I am wondering how long will it be until police have the ability to remotely shut off cars?... While the cars are underway?
Obligatory existing movie reference--Idiocracy: "Why are we slowing down?",,, "They turned off my battery!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(and it's even an electric car too. Mike Judge is psychic)
Without trying too hard, I can imagine a few instances where an automatic-driving car could end up rolling down the road on its way to (somewhere) with nobody alive in it, or nobody old enough in it to possibly intervene if necessary.
It only stands to reason that the police will need to have a way to instantly and quickly shut the vehicle's motive power off, in some safe fashion.
And while the police having that ability doesn't worry me much, hackers learning how to do it will be able to cause quite a worry.
Any hardware or software process that is quick and simple (that can literally be done at the press of a button) won't be difficult to hack...
So then,,,,, if a hacker can make a new key, what was the point of these microchip keys again?
And anyway, why would they not just contact a dealer or the manufacturer in Japan to make some new keys, and overnight-ship them? Seems a lot cheaper than $3500 and faster than two months,,,
I recall reading at one point that such systems were "un-hackable",,,, tho that was a while back now. They don't say that much anymore.
"You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means..."
A long time ago governments (of all varieties) would keep huge amounts of paper records on anyone or anything they thought was suspicious.
And they could afford to pay people to generate LOTS of records, so there ended up being so many records on paper that they became difficult to use.
Much of the information retained turned out to be ultimately worthless. And of what little of it would have been valuable, there was no way to search or access it efficiently, so it often turned out to be worthless as well.
When computers came along, it was said that they would fix that problem...... And for a while the computers did... But maybe even that tide is now turning?
What this basically amounts to is a special project to discover and sub-index results that are already in Google's database system, but that cannot be searched or accessed conveniently by the normal means.
?
So what is the next stage in search engine design?
Is it to selectively forget results that people click on the least? (not just push them down in the results, but remove them entirely?)
Do a search engine's indexes regularly need to be pruned to improve results?
Phones aren't really my "thing", but... it is my understanding that with some phones (that are carrier-locked in the USA) the only way you can install software is from the Google Store.
I could be incorrect here.... Perhaps it is set to that this is the only *website* allowed to install from...
I have an Android phone that allows direct-file-installs, but it is a prepaid phone that I bought outright. I've written small silly apps for it but never dug into the details much.
Also an Android tablet I own allows it too, but that wasn't really locked other than not having any hardware drivers available for USB debugging.
Here is another way that not a lot of people seem to know of:
1. Go buy a small convex round rear-view mirror at any auto parts or department store. (This is the kind of round mirrors that bulge out in the center, and ANY size will work--even the little 2-inch across ones)
2. To view the sun, on a clear day stand near a building where the building's wall is in the shade of the roof overhang.
3. When you hold the round mirror at a 45-degree angle, you will see a round spot of light projected onto the shaded wall. Any activity on the sun such as sunspots (or eclipses) will be easily visible as dark spots on it.
There might be spots caused by dirt on the mirror, but if you rotate the mirror, the dirt-spots will rotate also. The sun spots will stay in the same place.
The farther you stand from the wall, the larger the reflected image is, but the fainter it is also...
This is a nice kids' group experiment to do as it appears BIG on the wall and doesn't involve anybody looking straight at the sun at all.
But how? And why?
The Arduino line of products is open-source, and (I'd bet that) most sold are clones that don't return any money to the originating company.
Arduinos aren't even that good of an example of embedded chips; most toys use smaller items more like the ATTiny85, and most industrial-grade stuff runs bigger+faster ARM chips... ,,,
How many tens of millions would MS have to spend to gain control of the multi-million-dollar Arduino empire?
As for what VS Code actually does,,, it's a bit nicer but I'm not seeing differences big enough to try to change to it.
The debugging is still only on ARM chips that physically support it, which is (not most Arduinos). And most Arduino coders live without on-chip debugging just fine... ?
Maybe they are playing a educational/school game here...
Well, was there WiFi? That makes it a tech story, right?;>)
Seriously--it could matter to people in the pet-related industries. And to people who have pets too, I guess.
One cause is that dry food is convenient to feed, but it is usually vegetable-based (corn or rice) which isn't really good for dogs, and is twice as not-good for cats. Canned food is generally much better for them.
Semi-related: one time I was told that when investigating senility in seniors (people, that is) some doctors ask to see a current photo of the person's pet, if they have one.
The reason is because when people begin to get memory loss they frequently can't recall if they fed the pet that day, so just to be sure they feed it several times a day... And the pet ends up quite visibly overweight because of it.
In the US--pursuing child molesters is the last bastion of the bureaucratic tyrant. No right is beyond revoke and no punishment too severe to stand in the way of "protecting the children".
My local police (like many in the US) has a special web page showing convicted sex offenders.
There is no page showing convicted murderers; somehow the normal public record of that was enough...
What's wrong with this picture?...
Yea but,,, see,,, if they went into debt for a 'real' school, they would have asked for a lot more pay. And probably would have been a lot less likely to get hired.
How about government stop paying for all schools for a while? And let the schools educational standards and tuition pricing stand on their own merits?
There will be face-to-face social activities in the future, but probably not what we engage in now.
Semi-related: back when AOL was a big thing, they had home-town chat rooms. Whatever area you were in, that was the chat room you could get into. You couldn't get into the others, as the ONE you could get into was tied to your subscriber/account info. The weekend bar/club meetups were rather fun, and a lot more casual than a dating service.
Restricting it to only local people made it a lot more honest and civil, I think.
But then, , , the AOL hometown chat was a free feature of their internet service, so they had no reason to try to inflate the user numbers.
No other chat program bothers to do that; they allow people from across the country/world to spam and troll.
I saw this in action a year or two ago (variable pricing online) and asked about it on a couple tech forums, and everyone who responded had no idea WTF I was talking about. And I could not find any explanation for it...
It's basically variable pricing that is based on your browsing history. That sounds simple enough, but different websites seemed to be using the opposite algorithms,,, if you visited a site now and checked the price on something, and then checked again in an hour, the 1-hour price might be a few percent higher. -Or lower... And likewise, if you checked back in a day, or 3-4 days from now, you might get two more different prices. That may be higher or lower than the [now] price, and the [1-hour] price.
I don't blame anyone for trying to use optimized pricing strategies.
The reason I was curious about it, was because I was wondering what is the process used and more importantly--how can one take maximum advantage of it? Of course at that point I was assuming there would be one method that was pretty similar across sites, but there does not seem to be. If you check a price for a particular item and then come back an hour later to that same item's page, the price may be higher, or may now be lower. Not a HUGE amount; you might have a $25 item get lowered to $22 or bumped up to $27. Or maybe $32. But something here is definitely going on, and some of the bigger online PC parts places are doing it.
Somebody already mentioned one place you see this in action: Newegg. I believe I was shopping for desktop PC parts when I first saw it, so you might keep an eye out when browsing those sites. I've not noticed it at other sites yet, but then, I do a lot of comparison shopping when I'm buying PC parts. And I use Google for normal searches, and that may be playing a big role in the process.
The rest of the movie was kinda-funny/kinda-odd, but the spaceships were outstanding despite being shown for only brief moments. Specifically, the Lectroid mother ship--it looked like a giant tree stump. They were organic-looking, asymmetrical and unrecognizable as such; the very definition of the term "alien" that so many other movies and TV shows have failed to grasp.
The only other one to come close was the Alien series, and only because they were based heavily on Geiger's original concept art (and that got sequel-ed to death).
Could it be that economic prosperity is not caused by college graduates... could it be the other way around perhaps?
Could it be that instead of attacking fundamental problems in national economics, politicians instead decided to hand out even more money that wasn't there... ?
"We must be doing better, cause we all got papers now saying how smart we are"
If only we could get this kind of competitive pressure to occur in the healthcare market!
The main problem that US healthcare has is that they are not required to publish their price schedules, and they are allowed to engage in discriminatory pricing.
And so far, not many legislators have the spine to even mention this matter.
This is why you get an invoice (if you have health insurance) and it says the bill for you recent visit was $500, but the insurance discount was $450..... And you may have had to pay the co-pay of $15 or $20....
It's not unusual for the insurer discount to be 90% off the cash price,,, so when you read of US medical providers "losing money", it's not unfair to ask of they're losing the cash price money or the insurance discount money...
The problem not often mentioned with socialized health care outside of the US, is that to control costs they usually engage in rationing healthcare.
They schedule a given number of a certain procedures a year, based on their budget, and that's all they do. No matter what.
If they're doing 12 heart transplants this year (one per day, for the first 12 days in January) and you are the 13th person, you have to wait until next year. If you make it that long, that is.
So a lot more people suffer with a much worse quality of life while just waiting for a slot to come up, and a lot of people with life-threatening problems die while waiting for a slot when there's surgeons and operating rooms standing empty most of the year.
In many countries you can't even offer to pay your own money for the care, since that would destroy the "fairness" of the system.
So you never get a bill--but then, a lot of the time, you don't get health care either. {-and I guess that's fair, in a way--but not the way most people would imagine}
Canada is frequently used as a better of health care than the US--but heath care procedure wait times in the USA are measured in days; in Canada it's measured in months. Some people forget to tell you that part. http://globalnews.ca/news/1886...
It's okay to be skeptical, but outright cynicism can leave you looking like an idiot.
Consider that:
1. Vietnam people said for years there was a big deer that only lived deep in the jungle, but scientists kept saying "no there's not, we're smart and we looked"
2. Border Mexico people said for years that there was Jaguars roaming in the US/Mexico border region, but scientists kept saying "no there's not, we're smart and we looked"
3. People said for the last several hundred years that octopi can come out of the water and attack prey, but scientists said "no they don't, we're smart and we looked"
A lot of local yokel animal stories turn out to be BS, but a few have not.
I've noticed over the last ~3 months that whenever I start up Notepad++, it also seems to kick the MS CloudDrive thing on (which I have never set up, and keep shutting off when it asks if I want to, even tho it's not set to ever come on automatically).
Oddly enough I use Visual Studio (community/freebie) to write personal programs and CloudDrive never kicks on when I start that...
I have no plans on using CloudDrive.
Using a free could service to hold important files is rather like asking a street bum to hold your wallet.
Eventually something bad will happen, and they will only shrug and say "hey, waddya want for free?"
This "coating" is already outdated, since bottle companies are working on plastics that basically do this without any additional coatings.
And they're already partly there: if you look at ketchup bottles in (US) stores you can see that the ketchup does all slide to the bottom now.
The sliding doesn't happen real fast but it works. And nobody wants the whole bottle to come gushing out at once anyway.
I am assuming something here:
OP is interested in maybe being more helpful at their current job, by learning "programming" in some regard.
Okay then,
First ask your employer what kinds of computer systems they use for management--what operating system, what word processor, what mail client, what mail server and what data bases (local management may not know this). THAT is what your guidance is on what to study using. You want to be able to do things that they can use with the setup they already have. But having them accept any help like that is kind of a long shot, as they won't be excited about running programs from an unknown source (you) on their business computers. You can ask anyway tho. Heck, email the corporate HQ and ask. They might be interested that you're interested.
If you are curious about learning something to get another/better job, then look in your local newspaper for what is being asked for. You likely won't have the degree required, but it will still be some guidance.
Programming skills are rather localized IME... Where I am most jobs ask for Windows, MS Office and databases, databases, databases. Most Windows coding is done in Visual Studio, which means mostly C# or maybe Visual Basic. A bit of server admin stuff/Python/Linux, but not much.... But that's here. Wherever you are may be a lot different.
If you just want to learn to program as a hobby, then start anywhere. All the common concepts of the major languages are available in all the others, and there's tutorials online for everything.
Console programs get boring pretty fast and making Windows programs is fantastically easy with Visual Studio (that is free for non-professional, non-commercial use) assuming you're using Windows anyway...
If you want to learn the deep-down details of game programming, then look at MS's C#, because the DirectX Library examples are all in that language.
If you want to learn Java, buy a cheap Java tablet and download Android Studio (the software for creating Android apps, free from Google). Android apps on a small portable tablet can either be silly games or useful work programs, so this can fit into either [work] or [play] categories very easily.
And finally,
Everyone else who replied to this topic is WRONG!
The Nobel prize lost a lot of credibility with me when they gave an award to Al Gore.
I believe in science--but not in scientists that predict cataclysmic doom every few years, and then keep changing their prediction every time it doesn't work out like they said.
That isn't a scientist, it's a con man.
No, not really. The main thing runaway is the process by which climate change "scientists" are spinning more bullsh*t.
Since the carbon dioxide bit is turning out to be wrong (due to some involved mechanism they did not know of!) the climate change charlatans need to change the story to something else.
As for all the previous times they've been wrong, forget about that, that's in the past. It doesn't matter now. This is the current emergency!
Might as well teach US kids to make tennis shoes while you're at it.
US kids don't need more computer science, US companies are already (still) offshoring tech jobs as fast as they can.
The colleges want to keep selling the courses and the big tech guys want to say that they're "doing something" about "the problem" (meanwhile they need more H1Bs, please) but nobody else would benefit.
If US public education gets behind *any* concept, you can bet that it's at least 5 years out of date already, and may be 10+ years out of date.
I wondered what happened to this guy since the 2007 arrest (for smoke alarms)... He never struck me as especially talented; he seemed to disregard a lot of safety matters with what he was doing, which is not the mark of an intellectual. The facial sores looked like narcotics use or possibly still more radiation exposure, neither of which would have been good news (for him).
He was on my ship. I was a nuke. He was not, and he was not nearly smart enough to be one. Nor did he have the dedication or discipline to succeed at it. He was obnoxious and racist. And I don't mean pretend racist that everyone like to toss around. He was openly racist and got his ass kicked more than once because of how openly bigoted and belligerent about it he was. There was nothing impressive about him, except for his disregard for common sense.
If the claim of his schizophrenia is true I would hope this would dispel any anger you had for him.
The typical onset of this condition is the late-teens / early 20's, and schizophrenics commonly pose the greatest risk to themselves--exactly by attempting to do things that they don't really know much about.
Are you reeeeeally, now?
How many big company execs have you seen that don't know that "when Microsoft Word underlines something in red, it means you probably spelled it wrong"?
As for silicon valley, it is what it is.
A 'startup' is what they call a company with people who have no experience, no real assets and no real product.
Old money stays far away. "Pump and dump" is not a viable long-term investment plan.
Slashdot Mirror
I am wondering how long will it be until police have the ability to remotely shut off cars?... While the cars are underway?
,,, "They turned off my battery!"
Obligatory existing movie reference--Idiocracy: "Why are we slowing down?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(and it's even an electric car too. Mike Judge is psychic)
Without trying too hard, I can imagine a few instances where an automatic-driving car could end up rolling down the road on its way to (somewhere) with nobody alive in it, or nobody old enough in it to possibly intervene if necessary.
It only stands to reason that the police will need to have a way to instantly and quickly shut the vehicle's motive power off, in some safe fashion.
And while the police having that ability doesn't worry me much, hackers learning how to do it will be able to cause quite a worry.
Any hardware or software process that is quick and simple (that can literally be done at the press of a button) won't be difficult to hack...
So then,,,,, if a hacker can make a new key, what was the point of these microchip keys again?
And anyway, why would they not just contact a dealer or the manufacturer in Japan to make some new keys, and overnight-ship them? Seems a lot cheaper than $3500 and faster than two months,,,
I recall reading at one point that such systems were "un-hackable",,,, tho that was a while back now. They don't say that much anymore.
"You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means..."
A long time ago governments (of all varieties) would keep huge amounts of paper records on anyone or anything they thought was suspicious.
And they could afford to pay people to generate LOTS of records, so there ended up being so many records on paper that they became difficult to use.
Much of the information retained turned out to be ultimately worthless. And of what little of it would have been valuable, there was no way to search or access it efficiently, so it often turned out to be worthless as well.
When computers came along, it was said that they would fix that problem...... And for a while the computers did... But maybe even that tide is now turning?
What this basically amounts to is a special project to discover and sub-index results that are already in Google's database system, but that cannot be searched or accessed conveniently by the normal means.
?
So what is the next stage in search engine design?
Is it to selectively forget results that people click on the least? (not just push them down in the results, but remove them entirely?)
Do a search engine's indexes regularly need to be pruned to improve results?
Phones aren't really my "thing", but... it is my understanding that with some phones (that are carrier-locked in the USA) the only way you can install software is from the Google Store.
I could be incorrect here.... Perhaps it is set to that this is the only *website* allowed to install from...
I have an Android phone that allows direct-file-installs, but it is a prepaid phone that I bought outright. I've written small silly apps for it but never dug into the details much. Also an Android tablet I own allows it too, but that wasn't really locked other than not having any hardware drivers available for USB debugging.
You mean like, if a gay guy wants to buy a wedding cake from your cake shop, and you refuse to do it because you don't condone gay marriage?
Here is another way that not a lot of people seem to know of:
1. Go buy a small convex round rear-view mirror at any auto parts or department store. (This is the kind of round mirrors that bulge out in the center, and ANY size will work--even the little 2-inch across ones)
2. To view the sun, on a clear day stand near a building where the building's wall is in the shade of the roof overhang.
3. When you hold the round mirror at a 45-degree angle, you will see a round spot of light projected onto the shaded wall. Any activity on the sun such as sunspots (or eclipses) will be easily visible as dark spots on it.
There might be spots caused by dirt on the mirror, but if you rotate the mirror, the dirt-spots will rotate also. The sun spots will stay in the same place.
The farther you stand from the wall, the larger the reflected image is, but the fainter it is also...
This is a nice kids' group experiment to do as it appears BIG on the wall and doesn't involve anybody looking straight at the sun at all.
But how? And why?
The Arduino line of products is open-source, and (I'd bet that) most sold are clones that don't return any money to the originating company.
Arduinos aren't even that good of an example of embedded chips; most toys use smaller items more like the ATTiny85, and most industrial-grade stuff runs bigger+faster ARM chips...
,,, How many tens of millions would MS have to spend to gain control of the multi-million-dollar Arduino empire?
As for what VS Code actually does,,, it's a bit nicer but I'm not seeing differences big enough to try to change to it.
The debugging is still only on ARM chips that physically support it, which is (not most Arduinos). And most Arduino coders live without on-chip debugging just fine... ?
Maybe they are playing a educational/school game here...
Well, was there WiFi? That makes it a tech story, right? ;>)
Seriously--it could matter to people in the pet-related industries. And to people who have pets too, I guess.
One cause is that dry food is convenient to feed, but it is usually vegetable-based (corn or rice) which isn't really good for dogs, and is twice as not-good for cats. Canned food is generally much better for them.
Semi-related: one time I was told that when investigating senility in seniors (people, that is) some doctors ask to see a current photo of the person's pet, if they have one.
The reason is because when people begin to get memory loss they frequently can't recall if they fed the pet that day, so just to be sure they feed it several times a day... And the pet ends up quite visibly overweight because of it.
In the US--pursuing child molesters is the last bastion of the bureaucratic tyrant. No right is beyond revoke and no punishment too severe to stand in the way of "protecting the children".
My local police (like many in the US) has a special web page showing convicted sex offenders.
There is no page showing convicted murderers; somehow the normal public record of that was enough...
What's wrong with this picture?...
Oh sure, hire a girl with no experience to invent COBOL
If it was a guy, they'd have wanted him to have five years experience in inventing COBOL
Yea but,,, see,,, if they went into debt for a 'real' school, they would have asked for a lot more pay. And probably would have been a lot less likely to get hired.
How about government stop paying for all schools for a while? And let the schools educational standards and tuition pricing stand on their own merits?
Obligatory Blade Runner reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There will be face-to-face social activities in the future, but probably not what we engage in now.
Semi-related: back when AOL was a big thing, they had home-town chat rooms. Whatever area you were in, that was the chat room you could get into. You couldn't get into the others, as the ONE you could get into was tied to your subscriber/account info. The weekend bar/club meetups were rather fun, and a lot more casual than a dating service.
Restricting it to only local people made it a lot more honest and civil, I think.
But then, , , the AOL hometown chat was a free feature of their internet service, so they had no reason to try to inflate the user numbers.
No other chat program bothers to do that; they allow people from across the country/world to spam and troll.
I saw this in action a year or two ago (variable pricing online) and asked about it on a couple tech forums, and everyone who responded had no idea WTF I was talking about. And I could not find any explanation for it...
It's basically variable pricing that is based on your browsing history. That sounds simple enough, but different websites seemed to be using the opposite algorithms,,, if you visited a site now and checked the price on something, and then checked again in an hour, the 1-hour price might be a few percent higher. -Or lower... And likewise, if you checked back in a day, or 3-4 days from now, you might get two more different prices. That may be higher or lower than the [now] price, and the [1-hour] price.
I don't blame anyone for trying to use optimized pricing strategies.
The reason I was curious about it, was because I was wondering what is the process used and more importantly--how can one take maximum advantage of it? Of course at that point I was assuming there would be one method that was pretty similar across sites, but there does not seem to be. If you check a price for a particular item and then come back an hour later to that same item's page, the price may be higher, or may now be lower. Not a HUGE amount; you might have a $25 item get lowered to $22 or bumped up to $27. Or maybe $32. But something here is definitely going on, and some of the bigger online PC parts places are doing it.
Somebody already mentioned one place you see this in action: Newegg. I believe I was shopping for desktop PC parts when I first saw it, so you might keep an eye out when browsing those sites. I've not noticed it at other sites yet, but then, I do a lot of comparison shopping when I'm buying PC parts. And I use Google for normal searches, and that may be playing a big role in the process.
were the ones in Buckaroo Banzai.
The rest of the movie was kinda-funny/kinda-odd, but the spaceships were outstanding despite being shown for only brief moments.
Specifically, the Lectroid mother ship--it looked like a giant tree stump.
They were organic-looking, asymmetrical and unrecognizable as such; the very definition of the term "alien" that so many other movies and TV shows have failed to grasp.
The only other one to come close was the Alien series, and only because they were based heavily on Geiger's original concept art (and that got sequel-ed to death).
Could it be that economic prosperity is not caused by college graduates... could it be the other way around perhaps?
Could it be that instead of attacking fundamental problems in national economics, politicians instead decided to hand out even more money that wasn't there... ?
"We must be doing better, cause we all got papers now saying how smart we are"
The main problem that US healthcare has is that they are not required to publish their price schedules, and they are allowed to engage in discriminatory pricing.
And so far, not many legislators have the spine to even mention this matter.
This is why you get an invoice (if you have health insurance) and it says the bill for you recent visit was $500, but the insurance discount was $450..... And you may have had to pay the co-pay of $15 or $20....
It's not unusual for the insurer discount to be 90% off the cash price,,, so when you read of US medical providers "losing money", it's not unfair to ask of they're losing the cash price money or the insurance discount money...
The problem not often mentioned with socialized health care outside of the US, is that to control costs they usually engage in rationing healthcare.
They schedule a given number of a certain procedures a year, based on their budget, and that's all they do. No matter what.
If they're doing 12 heart transplants this year (one per day, for the first 12 days in January) and you are the 13th person, you have to wait until next year. If you make it that long, that is.
So a lot more people suffer with a much worse quality of life while just waiting for a slot to come up, and a lot of people with life-threatening problems die while waiting for a slot when there's surgeons and operating rooms standing empty most of the year.
In many countries you can't even offer to pay your own money for the care, since that would destroy the "fairness" of the system.
So you never get a bill--but then, a lot of the time, you don't get health care either.
{-and I guess that's fair, in a way--but not the way most people would imagine}
Canada is frequently used as a better of health care than the US--but heath care procedure wait times in the USA are measured in days; in Canada it's measured in months. Some people forget to tell you that part.
http://globalnews.ca/news/1886...
It's okay to be skeptical, but outright cynicism can leave you looking like an idiot.
Consider that:
1. Vietnam people said for years there was a big deer that only lived deep in the jungle, but scientists kept saying "no there's not, we're smart and we looked"
2. Border Mexico people said for years that there was Jaguars roaming in the US/Mexico border region, but scientists kept saying "no there's not, we're smart and we looked"
3. People said for the last several hundred years that octopi can come out of the water and attack prey, but scientists said "no they don't, we're smart and we looked"
A lot of local yokel animal stories turn out to be BS, but a few have not.
I've noticed over the last ~3 months that whenever I start up Notepad++, it also seems to kick the MS CloudDrive thing on (which I have never set up, and keep shutting off when it asks if I want to, even tho it's not set to ever come on automatically).
Oddly enough I use Visual Studio (community/freebie) to write personal programs and CloudDrive never kicks on when I start that...
I have no plans on using CloudDrive.
Using a free could service to hold important files is rather like asking a street bum to hold your wallet.
Eventually something bad will happen, and they will only shrug and say "hey, waddya want for free?"
This "coating" is already outdated, since bottle companies are working on plastics that basically do this without any additional coatings.
And they're already partly there: if you look at ketchup bottles in (US) stores you can see that the ketchup does all slide to the bottom now.
The sliding doesn't happen real fast but it works. And nobody wants the whole bottle to come gushing out at once anyway.
-here is another one.
I am assuming something here:
OP is interested in maybe being more helpful at their current job, by learning "programming" in some regard.
Okay then,
First ask your employer what kinds of computer systems they use for management--what operating system, what word processor, what mail client, what mail server and what data bases (local management may not know this). THAT is what your guidance is on what to study using. You want to be able to do things that they can use with the setup they already have. But having them accept any help like that is kind of a long shot, as they won't be excited about running programs from an unknown source (you) on their business computers. You can ask anyway tho. Heck, email the corporate HQ and ask. They might be interested that you're interested.
If you are curious about learning something to get another/better job, then look in your local newspaper for what is being asked for. You likely won't have the degree required, but it will still be some guidance.
Programming skills are rather localized IME... Where I am most jobs ask for Windows, MS Office and databases, databases, databases. Most Windows coding is done in Visual Studio, which means mostly C# or maybe Visual Basic. A bit of server admin stuff/Python/Linux, but not much.... But that's here. Wherever you are may be a lot different.
If you just want to learn to program as a hobby, then start anywhere. All the common concepts of the major languages are available in all the others, and there's tutorials online for everything.
Console programs get boring pretty fast and making Windows programs is fantastically easy with Visual Studio (that is free for non-professional, non-commercial use) assuming you're using Windows anyway...
If you want to learn the deep-down details of game programming, then look at MS's C#, because the DirectX Library examples are all in that language.
If you want to learn Java, buy a cheap Java tablet and download Android Studio (the software for creating Android apps, free from Google). Android apps on a small portable tablet can either be silly games or useful work programs, so this can fit into either [work] or [play] categories very easily.
And finally,
Everyone else who replied to this topic is WRONG!
The Nobel prize lost a lot of credibility with me when they gave an award to Al Gore.
I believe in science--but not in scientists that predict cataclysmic doom every few years, and then keep changing their prediction every time it doesn't work out like they said.
That isn't a scientist, it's a con man.
No, not really. The main thing runaway is the process by which climate change "scientists" are spinning more bullsh*t.
Since the carbon dioxide bit is turning out to be wrong (due to some involved mechanism they did not know of!) the climate change charlatans need to change the story to something else.
As for all the previous times they've been wrong, forget about that, that's in the past. It doesn't matter now. This is the current emergency!
Might as well teach US kids to make tennis shoes while you're at it.
US kids don't need more computer science, US companies are already (still) offshoring tech jobs as fast as they can.
The colleges want to keep selling the courses and the big tech guys want to say that they're "doing something" about "the problem" (meanwhile they need more H1Bs, please) but nobody else would benefit.
If US public education gets behind *any* concept, you can bet that it's at least 5 years out of date already, and may be 10+ years out of date.
He never struck me as especially talented; he seemed to disregard a lot of safety matters with what he was doing, which is not the mark of an intellectual.
The facial sores looked like narcotics use or possibly still more radiation exposure, neither of which would have been good news (for him).
If the claim of his schizophrenia is true I would hope this would dispel any anger you had for him.
The typical onset of this condition is the late-teens / early 20's, and schizophrenics commonly pose the greatest risk to themselves--exactly by attempting to do things that they don't really know much about.
Are you reeeeeally, now?
How many big company execs have you seen that don't know that "when Microsoft Word underlines something in red, it means you probably spelled it wrong"?
As for silicon valley, it is what it is.
A 'startup' is what they call a company with people who have no experience, no real assets and no real product.
Old money stays far away. "Pump and dump" is not a viable long-term investment plan.