My impression is that the demoscene is still largely international, but there are demoparties in the U.S. One that I've been to is blockparty/pixeljam in Ohio. I'm sure there are larger ones on the east and west coasts, though.
Every one of those that you listed is a free consumer-level service. There was never even so much as a hint of guaranteed uptime. In fact, the terms of service quite clearly specify that Google, Yahoo, et al can do literally anything they like, up to and including deleting your account permanently for no reason whatsoever.
RIM developed, marketed, and sold Blackberry as an enterprise communication system. It is most assuredly not free. The government relies on RIM's services, as well as the vast majority of large enterprises. My previous job was a sysadmin in a large financial institution where every minute of downtime was quite realistically estimated in the millions of dollars. Blackberries were how the entire IT department communicated with each other and the monitoring systems both during and after hours. Without the use of our Blackberries, we would have had no way to respond to "host down" alerts coordinate for the nightly 3 a.m. maintenance windows.
In the US, a culture is built around items, and that culture build upon itself. In Asia, they are happy to take anyones ideas, and sell them illegally.
That's the troll part. You seem to have missed it.
You could turn the tables and say that Americans are fat and lazy and don't want to innovate anymore while Asia (India and China in particular) is merely taking advantage of the western world's recent lack of blue-collar ambition.
I'm going to post that, despite a decade of Drupal book reviews being posted almost biweekly on/., I still have no earthly clue what Drupal does, how it fits into the web infrastructure,
Yeah, no kiddin' and what's with all these danged Linux stories lately? I tell you what, all I can figure out is that it's some kind of Windows program that kids use to play text adventure games on.
No, your ISP is correct to block port 25 outbound on residential service. It's actually one of the more effective spam-fighting measures. Not because residential customers are themselves spammers, but because their computers become botnet zombies under the control of spammers.
If you want your own server on the Internet, go rent a VPS. They're not expensive and you'll have the added benefit of getting a service was that designed for hosting server applications. I pay $15/month for a Debian VPS that handles email, a database, and a few websites. When hardware and energy costs are taken into consideration, I can't host my own server at home for anything near that cheap.
Sadly this rise has happened in a time when it has become almost essential to get a college degree if you want any kind of decent job.
I keep hearing this from people who have degrees, but I don't think it's as true as they think.
Yes, for many career fields, you are legally required to have a degree in order to practice that profession (doctors, lawyers, etc). In others, competition is so fierce that you're unlikely to do what you really want without a degree (show biz, journalism, some types of engineering). In yet others, everyone tells you that you need a degree to get anywhere and it's categorically false.
I.T. and development in particular are probably the best example of the latter. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, anyone can teach him or herself enough to get at least very close to a six-figure income, if accompanied with a healthy dose of networking and social skills. I'm doing it myself and know countless others who've landed good jobs thanks to the "or equivalent experience" qualification in the job listing.
Starting your own business likewise requires no particular educational background. Of course, courses in finance and business management will never hurt. And running your own business is a crap-ton of work and generally risky. But I've run into a lot of business owners with no formal education and some of them easily exceeded the average national income thanks to hard work and smart business decisions.
Western culture puts higher education on an pedestal whose loft is undeserved. Yes, we'll always need academics and formally-trained professionals, but most of us do not (or should not) be compelled to spend four years sitting on our behinds in a classroom only to spend the next decade paying off the enormous debt incurred for the privilege. We need to teach kids early on that learning is self-directed and that success is a result of motivation and execution, not how many credit hours they cram into a semester.
The distribution of wealth in the country (and world for that matter) among individuals is reflective of those at the top of the game rigging it to their advantage, politically, technologically, and otherwise.
I used to look at the stock market (and investing in general) the same as you. To me, the financial world was just a big game that only fat cats could play, let alone win. The rest of us were doomed to stashing whatever we could scrape together from our minimum wage paychecks into micro-interest savings accounts with the hope that Social Security will still be around in 50 years to make our dying years slightly less painful.
But then my inner nerd got the better of me and I spent some time studying how the financial world actually worked. And I found out that it doesn't take long (maybe a month or two) of solid studying in your free time to get a good grasp of the basics. Once you have that, dabbling in the stock market is a brain-dead simple formula:
1. Find a public company with some history of growth and (most importantly) a solid plan to grow further 2. Buy it 3. Constantly monitor the company and its industry to watch for signs that you should exit 4. Profit
I started investing two years ago and have done extremely well even through a crappy roller-coaster recession. My portfolio will never be enough to live off of no matter how much capital I throw at it. But I estimate that if my rate of return holds, I would be able to buy a new car with cash in 7 or 8 years on the profit alone. (Just an example, not what I actually plan to do.) It's basically free money if you're willing to get the initial education and spend about 30 minutes a week reviewing your investments and looking for new opportunities. I'm just this normal dude with an average job and no formal training in anything. There's always the chance that you can end up making a bad investment, of course, but for the most part it's really not rocket surgery. Anyone can invest their money and come out far ahead if they're willing to do the homework and be patient.
Hopefully getting their control channel hammered with SMS noise will induce them to offer some sort of reasonably priced modest-speed data mechanism that isn't a horrible pile of hack...
Don't be silly. They'll just do what they did with all the VoIP apps: block or cripple them. And if that fails, it would be trivial to filter the messages as they're bouncing through the network. Until strong net neutrality laws are enacted, mobile carriers will always have the last word on how you use your phone no matter how "rooted" or "unlocked" you think it is.
Okay, I've done some moderate JavaScript programming in the course of programming many websites and I've used most of the popular libraries out there. But I've never even heard of this JavaScript toolkit. A quick trip to the home page shows that it's trying to be yet another attempt at a JavaScript standard library. And not a very good one, either. A few helper libraries. Pfft!
If you really want a JS library that does damn near everything under the sun, check out php.js. They have the vast majority of core PHP functions implemented in JavaScript.
Flightgear is an awesome piece of work being an all-volunteer project and I enjoy taking it for a spin every now and then. But my biggest gripe about modern PC flightsims is this: 3D cockpits.
I can understand completely why some people want them. They look pretty and (if done well) give you an idea of what it's like to actually sit in a plane. But for the most part, I've always found them to be a hinderance to interacting with the simulated aircraft. In most real planes, there are instrument panels situated everywhere along the pilot. Ahead, off to the side, between the seats, over head, and so on. A real pilot in a real plane has easy access to all of the controls because all he has to do is glance and reach down to flip a switch. A PC sim user, however, has to shift his entire view over, which moves the windscreen and primary indicators completely out of view.
3D cockpits also take a lot (and I mean a *lot*) of work to get right. As a result, many end up being quite bad (I daresay "ugly") and those that are done well still miss a lot of the detail and information present in a real plane anyway.
But my biggest problem with 3D cockpits is that they make it extremely hard to directly read and interact with instruments. Manipulating controls with the mouse is hit-and-miss, and the details on indicators gets lost completely due to the comparatively low resolution of today's monitors vs real life. Compare the following screenshots to see what I'm talking about:
Ignoring for the moment that the former has a lot more artistic detail, the 2D cockpit simply has more information because use of the PC screen's resolution is maximized. Each instrument is easier to read, has far more detail, and most likely does a lot more. (I.e., half the buttons aren't just eye candy.)
Many banking systems only talk to each-other in nightly batches. It's mostly done that way because that's the way it's always been done, and to save money on entirely new systems. The every-24-hours style is less secure, slow, and inefficient. This is 2011 and there's no real excuse for it.
(Disclaimer: I used to work in financial I.T. But don't worry, I got better.)
At the end of the banking day, the backend systems of every decent-sized financial institution begin churning through the day's data to settle transactions, adjust accounts, produce reports, and exchange information with other institutions. This is called running cycle. Some parts of cycle are kicked off automatically when a certain condition is met (e.g., it's 18:00 or a file suddenly appears in a magic directory), other parts are started manually by the datacenter operators. Depending on the volume of data to be dealt with, cycle can take anywhere from a couple hours to halfway through the night. End-of-month cycle can take an entire weekend. If you're (to pick a non-random example) a Unix admin and something you did to one of the boxes crashes a job and holds up cycle, you get a phone call no matter how late/early it is.
Cycle can't be run during the day for a number of reasons, none of which are simply tradition. The biggest one is that in the middle of the business day, there are lots of accounts and databases which are open and being actively used in real-time by other systems and users. Trying to run heavy reporting or transaction jobs on that data all day long just for the sake of staying up-to-the-minute is highly wasteful in terms of system resources alone. You'd be putting extra load on a production server with extremely expensive downtime (as in, millions-of-dollars-per-minute downtime) and drastically lowering the system response time for users who are entering or retrieving data from it. It's far better to shift that load to the evening when the business is closed for the day, downtime is much cheaper, and there's more time available to fix the tough problems.
A good analogy would be this: running cycle in the middle of the day is like running fsck on your desktop system with all of the filesystems mounted and also while you are trying to use it for important work. Now, there are plenty of real-time data reporting systems where possible and where it makes sense. But for the most part, the consumers of the data (customers, accountants, managers, actuaries, and other software) are perfectly able to do their jobs with the previous days' data.
Maybe one day humans will do away with the concept of business hours. Or perhaps we'll develop software that can affordably process petabytes of raw financial data in the blink of an eye. Until then, we're stuck with a daily after-hours cycle.
I went researching this one time and so far as I can tell, it's a almost a complete urban legend. The version that I heard was that some guy lived directly under some high-voltage power lines. Huge kilovolt transmission lines with gigantic steel towers and a dozen or more conductors. Anyway, the story went that he built a large copper coil in his attic, and managed to leech enough power to light his whole house. The electric company eventually notices that his electricity bill dropped by 90%, the police get involved, and so on.
I can find nothing that says anyone has ever tried this, but perhaps more surprisingly, I haven't seen anyone with the theoretical knowledge to work out the equations to prove or disprove the concept of leeching electricity from the ground. The only two concrete things I ever found were:
A mythbusters episode where Adam and Jamie try to duplicate the myth. They fail horribly, but their test setup was really quite awful too. (And the fact that they consulted with ZERO experts on the topic. It's like me busting the myth that a man can set foot on the moon because I can't do it.)
A guy who did an art installation by literally planting a few hundred fluorescent tube light bulbs into the ground under a transmission power line. One end in the dirt, one end in the air. It worked quite well. The bulbs light dimly at dusk. (If you find any photos, note that they exaggerate the effect via long exposure.) I think the tubes' phosphor coating is reacting to the RF field generated by the power lines. I highly doubt that there is any current whatsoever flowing from the upper tips of the tubes to the lower tips.
So, with my limited knowledge of electricity, my suspicion is that it may be possible to capture very small amounts of energy from being directly underneath a power line. But you're not going to be able to do it covertly and get anything approaching a usable amount.
So here we are again, this time with power from radio waves. How much interference does this cost if we add to the scale?
None. No interference is generated by a properly-functioning receiver.
will the radio stations and wireless access points get reduced range by this?
Every antenna, tree, power line, flag pole, chain-link fence, and filing cabinet within range of a transmitter is already shunting a small portion of that transmitter's power to ground. The rest of the signal which is unhindered by any natural or man-made objects simply skips all the excitement and either goes straight into the ground or is weakened to nothing in the atmosphere.
I'm not going to tell you why this is, but I am going to give you the opportunity to experiment for yourself:
1. Locate the nearest wifi access point and associate two laptops with it. These should have built-in wifi and have similar screen sizes, as the antennas are located on either side of the screen. 2. Put the first laptop on a table, with the screen facing the access point 3. Put the second laptop back-to-back with the first, with the screen facing away from the access point. 4. Did the second laptop lose its wifi signal? Why not?
Having another pair of eyes on your code is a very good idea but this whole concept of everybody getting together and put somebody's work to shame is bad for team dynamics and a waste of time.
There are two main kinds of code review processes: good and bad. This is the bad one. It's a huge waste of time for everyone to sit in a meeting, read code together, bikeshed the fuck out of it, and get nothing done. I can't imagine a worse development methodology than coding by committee.
I rather have a team dynamic where any developer can pick up a task involving work on somebody else's code, this way code reviews just happen naturally.
This is the good one. We use an open source product called Review Board to do just this. Before anything is committed to trunk, it has to be approved by at least one other developer first. Our defect rate from QA has dropped to 1/3 of that from the previous development cycle since we started doing code reviews and a few other cherry-picked "agile" techniques.
I've stuck with namecheap over the years because they offer a lot of services for free that other registrar's charge extra for (DNS hosting, email forwarding, etc).
Re:Google was great because of the lack of Google+
on
Google's New Design
·
· Score: 1
I've become a fan of DuckDuckGo lately. They have a strong privacy policy (no user tracking), an HTTPS interface, interface customizations, and loads of extra features for developers. My only real complaint with DDG so far is that Google sometimes does better with obscure queries. (And the cartoon duck logo is really stupid.)
Nobody seems to ever bring this up, but by supporting illegal immigration you are supporting modern day slavery. Illegal immigrants don't make a proper wage and dont receive any of the protections that their legal immigrant friends enjoy.
By casting illegal immigrants as slaves, you diminish the tragedy of actual slavery. Real slaves don't get paid. Real slaves can't escape their captors or they will face death if they try.
Illegal immigrants make a choice to cross over the border because they can (or at least believe they can) make a better living for themselves and/or their family. Even if it means making a fraction of what a citizen can, evading the law, and enduring harassment and physical violence from their neighbors, they still made a choice and generally have the ability to cross the border again should they so choose.
Unless they are being held against their will, they cannot, by definition, be slaves.
Get rid of offshoring, and Johnny will want to code.
Judging from your sig, I'm sure you find offshore contracting and industry a convenient scapegoat for just about everything. But back here in the real world, the U.S. has a thriving software development industry and it's one of the few white-collar jobs that hasn't been trounced by the recession. The last three companies that I've worked for (to include my current employer) simply can't find enough programmers. The last one in particular had a $10,000 referral bounty for Java developers. And you didn't even have to be affiliated with the company to be awarded the bounty.
Developers in the U.S. still make decent salaries these days and likely will in the foreseeable future. And TFA itself is about how there are lots more job openings than there are programmers to fill them. Employers literally have no choice but to go overseas if they ever want their products to ship and be maintained.
Slashdot Mirror
My impression is that the demoscene is still largely international, but there are demoparties in the U.S. One that I've been to is blockparty/pixeljam in Ohio. I'm sure there are larger ones on the east and west coasts, though.
Looks to me like your dreams have already been realized.
Every one of those that you listed is a free consumer-level service. There was never even so much as a hint of guaranteed uptime. In fact, the terms of service quite clearly specify that Google, Yahoo, et al can do literally anything they like, up to and including deleting your account permanently for no reason whatsoever.
RIM developed, marketed, and sold Blackberry as an enterprise communication system. It is most assuredly not free. The government relies on RIM's services, as well as the vast majority of large enterprises. My previous job was a sysadmin in a large financial institution where every minute of downtime was quite realistically estimated in the millions of dollars. Blackberries were how the entire IT department communicated with each other and the monitoring systems both during and after hours. Without the use of our Blackberries, we would have had no way to respond to "host down" alerts coordinate for the nightly 3 a.m. maintenance windows.
Will I finally be able to buy my own vanity timezone for $200,000?
Fixed that for you, racist scumbag. Cheers.
That's the troll part. You seem to have missed it.
You could turn the tables and say that Americans are fat and lazy and don't want to innovate anymore while Asia (India and China in particular) is merely taking advantage of the western world's recent lack of blue-collar ambition.
Yeah, no kiddin' and what's with all these danged Linux stories lately? I tell you what, all I can figure out is that it's some kind of Windows program that kids use to play text adventure games on.
Drupal isn't a CMS, it's a framework for building one without having to do (much || any) programming.
Purchase and install a good antivirus solution.
Which is good right up until Debian switches to Gnome 3. It won't be soon, but it will happen.
No, your ISP is correct to block port 25 outbound on residential service. It's actually one of the more effective spam-fighting measures. Not because residential customers are themselves spammers, but because their computers become botnet zombies under the control of spammers.
If you want your own server on the Internet, go rent a VPS. They're not expensive and you'll have the added benefit of getting a service was that designed for hosting server applications. I pay $15/month for a Debian VPS that handles email, a database, and a few websites. When hardware and energy costs are taken into consideration, I can't host my own server at home for anything near that cheap.
I keep hearing this from people who have degrees, but I don't think it's as true as they think.
Yes, for many career fields, you are legally required to have a degree in order to practice that profession (doctors, lawyers, etc). In others, competition is so fierce that you're unlikely to do what you really want without a degree (show biz, journalism, some types of engineering). In yet others, everyone tells you that you need a degree to get anywhere and it's categorically false.
I.T. and development in particular are probably the best example of the latter. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, anyone can teach him or herself enough to get at least very close to a six-figure income, if accompanied with a healthy dose of networking and social skills. I'm doing it myself and know countless others who've landed good jobs thanks to the "or equivalent experience" qualification in the job listing.
Starting your own business likewise requires no particular educational background. Of course, courses in finance and business management will never hurt. And running your own business is a crap-ton of work and generally risky. But I've run into a lot of business owners with no formal education and some of them easily exceeded the average national income thanks to hard work and smart business decisions.
Western culture puts higher education on an pedestal whose loft is undeserved. Yes, we'll always need academics and formally-trained professionals, but most of us do not (or should not) be compelled to spend four years sitting on our behinds in a classroom only to spend the next decade paying off the enormous debt incurred for the privilege. We need to teach kids early on that learning is self-directed and that success is a result of motivation and execution, not how many credit hours they cram into a semester.
I used to look at the stock market (and investing in general) the same as you. To me, the financial world was just a big game that only fat cats could play, let alone win. The rest of us were doomed to stashing whatever we could scrape together from our minimum wage paychecks into micro-interest savings accounts with the hope that Social Security will still be around in 50 years to make our dying years slightly less painful.
But then my inner nerd got the better of me and I spent some time studying how the financial world actually worked. And I found out that it doesn't take long (maybe a month or two) of solid studying in your free time to get a good grasp of the basics. Once you have that, dabbling in the stock market is a brain-dead simple formula:
1. Find a public company with some history of growth and (most importantly) a solid plan to grow further
2. Buy it
3. Constantly monitor the company and its industry to watch for signs that you should exit
4. Profit
I started investing two years ago and have done extremely well even through a crappy roller-coaster recession. My portfolio will never be enough to live off of no matter how much capital I throw at it. But I estimate that if my rate of return holds, I would be able to buy a new car with cash in 7 or 8 years on the profit alone. (Just an example, not what I actually plan to do.) It's basically free money if you're willing to get the initial education and spend about 30 minutes a week reviewing your investments and looking for new opportunities. I'm just this normal dude with an average job and no formal training in anything. There's always the chance that you can end up making a bad investment, of course, but for the most part it's really not rocket surgery. Anyone can invest their money and come out far ahead if they're willing to do the homework and be patient.
Don't be silly. They'll just do what they did with all the VoIP apps: block or cripple them. And if that fails, it would be trivial to filter the messages as they're bouncing through the network. Until strong net neutrality laws are enacted, mobile carriers will always have the last word on how you use your phone no matter how "rooted" or "unlocked" you think it is.
Okay, I've done some moderate JavaScript programming in the course of programming many websites and I've used most of the popular libraries out there. But I've never even heard of this JavaScript toolkit. A quick trip to the home page shows that it's trying to be yet another attempt at a JavaScript standard library. And not a very good one, either. A few helper libraries. Pfft!
If you really want a JS library that does damn near everything under the sun, check out php.js. They have the vast majority of core PHP functions implemented in JavaScript.
The colors are off because it's a mediocre camera recording a crappy monitor.
Flightgear is an awesome piece of work being an all-volunteer project and I enjoy taking it for a spin every now and then. But my biggest gripe about modern PC flightsims is this: 3D cockpits.
I can understand completely why some people want them. They look pretty and (if done well) give you an idea of what it's like to actually sit in a plane. But for the most part, I've always found them to be a hinderance to interacting with the simulated aircraft. In most real planes, there are instrument panels situated everywhere along the pilot. Ahead, off to the side, between the seats, over head, and so on. A real pilot in a real plane has easy access to all of the controls because all he has to do is glance and reach down to flip a switch. A PC sim user, however, has to shift his entire view over, which moves the windscreen and primary indicators completely out of view.
3D cockpits also take a lot (and I mean a *lot*) of work to get right. As a result, many end up being quite bad (I daresay "ugly") and those that are done well still miss a lot of the detail and information present in a real plane anyway.
But my biggest problem with 3D cockpits is that they make it extremely hard to directly read and interact with instruments. Manipulating controls with the mouse is hit-and-miss, and the details on indicators gets lost completely due to the comparatively low resolution of today's monitors vs real life. Compare the following screenshots to see what I'm talking about:
http://www.tok2.com/home/avionics/msfsx/c172sp-cockpit-cgx1.jpg
http://cdn.freedownloadsplace.com/screenshots-1024/FlightGear-2.png
Ignoring for the moment that the former has a lot more artistic detail, the 2D cockpit simply has more information because use of the PC screen's resolution is maximized. Each instrument is easier to read, has far more detail, and most likely does a lot more. (I.e., half the buttons aren't just eye candy.)
(Disclaimer: I used to work in financial I.T. But don't worry, I got better.)
At the end of the banking day, the backend systems of every decent-sized financial institution begin churning through the day's data to settle transactions, adjust accounts, produce reports, and exchange information with other institutions. This is called running cycle. Some parts of cycle are kicked off automatically when a certain condition is met (e.g., it's 18:00 or a file suddenly appears in a magic directory), other parts are started manually by the datacenter operators. Depending on the volume of data to be dealt with, cycle can take anywhere from a couple hours to halfway through the night. End-of-month cycle can take an entire weekend. If you're (to pick a non-random example) a Unix admin and something you did to one of the boxes crashes a job and holds up cycle, you get a phone call no matter how late/early it is.
Cycle can't be run during the day for a number of reasons, none of which are simply tradition. The biggest one is that in the middle of the business day, there are lots of accounts and databases which are open and being actively used in real-time by other systems and users. Trying to run heavy reporting or transaction jobs on that data all day long just for the sake of staying up-to-the-minute is highly wasteful in terms of system resources alone. You'd be putting extra load on a production server with extremely expensive downtime (as in, millions-of-dollars-per-minute downtime) and drastically lowering the system response time for users who are entering or retrieving data from it. It's far better to shift that load to the evening when the business is closed for the day, downtime is much cheaper, and there's more time available to fix the tough problems.
A good analogy would be this: running cycle in the middle of the day is like running fsck on your desktop system with all of the filesystems mounted and also while you are trying to use it for important work. Now, there are plenty of real-time data reporting systems where possible and where it makes sense. But for the most part, the consumers of the data (customers, accountants, managers, actuaries, and other software) are perfectly able to do their jobs with the previous days' data.
Maybe one day humans will do away with the concept of business hours. Or perhaps we'll develop software that can affordably process petabytes of raw financial data in the blink of an eye. Until then, we're stuck with a daily after-hours cycle.
I went researching this one time and so far as I can tell, it's a almost a complete urban legend. The version that I heard was that some guy lived directly under some high-voltage power lines. Huge kilovolt transmission lines with gigantic steel towers and a dozen or more conductors. Anyway, the story went that he built a large copper coil in his attic, and managed to leech enough power to light his whole house. The electric company eventually notices that his electricity bill dropped by 90%, the police get involved, and so on.
I can find nothing that says anyone has ever tried this, but perhaps more surprisingly, I haven't seen anyone with the theoretical knowledge to work out the equations to prove or disprove the concept of leeching electricity from the ground. The only two concrete things I ever found were:
A mythbusters episode where Adam and Jamie try to duplicate the myth. They fail horribly, but their test setup was really quite awful too. (And the fact that they consulted with ZERO experts on the topic. It's like me busting the myth that a man can set foot on the moon because I can't do it.)
A guy who did an art installation by literally planting a few hundred fluorescent tube light bulbs into the ground under a transmission power line. One end in the dirt, one end in the air. It worked quite well. The bulbs light dimly at dusk. (If you find any photos, note that they exaggerate the effect via long exposure.) I think the tubes' phosphor coating is reacting to the RF field generated by the power lines. I highly doubt that there is any current whatsoever flowing from the upper tips of the tubes to the lower tips.
So, with my limited knowledge of electricity, my suspicion is that it may be possible to capture very small amounts of energy from being directly underneath a power line. But you're not going to be able to do it covertly and get anything approaching a usable amount.
None. No interference is generated by a properly-functioning receiver.
Every antenna, tree, power line, flag pole, chain-link fence, and filing cabinet within range of a transmitter is already shunting a small portion of that transmitter's power to ground. The rest of the signal which is unhindered by any natural or man-made objects simply skips all the excitement and either goes straight into the ground or is weakened to nothing in the atmosphere.
I'm not going to tell you why this is, but I am going to give you the opportunity to experiment for yourself:
1. Locate the nearest wifi access point and associate two laptops with it. These should have built-in wifi and have similar screen sizes, as the antennas are located on either side of the screen.
2. Put the first laptop on a table, with the screen facing the access point
3. Put the second laptop back-to-back with the first, with the screen facing away from the access point.
4. Did the second laptop lose its wifi signal? Why not?
There are two main kinds of code review processes: good and bad. This is the bad one. It's a huge waste of time for everyone to sit in a meeting, read code together, bikeshed the fuck out of it, and get nothing done. I can't imagine a worse development methodology than coding by committee.
This is the good one. We use an open source product called Review Board to do just this. Before anything is committed to trunk, it has to be approved by at least one other developer first. Our defect rate from QA has dropped to 1/3 of that from the previous development cycle since we started doing code reviews and a few other cherry-picked "agile" techniques.
I've stuck with namecheap over the years because they offer a lot of services for free that other registrar's charge extra for (DNS hosting, email forwarding, etc).
I've become a fan of DuckDuckGo lately. They have a strong privacy policy (no user tracking), an HTTPS interface, interface customizations, and loads of extra features for developers. My only real complaint with DDG so far is that Google sometimes does better with obscure queries. (And the cartoon duck logo is really stupid.)
By casting illegal immigrants as slaves, you diminish the tragedy of actual slavery. Real slaves don't get paid. Real slaves can't escape their captors or they will face death if they try.
Illegal immigrants make a choice to cross over the border because they can (or at least believe they can) make a better living for themselves and/or their family. Even if it means making a fraction of what a citizen can, evading the law, and enduring harassment and physical violence from their neighbors, they still made a choice and generally have the ability to cross the border again should they so choose.
Unless they are being held against their will, they cannot, by definition, be slaves.
Judging from your sig, I'm sure you find offshore contracting and industry a convenient scapegoat for just about everything. But back here in the real world, the U.S. has a thriving software development industry and it's one of the few white-collar jobs that hasn't been trounced by the recession. The last three companies that I've worked for (to include my current employer) simply can't find enough programmers. The last one in particular had a $10,000 referral bounty for Java developers. And you didn't even have to be affiliated with the company to be awarded the bounty.
Developers in the U.S. still make decent salaries these days and likely will in the foreseeable future. And TFA itself is about how there are lots more job openings than there are programmers to fill them. Employers literally have no choice but to go overseas if they ever want their products to ship and be maintained.