You should consider setting up an SSH keypair for authenticating against SSH. Then you don't actually need to type your server password. If passwordless authentication bothers you (someone compromises your key by accessing your local home folder or whatever), you can put a password on the keypair which is different from your actual authentication password.
However, I agree, the example I gave is much too long for convenience; it's more of a root password than an every day password. Mostly it was just an example of the sort of incredibly complex password you can create that's also super easy to remember.
I have to wonder why you would wait for someone to start trying to crack your password before you used a strong one?
If you have a hard time with passwords, use some sort of mnemonic, such as lyrics from a favorite song, choose some letters / words to represent as a number instead, and use a symbol to delineate phrases.
Just from the song I'm listening to now: iWu2km!W&tW@Wis#t
Personally for some reason I have a fairly easy time remembering really obscure passwords, so I usually just use the passwd command to generate a completely random one. Some little quirk in my brain learns that the first time I type it, and I never have a problem remembering it perfectly later.
What are "3 locations?" 3 different IP addresses? What if my ISP has a load balanced transparent HTTP proxy with different public IP's?
We dealt with problems related to customers having load balanced public IP addresses such that request-to-request their IP address changes, sometimes even across A-class networks.
There is no available metadata that allows us to identify that these two IP's belong to a single physical location. IP and location are only correlated, there is no guaranteed mapping, and nobody (to my knowledge) has the data necessary to map that out.
When you say "3 locations," even relatively technically savvy people might read that as 3 physical locations (since you didn't say "3 C-class networks"). But since you don't have the information to make that call in all cases, it can be more confusing than not saying anything at all.
Besides it's a pretty sure shot most of these places aren't brute forcing passwords; major email providers already have protections in place against that. Instead they'll rely on the ex-spouse's personal knowledge to successfully complete a forgotten password request, etc. The same way Sarah Palin's email was hacked some months back.
Usually we have a specific position we're interviewing for, it's not all that open ended, and as a result we have a specific salary range in mind / budget for. We're looking for someone to fill that role, and if you're able to convince us that you're qualified for the high end of the range for which we have the money, then you'll get it.
However if we're interviewing for a junior developer position, and you come in with 12 years of experience and solidly ace the test, including pointing out errors we didn't even know were in it - we'll probably be happy to have you, and we'll probably try hard to make sure we can keep onto you by giving you plenty of opportunities for advancement into other roles. But if the head we have open is a junior role, you're not going to be able to make what you deserve until a more senior role is available. Though you can bet that when a more senior role is available, you'll be our top pick.
Most people don't do testing until the 2nd or 3rd interview. Such candidates have a pretty good idea if this is a company they'd like to work for, and if not, they refuse the interview. They don't have to spend that much time taking tests, because presumably they only end up in a few final-round interviews before they find a job (unless the testing outs them as a fraudster).
I know there are definitely people who refuse to take a test out of principle. I'm not really sure what principle this is; maybe it's that they do poorly on testing in general. But we have been burned too many times by people who know how to talk the talk but turn out to have very little real skill. Sometimes too, there are multiple similarly skilled candidates to choose from. Giving them a coding test; especially an open-ended one can give you some insight into the sort of developer they are. Some people will be a better fit for the team just out of the approaches they tend to take toward problem solving.
Also, tests must be taken in-person. We do not allow phone or otherwise remote test taking. There are a lot of really unscrupulous agencies and individuals out there. Some of them have you interview with a different person than who they claim to be, including the person who will take the tests if any. The guy completely aces your questions and really knocks your sock off with his knowledge. Then he shows up, and his voice sounds different. You put him in front of a keyboard, and he asks you which key is the "Any" key.
The thing is, it's no offense meant to the interviewee. Indeed, just as it protects our interests to be certain that we hire a qualified developer, it's in your interests too (if you are a qualified developer) - the fewer and more quickly we sort through the deadbeats, the faster we get a job to a person who deserves it. It's not that you'll necessarily lie to us, it's that there are plenty of people out there who will, and until we really get to know you, the only way to tell the difference is to require you to answer questions that only a qualified individual is able to.
They are definitely working hard on artificial sight. However it will be quite a while before artificial sight will be near as good as natural sight. Certainly I'm not an expert, but I do find the field fascinating. Slashdot user BWJones is one of the field's prominent researchers, working for the University of Utah.
There's a number of things which prohibit us from being able to produce drop-in replacements for eyeballs. One of which, for example, is that the precise nature of the work that the retina does for us is not completely understood. There was some research about a year ago which showed that the retina itself is responsible for a large amount of the neurological processing we formerly thought occurred in the brain. Also it sends a number of distinct data channels to the brain. For example, one of the channels is edge detection, one is luminosity, one is motion detection, one is color, and so on. The exact nature of all of the data channels is not precisely understood, and at a minimum we need to understand that before we can do much meaningfully with providing a replacement signal.
Apple only really has to convince one vendor for each significant type of device to support their OS, or write one themselves for a specific device if they can't find a vendor willing to work with them on it. Either way they then sell the device as approved, and they receive the middle man markup that normally would go to Fry's, etc.
As long as they sell at least one item in that category which works, the feather is firmly in their cap. Mac users look for Mac compatibility when choosing hardware.
Just as an example, Logitech mice work poorly on Macs, but because Apple provides a pretty nice mouse out of the box, nobody counts it against Apple (though I count it against Logitech for failing to provide better Mac support).
FWIW, there is a $20 program called SteerMouse which provides great support for Logitech (and other) mice, as well as providing a number of advanced features like program-specific button bindings. For example maybe in some video game that doesn't recognize the 3rd thumb button on my mouse, I can bind that to "F19" which it does recognize.
I will forgo my mod points to provide you with the very minor amount of leg work required to point out to you the explanations of why there would be a flat looking background surface.
Then let's look at a response to your initial comment here at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29230315, which notes that this is not an electron microscope like you appear to think it is, and that "shadows" are common in an AFM microscope, complete with a citation, and is followed up with a response from a different user who mentions how they see shadows on this sort of work all the time.
Next we can look at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29230195 which points out that there is a single molecule tip that scans across the target and records when it has an interaction with the electron field of atoms of the subject. Simple knowledge of van der waals forces suggests that this will create unevenness in the measurement ("shadows") in the same direction as the probe tip scans. If the van der waals forces are attractive, then the "highlight" will be the direction the tip arrives from as the tip is attracted to the subject in advance of its natural arrival.
And then the Coup de grÃce are comments http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29230461 and http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29230533 which cite the original paper where it explains the smooth background surface as being the result of the scanning tip having been moved across the target field at a fixed z-index - such that its tip wouldn't have been touching the substrate, and because the surface was an atomically smooth CU(111), any van der waals forces from the substrate should be fairly evened out.
I think the thing that Chris Burke was getting at is that it's perfectly acceptable to point out ostensibly unexplained observations of the results of a work. However, unless you have read the original work from the actual paper authors, you don't know if they're actually unexplained. All you read was a summary article by a third party which was put into layman's terms. Also you don't have the background experience to know if these sorts of phenomena are common in this field. So there's a substantial amount of hubris involved in thinking that regardless of your substantial self-admitted ignorance both of the paper and of the field in general, somehow you're still in a position to "call into question" the results. This is a phrase which (and maybe this wasn't your intention) suggests that you think the paper authors have somehow been negligent either by failing to explain certain phenomena (which they did), or perhaps even fabricated the results.
That's like you saying, "I found a dollar," and me smacking you in the mouth and calling you a liar or an imbecile, when I don't even know what a dollar looks like. Sure, you're free to make such an observation in whatever hubris laden manner you desire, but we're similarly free to point out your ignorance and idiocy.
Protip: usually when you're commenting in a thread which has abundant evidence counter to your original points either as a response to you or to the comment you were responding to (as every one of my links are), it's usually best to just go ahe
Some employees are less friendly than others. It all depends on the reason for the termination of employment. One of my coworkers was forcibly removed from campus about 10 years ago when it was discovered he was the one who was responsible for the purses which were stolen from unattended desks within the building. They did not allow him to decide what was and was not a personal effect when he was escorted out.
We always do a big pleasant sendoff when the reason for parting isn't "your ass is SO fired." Some guys don't deserve that though.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a big amateur at this stuff, but what you're saying differs from my understanding of the principles involved, including Carnot's law and Newton's laws of thermodynamics. What you're suggesting would result in a closed system which has a higher energy state as it progresses through time (thus be grounds for a perpetual motion machine).
If the photon leaves the surface of the mirror with the same energy as it had when it collided with it, then how can the sail be in a higher energy state after the fact?
This article was extremely useful to me, talking deeply about the actual physics involved, and covering the common misconceptions regarding solar sails: http://arxiv.org/html/physics/0306050.
In order to accelerate a body, you need thrust. Thrust requires energy. Radiation or particles of any sort which leave a surface at the same energy level as they arrived have not imparted any energy, thus no thrust, and therefore no acceleration. So yes, you are trying to absorb energy in a very real sense.
Radiative momentum is not like Newtonian momentum. It is a scalar defined as E/c (E being scalar and c being a constant) and not a vector.
From the article I linked above: "If the body is a perfect mirror or reflector of all incident energy, instead of a black body, then the energy absorbed is zero and so the radiation pressure is zero also. The same is true for any body, when it has reached temperature equilibrium with the radiation to which it is exposed."
The energy of a closed system is fixed. If you consider the closed system to be the light over a certain time period plus the solar craft, then it's clear that this system by itself cannot produce thrust on the craft except that you have converted energy from the light into thrust in some way. If there is thrust, and the solar energy which interacted with the craft has not changed in energy state, then the system was not closed, and the thrust came from somewhere else.
It's my understanding that the thrust in a solar sail is not from the collision of photons against the sail (in ocean sailing, thrust is the transfer of momentum from the air molecules to the sail, mast, and ultimately body of the ship). Although photons have momentum, they do not have mass, so no meaningful acceleration can be acquired in this way.
Instead, in solar sailing thrust is produced by absorbing the energy of the photons (not the momentum), and radiating it in the opposite direction (eg in the form of thermal energy).
As such, the thrust vector would be along the normal of the surface of the sail. The direction of the sail is thus the direction of the thrust. But (like ocean sailing) the more you angle your sail away from the energy source, the smaller the effective cross-sectional area, and thus the less energy is absorbed. Unlike ocean sailing, you would not be able to meaningfully tack into the wind because it is this which relies on using water to convert the angle of momentum. In space, you can orient your thrust, but you cannot orient it opposite to your energy source.
Wouldn't the propulsion surface of the sail be black to absorb the energy of the light rather than reflect it away having received none of its energy? Photons do not have mass, merely causing the photon to collide and bounce off of the mirror surface should not transfer any energy (the speed of the photon has not been altered as it's still traveling at 1c, thus no transfer of energy).
If the surface is black, the energy of the photon is absorbed, and as that surface heats up, it will radiate this energy in the opposite direction producing thrust. You can still steer, because the thrust vector will be along the normal of the surface of the sail.
I'm not sure I follow the logic. God also designed rocks, and they can inhibit brain function when applied to the brain in certain ways also. Is the fact that humans aren't indestructible proof that God doesn't exist?
That seems extremely unlikely. Books have fans who will have read a book in both print and electronic form (I own several in both). Altering the text in any meaningful way would make such a fan go, "Hey, I don't remember that," and cross-reference that specific section with their printed copy. Also many authors regularly read their own writings in multiple media (you'd be surprised how a different medium can affect the feel of a story for example). The author him/herself would very likely notice any semantic differences.
The size of the conspiracy to pull that off would be prohibitive anyway. You'd need extremely talented writers who can emulate the writing style of the original author. You'd either need cooperation from both the publisher and the distributor (two separate third parties), or you'd need skilled crackers who can inject the altered text without detection (including updating the cryptographic hashes they use to ensure the text transmission was correct).
If you did a word for word comparison, it's possible you'd notice some words have changed, but that happens in printed books too - the author or publisher may decide to rephrase a sentence which reads poorly or correct a typo, and subsequent runs of the same book will be slightly different.
All in all, to alter a text in any semantically meaningful fashion, avoid detection from the author and fans of the book, keep it consistent with the writing style and sufficiently in-line with the original text to not seem out of place, and to either include multiple parties in the conspiracy or both hack into a secured network and break data integrity systems, the risk vs reward is far too low.
90% of the time when she has a problem she wants to talk about, SHE DOES NOT WANT YOU TO SOLVE IT, she wants to TALK about it!
Yes, yes yes! Girls talk about problems because they want to talk about them. Guys talk about problems when they are looking for a solution.
For me, it's difficult to know when she's looking for advice or just talking. I try to engage her in these situations and find out if she has a plan for dealing with it. It means I'm being interested in what she has to say, which shows her that she's not just talking to a blank wall. It also means that when she has a solution in mind, I can just let her get it off her chest, and when she's looking for a solution, I can try to help.
Yeah, I think that translation you describe is not an accurate representation of the intent of the axiom. It's not "always solve the argument before you go to bed," it's "always make sure your wife knows you love her, and that you're committed to working this out."
You can stop being angry over something without closing the issue. Your spouse might have a hard time with that, and that can be a problem (as it seems to have been in your case). But most of these principles only work if adherence is reciprocal. When they are one-sided, then it's an abusive relationship instead of a healthy one.
Don't try to keep tabs, though - the geek side of you might be tempted to try "keeping score", but that is not healthy. Just serve your wife and let her (but don't force her) serve you.
Well said, and this same principle transverses simply putting your wife's interests first. Never keep score.
To put it in appropriately nerdy terms, your marriage is "Co-op Life," not "Deathmatch Life." Winning = getting to the end with your partner, not beating the other person.
FWIW: My own marriage is ~8.2 years old at this point.
Don't assume the fault is hers =) Usually it's because I'm being an asshat and I know it, I just can't admit it, and it pisses me off that I've argued myself into a corner. My wife and I rarely argue even on fairly small issues, literally 1 to 2 times a year. When we do it can be pretty energetic though, probably because we don't have that much practice at it.
The thing that trips my temper more than anything else is anger at myself. I'll trip it when I can't get some chunk of code to work which really ought to work. I'll trip it when I feel like I've screwed up really bad, etc. When I feel that coming on in an argument with my wife, it's not usually at her (maybe not ever, though I can't say I remember the topic of our arguments even as soon as a week later), it's at myself.
The problem is that when I cross my threshold of being able to keep it under control, I'm not going to be especially logical until the anger dissipates. So my rage will easily shift to whatever thing has caused me annoyance most recently. That is to say, I might be angry over broken code, but if my wife says, "You need to calm down," in any but the most caring sensitive and positive way, my anger will shift directly to her and the code will be forgotten. Like I said, at these times I'm not being logical. Her best course of action is to let my rage run its course and just stay out of my way until it passes.
This isn't a characteristic of myself that I'm proud of in the least. In fact it's through the above sort of logical analysis that I'm able to control it as well as I am. If there were two things that I could change about myself, it's this and my ridiculous competitive need to succeed and to win at everything (I think the two are closely related). I'm working hard on correcting both, but so far I haven't completely mastered either as eventually I have a breaking point.
A lot of traditional wisdom is honestly some of the best wisdom. When reading books and whatnot, sure it may often be presented in ways that are dated, but there's still a core of truth to much of it. For example:
1) Never go to bed angry. You might go to bed before you solve the problem, but no matter what it is, no matter how bad it is, you can always find a way to hug your wife, kiss her, and tell her that the two of you will be able to work it out. Going to bed angry breeds resentment.
2) Find a few minutes to connect with your wife every day. Tell her that you love her in a way that's not just a repeat utterance of the phrase (like some people say "Have a good day," at the end of every transaction at the store). Change the word order, change the inflection, make eye contact, and hold her hand - something to indicate that you mean it and that you're not just saying it because it's supposed to be said.
3) Never say the word divorce. Not even once. It doesn't matter how mad you are, that is a word that once spoken you cannot take it back. It represents a fracture that will never heal.
4) Agree with each other that when you're having an argument which gets particularly heated, it is ok for either person to walk out of the room, and the argument can just wait until tempers have cooled down a bit. Personally I've always had a really bad temper, and it's only through substantial effort that I have learned to not allow it to control me. But I have a breaking point, and because I'm working so hard at controlling my temper by this point already, I go from seemingly relatively calm to white hot don't-later-remember-what-happened rage within a few seconds. When I fear I'm approaching that point, I walk away, and my wife lets me go. This is much harder than it seems, because both people are probably very angry, hurt, and frustrated at this point, and it's hard to set that aside for the moment. When you resume the discussion later (usually not very long, just long enough to cool off some), cooler heads almost always make it much smoother. DO NOT use this as a way to avoid an argument - this is meant to protect your marriage; abusing it is a form of dishonesty, and will cripple its ability to act as a safety valve. When you get to that point, the things you say can be so hurtful that they remain long after the original trifle that the argument was about is forgotten. When you walk out on the argument, you must always return to it, and it really should be the person who walked out who initiates the return.
5) Always put your wife first. Her interests always trump yours, just as they would when you're dating. That might sound like an unbalanced relationship, but when it's reciprocal the decision process is each person advocating for the other. It tends to cause much more level-headed discussions, and it reinforces the strength of your bond because you feel as if your spouse genuinely cares about what's best for you (and you're right about that). Women are much more likely than men to do this naturally, so you may have to work at it. Sometimes you don't get to do what you wanted to do, but if it's actually important to you, then she'll see and understand that and will advocate it for you. Often you'll later discover that it wasn't nearly as important to you as you thought it was at the time.
All this is is a loan using the state buildings as collateral. Calling it anything else (as they are doing) - even if you structure it that way legally - is an attempt to cloud the issue.
I didn't mean to say that religion has no place. I only meant to say that government has no place endorsing one religion over another. My apologies if I came across otherwise.
I'm also not saying that it's okay to be deceitful if it produces a positive result as a rule (though there are times when this is the case), I'm saying that even if we misunderstand what global warming is or what causes it, in any event there is a positive aspect in the form of increased ecological awareness by the public at large.
Further there are sufficiently many detractors of global warming whose interests seem to be personal rather than global, whose arguments against it are based more out of fear and uncertainty than scientific fact, which may take the opportunity to loudly declare, "See, global warming is a fraud, go back to your planet trashing ways." Essentially I'm saying that there's a danger that much of the progress we've made in related areas like green technology will be abandoned if people fail to realize that these things are worth pursuing whether or not global warming turns out to be what we think it is.
Global warming is just the excuse; the result is necessary either way. Proponents of ecologically sound behavior/decisions/technology have been around well before global warming got everyone's attention. Even if you remove global warming from the equation it doesn't change that being better to our planet is the right decision.
You're still for some reason insisting that ecology and politics are hopelessly intertwined and perhaps even parts of the same beast. I don't agree that this is the case, and I think that to claim it is unnecessarily pollutes otherwise productive conversation on one or the other.
They are certainly influenced by each other, but it's still possible to discuss one meaningfully without involving the other, and doing so helps to keep the relevant issues substantially more clear. When talking about the overlap, you can do so in a way which speaks specifically to the overlap and sandboxes the discussion of the overlap to overlap-relevant topics (such as political ecological policy). I'm not talking about overlap though, I'm talking about the benefit that is had when individual people are making ecologically sound decisions even when it's not the optimum fiscal decision.
Maybe the global warming has given governments a new way to hide their corruption, or a new excuse to expand it. That doesn't make ecological awareness a bad thing, it makes that specific behavior a bad thing. You can't simply refuse to converse on any subject which has political implications just because doing so opens opportunities to political opportunists. In fact, trying to equate them like you do probably only makes that worse.
You can separate politics from the issues which it attempts to entangle itself with. Claiming otherwise is succumbing to the strategy you propose to fight.
Finally, the implication that ecological good intentions will necessarily result in "millions of people dying younger, and having substandard lives," is pretty far off the mark. The whole point of ecological awareness is that you 1) make the planet a healthier place to live by, for example, reducing pollution which has a direct positive effect on the quality and quantity of a person's years on earth, and 2) doing good by the environment does not necessarily mean sacrificing convenience - it's specifically this that is the target of most modern alternative energy research.
Holy cow, it's hard to take you and FireStormZ seriously when you keep putting words into my mouth like that and keep trying to muddy the topic with irrelevant tangents.
I've said it several times now, and I'll say it again. The only point I'm making in this conversation has nothing to do with politics, it has nothing to do with Iraq, it has nothing to do with the economy.
It's purely this: The global warming moniker promotes ecological awareness, which is a good thing even if it turns out that we misunderstand what causes global warming.
How you derive anything political out of that I can't quite gather, but construct your straw men elsewhere please. If you have something to say about the previous paragraph, then congratulations you're officially taking part in the conversation; otherwise go try to sell your distractions to someone else.
You've failed to shine any light at all. You took a statement I made about a single instance, and pretended as though I presented it as a universal truth. Let's go back to my original statement:
Even if global warming is a purely natural phenomenon, even if it didn't exist at all and this was all just a natural fluctuation, the idea of global warming has been very good for us as a whole.
Nowhere in there do I claim this is a principle to be upheld in all cases. Nor do I anywhere claim there are lies present; I did voice doubts that global warming is man-made, but I did not voice doubts that it exists, and I did not and do not voice doubts that most advocates of the global warming theory are intentionally misleading anyone; at worst they draw the wrong conclusions.
You further attempt to pollute the discussion by refusing to actually engage in any conversation on environmentalism, and instead repeatedly retreat to a position which has no bearing on the debate at hand, and whose parallels you have completely failed to demonstrate.
Step forward and respond directly without engaging in tangents: Do you think that regardless of whether global warming is man-made, that the result of public awareness of the phenomenon is an increased ecological awareness by the world at large? Yes or no?
The only point I'm making is that it has done so. Anything other than that which you infer from this are your words put into my mouth, and I reject them as the badly crafted attempt at misdirection that they are.
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You should consider setting up an SSH keypair for authenticating against SSH. Then you don't actually need to type your server password. If passwordless authentication bothers you (someone compromises your key by accessing your local home folder or whatever), you can put a password on the keypair which is different from your actual authentication password.
However, I agree, the example I gave is much too long for convenience; it's more of a root password than an every day password. Mostly it was just an example of the sort of incredibly complex password you can create that's also super easy to remember.
I have to wonder why you would wait for someone to start trying to crack your password before you used a strong one?
If you have a hard time with passwords, use some sort of mnemonic, such as lyrics from a favorite song, choose some letters / words to represent as a number instead, and use a symbol to delineate phrases.
Just from the song I'm listening to now: iWu2km!W&tW@Wis#t
Personally for some reason I have a fairly easy time remembering really obscure passwords, so I usually just use the passwd command to generate a completely random one. Some little quirk in my brain learns that the first time I type it, and I never have a problem remembering it perfectly later.
What are "3 locations?" 3 different IP addresses? What if my ISP has a load balanced transparent HTTP proxy with different public IP's?
We dealt with problems related to customers having load balanced public IP addresses such that request-to-request their IP address changes, sometimes even across A-class networks.
There is no available metadata that allows us to identify that these two IP's belong to a single physical location. IP and location are only correlated, there is no guaranteed mapping, and nobody (to my knowledge) has the data necessary to map that out.
When you say "3 locations," even relatively technically savvy people might read that as 3 physical locations (since you didn't say "3 C-class networks"). But since you don't have the information to make that call in all cases, it can be more confusing than not saying anything at all.
Besides it's a pretty sure shot most of these places aren't brute forcing passwords; major email providers already have protections in place against that. Instead they'll rely on the ex-spouse's personal knowledge to successfully complete a forgotten password request, etc. The same way Sarah Palin's email was hacked some months back.
Usually we have a specific position we're interviewing for, it's not all that open ended, and as a result we have a specific salary range in mind / budget for. We're looking for someone to fill that role, and if you're able to convince us that you're qualified for the high end of the range for which we have the money, then you'll get it.
However if we're interviewing for a junior developer position, and you come in with 12 years of experience and solidly ace the test, including pointing out errors we didn't even know were in it - we'll probably be happy to have you, and we'll probably try hard to make sure we can keep onto you by giving you plenty of opportunities for advancement into other roles. But if the head we have open is a junior role, you're not going to be able to make what you deserve until a more senior role is available. Though you can bet that when a more senior role is available, you'll be our top pick.
Most people don't do testing until the 2nd or 3rd interview. Such candidates have a pretty good idea if this is a company they'd like to work for, and if not, they refuse the interview. They don't have to spend that much time taking tests, because presumably they only end up in a few final-round interviews before they find a job (unless the testing outs them as a fraudster).
I know there are definitely people who refuse to take a test out of principle. I'm not really sure what principle this is; maybe it's that they do poorly on testing in general. But we have been burned too many times by people who know how to talk the talk but turn out to have very little real skill. Sometimes too, there are multiple similarly skilled candidates to choose from. Giving them a coding test; especially an open-ended one can give you some insight into the sort of developer they are. Some people will be a better fit for the team just out of the approaches they tend to take toward problem solving.
Also, tests must be taken in-person. We do not allow phone or otherwise remote test taking. There are a lot of really unscrupulous agencies and individuals out there. Some of them have you interview with a different person than who they claim to be, including the person who will take the tests if any. The guy completely aces your questions and really knocks your sock off with his knowledge. Then he shows up, and his voice sounds different. You put him in front of a keyboard, and he asks you which key is the "Any" key.
The thing is, it's no offense meant to the interviewee. Indeed, just as it protects our interests to be certain that we hire a qualified developer, it's in your interests too (if you are a qualified developer) - the fewer and more quickly we sort through the deadbeats, the faster we get a job to a person who deserves it. It's not that you'll necessarily lie to us, it's that there are plenty of people out there who will, and until we really get to know you, the only way to tell the difference is to require you to answer questions that only a qualified individual is able to.
They are definitely working hard on artificial sight. However it will be quite a while before artificial sight will be near as good as natural sight. Certainly I'm not an expert, but I do find the field fascinating. Slashdot user BWJones is one of the field's prominent researchers, working for the University of Utah.
There's a number of things which prohibit us from being able to produce drop-in replacements for eyeballs. One of which, for example, is that the precise nature of the work that the retina does for us is not completely understood. There was some research about a year ago which showed that the retina itself is responsible for a large amount of the neurological processing we formerly thought occurred in the brain. Also it sends a number of distinct data channels to the brain. For example, one of the channels is edge detection, one is luminosity, one is motion detection, one is color, and so on. The exact nature of all of the data channels is not precisely understood, and at a minimum we need to understand that before we can do much meaningfully with providing a replacement signal.
Apple only really has to convince one vendor for each significant type of device to support their OS, or write one themselves for a specific device if they can't find a vendor willing to work with them on it. Either way they then sell the device as approved, and they receive the middle man markup that normally would go to Fry's, etc.
As long as they sell at least one item in that category which works, the feather is firmly in their cap. Mac users look for Mac compatibility when choosing hardware.
Just as an example, Logitech mice work poorly on Macs, but because Apple provides a pretty nice mouse out of the box, nobody counts it against Apple (though I count it against Logitech for failing to provide better Mac support).
FWIW, there is a $20 program called SteerMouse which provides great support for Logitech (and other) mice, as well as providing a number of advanced features like program-specific button bindings. For example maybe in some video game that doesn't recognize the 3rd thumb button on my mouse, I can bind that to "F19" which it does recognize.
I will forgo my mod points to provide you with the very minor amount of leg work required to point out to you the explanations of why there would be a flat looking background surface.
Let's start with http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29235419 from a user who is a technician on such devices.
Then let's look at a response to your initial comment here at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29230315, which notes that this is not an electron microscope like you appear to think it is, and that "shadows" are common in an AFM microscope, complete with a citation, and is followed up with a response from a different user who mentions how they see shadows on this sort of work all the time.
Next we can look at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29230195 which points out that there is a single molecule tip that scans across the target and records when it has an interaction with the electron field of atoms of the subject. Simple knowledge of van der waals forces suggests that this will create unevenness in the measurement ("shadows") in the same direction as the probe tip scans. If the van der waals forces are attractive, then the "highlight" will be the direction the tip arrives from as the tip is attracted to the subject in advance of its natural arrival.
We'll follow that with a comment http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29230421 which talks about atomically smooth surfaces such as CU(111), complete with two citations.
And then the Coup de grÃce are comments http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29230461 and http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1350843&cid=29230533 which cite the original paper where it explains the smooth background surface as being the result of the scanning tip having been moved across the target field at a fixed z-index - such that its tip wouldn't have been touching the substrate, and because the surface was an atomically smooth CU(111), any van der waals forces from the substrate should be fairly evened out.
I think the thing that Chris Burke was getting at is that it's perfectly acceptable to point out ostensibly unexplained observations of the results of a work. However, unless you have read the original work from the actual paper authors, you don't know if they're actually unexplained. All you read was a summary article by a third party which was put into layman's terms. Also you don't have the background experience to know if these sorts of phenomena are common in this field. So there's a substantial amount of hubris involved in thinking that regardless of your substantial self-admitted ignorance both of the paper and of the field in general, somehow you're still in a position to "call into question" the results. This is a phrase which (and maybe this wasn't your intention) suggests that you think the paper authors have somehow been negligent either by failing to explain certain phenomena (which they did), or perhaps even fabricated the results.
That's like you saying, "I found a dollar," and me smacking you in the mouth and calling you a liar or an imbecile, when I don't even know what a dollar looks like. Sure, you're free to make such an observation in whatever hubris laden manner you desire, but we're similarly free to point out your ignorance and idiocy.
Protip: usually when you're commenting in a thread which has abundant evidence counter to your original points either as a response to you or to the comment you were responding to (as every one of my links are), it's usually best to just go ahe
Some employees are less friendly than others. It all depends on the reason for the termination of employment. One of my coworkers was forcibly removed from campus about 10 years ago when it was discovered he was the one who was responsible for the purses which were stolen from unattended desks within the building. They did not allow him to decide what was and was not a personal effect when he was escorted out.
We always do a big pleasant sendoff when the reason for parting isn't "your ass is SO fired." Some guys don't deserve that though.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a big amateur at this stuff, but what you're saying differs from my understanding of the principles involved, including Carnot's law and Newton's laws of thermodynamics. What you're suggesting would result in a closed system which has a higher energy state as it progresses through time (thus be grounds for a perpetual motion machine).
If the photon leaves the surface of the mirror with the same energy as it had when it collided with it, then how can the sail be in a higher energy state after the fact?
This article was extremely useful to me, talking deeply about the actual physics involved, and covering the common misconceptions regarding solar sails: http://arxiv.org/html/physics/0306050.
In order to accelerate a body, you need thrust. Thrust requires energy. Radiation or particles of any sort which leave a surface at the same energy level as they arrived have not imparted any energy, thus no thrust, and therefore no acceleration. So yes, you are trying to absorb energy in a very real sense.
Radiative momentum is not like Newtonian momentum. It is a scalar defined as E/c (E being scalar and c being a constant) and not a vector.
From the article I linked above: "If the body is a perfect mirror or reflector of all incident energy, instead of a black body, then the energy absorbed is zero and so the radiation pressure is zero also. The same is true for any body, when it has reached temperature equilibrium with the radiation to which it is exposed."
The energy of a closed system is fixed. If you consider the closed system to be the light over a certain time period plus the solar craft, then it's clear that this system by itself cannot produce thrust on the craft except that you have converted energy from the light into thrust in some way. If there is thrust, and the solar energy which interacted with the craft has not changed in energy state, then the system was not closed, and the thrust came from somewhere else.
It's my understanding that the thrust in a solar sail is not from the collision of photons against the sail (in ocean sailing, thrust is the transfer of momentum from the air molecules to the sail, mast, and ultimately body of the ship). Although photons have momentum, they do not have mass, so no meaningful acceleration can be acquired in this way.
Instead, in solar sailing thrust is produced by absorbing the energy of the photons (not the momentum), and radiating it in the opposite direction (eg in the form of thermal energy).
As such, the thrust vector would be along the normal of the surface of the sail. The direction of the sail is thus the direction of the thrust. But (like ocean sailing) the more you angle your sail away from the energy source, the smaller the effective cross-sectional area, and thus the less energy is absorbed. Unlike ocean sailing, you would not be able to meaningfully tack into the wind because it is this which relies on using water to convert the angle of momentum. In space, you can orient your thrust, but you cannot orient it opposite to your energy source.
Wouldn't the propulsion surface of the sail be black to absorb the energy of the light rather than reflect it away having received none of its energy? Photons do not have mass, merely causing the photon to collide and bounce off of the mirror surface should not transfer any energy (the speed of the photon has not been altered as it's still traveling at 1c, thus no transfer of energy).
If the surface is black, the energy of the photon is absorbed, and as that surface heats up, it will radiate this energy in the opposite direction producing thrust. You can still steer, because the thrust vector will be along the normal of the surface of the sail.
I'm not sure I follow the logic. God also designed rocks, and they can inhibit brain function when applied to the brain in certain ways also. Is the fact that humans aren't indestructible proof that God doesn't exist?
That seems extremely unlikely. Books have fans who will have read a book in both print and electronic form (I own several in both). Altering the text in any meaningful way would make such a fan go, "Hey, I don't remember that," and cross-reference that specific section with their printed copy. Also many authors regularly read their own writings in multiple media (you'd be surprised how a different medium can affect the feel of a story for example). The author him/herself would very likely notice any semantic differences.
The size of the conspiracy to pull that off would be prohibitive anyway. You'd need extremely talented writers who can emulate the writing style of the original author. You'd either need cooperation from both the publisher and the distributor (two separate third parties), or you'd need skilled crackers who can inject the altered text without detection (including updating the cryptographic hashes they use to ensure the text transmission was correct).
If you did a word for word comparison, it's possible you'd notice some words have changed, but that happens in printed books too - the author or publisher may decide to rephrase a sentence which reads poorly or correct a typo, and subsequent runs of the same book will be slightly different.
All in all, to alter a text in any semantically meaningful fashion, avoid detection from the author and fans of the book, keep it consistent with the writing style and sufficiently in-line with the original text to not seem out of place, and to either include multiple parties in the conspiracy or both hack into a secured network and break data integrity systems, the risk vs reward is far too low.
Yes, yes yes! Girls talk about problems because they want to talk about them. Guys talk about problems when they are looking for a solution.
For me, it's difficult to know when she's looking for advice or just talking. I try to engage her in these situations and find out if she has a plan for dealing with it. It means I'm being interested in what she has to say, which shows her that she's not just talking to a blank wall. It also means that when she has a solution in mind, I can just let her get it off her chest, and when she's looking for a solution, I can try to help.
Yeah, I think that translation you describe is not an accurate representation of the intent of the axiom. It's not "always solve the argument before you go to bed," it's "always make sure your wife knows you love her, and that you're committed to working this out."
You can stop being angry over something without closing the issue. Your spouse might have a hard time with that, and that can be a problem (as it seems to have been in your case). But most of these principles only work if adherence is reciprocal. When they are one-sided, then it's an abusive relationship instead of a healthy one.
Well said, and this same principle transverses simply putting your wife's interests first. Never keep score.
To put it in appropriately nerdy terms, your marriage is "Co-op Life," not "Deathmatch Life." Winning = getting to the end with your partner, not beating the other person.
FWIW: My own marriage is ~8.2 years old at this point.
Don't assume the fault is hers =) Usually it's because I'm being an asshat and I know it, I just can't admit it, and it pisses me off that I've argued myself into a corner. My wife and I rarely argue even on fairly small issues, literally 1 to 2 times a year. When we do it can be pretty energetic though, probably because we don't have that much practice at it.
The thing that trips my temper more than anything else is anger at myself. I'll trip it when I can't get some chunk of code to work which really ought to work. I'll trip it when I feel like I've screwed up really bad, etc. When I feel that coming on in an argument with my wife, it's not usually at her (maybe not ever, though I can't say I remember the topic of our arguments even as soon as a week later), it's at myself.
The problem is that when I cross my threshold of being able to keep it under control, I'm not going to be especially logical until the anger dissipates. So my rage will easily shift to whatever thing has caused me annoyance most recently. That is to say, I might be angry over broken code, but if my wife says, "You need to calm down," in any but the most caring sensitive and positive way, my anger will shift directly to her and the code will be forgotten. Like I said, at these times I'm not being logical. Her best course of action is to let my rage run its course and just stay out of my way until it passes.
This isn't a characteristic of myself that I'm proud of in the least. In fact it's through the above sort of logical analysis that I'm able to control it as well as I am. If there were two things that I could change about myself, it's this and my ridiculous competitive need to succeed and to win at everything (I think the two are closely related). I'm working hard on correcting both, but so far I haven't completely mastered either as eventually I have a breaking point.
A lot of traditional wisdom is honestly some of the best wisdom. When reading books and whatnot, sure it may often be presented in ways that are dated, but there's still a core of truth to much of it. For example:
1) Never go to bed angry. You might go to bed before you solve the problem, but no matter what it is, no matter how bad it is, you can always find a way to hug your wife, kiss her, and tell her that the two of you will be able to work it out. Going to bed angry breeds resentment.
2) Find a few minutes to connect with your wife every day. Tell her that you love her in a way that's not just a repeat utterance of the phrase (like some people say "Have a good day," at the end of every transaction at the store). Change the word order, change the inflection, make eye contact, and hold her hand - something to indicate that you mean it and that you're not just saying it because it's supposed to be said.
3) Never say the word divorce. Not even once. It doesn't matter how mad you are, that is a word that once spoken you cannot take it back. It represents a fracture that will never heal.
4) Agree with each other that when you're having an argument which gets particularly heated, it is ok for either person to walk out of the room, and the argument can just wait until tempers have cooled down a bit. Personally I've always had a really bad temper, and it's only through substantial effort that I have learned to not allow it to control me. But I have a breaking point, and because I'm working so hard at controlling my temper by this point already, I go from seemingly relatively calm to white hot don't-later-remember-what-happened rage within a few seconds. When I fear I'm approaching that point, I walk away, and my wife lets me go. This is much harder than it seems, because both people are probably very angry, hurt, and frustrated at this point, and it's hard to set that aside for the moment. When you resume the discussion later (usually not very long, just long enough to cool off some), cooler heads almost always make it much smoother. DO NOT use this as a way to avoid an argument - this is meant to protect your marriage; abusing it is a form of dishonesty, and will cripple its ability to act as a safety valve. When you get to that point, the things you say can be so hurtful that they remain long after the original trifle that the argument was about is forgotten. When you walk out on the argument, you must always return to it, and it really should be the person who walked out who initiates the return.
5) Always put your wife first. Her interests always trump yours, just as they would when you're dating. That might sound like an unbalanced relationship, but when it's reciprocal the decision process is each person advocating for the other. It tends to cause much more level-headed discussions, and it reinforces the strength of your bond because you feel as if your spouse genuinely cares about what's best for you (and you're right about that). Women are much more likely than men to do this naturally, so you may have to work at it. Sometimes you don't get to do what you wanted to do, but if it's actually important to you, then she'll see and understand that and will advocate it for you. Often you'll later discover that it wasn't nearly as important to you as you thought it was at the time.
Presumably the terms of the sale cover that.
All this is is a loan using the state buildings as collateral. Calling it anything else (as they are doing) - even if you structure it that way legally - is an attempt to cloud the issue.
I didn't mean to say that religion has no place. I only meant to say that government has no place endorsing one religion over another. My apologies if I came across otherwise.
I'm also not saying that it's okay to be deceitful if it produces a positive result as a rule (though there are times when this is the case), I'm saying that even if we misunderstand what global warming is or what causes it, in any event there is a positive aspect in the form of increased ecological awareness by the public at large.
Further there are sufficiently many detractors of global warming whose interests seem to be personal rather than global, whose arguments against it are based more out of fear and uncertainty than scientific fact, which may take the opportunity to loudly declare, "See, global warming is a fraud, go back to your planet trashing ways." Essentially I'm saying that there's a danger that much of the progress we've made in related areas like green technology will be abandoned if people fail to realize that these things are worth pursuing whether or not global warming turns out to be what we think it is.
Global warming is just the excuse; the result is necessary either way. Proponents of ecologically sound behavior/decisions/technology have been around well before global warming got everyone's attention. Even if you remove global warming from the equation it doesn't change that being better to our planet is the right decision.
You're still for some reason insisting that ecology and politics are hopelessly intertwined and perhaps even parts of the same beast. I don't agree that this is the case, and I think that to claim it is unnecessarily pollutes otherwise productive conversation on one or the other.
They are certainly influenced by each other, but it's still possible to discuss one meaningfully without involving the other, and doing so helps to keep the relevant issues substantially more clear. When talking about the overlap, you can do so in a way which speaks specifically to the overlap and sandboxes the discussion of the overlap to overlap-relevant topics (such as political ecological policy). I'm not talking about overlap though, I'm talking about the benefit that is had when individual people are making ecologically sound decisions even when it's not the optimum fiscal decision.
Maybe the global warming has given governments a new way to hide their corruption, or a new excuse to expand it. That doesn't make ecological awareness a bad thing, it makes that specific behavior a bad thing. You can't simply refuse to converse on any subject which has political implications just because doing so opens opportunities to political opportunists. In fact, trying to equate them like you do probably only makes that worse.
You can separate politics from the issues which it attempts to entangle itself with. Claiming otherwise is succumbing to the strategy you propose to fight.
Finally, the implication that ecological good intentions will necessarily result in "millions of people dying younger, and having substandard lives," is pretty far off the mark. The whole point of ecological awareness is that you 1) make the planet a healthier place to live by, for example, reducing pollution which has a direct positive effect on the quality and quantity of a person's years on earth, and 2) doing good by the environment does not necessarily mean sacrificing convenience - it's specifically this that is the target of most modern alternative energy research.
Holy cow, it's hard to take you and FireStormZ seriously when you keep putting words into my mouth like that and keep trying to muddy the topic with irrelevant tangents.
I've said it several times now, and I'll say it again. The only point I'm making in this conversation has nothing to do with politics, it has nothing to do with Iraq, it has nothing to do with the economy.
It's purely this: The global warming moniker promotes ecological awareness, which is a good thing even if it turns out that we misunderstand what causes global warming.
How you derive anything political out of that I can't quite gather, but construct your straw men elsewhere please. If you have something to say about the previous paragraph, then congratulations you're officially taking part in the conversation; otherwise go try to sell your distractions to someone else.
Am I being trolled, or are you serious?
You've failed to shine any light at all. You took a statement I made about a single instance, and pretended as though I presented it as a universal truth. Let's go back to my original statement:
Nowhere in there do I claim this is a principle to be upheld in all cases. Nor do I anywhere claim there are lies present; I did voice doubts that global warming is man-made, but I did not voice doubts that it exists, and I did not and do not voice doubts that most advocates of the global warming theory are intentionally misleading anyone; at worst they draw the wrong conclusions.
You further attempt to pollute the discussion by refusing to actually engage in any conversation on environmentalism, and instead repeatedly retreat to a position which has no bearing on the debate at hand, and whose parallels you have completely failed to demonstrate.
Step forward and respond directly without engaging in tangents: Do you think that regardless of whether global warming is man-made, that the result of public awareness of the phenomenon is an increased ecological awareness by the world at large? Yes or no?
The only point I'm making is that it has done so. Anything other than that which you infer from this are your words put into my mouth, and I reject them as the badly crafted attempt at misdirection that they are.