to the available pool by letting anyone who wants to mine them. There's no scam in the design; the scammy part is in the way we attached value to those tokens, and the way exchanges manipulate that value (or just take off with our coins). Calling Bitcoin a scam is a bit like calling tulip bulbs evil by design because at some point in history silly people paid fortunes for them. Or calling the dollar scammy by design because Motherf..ing Guido just made off with the wad of cash you gave him for safekeeping.
Agreed. I loved the evenings of multiplayer fun with friends on the old XBox or PS, and we had some good fun playing Goldeneye on a Nintendo at work, locked away in a secret NATO dungeon. Later I got a PS3 and was seriously disappointed with the selection and quality of head-to-head games in split-screen. Most games are single and net play only, and if they have split screen it usually sucks.
Luckily the guys at my old employer still throw a little LAN party every 2 months or so at the office: games, beers and good natured rage.
Fine, so crimes are still being committed behind bars. Score 1 for you. Even so, society is much better off with these people behind bars than on the streets. Shorter sentences aren't the answer to a failing jail system.
That said, given a choice of a stiff jail term and a good chance at successful rehabilitation we should of course go for rehab. But in some cases where we have to face facts and admit that the chances of rehabilitation are slim to none, longer jail terms are the way to go. There is also plenty of evidence that too-light sentencing increases crime; if a crime carries little or no consequences, more people will be tempted to commit it, and the light sentence will also reduce the perceived seriousness of the crime.
Like hell it has. First of all: what do you mean by " work"? Keeping a criminal in jail has proven to be 100% effective in preventing him from inflicting more crimes on the public. For rehabilitation and scaring the criminal and others straight, effectiveness of punishment follows something of a Laffer curve: at some point, stiffer sentences no longer increase the deterrence factor, and the chance of successful rehabilitation actually drops after a certain point. But punishment does work. If it didn't, we might as well have no punishment at all. Ask yourself, would we then have more crime, or less?
She also seems to hint at a more bleeding hearts approach, letting criminals serve sentences of normal duration in subjective time, whilst keeping them in jail for a much shorter real-time interval.
Sentencing should serve a number of objectives: deterrence (scaring others into not breaking the law), correction (rehabilitating the criminal), prevention (keeping people in jail is a good way to keep them from doing more crimes), and revenge (feeding the public's sense of justice). Shortening real jail terms while letting inmates subjectively do their given time might help correction a little bit, at the cost of prevention. Perhaps that could be useful for first offenders or criminals with an expected low chance of recidivism. Subjectively lengthening current jail terms seems to serve only deterrence (the effect of which is proven to level off quickly with increased sentences) and revenge, the more pointless of objectives. And don't ask how this will help correction... how sane is someone going to come out of a 1000 year sentence?
All this seems needlessly cruel and detrimental to the more important aspects of punishment.
Learning the syntax of a new language in itself is easy; what takes time is learning about libraries, their idiosyncrasies, best practices, pitfalls to avoid, etc. My own experience with experienced programmers is that it can take them upwards of 6 months to master a language. I expect it will have taken you a whole lot less than that to get up to speed in VB.net, coming from another MS language, but in many cases the switch takes longer.
A nice illustration of this was presented in an article of about a decade ago (can't find it at the moment), about programmer productivity. The researchers looked at overall productivity (LOC / bugs, etc) of C programmers on Unix (using X) and found a difference between programmers with 1, 2 5 and 10 years on the clock. Apparently, programmers already 10 years into their career in that environment were still learning new things. In contrast, productivity of programmers in the Microsoft ecosystem leveled off after 5 years. One of the reasons cited was that the MS framework was changing so often that programmers never really got the chance to master one completely.
Learning the company's codebase may or may not be relevant; I've worked in places with a lot of custom code and libraries, and other places where coding projects tended to be small and isolated (more system integration than true app development).
Depends. Young coders with little or no actual work experience are going to be doing enough on-the-job learning to keep them quite busy. Many will have a limited experience in documenting, test procedures, version control mechanisms, and they will need some help in learning the ropes in soft skills: team working, talking to the non tech departments, etc. You want those young programmers to be at least somewhat proficient in the language you hired them to program in, instead of having to teach them that as well.
As for all that other stuff? They can / should hopefully learn that from the old hands. If they aren't fully up to speed on the latest SDKs or languages, no biggy, since the biggest added value comes from their experience. I say a senior techy who isn't spending at least 30% of his time at coaching or transferring knowledge has no business being in the tech business anymore. But that's just me... sadly I see very, very little coaching going on in IT land. Perhaps that's why young people keep learning the same stuff we did, making the same mistakes. Perhaps that's why development is still more of a craft than a profession.
All it takes is to be identified once. Just one friend snapping a picture of you & pals at a wedding,who then posts the picture on FB, and dutifully identifies each person in the photo. After that, every image of you available on the web will be linked to you. That picture of you puking your guts out at some drunken frathouse blowout that you hoped everyone had forgotten about will now be on the first page of a Google search on your name.
Smog and levels of particulate matter in large cities are generally a lot lower compared to before the 60s, when a lot of people still heated their houses with coal fires. Smoke / Sulphur concentrations in London for example have dropped from around 350 mg / m^3 in 1950 to around 5mg / m^3 today, and levels are still dropping owing to better filters & cleaner cars. Particulate matter in the air hasn't increased; the maximum acceptable levels have been substantially lowered.
That's a good thing, By the way. Also, Paris seems to have lifted the driving ban for tomorrow, apparently smog is down to acceptable levels already.
Keep in mind this thing is meant to be used in places without plumbing... in a lot of cases that means there will also be a lack of replacement solar panels or the tools / skills to repair this setup. The problem of deploying 1st world stuff in 3rd world countries is not the stuff itself, but the expense and parts required to keep it in good repair. Simpler is better in this case.
The Solowheel is actually not a bad idea: it has the right speed, range and portability. But it looks hard to ride, especially getting on and off the thing. Something that improves with practice I suppose, but I haven't read any account of anyone actually trying to use it daily. Reviews & videos are either Solowheel "pros" doing neat tricks and making it look really easy (after god knows how many hours of training), or faceplanting beginners. Anyone out there using a Solowheel as part of their commute?
You're right: you don't get it. But don't worry about it.
Is XKCD overhyped and overrated? Sure it is... like pretty much everything else with a certain level of popularity in the geek crowd. Even so, I often find XKCD funny, sometimes thought-provoking or profound, and generally interesting. And it's often applicable to everyday situations (hence the many "oblig XKCD" references here on/. )
The community seemed to be on to them; rumours about that exchange have been floating around for ages, and they apparently already had a bad payment history. The market was doing its work just fine, factoring in risk and the trustworthiness of the exchange, with BTC trading for $100 at MtGox and $500 everywhere else.
This. It's pointless to go for a Pono if the audio files for this thing will come from the master intended for CD and radio, instead of the one for vinyl. If Neil Young is concerned with the quality of music on modern media, he ought to first address the horrible mastering process applied to recordings.
I'm sure some criminals have already looked into the use of drones; R/C planes or quadcopters navigating by GPS are more or less off-the-shelf these days. They probably found them unpractical as they have a small payload and range.
Getting stuff across the border isn't all that hard for criminals anyway, unless you're talking really bulky stuff one has to truck in (booze etc). Even sending stuff by airliner isn't that hard; you're ok if you send 10 drug mules and 5 make it through. The quoted "street value" of seized coke is crap, its actual value at that stage is bugger all.
It's not just moving around, but also reaching where we can reach, carry what we can carry, use our tools, etc. When versatile general purpose robots become feasible, I suspect that there will be many situations where the most practical robot form will be a humanoid one. A household robot is a prime example of that.
Why put 4-8 legs on a robot when 2 will do? We ourselves do just fine on 2. Maybe there's a case if it means 4 cheap, simple legs instead of 2 complex and expensive ones, but I doubt it.
And why a general purpose robot? Because it will probably end up being much cheaper than making a whole range of specialized robots effective. A Roomba will vacuum nicely, but it won't do the stairs, or move the chairs out of the way, or open the door to go into the next room after emptying its own bag. Sure, it could be made to do all those things having to do with vacuuming, but it would make it that much more complex.
You don't see too many hybrid microwave oven/vacuum cleaner/cars do you? Why build a general purpose robot that needs a vacuum cleaner so it can clean the house? You're back to buying individual machines AND a machine to operate them.
You kind of answered your own question there. It makes sense to separate functions into separate appliances, and that includes separating the highly complex part to give these tools the mobility, vision and smarts that enable them to do their tasks by themselves.
Specialisation vs. generalisation. Build a robot with 8 legs and it will only carry girders for you; if you want something to inspect pipes or weld bits of steel together, you might have to get a different robot. A humanoid robot however can do a variety of tasks. If the jobs are varied and ever-changing, a humanoid robot might work out better than specialised ones. And a humanoid robot can go where we go, which is useful in places where they work alongside us or share our environment (think: stairs!). Think of the chores that need doing around your house: would you rather have a specialized robot for each task, or a humanoid robot than can do all, even assist in 2 man jobs like putting up a shed?
Also, in technology, the phrase "too expensive" should always beconsidered with the word "today" added. Think computers: how long did powerful computing take to become cheap and ubiquitous? There's no components in humanoid robots that will not become cheaper with mass production, and as we often see with other technology, mass production will drive simplification of the design itself as well. If there's a good use for humanoid robots, I'm betting that eventually they will be cheap enough for individuals to own. The hardware isn't even that expensive today, the problem is that the software just isn't there yet.
Doesn't the area around a helipad count as restricted airspace? Not sure how it is in the US, but over here model airplanes (including foam park flyers) are strictly banned from flying in such airspace. Breaking that rule will get you in trouble with airspace regulations; they won't just do you for trespassing.
Since when do muslims constitute a race? Silly as that statement is, racism it aint.
With that said, no terrorist of any persuasion would be so dumb as to stick a (tiny) bomb in an R/C plane. There are much easier and effective ways to blow up people.
Not really. A model plane is not a regular aircraft, but it is an "unmanned aircraft system", and he was using it commercially i.e. to shoot an advertisement video. Sounds to me that the FAA is right to assert that this falls under their regulation.
However the article implies that there is more to the case: "As a general matter, the decision finds that the FAA's 2007 policy statement banning the commercial use of model aircraft is not enforceable". In other words, the judge didn't say that the rule was not broken, but that the rule itself is poorly drafted.
Coincidences happen. There's a guy sharing my first and last name (my last name is very uncommon; it's spelled in an unusual way), went to the same university and faculty, and wrote his master's thesis on a subject close to my line of study. He's about my age, too. People often mistake us on LinkedIn, and I get asked sometimes about certain papers he wrote (he remained in academia). Sometimes it takes some effort to convince people that I am not the other guy.
I'm just glad he's not a criminal... or founder of a cryptocurrency.
Slashdot Mirror
The machine might report cash being taken out; very unfortunate if that happens while you stand there shoving piles of bills into your pockets. Better to install the device and come back at night, with a hoodie over your face, grab all the cash, and run.
These machines rarely miscount, and if it happens once a day, the bank will probably take notice. There was a weird little trick on certain ATMs a while back that let you tease an extra note from the machine, but the banks caught on very quickly.
everyone just needs to accept this: BITCOIN IS A SCAM
We all "just" need to take your word for it, or did you have anything to substantiate this claim?
Bitcoin is just a mechanism to transfer tokens ("coins") securely from one wallet to another, and gradually add tokens to the available pool by letting anyone who wants to mine them. There's no scam in the design; the scammy part is in the way we attached value to those tokens, and the way exchanges manipulate that value (or just take off with our coins). Calling Bitcoin a scam is a bit like calling tulip bulbs evil by design because at some point in history silly people paid fortunes for them. Or calling the dollar scammy by design because Motherf..ing Guido just made off with the wad of cash you gave him for safekeeping.
Look at what that champagne (& other stuff) cost you last week compared to a few years ago; that's proof of inflation right there...
Agreed. I loved the evenings of multiplayer fun with friends on the old XBox or PS, and we had some good fun playing Goldeneye on a Nintendo at work, locked away in a secret NATO dungeon. Later I got a PS3 and was seriously disappointed with the selection and quality of head-to-head games in split-screen. Most games are single and net play only, and if they have split screen it usually sucks.
Luckily the guys at my old employer still throw a little LAN party every 2 months or so at the office: games, beers and good natured rage.
Commercials can be funny as hell, even if you've seen them before. I still enjoy these older ones from a Dutch insurance firm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... (The 2 guys getting out of the car at the end are father & son Moszkowicz, the country's infamous top lawyers).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Fine, so crimes are still being committed behind bars. Score 1 for you. Even so, society is much better off with these people behind bars than on the streets. Shorter sentences aren't the answer to a failing jail system.
That said, given a choice of a stiff jail term and a good chance at successful rehabilitation we should of course go for rehab. But in some cases where we have to face facts and admit that the chances of rehabilitation are slim to none, longer jail terms are the way to go. There is also plenty of evidence that too-light sentencing increases crime; if a crime carries little or no consequences, more people will be tempted to commit it, and the light sentence will also reduce the perceived seriousness of the crime.
Science has proven punishment doesn't work
Like hell it has. First of all: what do you mean by " work"? Keeping a criminal in jail has proven to be 100% effective in preventing him from inflicting more crimes on the public. For rehabilitation and scaring the criminal and others straight, effectiveness of punishment follows something of a Laffer curve: at some point, stiffer sentences no longer increase the deterrence factor, and the chance of successful rehabilitation actually drops after a certain point. But punishment does work. If it didn't, we might as well have no punishment at all. Ask yourself, would we then have more crime, or less?
She also seems to hint at a more bleeding hearts approach, letting criminals serve sentences of normal duration in subjective time, whilst keeping them in jail for a much shorter real-time interval.
Sentencing should serve a number of objectives: deterrence (scaring others into not breaking the law), correction (rehabilitating the criminal), prevention (keeping people in jail is a good way to keep them from doing more crimes), and revenge (feeding the public's sense of justice). Shortening real jail terms while letting inmates subjectively do their given time might help correction a little bit, at the cost of prevention. Perhaps that could be useful for first offenders or criminals with an expected low chance of recidivism. Subjectively lengthening current jail terms seems to serve only deterrence (the effect of which is proven to level off quickly with increased sentences) and revenge, the more pointless of objectives. And don't ask how this will help correction... how sane is someone going to come out of a 1000 year sentence?
All this seems needlessly cruel and detrimental to the more important aspects of punishment.
Learning the syntax of a new language in itself is easy; what takes time is learning about libraries, their idiosyncrasies, best practices, pitfalls to avoid, etc. My own experience with experienced programmers is that it can take them upwards of 6 months to master a language. I expect it will have taken you a whole lot less than that to get up to speed in VB.net, coming from another MS language, but in many cases the switch takes longer.
A nice illustration of this was presented in an article of about a decade ago (can't find it at the moment), about programmer productivity. The researchers looked at overall productivity (LOC / bugs, etc) of C programmers on Unix (using X) and found a difference between programmers with 1, 2 5 and 10 years on the clock. Apparently, programmers already 10 years into their career in that environment were still learning new things. In contrast, productivity of programmers in the Microsoft ecosystem leveled off after 5 years. One of the reasons cited was that the MS framework was changing so often that programmers never really got the chance to master one completely.
Learning the company's codebase may or may not be relevant; I've worked in places with a lot of custom code and libraries, and other places where coding projects tended to be small and isolated (more system integration than true app development).
Depends. Young coders with little or no actual work experience are going to be doing enough on-the-job learning to keep them quite busy. Many will have a limited experience in documenting, test procedures, version control mechanisms, and they will need some help in learning the ropes in soft skills: team working, talking to the non tech departments, etc. You want those young programmers to be at least somewhat proficient in the language you hired them to program in, instead of having to teach them that as well.
As for all that other stuff? They can / should hopefully learn that from the old hands. If they aren't fully up to speed on the latest SDKs or languages, no biggy, since the biggest added value comes from their experience. I say a senior techy who isn't spending at least 30% of his time at coaching or transferring knowledge has no business being in the tech business anymore. But that's just me... sadly I see very, very little coaching going on in IT land. Perhaps that's why young people keep learning the same stuff we did, making the same mistakes. Perhaps that's why development is still more of a craft than a profession.
All it takes is to be identified once. Just one friend snapping a picture of you & pals at a wedding,who then posts the picture on FB, and dutifully identifies each person in the photo. After that, every image of you available on the web will be linked to you. That picture of you puking your guts out at some drunken frathouse blowout that you hoped everyone had forgotten about will now be on the first page of a Google search on your name.
Smog and levels of particulate matter in large cities are generally a lot lower compared to before the 60s, when a lot of people still heated their houses with coal fires. Smoke / Sulphur concentrations in London for example have dropped from around 350 mg / m^3 in 1950 to around 5mg / m^3 today, and levels are still dropping owing to better filters & cleaner cars. Particulate matter in the air hasn't increased; the maximum acceptable levels have been substantially lowered.
That's a good thing, By the way. Also, Paris seems to have lifted the driving ban for tomorrow, apparently smog is down to acceptable levels already.
Keep in mind this thing is meant to be used in places without plumbing... in a lot of cases that means there will also be a lack of replacement solar panels or the tools / skills to repair this setup. The problem of deploying 1st world stuff in 3rd world countries is not the stuff itself, but the expense and parts required to keep it in good repair. Simpler is better in this case.
The Solowheel is actually not a bad idea: it has the right speed, range and portability. But it looks hard to ride, especially getting on and off the thing. Something that improves with practice I suppose, but I haven't read any account of anyone actually trying to use it daily. Reviews & videos are either Solowheel "pros" doing neat tricks and making it look really easy (after god knows how many hours of training), or faceplanting beginners. Anyone out there using a Solowheel as part of their commute?
You're right: you don't get it. But don't worry about it.
/. )
Is XKCD overhyped and overrated? Sure it is... like pretty much everything else with a certain level of popularity in the geek crowd. Even so, I often find XKCD funny, sometimes thought-provoking or profound, and generally interesting. And it's often applicable to everyday situations (hence the many "oblig XKCD" references here on
The community seemed to be on to them; rumours about that exchange have been floating around for ages, and they apparently already had a bad payment history. The market was doing its work just fine, factoring in risk and the trustworthiness of the exchange, with BTC trading for $100 at MtGox and $500 everywhere else.
This. It's pointless to go for a Pono if the audio files for this thing will come from the master intended for CD and radio, instead of the one for vinyl. If Neil Young is concerned with the quality of music on modern media, he ought to first address the horrible mastering process applied to recordings.
I'm sure some criminals have already looked into the use of drones; R/C planes or quadcopters navigating by GPS are more or less off-the-shelf these days. They probably found them unpractical as they have a small payload and range.
Getting stuff across the border isn't all that hard for criminals anyway, unless you're talking really bulky stuff one has to truck in (booze etc). Even sending stuff by airliner isn't that hard; you're ok if you send 10 drug mules and 5 make it through. The quoted "street value" of seized coke is crap, its actual value at that stage is bugger all.
It's not just moving around, but also reaching where we can reach, carry what we can carry, use our tools, etc. When versatile general purpose robots become feasible, I suspect that there will be many situations where the most practical robot form will be a humanoid one. A household robot is a prime example of that.
And why a general purpose robot? Because it will probably end up being much cheaper than making a whole range of specialized robots effective. A Roomba will vacuum nicely, but it won't do the stairs, or move the chairs out of the way, or open the door to go into the next room after emptying its own bag. Sure, it could be made to do all those things having to do with vacuuming, but it would make it that much more complex.
You don't see too many hybrid microwave oven/vacuum cleaner/cars do you? Why build a general purpose robot that needs a vacuum cleaner so it can clean the house? You're back to buying individual machines AND a machine to operate them.
You kind of answered your own question there. It makes sense to separate functions into separate appliances, and that includes separating the highly complex part to give these tools the mobility, vision and smarts that enable them to do their tasks by themselves.
Specialisation vs. generalisation. Build a robot with 8 legs and it will only carry girders for you; if you want something to inspect pipes or weld bits of steel together, you might have to get a different robot. A humanoid robot however can do a variety of tasks. If the jobs are varied and ever-changing, a humanoid robot might work out better than specialised ones. And a humanoid robot can go where we go, which is useful in places where they work alongside us or share our environment (think: stairs!). Think of the chores that need doing around your house: would you rather have a specialized robot for each task, or a humanoid robot than can do all, even assist in 2 man jobs like putting up a shed?
Also, in technology, the phrase "too expensive" should always beconsidered with the word "today" added. Think computers: how long did powerful computing take to become cheap and ubiquitous? There's no components in humanoid robots that will not become cheaper with mass production, and as we often see with other technology, mass production will drive simplification of the design itself as well. If there's a good use for humanoid robots, I'm betting that eventually they will be cheap enough for individuals to own. The hardware isn't even that expensive today, the problem is that the software just isn't there yet.
Doesn't the area around a helipad count as restricted airspace? Not sure how it is in the US, but over here model airplanes (including foam park flyers) are strictly banned from flying in such airspace. Breaking that rule will get you in trouble with airspace regulations; they won't just do you for trespassing.
Since when do muslims constitute a race? Silly as that statement is, racism it aint.
With that said, no terrorist of any persuasion would be so dumb as to stick a (tiny) bomb in an R/C plane. There are much easier and effective ways to blow up people.
Not really. A model plane is not a regular aircraft, but it is an "unmanned aircraft system", and he was using it commercially i.e. to shoot an advertisement video. Sounds to me that the FAA is right to assert that this falls under their regulation.
However the article implies that there is more to the case: "As a general matter, the decision finds that the FAA's 2007 policy statement banning the commercial use of model aircraft is not enforceable". In other words, the judge didn't say that the rule was not broken, but that the rule itself is poorly drafted.
Coincidences happen. There's a guy sharing my first and last name (my last name is very uncommon; it's spelled in an unusual way), went to the same university and faculty, and wrote his master's thesis on a subject close to my line of study. He's about my age, too. People often mistake us on LinkedIn, and I get asked sometimes about certain papers he wrote (he remained in academia). Sometimes it takes some effort to convince people that I am not the other guy.
I'm just glad he's not a criminal... or founder of a cryptocurrency.