I don't agree with the advice of "find a favorite comp sci prof" as your collaborator -- if your idea has merit, you should be able to just publish it as sole author (if you are indeed the sole contributor).
What you do need to do is find an appropriate journal venue for your work. It helps to read some of the papers published there to get a feel what they publish.
The other thing you must do as part of serious scholarship is to put your work in the context of prior papers if not prior art. You know, the Isaac Newton "I see far as I stand on the shoulders of giants" kind of thing, when the work in question (Principia) made him one of the giants.
Is there any way that you can get library privileges at your local university? You could walk in the door and tell one of the librarians what you are doing and why you want access to their collection. These days, this does not mean simply browsing their stacks, it means having access to their electronic journals behind (expensive) subscription walls.
Once you have library access, you can use Google Scholar along with the other search engines for scientific literature and "go to town" figuring out what others have done on similar lines. Even if you come across something very similar to your work, do not be discouraged and think you "have been scooped." A reference to that similar work is a powerful way of establishing that "brilliant minds think alike" and that you are not working in a complete vacuum. Often times, your result will have important differences or enhancements or possible simplifications on an earlier derivation or result, and as the saying goes, "On the shoulders of giants."
Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemens was a person who came from a humble background and married into wealth, but his appetite for the fine things that money could bring exceeded whatever came his way by way of his wife's family.
Having worked as a newspaper "printer's devil", he saw his path to the riches required for the life style to which he had become accustomed in the Paige Compositor -- essentially a Victorian Era version of MS-Word implemented largely in hardware, making "leveraged" investments in this invention.
The Paige compositor failed in the marketplace, more sophisticated than its competitor the Linotype -- kind of like the tale of a "death march" failed software or computer hardware project some 100 years later. Twain lost all of his money and then money he didn't have. To make good on his debts, he went on a worldwide lecture tool, essentially doing impressions of Hal Holbrooke pretending to be Mark Twain.
Not only did the speaking fees from this grueling tour pay back his debts in full and then some, it made him immortal. Were it not for the fame of the speaking tour and connecting with audiences around the world with his personal appearances in a day before TV and cable and talk shows, he may as well been forgetten as many a 19'th century humorist.
So remember, what made Mark Twain a household word even into the 21'st Century was one, the man's greed, and two, an antecedant to the personal computer.
I am amazed at the lack of depth of the conversation here. Whether it is nuclear offensive capability or anti-missile defense, it is all a grand bluff when it comes down to it.
With either the offensive or defensive systems, you don't get to have a "small war" where you "blood the troops" -- the stakes are too high. So it is a huge uncertainty as to whether any of these systems will "work as advertised." How do know that for an offensive strike that when the President "pushes the big red button" that it won't be all a big fizzle? There is no way to perform full-scale operational tests on any of this.
So all of these weapons, offensive and anti-missile defensive are about deterrence, which is ultimately about deception in warfighting in a Sun Tzu sense. So no, we should not engage in self deception regarding the capabilities of these arms, but deception of a potential adversary is the entire capability in these things because forbid that we ever have to use them -- either the offensive or defensive systems. And all of this talk unilaterally removes the veil of deception, so I think those MIT guys need to STFU.
My idea is to start with near and work out towards far. My other idea is to tell the story behind what they are looking at and why these things are important.
Jupiter and its moons are important because of Galileo, and Galileo used Jupiter and moons as an analogy for the Copernican helio-centric model. Venus can also serve that purpose if it is showing a crescent -- the phases of Venus were further support for Copernicus according to Galileao.
Next, point out objects such as the Big Dipper. It actually is a star cluster, only we are too close to it to notice. Work your way out to the Pleiades and the Bee Hive. You can point out that the Pleiades appear on the hood ornament of a popular Japanese car as "Subaru" is the name for the Pleiades in Japan.
Depending on season, try the Orion Nebula as an active formation region of a star cluster, some of the more distance "galactic" star clusters in the Milky Way. Revert to the naked eye and point out the Milky Way (if able depending on light pollution and weather) and the "dark rifts" in the Milky Way (those are not the absence of stars, rather they are the presence of dust -- the heavy elements out of which you and I are made out of and where are heavy elements came from).
Next, try for a globular cluster such as M-13. Tell the story of Harlow Shapley and the discovery that the center of the Milky Way is in Sagittarius instead of us being in the center.
Finally, wrap up with a view of M-31, and explain how Edwin Hubble discovered Cephiad variables in it and discovered it to be remote. Point out Polaris (the North Star) and explain that it is a Cephiad -- that it is a reasonably distant star, but we see it because of its high luminosity. Tell the story of Hubble's discovery of the "spirals" as being "island universes" like our Milky Way, red shift, and what I call the "Copernican Revolution of the 20th Century", where M-31 was the stepping stone to finding out how freakin' large the Universe is and how we are such a small speck in it.
Also, moderate expectations of what they are going to see. Explain that large telescopes taking long photographic or CCD time exposures can show much more dramatic views of the same objects, but they are looking at what they see in those famous pictures with their own eyeball, first hand, through your telescope. Also give them a primer on averted vision on how to see faint objects. Finally, explain that through the telescope what they are seeing of M-31 is mainly the central core, and that M-31 is a much vaster and fainter object that extends well beyond the telescope field.
As someone with with years of experience in model railroading, that story is "real scary."
You mean to tell me you are going to count on a model train going around its tracks for 3 days straight without someone, at some time during the 3 days, to either have to give the train a nudge when it gets stuck, or put it back on the track?
I don't recall the "Straight to the moon!" line as being a laugh line even back in the day.
The whole premise of Ralph Kramden was, "You know that crabby bus driver, I wonder what he is like to his wife and friends?"
Ralph on one hand was supposed to be an object of the viewer's sympathy -- a working class guy barely making ends meet, living in a tiny apartment with his wife, barely any furniture or any other possessions to their name. On the other hand, Ralph was a blowhard, a guy with a chip on his shoulder, a fellow in humble circumstances who thought he was Center of the Universe, and yes, a guy who fought with his wife at times, even threatening domestic battery. That a guy like that even talked liked that was regarded as a "fact of life" back in the day, but it was part of the character portrait that Ralph could be the butt of our jokes, someone who perhaps deserved the laughs and ridicule that came his way.
On the other hand, a seemingly self-effacing mega-celebrity golf pro, suspected for cheating on his wife, leaves the house at 2 AM with his wife in hot pursuit breaking out windows on his truck leading him to crash into a hydrant and then a tree, found unconscious on the grass after being beaten about the head with a golf club, who refuses three times to meet with the cops and give a statement and "lawyers up" to keep his wife out of jail on zero-tolerance domestic battery laws put on the books to protect women from abusive husbands, now that is not funny either. And one does not laugh.
Our power company has a Web site -- enter an address, badda boom, badda bing, get the household electric use.
Maybe a person with illegal growing in mind could canvas the neighborhood, find out the upper bound from the normal "wasteful" electric use, and then "fly under the radar" and only grow subject to that cap on electric use.
On the other hand, maybe all of the folks with big electric bills are growing?
X is seriously deficient in graphics performance, but OpenGL isn't. So much so that Java under Linux is using OpenGL for graphics acceleration over just plain X. I am thinking things like OpenGL, available under the gamut of OS's, are a better answer than porting graphics-intensive applications to a specialty OS.
In the episode where they were all Civil War reenactors and Raymond "got stuck on the reenacting the Confederate side because no one else wanted to", brother Robert, the NYC cop was heard to sigh,
Actually, civilian use of nuclear bombs for the equivalent of "clearing a large chunk of land" had been studied as part of Project Plowshare, and the showstopper was not so much cost as the problem of getting a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to slow the arms race.
It seems that nuclear bombs are not an effective way of clearing a large chunk of land when the military needs to to this.
I mean, why doesn't the US/Israel/UK use nuclear munitions to "solve" the problem of the Iranian nuclear program? Its not like the Middle Eastern Arab neighbors of Persian Iran are that crazy about Iran, and who could threaten a counterstrike, although I suppose oil going to $500/barrel could be an economic counterstrike.
There must be an informal "Great Convention" in effect that there would be serious consequences (complete alienation from the international community with the accompanying economic ruin) to any use of "atomics", even in a kind of "surgical strike."
So, apart from a last-ditch option when a country has their backs against the wall, from a military standpoint nuclear bombs are thoroughly ineffective.
Of course Java is a dynamic duck-typed language as well. You just have to use the Reflection API.
As a matter of fact, I don't bother with all of those inner classes, anonymous or otherwise, to attach event handlers to menus, buttons, and mouse actions. I use java.beans.EventHandler to establish these connections. EventHandler uses Reflection under the hood to pull this off. So you can get duck typing and dynamic dispatch without using the ugly Reflection API syntax.
PBS Nova had a show on the comparative skills of humans and the great apes.
One test was that the subject was offered a treat inside a cage -- a banana pellet for the ape, a Gummy Bear candy for the human child -- an a kind of toothed rake to retreive the treat.
In each case, the rake was handed to the subject tooth-side down, and the teeth were to widely spaced to make and headway retrieving the treat. In each case the subject, a chimp and a 2-year-old human, raked away to no effect.
Then the experimenter turned the rake over and demonstrated how the treat could easily be retrieved using the flat end of the rake. Then the rake was returned to the subject with the tooth-side-down position of the rake.
The ape went back to raking away to no effect. With respect to the human 2-year-old, however, not only did the 2-year-old achieve 1-trial learning that the flat side of the rake was the effective way to get the Gummy Bear candy, when the 2-year-old was shown this technique, the 2-year-old laughed out loud, as if to say, "Oh, that's cheating, but if cheating is allowed, I am certainly going to do it."
What I figure was the role of the laughter and the sense that the rake experiment was a joke is this: humor is connected with this type of reasoning and this type of learning. A lot of learning is a matter of figuring out the exception to the rule, what has to be un-learned in order to effect an outcome. So not only did the 2-year-old learn in one trial, the 2-year-old developed a mental model of how the rake was supposed to operate and then made a conceptual correction to that model, and thought the whole thing to be funny.
I don't know the equivalent experiment with a dog as dogs lack the hand dexterity of humans and apes, but the minute I see a dog respond with 1-trial learning to a related situation, only then will I believe any claim as to a dog have the intelligence of a 2-year-old human.
We all say "that scam is stupid, it could not happen to me", and then I watched a video demo of the "pidgeon drop" confidence game.
I can kinda see being taken by some scam artist where there is some face-to-face contact. The way the "pidgeon drop" works is that the con artists drop some envelope full of money behind you, the con calls your attention to it "is this your money you dropped. Part of how this work is that an accomplice walks by posing as a "disinterested third party" to build up the crucial network of "trust, but distrust" so you get sucked in putting up "earnest money" until the "rightful owner is attempted to be located." Yes, the thing works on the mark's greed and the notion of an impromptu conspiracy, with the mark not knowing two of the three parties are in collusion, but it probably also works on the idea of a person "getting sucked in" by events and not thinking quickly enough on one's feet about what is happening and what should be happening.
The Nigerian thing, however, I just don't get. The Nigerian thing is as hackneyed a cliche as "In Soviet Russia", "All Your Base Are Belong to Us", and ". . . Profit!" I mean, what planet is a person living on who falls for it?
I could even understand if there was some variant to this game. Say, the "Nigerian dude" contacts you by spam e-mail, and you go "ha, ha funny, the dude doesn't even know English", and then it would be followed by an another e-mail "This is Agent Sam Smith from the FBI, and we need your cooperation tracking down a Nigerian con-artist." But they don't even try anything as basic as the "supposedly unrelated third party." It is completely transparent and utterly unsophisticated.
Are some people compensating for what they think is racial bias against Nigerians that they are willing to help the Nigerian dude to demonstrate they can act against their prejudice? Is it just a compulsion that grips a person to respond, kind of like a Simpson's episode where Homer knows he is being hypnotized and croaks out "must . . . not . . . hit . . . reply . . . to . . . spam . . . e-mail!" I mean, just who are these people who reply?
I used to be sympathetic to the mindset of all of the people using Ramsey Notation to express their frustration at the power company trying to tack fees on to solar energy users. After the recent financial crisis, I have changed my sympathies to the crabby power company people, but for an indirect reason.
All loans and mortgages involve some degree of risk. Homeowner loses their job, simply gets tired of making house payments, etc, etc. Risk, however, can be mitigated by pooling -- the principle behind insurance. If we pool a whole bunch of mortgages together, the risk kind of average out, doesn't it? One homeowner may lose their job, but they are not going to all lose their jobs at the same time, right? Yeah, one house gets the roof blown off in a windstorm, but the roof's are not going to blow off all the houses? For a Midwestern tornado, maybe an OK assumption, for Hurricane Katrina, maybe not so much.
That is how we got into the Financial Crisis. It wasn't so much that any one loan was higher risk than any other, but they all got bundled into some kind of traded mortgage bonds where everyone thought, "hey, they can't all default all at once." A recent discussion of this matter mentioned that the key factor was the Pearson r-coefficient of all of those mortgages, and no one doing the bundling or buying the bundled mortgages had a clue.
Wind and solar have a "capacity factor", a kind of risk that they cannot be relied upon to supply electricity when called upon. I used to think that one could "pool the risk", interconnect all of these wind generators and solar panels into the grid and average out the fluctuation. For wind power, I am pretty sure that the capacity factor is highly correlated and hence wind is almost worthlessly unreliable. For solar, I need to see some more data.
The thing is that wind is highly variable, and the variability can be correlated over continental land masses within the reach of any grid, and that wind can just quit for weeks at a time (summer doldrums, if you will). One of the things often suggested is "try it out and get real-world experience." Well, wind is being tried in a major way in Europe, and the capacity factors in practice are proving to be well below original predictions and projections.
Now solar could be another thing, especially in the desert Southwest. Maybe the availability of solar electricity correlates nicely with A/C demand, but I would need to see some data on this, and I imagine the A/C peak lags the sunshine peak on account of thermal lag, and maybe some of this could be compensated with some kind of "smart grid" where people are encourage to run their A/C more at noon instead of waiting till late afternoon and early evening when the heat finally filters through the walls.
The electric power companies never did like solar and wind interconnects, especially from residential users, and maybe they have solid reasons for not liking them, apart from utility executives being Blue Meanies with sharp teeth where most people have their stomachs. Maybe a homeowner with a wind or solar setup is producing much less in the way of usable green power than they think and is increasing the use of expensive natural gas in less-than-efficient peaking plants. We are geeks, here, and we can come up with some reasonable back-of-the-envelope estimates of these effects, instead of lapsing into, "Oh the humanity, those EVIL power companies!!"
If you mean, don't have a lame bounds check that checks on every single array reference, I agree.
On the other hand, for many well-mannered loops (that the array index is generated by some kind of iterator or index stepping expression, one not modified from inside the loop), it should be easy enough to have an optimizing compiler/JIT/whatever that checks the bounds once on entry to the loop.
In that case, I would indeed like to have bounds checking, thank-you-very-much. There are efficient ways to do bounds checking, and why not use them?
You can always tell the tourists apart from the pros.
The tourists (i.e. out-of-state vacation cabin owners) all have those orange hard hats with the built-in hearing protectors with "Husqvarna" across the front.
At least they didn't walk across the Menominee River Bridge with an empty soft drink can and try to get 10 cents from the State of Michigan for it at Angeli's. According to the sign, that can get you 5 at the Big House in Pontiac.
Slashdot Mirror
What you do need to do is find an appropriate journal venue for your work. It helps to read some of the papers published there to get a feel what they publish.
The other thing you must do as part of serious scholarship is to put your work in the context of prior papers if not prior art. You know, the Isaac Newton "I see far as I stand on the shoulders of giants" kind of thing, when the work in question (Principia) made him one of the giants.
Is there any way that you can get library privileges at your local university? You could walk in the door and tell one of the librarians what you are doing and why you want access to their collection. These days, this does not mean simply browsing their stacks, it means having access to their electronic journals behind (expensive) subscription walls.
Once you have library access, you can use Google Scholar along with the other search engines for scientific literature and "go to town" figuring out what others have done on similar lines. Even if you come across something very similar to your work, do not be discouraged and think you "have been scooped." A reference to that similar work is a powerful way of establishing that "brilliant minds think alike" and that you are not working in a complete vacuum. Often times, your result will have important differences or enhancements or possible simplifications on an earlier derivation or result, and as the saying goes, "On the shoulders of giants."
Yeah, but without an EPA permit, they will shut off your tornado containment field.
Having worked as a newspaper "printer's devil", he saw his path to the riches required for the life style to which he had become accustomed in the Paige Compositor -- essentially a Victorian Era version of MS-Word implemented largely in hardware, making "leveraged" investments in this invention.
The Paige compositor failed in the marketplace, more sophisticated than its competitor the Linotype -- kind of like the tale of a "death march" failed software or computer hardware project some 100 years later. Twain lost all of his money and then money he didn't have. To make good on his debts, he went on a worldwide lecture tool, essentially doing impressions of Hal Holbrooke pretending to be Mark Twain.
Not only did the speaking fees from this grueling tour pay back his debts in full and then some, it made him immortal. Were it not for the fame of the speaking tour and connecting with audiences around the world with his personal appearances in a day before TV and cable and talk shows, he may as well been forgetten as many a 19'th century humorist.
So remember, what made Mark Twain a household word even into the 21'st Century was one, the man's greed, and two, an antecedant to the personal computer.
With either the offensive or defensive systems, you don't get to have a "small war" where you "blood the troops" -- the stakes are too high. So it is a huge uncertainty as to whether any of these systems will "work as advertised." How do know that for an offensive strike that when the President "pushes the big red button" that it won't be all a big fizzle? There is no way to perform full-scale operational tests on any of this.
So all of these weapons, offensive and anti-missile defensive are about deterrence, which is ultimately about deception in warfighting in a Sun Tzu sense. So no, we should not engage in self deception regarding the capabilities of these arms, but deception of a potential adversary is the entire capability in these things because forbid that we ever have to use them -- either the offensive or defensive systems. And all of this talk unilaterally removes the veil of deception, so I think those MIT guys need to STFU.
Most of what you are paying for when you buy a car is someone elses health insurance.
Jupiter and its moons are important because of Galileo, and Galileo used Jupiter and moons as an analogy for the Copernican helio-centric model. Venus can also serve that purpose if it is showing a crescent -- the phases of Venus were further support for Copernicus according to Galileao.
Next, point out objects such as the Big Dipper. It actually is a star cluster, only we are too close to it to notice. Work your way out to the Pleiades and the Bee Hive. You can point out that the Pleiades appear on the hood ornament of a popular Japanese car as "Subaru" is the name for the Pleiades in Japan.
Depending on season, try the Orion Nebula as an active formation region of a star cluster, some of the more distance "galactic" star clusters in the Milky Way. Revert to the naked eye and point out the Milky Way (if able depending on light pollution and weather) and the "dark rifts" in the Milky Way (those are not the absence of stars, rather they are the presence of dust -- the heavy elements out of which you and I are made out of and where are heavy elements came from).
Next, try for a globular cluster such as M-13. Tell the story of Harlow Shapley and the discovery that the center of the Milky Way is in Sagittarius instead of us being in the center.
Finally, wrap up with a view of M-31, and explain how Edwin Hubble discovered Cephiad variables in it and discovered it to be remote. Point out Polaris (the North Star) and explain that it is a Cephiad -- that it is a reasonably distant star, but we see it because of its high luminosity. Tell the story of Hubble's discovery of the "spirals" as being "island universes" like our Milky Way, red shift, and what I call the "Copernican Revolution of the 20th Century", where M-31 was the stepping stone to finding out how freakin' large the Universe is and how we are such a small speck in it.
Also, moderate expectations of what they are going to see. Explain that large telescopes taking long photographic or CCD time exposures can show much more dramatic views of the same objects, but they are looking at what they see in those famous pictures with their own eyeball, first hand, through your telescope. Also give them a primer on averted vision on how to see faint objects. Finally, explain that through the telescope what they are seeing of M-31 is mainly the central core, and that M-31 is a much vaster and fainter object that extends well beyond the telescope field.
As someone with with years of experience in model railroading, that story is "real scary."
You mean to tell me you are going to count on a model train going around its tracks for 3 days straight without someone, at some time during the 3 days, to either have to give the train a nudge when it gets stuck, or put it back on the track?
hidden motives of thinly disguised advocacy group . . . question you!
Wasn't there a James Bond movie of the Russians having this device?
The whole premise of Ralph Kramden was, "You know that crabby bus driver, I wonder what he is like to his wife and friends?"
Ralph on one hand was supposed to be an object of the viewer's sympathy -- a working class guy barely making ends meet, living in a tiny apartment with his wife, barely any furniture or any other possessions to their name. On the other hand, Ralph was a blowhard, a guy with a chip on his shoulder, a fellow in humble circumstances who thought he was Center of the Universe, and yes, a guy who fought with his wife at times, even threatening domestic battery. That a guy like that even talked liked that was regarded as a "fact of life" back in the day, but it was part of the character portrait that Ralph could be the butt of our jokes, someone who perhaps deserved the laughs and ridicule that came his way.
On the other hand, a seemingly self-effacing mega-celebrity golf pro, suspected for cheating on his wife, leaves the house at 2 AM with his wife in hot pursuit breaking out windows on his truck leading him to crash into a hydrant and then a tree, found unconscious on the grass after being beaten about the head with a golf club, who refuses three times to meet with the cops and give a statement and "lawyers up" to keep his wife out of jail on zero-tolerance domestic battery laws put on the books to protect women from abusive husbands, now that is not funny either. And one does not laugh.
Do they use MFC, with its cruftology of C++ classes, templates, macros and You-Can't-Touch-This "wizard" generated code?
Or do they use MFC with out the "wizard" code from an IDE?
Or do they have their own C++ object library for Win32/COM/ActiveX that is not "out in the wild?"
Or are they writing the Big-Fine-Case-Statement of Win32 programming under C?
Maybe a person with illegal growing in mind could canvas the neighborhood, find out the upper bound from the normal "wasteful" electric use, and then "fly under the radar" and only grow subject to that cap on electric use.
On the other hand, maybe all of the folks with big electric bills are growing?
public officials are anonymous?
Gee, I always thought it was spelled kaos.
X is seriously deficient in graphics performance, but OpenGL isn't. So much so that Java under Linux is using OpenGL for graphics acceleration over just plain X. I am thinking things like OpenGL, available under the gamut of OS's, are a better answer than porting graphics-intensive applications to a specialty OS.
"Just think. Violence. Without paperwork."
It seems that nuclear bombs are not an effective way of clearing a large chunk of land when the military needs to to this.
I mean, why doesn't the US/Israel/UK use nuclear munitions to "solve" the problem of the Iranian nuclear program? Its not like the Middle Eastern Arab neighbors of Persian Iran are that crazy about Iran, and who could threaten a counterstrike, although I suppose oil going to $500/barrel could be an economic counterstrike.
There must be an informal "Great Convention" in effect that there would be serious consequences (complete alienation from the international community with the accompanying economic ruin) to any use of "atomics", even in a kind of "surgical strike."
So, apart from a last-ditch option when a country has their backs against the wall, from a military standpoint nuclear bombs are thoroughly ineffective.
As a matter of fact, I don't bother with all of those inner classes, anonymous or otherwise, to attach event handlers to menus, buttons, and mouse actions. I use java.beans.EventHandler to establish these connections. EventHandler uses Reflection under the hood to pull this off. So you can get duck typing and dynamic dispatch without using the ugly Reflection API syntax.
One test was that the subject was offered a treat inside a cage -- a banana pellet for the ape, a Gummy Bear candy for the human child -- an a kind of toothed rake to retreive the treat.
In each case, the rake was handed to the subject tooth-side down, and the teeth were to widely spaced to make and headway retrieving the treat. In each case the subject, a chimp and a 2-year-old human, raked away to no effect.
Then the experimenter turned the rake over and demonstrated how the treat could easily be retrieved using the flat end of the rake. Then the rake was returned to the subject with the tooth-side-down position of the rake.
The ape went back to raking away to no effect. With respect to the human 2-year-old, however, not only did the 2-year-old achieve 1-trial learning that the flat side of the rake was the effective way to get the Gummy Bear candy, when the 2-year-old was shown this technique, the 2-year-old laughed out loud, as if to say, "Oh, that's cheating, but if cheating is allowed, I am certainly going to do it."
What I figure was the role of the laughter and the sense that the rake experiment was a joke is this: humor is connected with this type of reasoning and this type of learning. A lot of learning is a matter of figuring out the exception to the rule, what has to be un-learned in order to effect an outcome. So not only did the 2-year-old learn in one trial, the 2-year-old developed a mental model of how the rake was supposed to operate and then made a conceptual correction to that model, and thought the whole thing to be funny.
I don't know the equivalent experiment with a dog as dogs lack the hand dexterity of humans and apes, but the minute I see a dog respond with 1-trial learning to a related situation, only then will I believe any claim as to a dog have the intelligence of a 2-year-old human.
I can kinda see being taken by some scam artist where there is some face-to-face contact. The way the "pidgeon drop" works is that the con artists drop some envelope full of money behind you, the con calls your attention to it "is this your money you dropped. Part of how this work is that an accomplice walks by posing as a "disinterested third party" to build up the crucial network of "trust, but distrust" so you get sucked in putting up "earnest money" until the "rightful owner is attempted to be located." Yes, the thing works on the mark's greed and the notion of an impromptu conspiracy, with the mark not knowing two of the three parties are in collusion, but it probably also works on the idea of a person "getting sucked in" by events and not thinking quickly enough on one's feet about what is happening and what should be happening.
The Nigerian thing, however, I just don't get. The Nigerian thing is as hackneyed a cliche as "In Soviet Russia", "All Your Base Are Belong to Us", and ". . . Profit!" I mean, what planet is a person living on who falls for it?
I could even understand if there was some variant to this game. Say, the "Nigerian dude" contacts you by spam e-mail, and you go "ha, ha funny, the dude doesn't even know English", and then it would be followed by an another e-mail "This is Agent Sam Smith from the FBI, and we need your cooperation tracking down a Nigerian con-artist." But they don't even try anything as basic as the "supposedly unrelated third party." It is completely transparent and utterly unsophisticated.
Are some people compensating for what they think is racial bias against Nigerians that they are willing to help the Nigerian dude to demonstrate they can act against their prejudice? Is it just a compulsion that grips a person to respond, kind of like a Simpson's episode where Homer knows he is being hypnotized and croaks out "must . . . not . . . hit . . . reply . . . to . . . spam . . . e-mail!" I mean, just who are these people who reply?
All loans and mortgages involve some degree of risk. Homeowner loses their job, simply gets tired of making house payments, etc, etc. Risk, however, can be mitigated by pooling -- the principle behind insurance. If we pool a whole bunch of mortgages together, the risk kind of average out, doesn't it? One homeowner may lose their job, but they are not going to all lose their jobs at the same time, right? Yeah, one house gets the roof blown off in a windstorm, but the roof's are not going to blow off all the houses? For a Midwestern tornado, maybe an OK assumption, for Hurricane Katrina, maybe not so much.
That is how we got into the Financial Crisis. It wasn't so much that any one loan was higher risk than any other, but they all got bundled into some kind of traded mortgage bonds where everyone thought, "hey, they can't all default all at once." A recent discussion of this matter mentioned that the key factor was the Pearson r-coefficient of all of those mortgages, and no one doing the bundling or buying the bundled mortgages had a clue.
Wind and solar have a "capacity factor", a kind of risk that they cannot be relied upon to supply electricity when called upon. I used to think that one could "pool the risk", interconnect all of these wind generators and solar panels into the grid and average out the fluctuation. For wind power, I am pretty sure that the capacity factor is highly correlated and hence wind is almost worthlessly unreliable. For solar, I need to see some more data.
The thing is that wind is highly variable, and the variability can be correlated over continental land masses within the reach of any grid, and that wind can just quit for weeks at a time (summer doldrums, if you will). One of the things often suggested is "try it out and get real-world experience." Well, wind is being tried in a major way in Europe, and the capacity factors in practice are proving to be well below original predictions and projections.
Now solar could be another thing, especially in the desert Southwest. Maybe the availability of solar electricity correlates nicely with A/C demand, but I would need to see some data on this, and I imagine the A/C peak lags the sunshine peak on account of thermal lag, and maybe some of this could be compensated with some kind of "smart grid" where people are encourage to run their A/C more at noon instead of waiting till late afternoon and early evening when the heat finally filters through the walls.
The electric power companies never did like solar and wind interconnects, especially from residential users, and maybe they have solid reasons for not liking them, apart from utility executives being Blue Meanies with sharp teeth where most people have their stomachs. Maybe a homeowner with a wind or solar setup is producing much less in the way of usable green power than they think and is increasing the use of expensive natural gas in less-than-efficient peaking plants. We are geeks, here, and we can come up with some reasonable back-of-the-envelope estimates of these effects, instead of lapsing into, "Oh the humanity, those EVIL power companies!!"
No disgust . . . my backside.
On the other hand, for many well-mannered loops (that the array index is generated by some kind of iterator or index stepping expression, one not modified from inside the loop), it should be easy enough to have an optimizing compiler/JIT/whatever that checks the bounds once on entry to the loop.
In that case, I would indeed like to have bounds checking, thank-you-very-much. There are efficient ways to do bounds checking, and why not use them?
The tourists (i.e. out-of-state vacation cabin owners) all have those orange hard hats with the built-in hearing protectors with "Husqvarna" across the front.
At least they didn't walk across the Menominee River Bridge with an empty soft drink can and try to get 10 cents from the State of Michigan for it at Angeli's. According to the sign, that can get you 5 at the Big House in Pontiac.