And let this be a lesson for ya, it's all fun and games moving with your millions to a Caribbean tax shelter, until the local [cartel,corrupt police,militias, kidnappers, etc] come for you. Why not just keep your millions stateside, pay your taxes like a good boy, and get old and fat without these kinds of worries? Was there not enough suspense in that option?
Exactly. This is the exact point of the "You Didn't Build That" speech (and the Elizabeth Warren one which gave rise to it). Try getting your Subway franchise or tanning salon off the ground when there are roving bands of thugs and rebels going up and down the unpaved roads. Once you buy your own security force, one could argue that you're out the same amount of money.
The teacher wants the students to do the creative work, but the teacher does not want to put the work into the grading portion of the student-teacher contract, eh?
I think that's a little unfair (and I'm the OP, by the way... and I'm going to address some of the other criticisms, here, so don't take all of this as being directed toward you). That's like saying that you're being lazy by using a testing suite to do your unit tests on the code you're working on. So, stop being lazy and go back to testing your code by hand.
My personal opinion is that grading is a Q/A step in the teaching process. Teaching is when you're actually "generating product", in the sense that you're putting knowledge into brains where it previously wasn't. Grading is just checking to see if it actually worked and, every minute you're grading is a minute you're not teaching. So, it seems to me that, the more you can automate the grading (just like automating testing of your code), the more you can focus on actually producing (ie, adding knowledge to those malleable little brains).
Also, keep in mind that she teaches about 4-5 very un-related courses (video production, electronic media, freehand drawing, printing techniques), each with it's own set of students who either A) are trying to contrive ways to avoid doing the actual work or B) want to actually learn, but who can't follow directions for shit (I used to grade for math, physics, and CS in college, and, even at that level, it's amazing at how hard students seem to make it for you to give them the credit they deserve). What you end up with is about 25 homework submissions, none of which look alike, and you've got to figure out which ones are properly demonstrating the learned skills and which ones are just blowing it off. The submissions which look almost perfect require some painstaking attention because the kid is either really good (and deserves 100%) or they just copied the end result (and deserves a 0), so the stakes are higher with those than with the other submissions. Now, multiply all that work by 4-5 classes of kids. That's why she was at the school, grading, through the whole 3-day weekend. Fun way to spend your long weekend, eh? Now, what was that again about lazy teachers, basking in the warm glow of union protection while they run their feet through the sand at the beach?
So that's where I came in. When I saw her comparing images, side by side... overlaying them, adjusting transparencies to find differences, my first reaction was (due to the "hubris" and "impatience" traits of programmers) "Hey, I'm a programmer. I can write you an application which just compares all of them and tells you which ones are identical faster than you can drag-and-drop them into the app". Then, she could get on to thinking up cool projects for the next week. But, alas, as I thought about it, MD5's wouldn't work (as the students sometimes change names of layers or make other trivial changes). And, also, the "impatience" programmer trait kicked in and I said "Somebody has to have solved this problem before". Now, we did realize that she could just provide a flat image of the target result, but the problem still stuck in my mind, since I'm a programmer, but fuzzy image comparison is not my forte, so I figured I'd ask. This wasn't started by her asking me to find some way for her to automate her grading so she could duck out early and hit the nail salon. This was started by me, reflexively seeking a way to automate a boring, labor-intensive process (like unit-testing) so that she could get on to the creative parts of teaching and also because I was curious about open-source image processing stuff out there, these days.
I'm going to make a plug for National Popular Vote (http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/), here.
Part of why the election prediction is tricky is because of the electoral college. It doesn't matter what the mean and standard deviations of the nationwide polls are, since the states aggregate their votes and (with the exception of Nebraska, I think) give all of their electoral votes to one candidate. So, people like Nate have to look at the probability curves for all 50 states (let's leave out Puerto Rico and military bases for this) and work through each probability of either candidate winning any of the states. Basically, they run through 2^50 permutations, starting with the probability that Romney wins all 50 and (since that would result in Romney winning the election) adding that probability to his probability of being elected. Add to that the probabilities of him winning 49 states P(Romney wins everything but Alabama), P(Romney wins everything but Alaska), etc. through to P(Romney wins everything but Wyoming), and then do that for all 1225 combinations of him winning 48, etc..
When you get down to him winning about 35-40 states, you have to just limit yourself to the combinations of states which would give him enough electoral votes, of course. Then, when you've added all that up, you've got his percent chance of winning (which is the number on the red line on the top graph on Nate's blog). Now, you go and do all that for Obama.
But this is all much more messy than it needs to be, and state-by-state electoral voting just leads to a few states getting a disproportionate amount of gov't pork (and political advertising) as politicians try to buy the votes of a few swing states. However, no state wants to switch to Nebraska's model of proportional electoral votes, because that would dilute the votes that go to their probable candidate. For example, California (which voted about 60% Obama, and usually votes Democrat) doesn't want to see 40% of it's 55 electoral votes go to a Republican. Same goes for Texas not wanting any of their electoral votes going to Democratic candidates. What you get is a stand-off where the red and blue states look at each other and say "You go first!".
So, some enterprising individual figured out a nice solution: ignore your own state vote and just give all of your state's electoral votes to whomever wins the national popular vote. Some states have already adopted legislation for this, but the legislation doesn't kick in until there are enough states on-board to give 270 electoral votes. Turns out that they're already half-way to the 270 target. At that point, the NPV-participating states will guarantee that the winner of the popular vote wins the election, no matter what the non-NPV states do.
Somebody patent couches with periscopes so people can watch from behind them. And mannequins with webcams in their eyes which re-broadcast the program over the local wifi. This will be a goldmine!
Meh... on the other hand, screw it. Just take a picture of one dude on a couch, print it on a card, and then sell it with a little bracket which dangles it right in front of the Kinect's eye.
If you're at all interested in getting more ideas out into the national consciousness (and if you're living in a state that Obama or Romney has a lock on), consider voting for a third-party candidate. Because of the electoral system, it's not going to change who wins the election, but it can increase the chances that one of these candidates gets a spot at some future televised debate. Once upon a time, the debates were sponsored by the National Organization of Women... and now they're run by the Commission on Presidential Debates (which is run by the Democratic and Republican parties). Being a bit of a cartel, they've managed to stipulate that the only invitees to debate must get at least 15% representation in various national polls (another classic case of the successful pulling up the ladder they used to climb to the top).
Now, we could argue the game theory of elections and I'd have to concede that it's always going to devolve into two parties (like how tea-partiers, when the chips are really down, vote for the republican because the alternative, a democrat, would be, to them, the apocalypse), but part of how those two parties stay on top is by having a "big tent" and trying to appeal to a broad spectrum of views (okay... and also by not really specifying what their views are). And I think that, if other candidates are able to get up with the "big boys" and put forward their views, then that's more exposure... and maybe some of those views might have to get some recognition from one of the major parties.
Frankly, after visiting ISideWith.com, I was blown away at how congruent my views are with the Green candidate, Jill Stein... to the point where I really wish more people knew that there was a candidate that was, potentially, so suited to their views. Same goes for Gary Johnson. He's not my cup of tea, but I really wish the socially-liberal/economically-conservative republican voters out there were more aware that they didn't necessarily need to throw gays and women under the bus in exchange for getting capital-gains and inheritance taxes abolished. And maybe a stronger-than-expected showing in the election will provide the social proof for some more people to look into what's up with this (Libertarian|Green|Justice| Constitution) thing.
Of course, as I said in the subject, if you live in a swing state, then ignore the preceding rant and get your state swinging.
I'll second the Fine Point Zebra F301 Pens, made for over over twenty years now I think, and it's the only pen I ever use.
I'd third the recommendation. I actually use the Zebra F301 and the PIlot Easytouch, but the Zebra kicks ass in a few ways. First, it's of uniform diameter over its whole length and it doesn't have and rubbery ergo-grip stuff, so it slides in and out of elastic pen holders easily. It's almost all metal, which makes it feel a little more engineered. It's got a bit more "heft" (kinda like an iPhone 4). Lastly, it's compact. It's not any bigger around or longer than it needs to be to house the ink and to brace against the webbing between your thumb and index finger. Oh, and the clip is flat, so you can set the pen down in a "clip-down" orientation... which I find inexplicably soothing.
BTW, now that there are 500 comments, I doubt the OP wants to sift through the responses counting votes. How about a poll?
one crab is forced from a relatively large shell, whereupon the rest trade up (one loser and multiple winners
Reminds me of what's happening in Paris, as the super-rich are fleeing to neighboring countries ahead of the upcoming 75% tax. This is causing the prices of luxury Paris homes to decline in value, allowing the less-affluent to afford them, who then sell their former homes to people further down and... well, you get the idea.
Now, if those crabs were here in the U.S., 99% of the crabs would be stuck in the same size shell for the past 20 years while a couple of crabs had gargantuan shells (as well as many "vacation" shells on a variety of coasts). But at least they'd be creating jobs for the other crabs... by having them clean their spare shells or something.:)
uh...why would you want sustainable constantly increasing growth? That would mean things are rigged. Peaks and valleys are a good thing.
Ummm... try applying this thinking to any other naturally-occurring cyclic phenomenon. How about rivers? Why would you want consistent water levels? That would mean that you've rigged the river (by damming it). Occasional massive floods and droughts are a good thing, right?
Uh... no.
I'll answer your first question with another question (and I'm applying this argument to economic growth, in general, not in individual stock prices). "Why would you want sustainable constantly increasing growth?"... why wouldn't you? It allows you to be more productive when you can count on what the working environment is going to be like. Farmers know what to plant when they know that the sun is going to come up tomorrow... and they have even more idea of what to plant when they know what weather the seasons will bring.
I get the impression that you like the peaks and valleys because they serve as proof to you that the system isn't being managed in some way. The only explanation I can imagine for this disdain for managing the system is that, often times, we screw it up. But that's an aspect of our execution, not of the principle. Indeed, it seems that we pervert the Keynesean notion of intervening to raise the valleys... and we figure that we can intervene, then, to raise the peaks as well (especially when there's an election coming up).
Honestly, I wonder what would happen if we looked at average growth over the last 50 years and decided to shoot for that, consistently. If growth exceeded that, we'd intervene to cool the economy, stowing away cash to use to bolster it when growth got too low.
To answer the parent's parent: "Why halt trading", it seems silly to me that they'd halt trading because of the early report (which is the insinuation of the article). So... what... Google wants their stock to tank tomorrow instead of today? What would be the point of that, unless the board of directors needs a day to unload their positions?
They have to halt trading to prevent automated trading programs from selling it down to zero.
Once there's a fast enough and large enough movement, you start getting more selling from automatic stop-loss orders, automatic short selling, and all kinds of nasty things.
So, let it happen. This doesn't hurt Google one whit (unless Google is buying or selling its own stock that day). Besides, if the stock dips unreasonably low, lots of people will swoop in to buy the bargain shares. You don't think there aren't just as many automatic trades that would start buying long before the price got down to half it's previous value?
I love that this is happening in a red state like Texas. On the one hand, this could increase security, maybe help prevent "tear-ism", and bring justice to those dastardly school-skippers and truants. On the other hand, it infringes on that individualist, "open range" mindset of just being able to roam around the prairie on your horse with nobody to answer to. Their heads must be exploding down there from the conundrum.
"There's a misconception that somebody's sitting in a room with a bank full of monitors looking at where 1,200 kids are here at Anson Middle School. That's not true," he said. "It's not even feasible. We're not staffed nor are we interested in knowing where all the kids are at a particular moment."
Yeah... my problem with this is the same problem I have with warrantless wiretaps: the only barrier to abuse is the mood they're in. Oh, you're not "interested" in knowing where all of the kids are, today? Well, that lets me sleep well at night.
Before the FBI could do warrantless wiretaps, they'd have to go to a judge and have their evidence weighed, and then they'd get their warrant, and then there'd be a paper-trail. Now, they can skip the warrant and they don't even have to divulge who they tapped or even how many times they've used that power. Then, to calm us down, they assure us that they don't want to tap everybody's phones. Well, what happens when they come to work one day and discover that they now want to? That was they only barrier to abuse of the privilege.
So, how long before everyone accepts "tracking for the sake of getting all of the attendance dollars we've got coming to us"? How long after that until some enterprising individual says "Hey, we could use this to cut down on teen smoking by tracking where/when students go off by themselves to remote parts of the school" or "We can find out when students are taking too long in the bathroom"?
Correlation doesn't PROVE causation.......but it bloody well DOES suggest it,
... or it could suggest that there's a third cause, right? Like when Steven Leavitt mentions that people used to think that ice-cream caused polio because of some correlation. Turns out that the correlation was due to the fact that, when it got hot in the Summer, people would: 1) eat ice-cream and 2) go swim at the local swimming hole (where they'd get polio).
Now, I take it that your point (about the "suggestion" of causation) is that it gives us reason to pursue, further, investigation into a possibly link between two things, but I'd phrase it a different way. I'd say that correlation shows that we cannot, yet, rule out causation. In other words, if we find NO correlation, then there's not going to be any causation, and we can all go home. If we, however, DO find correlation, then we can't rule causation out, so we gotta keep going.
Your kid is alone in the kitchen. The cookie jar is (now) empty. Does his presence CONCLUSIVELY PROVE that he ate the cookies?
When phrased this way, there's little implication of causality. The problem is when a headline reads "Depressed people send more emails". Now, it didn't say anything about "causing" anything, but... let's turn the sentence around: "People who send lots of emails are more depressed".
From a logic point of view, those two statements are fairly identical. So, how come they don't feel the same when we read them? I argue that it's because we have some tendency to infer that the former caused the latter... for whatever reason. So, I'd argue that the knee-jerk "correlation doesn't prove causation" people are merely trying to quash this innate tendency to assume causation.
They single out pharma, and suggest other legislative measures be found to foster innovation whenever there is clear evidence that laissez-faire under-supplies it."
One of the suggestions they make is to award a prize amount to companies which develop medications which the gov't deems as valuable to the public. This is a lot like something I've been wishing to see for years... to have the U.S. gov't just purchase patents for certain medications outright and then make them public-domain.
When you learn that pharmaceutical companies' largest expense is not R&D (as they try to make you believe), but rather marketing those drugs to get you to "ask your doctor about [medication]", you realize that there is a lot of savings to be reaped from just ending the marketing war. What if the U.S. waited until there were several, competing medications for an ailment (allergies, blood pressure, etc.) and then announced that they were going to purchase the patent for one of those medications and then never enforce the patent (and, possibly, make that medication the only one covered by Medicare for that ailment)?
For starters, that medication would get really cheap, hopefully resulting in less total cost to the taxpayers/consumers (ie, the money spent on the patent + the total money spent on all of the "generic" doses would be less than the total money spent on what would be all of the patented doses). Because the competing companies whose patent doesn't get bought will, potentially, be left with very little value in their patent, there'd be strong price competition among the companies in the running to sell their patent, so the gov't might actually get a good price on the patent. Also, we'd probably see a big drop-off in pharmaceutical ads (ok, so TV and print media would hate this idea), so even the pharma company selling its patent might make out better (than they currently do) since they'd avoid having to spend such a huge amount on marketing.
No, it's an indication of how many people are interested in what they see as quick and easy education. Hey, that course looks cool! It's free! Okay, I'll sign up!
Then they get into the course (or even before it starts), realize learning takes some work, and either drop out or fail. That's why completion rates for correspondence and other distance learning courses, particularly cheap or free ones, are astronomically low.
I thought the same thing when I read the headline. People see "Get your degree on the internet" and they think "Hey, I learn stuff on the internet all the time. Yesterday, I used YouTube to learn what happens when you light farts. How hard could this be?". And then they discover that, lo and behold, learning valuable skills is hard. In fact, there tends to be a correlation between the value of the skill and how hard it is to learn it. So, they bail and go back to flippin' burgers.
This isn't a commentary about MOOC's or correspondence courses as much as it's about lazy or dumb humans looking for an easy way when there is none. Sure, there's plenty of room for the educational "institutions" to make it sound easier than it is, but that's standard salesmanship (for any product) of downplaying the negatives.
The whole purpose of mock-ups and other things is to help people quickly see the potential of your idea. Without that, the amount of effort required to sort the wheat from the chaff is excessive, and most people won't bother to donate to anything.
Well, I think what they're trying to quash is the flood of yahoos who have nothing but a notion... that "1% inspiration" which is also clogging up our patent system with stuff like "A car that runs on farts" without any technical development to actually make it actually exist.
Instead, now people will have to demonstrate that they possess some important skill necessary in making it work and, thus, they are uniquely deserving of financial backing. So, what kind of demos will we now see from Kickstarter? Hopefully, it will be stuff where the dude has wires and cords all over his workbench... "So, I wired this cellphone into this Arduino... and that's sending signals to the RaspberryPi, and here's this ugly HTML interface I wrote so that I can now have my cellphone detect when I wake up and it starts the car and warms it up for me without me having to do a thing. So, as you can see, it works. Now, I just need a hardware guy to make this into a gadget about the size of a pack of cigarettes and an HTML ninja to make the web interface all slick."
Now, if we're unlucky, nobody will bother going to those lengths, and we'll be left with dumb quickie shit like "So, I changed a <stupidunitaskhouseholdobject> so that it's also a bottle-opener"
But, to be fair, isn't this how these things are suppose to work? Something fails, everything gracefully shuts down?
Yes. In fact, back in 1979, it became evident that there was one safety feature that they forgot to put into the design of the plant: one which would, at the first sign of a problem, release poison gas into the control room. You see, the plant would have gracefully shut itself down had the operators not overridden those safety features, forcing the reactor to keep going and causing the TMI event. Now, in their defense, the dudes in the control room were legitimately worried that the automatic shutdown would have taken the reactor off-line for weeks, if not months... which would have caused... y'know... loss of revenue. Can't have that.
What's eerie is how similar this latest development is to the 1979 event. Some cooling pumps were shut down, then there was a release of steam, then the announcement that the steam didn't have any radiation... then the announcement that, well, there wasn't that much radiation in the steam... then the announcement that, even though there was no risk to the public, they wanted all the kids and pregnant women to GTFO...
Lastly, as a point of clarification, from what I've read, Three-Mile Island wasn't a meltdown. The fuel-rods shattered from the heat, but they didn't get so hot that they melted. Now, Chernobyl... if you want to see a solidified "lava flow" of molten uranium draped over concrete beams... that's a man's meltdown, right there. The Soviets didn't do anything half-assed.
Keep in mind that Apple's early slogan (for the Mac, anyway) was "The computer for the rest of us". That "rest of us" bit referred to the folks who weren't computer geeks who loved the command prompt. In order to make the Mac welcoming, they tried to use plenty of metaphors which were already ingrained into the minds of potential users. Heck, even the very idea of a desktop is like that, where you pick stuff up, set it down somewhere else, windows overlaying like sheets of paper. The point is, Apple seemed to try (more than their competitors, at least) to create as many "Oh, this is just like what I do in the physical world, already!" moments as possible, so that, from first use, the user found the Mac to be familiar and welcoming.
Now... it sounds like the argument being made is "Yeah, yeah... but those days of the never-bought-a-computer consumers are over. Now that we've got them on-board, let's start cutting those ties to meatspace". However, to do so makes me immediately think of Photoshop. If you started with Photoshop when it was version 1.0, and if you grew up with the gradual addition of features as they appeared in the many versions, then you're fine. Frankly, I weep for anybody who has to learn today's Photoshop from no previous experience with it. About a decade ago, Adobe, itself, realized that they had this problem and they came out with Photoshop Elements (and you can make the same argument with Premiere and Premiere Elements) as an intermediate step to get users acclimated to Photoshop paradigms without just throwing them into the deep end of the pool. (For those about to argue that Photoshop Elements was, instead, an attempt to tap into a "pro-sumer" and amateur market which was priced out of Photoshop... yes, it was that, too... but it wasn't all that, or else Elements would have just been Photoshop with a bunch of the powerful features taken out. Instead, Elements had a bunch of UI changes which made it easier to use; there was now a red-eye removal button, instead of having to lasso or magic-wand and then use a spot-healing tool or whatever. It introduced the user to being able to successfully manipulate pixels, without the learning curve being way too steep.).
So, that's what I think of when I see the calls for Apple to abandon skeu... that the ship is full of passengers and it's time to shove off, take those passengers to further shores, and leave the rest of the folk on the docks. And I think that's a departure from what Apple has always tried to be.
Lastly, I gotta say... I grew up with MS-DOS... did 8086 and 6502 assembly... nuts-and-bolts stuff. I hated Apple with a passion for years as being "foofy". Nowadays, however, when I play with my iPhone or iPad, I find all of the real-world metaphors in the UI to be very heartwarming. The stitching on the leather in the Notes app... I look at that and it's a little like sipping hot cocoa.
corps have huge power. unions are there to balance it.
I have this debate with my brother (who hates unions) all the time. I try to point out that unions are a reaction to crappy stuff that companies do to their workers. When you look at what many workers had to go through in order to unionize (like getting their skulls cracked by club-wielding strike breakers, or worse), there's no way you can argue that they went through all of that just for longer lunch breaks or so that it would be harder to fire them. In short, if corporations would stop trying to screw over their employees in every way imaginable, unions wouldn't be needed.
But it's inherent in the system. I actually work at a business college, and we've got a "Human Resource Management" concentration. The notion that human beings are a "resource" (like an oil deposit or a vein of coal) from which the goal is to optimize the "yield"... it just turns my stomach. But this is the world we live in. Adam Smith pointed it out in Wealth of Nations... it's all about self-interest. The whole system is powered by everybody's (the workers', too, in all fairness) innate desire to screw over everybody else and get as much for themselves, so it's folly to expect the shareholders to voluntarily set that drive aside.
As for the short term on how to deal with the OP's problem of being timed on their bathroom breaks: I'd start documenting all of your bathroom visits on RateMyPoo or something. Then, after a weekend of eating Thai food, when your boss asks about your 45-minute bathroom break, you can open your browser and show him/her the fecal carnage unleashed from what used to be your anus.
I'm having trouble making the commitment to full-time stand-up. I usually do about 30% standing and then I have a high chair for other times.
My motivation was to avoid slouching in my desk chair. While standing, I do shift my weight from leg to leg (just can't seem to stand there with a 50/50 weight distribution), but I don't get any soreness or back pain from standing. I've heard some people have to tough through the first few days of back or foot soreness before their body acclimates, but not me.
To build mine, I actually just started with my desk, which was an adjustable-height desk which would go up to about 38" high. Then, I went to Bed, Bath, & Beyond to get some of those bed-risers to put under the feet which raised it another 6" or so. So, the desk comes up to just under my belly-button. That's where my keyboard is. Then, to reduce fatigue on my mouse-arm, the mouse is on top of a long box that a keyboard was shipped in, so it's about another 3" off the desk, and my whole forearm rests on that. The monitors are also raised off of the desk about 10" by placing a board across a couple of DVD drive boxes.
It looks pretty ghetto, but it's really strain-free. I get to look straight ahead, and nothing is tugging on my limbs when I use the keyboard or mouse. All told, I spent the money to buy the bed-risers. So, for fairly cheap, you can figure out if the standing thing is your thing and whether you want to spend more bucks for something a little more slick.
Actually, this brings up something that went through my head the last time I was prepping my 3oz bottles of scotch to bring onto the plane...
How long until some hot-shot chemistry geek goes into one of the gift shops inside the terminal and buys a bunch of items for sale beyond the checkpoint, and then takes them home and makes a YouTube video about how to make a cool bomb out of them using only those items and stuff you'd have available in an airplane lavatory?
I didn't take careful note of the stuff you can get in the shops, but I imagine you can get hand-sanitizer (~70% alcohol), anti-perspirants (with aluminum, which can be highly reactive), lots of cold medicines with all sorts of compounds in them, etc. Granted, chem isn't my area at all, so I don't know how feasible it is... but I figure this would be a great project for a chem hack.
It's another example of us trying to think about optimum strategies and then finding that nature, through millions or billions of years of trial-and-error, has come up with almost the same solutions.
One example is with sea-slug procreation. Certain sea-slugs can change their sex, but they can't do it in the heat of the moment, apparently. They have to decide what to be ahead of time. The technique they use is to become the sex opposite of the last other slug they came across... and it turns out that this also is the optimal solution to the classic "prisoner's dilemma" game-theory problem.
Another example is in computer networking. With Ethernet, when you have something to send, you listen on the wires to see if any other card is transmitting. If not, you start sending. If you notice another card start sending at the same time, you both stop and wait a random amount of time, and then check to see if anyone else is transmitting, etc. It turns out that this is exactly how humans converse in small groups. You wait until nobody's talking, and then open your mouth to speak. If you get a "collision" (where someone else started talking at the same time), then both people shut up and look at each other, and, usually, one will resume talking first. Every now and then, you'll get repeated collisions and then everybody start laughing and they pass the Cheetos.
When you get too many devices on the network, and traffic gets too high, then collisions become a big issue (this was before the days of switched hubs, people). You couldn't have devices just transmitting whenever they wanted because the odds of colliding with another transmission was too high. So, they came up with Token-Ring, where each device is given it's "turn" to transmit on the network, and then it passes its permission to the next one. It turns out that humans do this, too, when groups get so large that everyone would be interrupting and colliding. For example "The floor now recognizes the distinguished gentleman from Missouri", or "Mr. Speaker, I know relinquish the remainder of my time to the gentleman from Iowa...".
Some would view these similarities as "Hey... nature ain't so stupid!", but I view it the other way... that our thought-out method is probably pretty close to the optimal solution (either that or trapped in a local maxima along with the ants and slugs).
... a use for all of the wireless passwords in my neighborhood that I've cracked! All of my neighbors (individually) have slower connections than I do.
On a side note, it always would irk me that Windows XP, if you gave it more than 1 path to the internet, would be unable to get to the internet at all.
Because the amount is so low, he can go to small-claims court, and lawyers aren't allowed there. Mano-a-mano, like John Wayne woulda done it. Odds are, the company wouldn't even bother sending someone to defend the case.
But this whole "vanishing lifetime contract" seems *so* asking for a class-action suit, that I'll bet it's just a ploy to get some users to walk away. If you make a scene about it, I'll bet they'll just cave and let you stay. They're just trying to whittle down the number of revenue-less users.
Not the first,but the first to get packaging right
on
Happy Birthday, Debian!
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· Score: 5, Interesting
There were others before it: RedHat, Slackware, etc. But I remember when I first tried to install some packages after initially installing it.
I had been used to RedHat, where you'd try to install a package, it would complain about dependencies, and then you'd have to surf the web for someone who had an RPM for that dependency... hopefully a suitable version. FTP it. Try to install that. Of course, that would fail because it, too, had unmet dependencies. So, you'd write down all the stuff that needed and start searching for those... and their dependencies.
When it was all over, you had blown about 3-4 hours and you had about 2 pages of scribbled notes of package names, indented by their order of dependence, crossed out as you installed them.
I think I heard angels singing when I first tried to install something with Debian. It found all of the dependencies (recursing through the entire dependency tree), told me that it was going to go download them all in one shot, and then *did* it. I have not (voluntarily) used anything other than Debian/Ubuntu since.
This kind of package management is taken for granted today, just like so many features in the first iPhone are considered standard on any smartphone. We forget how all of the stuff before it now looks like the stone age.
Debian, we all owe a huge debt to your parents for conceiving you.
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And let this be a lesson for ya, it's all fun and games moving with your millions to a Caribbean tax shelter, until the local [cartel,corrupt police,militias, kidnappers, etc] come for you. Why not just keep your millions stateside, pay your taxes like a good boy, and get old and fat without these kinds of worries? Was there not enough suspense in that option?
Exactly. This is the exact point of the "You Didn't Build That" speech (and the Elizabeth Warren one which gave rise to it). Try getting your Subway franchise or tanning salon off the ground when there are roving bands of thugs and rebels going up and down the unpaved roads. Once you buy your own security force, one could argue that you're out the same amount of money.
Former anti-virus mogul... running from corrupt 3rd-world foot-soldiers through the jungle with a girl half his age?
I think Dos-Equis just found their new pitch-man. "I don't always run from corrupt Central-American governments, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis..."
The teacher wants the students to do the creative work, but the teacher does not want to put the work into the grading portion of the student-teacher contract, eh?
I think that's a little unfair (and I'm the OP, by the way... and I'm going to address some of the other criticisms, here, so don't take all of this as being directed toward you). That's like saying that you're being lazy by using a testing suite to do your unit tests on the code you're working on. So, stop being lazy and go back to testing your code by hand.
My personal opinion is that grading is a Q/A step in the teaching process. Teaching is when you're actually "generating product", in the sense that you're putting knowledge into brains where it previously wasn't. Grading is just checking to see if it actually worked and, every minute you're grading is a minute you're not teaching. So, it seems to me that, the more you can automate the grading (just like automating testing of your code), the more you can focus on actually producing (ie, adding knowledge to those malleable little brains).
Also, keep in mind that she teaches about 4-5 very un-related courses (video production, electronic media, freehand drawing, printing techniques), each with it's own set of students who either A) are trying to contrive ways to avoid doing the actual work or B) want to actually learn, but who can't follow directions for shit (I used to grade for math, physics, and CS in college, and, even at that level, it's amazing at how hard students seem to make it for you to give them the credit they deserve). What you end up with is about 25 homework submissions, none of which look alike, and you've got to figure out which ones are properly demonstrating the learned skills and which ones are just blowing it off. The submissions which look almost perfect require some painstaking attention because the kid is either really good (and deserves 100%) or they just copied the end result (and deserves a 0), so the stakes are higher with those than with the other submissions. Now, multiply all that work by 4-5 classes of kids. That's why she was at the school, grading, through the whole 3-day weekend. Fun way to spend your long weekend, eh? Now, what was that again about lazy teachers, basking in the warm glow of union protection while they run their feet through the sand at the beach?
So that's where I came in. When I saw her comparing images, side by side... overlaying them, adjusting transparencies to find differences, my first reaction was (due to the "hubris" and "impatience" traits of programmers) "Hey, I'm a programmer. I can write you an application which just compares all of them and tells you which ones are identical faster than you can drag-and-drop them into the app". Then, she could get on to thinking up cool projects for the next week. But, alas, as I thought about it, MD5's wouldn't work (as the students sometimes change names of layers or make other trivial changes). And, also, the "impatience" programmer trait kicked in and I said "Somebody has to have solved this problem before". Now, we did realize that she could just provide a flat image of the target result, but the problem still stuck in my mind, since I'm a programmer, but fuzzy image comparison is not my forte, so I figured I'd ask. This wasn't started by her asking me to find some way for her to automate her grading so she could duck out early and hit the nail salon. This was started by me, reflexively seeking a way to automate a boring, labor-intensive process (like unit-testing) so that she could get on to the creative parts of teaching and also because I was curious about open-source image processing stuff out there, these days.
I'm going to make a plug for National Popular Vote (http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/), here.
Part of why the election prediction is tricky is because of the electoral college. It doesn't matter what the mean and standard deviations of the nationwide polls are, since the states aggregate their votes and (with the exception of Nebraska, I think) give all of their electoral votes to one candidate. So, people like Nate have to look at the probability curves for all 50 states (let's leave out Puerto Rico and military bases for this) and work through each probability of either candidate winning any of the states. Basically, they run through 2^50 permutations, starting with the probability that Romney wins all 50 and (since that would result in Romney winning the election) adding that probability to his probability of being elected. Add to that the probabilities of him winning 49 states P(Romney wins everything but Alabama), P(Romney wins everything but Alaska), etc. through to P(Romney wins everything but Wyoming), and then do that for all 1225 combinations of him winning 48, etc..
When you get down to him winning about 35-40 states, you have to just limit yourself to the combinations of states which would give him enough electoral votes, of course. Then, when you've added all that up, you've got his percent chance of winning (which is the number on the red line on the top graph on Nate's blog). Now, you go and do all that for Obama.
But this is all much more messy than it needs to be, and state-by-state electoral voting just leads to a few states getting a disproportionate amount of gov't pork (and political advertising) as politicians try to buy the votes of a few swing states. However, no state wants to switch to Nebraska's model of proportional electoral votes, because that would dilute the votes that go to their probable candidate. For example, California (which voted about 60% Obama, and usually votes Democrat) doesn't want to see 40% of it's 55 electoral votes go to a Republican. Same goes for Texas not wanting any of their electoral votes going to Democratic candidates. What you get is a stand-off where the red and blue states look at each other and say "You go first!".
So, some enterprising individual figured out a nice solution: ignore your own state vote and just give all of your state's electoral votes to whomever wins the national popular vote. Some states have already adopted legislation for this, but the legislation doesn't kick in until there are enough states on-board to give 270 electoral votes. Turns out that they're already half-way to the 270 target. At that point, the NPV-participating states will guarantee that the winner of the popular vote wins the election, no matter what the non-NPV states do.
Somebody patent couches with periscopes so people can watch from behind them. And mannequins with webcams in their eyes which re-broadcast the program over the local wifi. This will be a goldmine!
Meh... on the other hand, screw it. Just take a picture of one dude on a couch, print it on a card, and then sell it with a little bracket which dangles it right in front of the Kinect's eye.
If you're at all interested in getting more ideas out into the national consciousness (and if you're living in a state that Obama or Romney has a lock on), consider voting for a third-party candidate. Because of the electoral system, it's not going to change who wins the election, but it can increase the chances that one of these candidates gets a spot at some future televised debate. Once upon a time, the debates were sponsored by the National Organization of Women... and now they're run by the Commission on Presidential Debates (which is run by the Democratic and Republican parties). Being a bit of a cartel, they've managed to stipulate that the only invitees to debate must get at least 15% representation in various national polls (another classic case of the successful pulling up the ladder they used to climb to the top).
Now, we could argue the game theory of elections and I'd have to concede that it's always going to devolve into two parties (like how tea-partiers, when the chips are really down, vote for the republican because the alternative, a democrat, would be, to them, the apocalypse), but part of how those two parties stay on top is by having a "big tent" and trying to appeal to a broad spectrum of views (okay... and also by not really specifying what their views are). And I think that, if other candidates are able to get up with the "big boys" and put forward their views, then that's more exposure... and maybe some of those views might have to get some recognition from one of the major parties.
Frankly, after visiting ISideWith.com, I was blown away at how congruent my views are with the Green candidate, Jill Stein... to the point where I really wish more people knew that there was a candidate that was, potentially, so suited to their views. Same goes for Gary Johnson. He's not my cup of tea, but I really wish the socially-liberal/economically-conservative republican voters out there were more aware that they didn't necessarily need to throw gays and women under the bus in exchange for getting capital-gains and inheritance taxes abolished. And maybe a stronger-than-expected showing in the election will provide the social proof for some more people to look into what's up with this (Libertarian|Green|Justice| Constitution) thing.
Of course, as I said in the subject, if you live in a swing state, then ignore the preceding rant and get your state swinging.
I'll second the Fine Point Zebra F301 Pens, made for over over twenty years now I think, and it's the only pen I ever use.
I'd third the recommendation. I actually use the Zebra F301 and the PIlot Easytouch, but the Zebra kicks ass in a few ways. First, it's of uniform diameter over its whole length and it doesn't have and rubbery ergo-grip stuff, so it slides in and out of elastic pen holders easily. It's almost all metal, which makes it feel a little more engineered. It's got a bit more "heft" (kinda like an iPhone 4). Lastly, it's compact. It's not any bigger around or longer than it needs to be to house the ink and to brace against the webbing between your thumb and index finger. Oh, and the clip is flat, so you can set the pen down in a "clip-down" orientation... which I find inexplicably soothing.
BTW, now that there are 500 comments, I doubt the OP wants to sift through the responses counting votes. How about a poll?
Reminds me of what's happening in Paris, as the super-rich are fleeing to neighboring countries ahead of the upcoming 75% tax. This is causing the prices of luxury Paris homes to decline in value, allowing the less-affluent to afford them, who then sell their former homes to people further down and... well, you get the idea.
:)
Now, if those crabs were here in the U.S., 99% of the crabs would be stuck in the same size shell for the past 20 years while a couple of crabs had gargantuan shells (as well as many "vacation" shells on a variety of coasts). But at least they'd be creating jobs for the other crabs... by having them clean their spare shells or something.
uh...why would you want sustainable constantly increasing growth? That would mean things are rigged. Peaks and valleys are a good thing.
Ummm... try applying this thinking to any other naturally-occurring cyclic phenomenon. How about rivers? Why would you want consistent water levels? That would mean that you've rigged the river (by damming it). Occasional massive floods and droughts are a good thing, right?
Uh... no.
I'll answer your first question with another question (and I'm applying this argument to economic growth, in general, not in individual stock prices). "Why would you want sustainable constantly increasing growth?"... why wouldn't you? It allows you to be more productive when you can count on what the working environment is going to be like. Farmers know what to plant when they know that the sun is going to come up tomorrow... and they have even more idea of what to plant when they know what weather the seasons will bring.
I get the impression that you like the peaks and valleys because they serve as proof to you that the system isn't being managed in some way. The only explanation I can imagine for this disdain for managing the system is that, often times, we screw it up. But that's an aspect of our execution, not of the principle. Indeed, it seems that we pervert the Keynesean notion of intervening to raise the valleys... and we figure that we can intervene, then, to raise the peaks as well (especially when there's an election coming up).
Honestly, I wonder what would happen if we looked at average growth over the last 50 years and decided to shoot for that, consistently. If growth exceeded that, we'd intervene to cool the economy, stowing away cash to use to bolster it when growth got too low.
They have to halt trading to prevent automated trading programs from selling it down to zero.
Once there's a fast enough and large enough movement, you start getting more selling from automatic stop-loss orders, automatic short selling, and all kinds of nasty things.
So, let it happen. This doesn't hurt Google one whit (unless Google is buying or selling its own stock that day). Besides, if the stock dips unreasonably low, lots of people will swoop in to buy the bargain shares. You don't think there aren't just as many automatic trades that would start buying long before the price got down to half it's previous value?
Yeah... my problem with this is the same problem I have with warrantless wiretaps: the only barrier to abuse is the mood they're in. Oh, you're not "interested" in knowing where all of the kids are, today? Well, that lets me sleep well at night.
Before the FBI could do warrantless wiretaps, they'd have to go to a judge and have their evidence weighed, and then they'd get their warrant, and then there'd be a paper-trail. Now, they can skip the warrant and they don't even have to divulge who they tapped or even how many times they've used that power. Then, to calm us down, they assure us that they don't want to tap everybody's phones. Well, what happens when they come to work one day and discover that they now want to? That was they only barrier to abuse of the privilege.
So, how long before everyone accepts "tracking for the sake of getting all of the attendance dollars we've got coming to us"? How long after that until some enterprising individual says "Hey, we could use this to cut down on teen smoking by tracking where/when students go off by themselves to remote parts of the school" or "We can find out when students are taking too long in the bathroom"?
Correlation doesn't PROVE causation.... ...but it bloody well DOES suggest it,
... or it could suggest that there's a third cause, right? Like when Steven Leavitt mentions that people used to think that ice-cream caused polio because of some correlation. Turns out that the correlation was due to the fact that, when it got hot in the Summer, people would: 1) eat ice-cream and 2) go swim at the local swimming hole (where they'd get polio).
Now, I take it that your point (about the "suggestion" of causation) is that it gives us reason to pursue, further, investigation into a possibly link between two things, but I'd phrase it a different way. I'd say that correlation shows that we cannot, yet, rule out causation. In other words, if we find NO correlation, then there's not going to be any causation, and we can all go home. If we, however, DO find correlation, then we can't rule causation out, so we gotta keep going.
Your kid is alone in the kitchen. The cookie jar is (now) empty. Does his presence CONCLUSIVELY PROVE that he ate the cookies?
When phrased this way, there's little implication of causality. The problem is when a headline reads "Depressed people send more emails". Now, it didn't say anything about "causing" anything, but... let's turn the sentence around: "People who send lots of emails are more depressed".
From a logic point of view, those two statements are fairly identical. So, how come they don't feel the same when we read them? I argue that it's because we have some tendency to infer that the former caused the latter... for whatever reason. So, I'd argue that the knee-jerk "correlation doesn't prove causation" people are merely trying to quash this innate tendency to assume causation.
One of the suggestions they make is to award a prize amount to companies which develop medications which the gov't deems as valuable to the public. This is a lot like something I've been wishing to see for years... to have the U.S. gov't just purchase patents for certain medications outright and then make them public-domain.
When you learn that pharmaceutical companies' largest expense is not R&D (as they try to make you believe), but rather marketing those drugs to get you to "ask your doctor about [medication]", you realize that there is a lot of savings to be reaped from just ending the marketing war. What if the U.S. waited until there were several, competing medications for an ailment (allergies, blood pressure, etc.) and then announced that they were going to purchase the patent for one of those medications and then never enforce the patent (and, possibly, make that medication the only one covered by Medicare for that ailment)?
For starters, that medication would get really cheap, hopefully resulting in less total cost to the taxpayers/consumers (ie, the money spent on the patent + the total money spent on all of the "generic" doses would be less than the total money spent on what would be all of the patented doses). Because the competing companies whose patent doesn't get bought will, potentially, be left with very little value in their patent, there'd be strong price competition among the companies in the running to sell their patent, so the gov't might actually get a good price on the patent. Also, we'd probably see a big drop-off in pharmaceutical ads (ok, so TV and print media would hate this idea), so even the pharma company selling its patent might make out better (than they currently do) since they'd avoid having to spend such a huge amount on marketing.
No, it's an indication of how many people are interested in what they see as quick and easy education. Hey, that course looks cool! It's free! Okay, I'll sign up!
Then they get into the course (or even before it starts), realize learning takes some work, and either drop out or fail. That's why completion rates for correspondence and other distance learning courses, particularly cheap or free ones, are astronomically low.
I thought the same thing when I read the headline. People see "Get your degree on the internet" and they think "Hey, I learn stuff on the internet all the time. Yesterday, I used YouTube to learn what happens when you light farts. How hard could this be?". And then they discover that, lo and behold, learning valuable skills is hard. In fact, there tends to be a correlation between the value of the skill and how hard it is to learn it. So, they bail and go back to flippin' burgers.
This isn't a commentary about MOOC's or correspondence courses as much as it's about lazy or dumb humans looking for an easy way when there is none. Sure, there's plenty of room for the educational "institutions" to make it sound easier than it is, but that's standard salesmanship (for any product) of downplaying the negatives.
The whole purpose of mock-ups and other things is to help people quickly see the potential of your idea. Without that, the amount of effort required to sort the wheat from the chaff is excessive, and most people won't bother to donate to anything.
Well, I think what they're trying to quash is the flood of yahoos who have nothing but a notion... that "1% inspiration" which is also clogging up our patent system with stuff like "A car that runs on farts" without any technical development to actually make it actually exist.
Instead, now people will have to demonstrate that they possess some important skill necessary in making it work and, thus, they are uniquely deserving of financial backing. So, what kind of demos will we now see from Kickstarter? Hopefully, it will be stuff where the dude has wires and cords all over his workbench... "So, I wired this cellphone into this Arduino... and that's sending signals to the RaspberryPi, and here's this ugly HTML interface I wrote so that I can now have my cellphone detect when I wake up and it starts the car and warms it up for me without me having to do a thing. So, as you can see, it works. Now, I just need a hardware guy to make this into a gadget about the size of a pack of cigarettes and an HTML ninja to make the web interface all slick."
Now, if we're unlucky, nobody will bother going to those lengths, and we'll be left with dumb quickie shit like "So, I changed a <stupidunitaskhouseholdobject> so that it's also a bottle-opener"
But, to be fair, isn't this how these things are suppose to work? Something fails, everything gracefully shuts down?
Yes. In fact, back in 1979, it became evident that there was one safety feature that they forgot to put into the design of the plant: one which would, at the first sign of a problem, release poison gas into the control room. You see, the plant would have gracefully shut itself down had the operators not overridden those safety features, forcing the reactor to keep going and causing the TMI event. Now, in their defense, the dudes in the control room were legitimately worried that the automatic shutdown would have taken the reactor off-line for weeks, if not months... which would have caused... y'know... loss of revenue. Can't have that.
What's eerie is how similar this latest development is to the 1979 event. Some cooling pumps were shut down, then there was a release of steam, then the announcement that the steam didn't have any radiation... then the announcement that, well, there wasn't that much radiation in the steam... then the announcement that, even though there was no risk to the public, they wanted all the kids and pregnant women to GTFO...
Lastly, as a point of clarification, from what I've read, Three-Mile Island wasn't a meltdown. The fuel-rods shattered from the heat, but they didn't get so hot that they melted. Now, Chernobyl... if you want to see a solidified "lava flow" of molten uranium draped over concrete beams... that's a man's meltdown, right there. The Soviets didn't do anything half-assed.
Keep in mind that Apple's early slogan (for the Mac, anyway) was "The computer for the rest of us". That "rest of us" bit referred to the folks who weren't computer geeks who loved the command prompt. In order to make the Mac welcoming, they tried to use plenty of metaphors which were already ingrained into the minds of potential users. Heck, even the very idea of a desktop is like that, where you pick stuff up, set it down somewhere else, windows overlaying like sheets of paper. The point is, Apple seemed to try (more than their competitors, at least) to create as many "Oh, this is just like what I do in the physical world, already!" moments as possible, so that, from first use, the user found the Mac to be familiar and welcoming.
Now... it sounds like the argument being made is "Yeah, yeah... but those days of the never-bought-a-computer consumers are over. Now that we've got them on-board, let's start cutting those ties to meatspace". However, to do so makes me immediately think of Photoshop. If you started with Photoshop when it was version 1.0, and if you grew up with the gradual addition of features as they appeared in the many versions, then you're fine. Frankly, I weep for anybody who has to learn today's Photoshop from no previous experience with it. About a decade ago, Adobe, itself, realized that they had this problem and they came out with Photoshop Elements (and you can make the same argument with Premiere and Premiere Elements) as an intermediate step to get users acclimated to Photoshop paradigms without just throwing them into the deep end of the pool. (For those about to argue that Photoshop Elements was, instead, an attempt to tap into a "pro-sumer" and amateur market which was priced out of Photoshop... yes, it was that, too... but it wasn't all that, or else Elements would have just been Photoshop with a bunch of the powerful features taken out. Instead, Elements had a bunch of UI changes which made it easier to use; there was now a red-eye removal button, instead of having to lasso or magic-wand and then use a spot-healing tool or whatever. It introduced the user to being able to successfully manipulate pixels, without the learning curve being way too steep.).
So, that's what I think of when I see the calls for Apple to abandon skeu... that the ship is full of passengers and it's time to shove off, take those passengers to further shores, and leave the rest of the folk on the docks. And I think that's a departure from what Apple has always tried to be.
Lastly, I gotta say... I grew up with MS-DOS... did 8086 and 6502 assembly... nuts-and-bolts stuff. I hated Apple with a passion for years as being "foofy". Nowadays, however, when I play with my iPhone or iPad, I find all of the real-world metaphors in the UI to be very heartwarming. The stitching on the leather in the Notes app... I look at that and it's a little like sipping hot cocoa.
Now.... GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!
corps have huge power. unions are there to balance it.
I have this debate with my brother (who hates unions) all the time. I try to point out that unions are a reaction to crappy stuff that companies do to their workers. When you look at what many workers had to go through in order to unionize (like getting their skulls cracked by club-wielding strike breakers, or worse), there's no way you can argue that they went through all of that just for longer lunch breaks or so that it would be harder to fire them. In short, if corporations would stop trying to screw over their employees in every way imaginable, unions wouldn't be needed.
But it's inherent in the system. I actually work at a business college, and we've got a "Human Resource Management" concentration. The notion that human beings are a "resource" (like an oil deposit or a vein of coal) from which the goal is to optimize the "yield"... it just turns my stomach. But this is the world we live in. Adam Smith pointed it out in Wealth of Nations... it's all about self-interest. The whole system is powered by everybody's (the workers', too, in all fairness) innate desire to screw over everybody else and get as much for themselves, so it's folly to expect the shareholders to voluntarily set that drive aside.
As for the short term on how to deal with the OP's problem of being timed on their bathroom breaks: I'd start documenting all of your bathroom visits on RateMyPoo or something. Then, after a weekend of eating Thai food, when your boss asks about your 45-minute bathroom break, you can open your browser and show him/her the fecal carnage unleashed from what used to be your anus.
I'm having trouble making the commitment to full-time stand-up. I usually do about 30% standing and then I have a high chair for other times.
My motivation was to avoid slouching in my desk chair. While standing, I do shift my weight from leg to leg (just can't seem to stand there with a 50/50 weight distribution), but I don't get any soreness or back pain from standing. I've heard some people have to tough through the first few days of back or foot soreness before their body acclimates, but not me.
To build mine, I actually just started with my desk, which was an adjustable-height desk which would go up to about 38" high. Then, I went to Bed, Bath, & Beyond to get some of those bed-risers to put under the feet which raised it another 6" or so. So, the desk comes up to just under my belly-button. That's where my keyboard is. Then, to reduce fatigue on my mouse-arm, the mouse is on top of a long box that a keyboard was shipped in, so it's about another 3" off the desk, and my whole forearm rests on that. The monitors are also raised off of the desk about 10" by placing a board across a couple of DVD drive boxes.
It looks pretty ghetto, but it's really strain-free. I get to look straight ahead, and nothing is tugging on my limbs when I use the keyboard or mouse. All told, I spent the money to buy the bed-risers. So, for fairly cheap, you can figure out if the standing thing is your thing and whether you want to spend more bucks for something a little more slick.
Actually, this brings up something that went through my head the last time I was prepping my 3oz bottles of scotch to bring onto the plane...
How long until some hot-shot chemistry geek goes into one of the gift shops inside the terminal and buys a bunch of items for sale beyond the checkpoint, and then takes them home and makes a YouTube video about how to make a cool bomb out of them using only those items and stuff you'd have available in an airplane lavatory?
I didn't take careful note of the stuff you can get in the shops, but I imagine you can get hand-sanitizer (~70% alcohol), anti-perspirants (with aluminum, which can be highly reactive), lots of cold medicines with all sorts of compounds in them, etc. Granted, chem isn't my area at all, so I don't know how feasible it is... but I figure this would be a great project for a chem hack.
Yeah, they found the gene that determines happiness in women. Turns out that it's in the Y-chromosome, in the part that determines penis size in men.
It's another example of us trying to think about optimum strategies and then finding that nature, through millions or billions of years of trial-and-error, has come up with almost the same solutions.
One example is with sea-slug procreation. Certain sea-slugs can change their sex, but they can't do it in the heat of the moment, apparently. They have to decide what to be ahead of time. The technique they use is to become the sex opposite of the last other slug they came across... and it turns out that this also is the optimal solution to the classic "prisoner's dilemma" game-theory problem.
Another example is in computer networking. With Ethernet, when you have something to send, you listen on the wires to see if any other card is transmitting. If not, you start sending. If you notice another card start sending at the same time, you both stop and wait a random amount of time, and then check to see if anyone else is transmitting, etc. It turns out that this is exactly how humans converse in small groups. You wait until nobody's talking, and then open your mouth to speak. If you get a "collision" (where someone else started talking at the same time), then both people shut up and look at each other, and, usually, one will resume talking first. Every now and then, you'll get repeated collisions and then everybody start laughing and they pass the Cheetos.
When you get too many devices on the network, and traffic gets too high, then collisions become a big issue (this was before the days of switched hubs, people). You couldn't have devices just transmitting whenever they wanted because the odds of colliding with another transmission was too high. So, they came up with Token-Ring, where each device is given it's "turn" to transmit on the network, and then it passes its permission to the next one. It turns out that humans do this, too, when groups get so large that everyone would be interrupting and colliding. For example "The floor now recognizes the distinguished gentleman from Missouri", or "Mr. Speaker, I know relinquish the remainder of my time to the gentleman from Iowa...".
Some would view these similarities as "Hey... nature ain't so stupid!", but I view it the other way... that our thought-out method is probably pretty close to the optimal solution (either that or trapped in a local maxima along with the ants and slugs).
... a use for all of the wireless passwords in my neighborhood that I've cracked! All of my neighbors (individually) have slower connections than I do.
On a side note, it always would irk me that Windows XP, if you gave it more than 1 path to the internet, would be unable to get to the internet at all.
Because the amount is so low, he can go to small-claims court, and lawyers aren't allowed there. Mano-a-mano, like John Wayne woulda done it. Odds are, the company wouldn't even bother sending someone to defend the case.
But this whole "vanishing lifetime contract" seems *so* asking for a class-action suit, that I'll bet it's just a ploy to get some users to walk away. If you make a scene about it, I'll bet they'll just cave and let you stay. They're just trying to whittle down the number of revenue-less users.
There were others before it: RedHat, Slackware, etc. But I remember when I first tried to install some packages after initially installing it.
I had been used to RedHat, where you'd try to install a package, it would complain about dependencies, and then you'd have to surf the web for someone who had an RPM for that dependency... hopefully a suitable version. FTP it. Try to install that. Of course, that would fail because it, too, had unmet dependencies. So, you'd write down all the stuff that needed and start searching for those... and their dependencies.
When it was all over, you had blown about 3-4 hours and you had about 2 pages of scribbled notes of package names, indented by their order of dependence, crossed out as you installed them.
I think I heard angels singing when I first tried to install something with Debian. It found all of the dependencies (recursing through the entire dependency tree), told me that it was going to go download them all in one shot, and then *did* it. I have not (voluntarily) used anything other than Debian/Ubuntu since.
This kind of package management is taken for granted today, just like so many features in the first iPhone are considered standard on any smartphone. We forget how all of the stuff before it now looks like the stone age.
Debian, we all owe a huge debt to your parents for conceiving you.