Jeema3000

I tend to actually think that the period during and immediately after World War 2 saw an even greater increase in terms of technology. Think about this, for example:

In 1940, the US army air force's best fighter plane was probably the P-40: a piston-driven, straight-wing, propeller-driven aircraft that had a top speed of 360mph.

A mere 20 years later they were using the F-106 Delta Dart, a jet-powered, delta wing aircraft that had a top speed of 1,525mph (Mach 2.3)...

I agree with everyone else: try to get your old job back. If they're professionals (and you didn't burn any bridges), then they should realize that it was nothing personal when you looked for other employment.

True, they may question your loyalty in the future, but if they like you, then they will probably be relieved that you're staying. They might even try to address whatever it was that made you look elsewhere to begin with...

I think what he's just saying is this:

Punishment is typically expensive; rehabilitation is typically cheap and more effective in reducing future crimes after the person is out in society again.

Punishment, therefore, should be reserved for the more heinous crimes where rehabilitation isn't likely to work, and rehabilitation should be used for less-heinous crimes where rehabilitation is likely to succeed.

I might be biased as a retrocoder hobbyist myself, but I feel like 6502 assembly would still be very useful in the classroom as a teaching tool, with it's small and (IMO) relatively straightforward instruction set - in some ways it's sort of like the 8-bit RISC-before-there-was-RISC processor. Plus there's great retrocoding potential once you learn it! ;)

Exactly. There's no way to know if the action of pushing the fat man onto the tracks would actually stop the train. Worst case scenario, you might end up killing one extra person.

In the 'switching the track' example, on the other hand, the worst case scenario is that your actions have no effect on the outcome and no additional people die than would have died otherwise.

So am I. It's illegal to ask questions about family or marital status to a prospective employee, in the US at least. Your company could be sued for discrimination if you ask those types of questions to candidates.

A lot has changed since 2004. Yahoo for example has 3 pane viewing, tabbed email and chat, you can scroll through and see every email in your Inbox ever received without having to click any links.

It feels pretty much like a desktop application, actually...

First, before you ever turn the computer on, you should explain to them how computers work from a high-level that a kid can understand - i.e. how they are dumb, and they just follow instructions that we give them, and how those instructions are what's known as the program, etc.

Then I would suggest starting out with Hello World in Javascript. Javascript is straightforward, relatively forgiving, and it's on every computer, so it's basically the modern-day BASIC in my opinion. Show them what happens when things go wrong, not just when things go right, in order to drive home how computers are really just slaves to our directions.

Then maybe have them start working on a game, one piece at a time. Kids like games, after all. Maybe something simple like Tic-Tac-Toe or a Pong clone. The main advantage here in using Javascript is that they can email it to themselves and then play it anywhere with no need to set anything up - they can also continue to tinker with it on any computer after the teaching is over.

Can someone who knows more than I do about this explain exactly why the government uses 'no-bid' and 'cost-plus' contracts and why nobody seems to complain about the seemingly obvious (to me, at least) conflict of interest here?

Slideshow on my Intel Core 2 E5400 with the latest version of Firefox.

If this is the best HTML 5 has to offer over Flash, color me not impressed.

EDIT: There seems to be something wrong with Firefox on my computer. It doesn't seem to want to update HTML canvas properly unless I'm actually moving the mouse around in the canvas. Might have something to do with it. Weird...

While these are some rather colorful and interesting ideas, might I suggest ROM chips?

goes back to playing 30+ year old Atari games

It's also very annoying to have to un-indent an entire block of code during debugging just because you want to comment out the conditional statement around it...

I agree that Javascript is the true heir to BASIC. It's available on pretty much every computer out-of-the-box, much in the same way that BASIC was in the 80s. It's also a lot easier to deploy and share, as you said.

It sounds like maybe you're being a little too hard on yourself. The only person telling you that you have to be a millionaire by age X, or that you have to get a job right this minute, or that your project has to be completely perfect is you.

It maybe sounds cliched, but I say just do the best you can and set expectations realistically. If you're not getting callbacks for jobs it doesn't mean you suck - it probably just means your resume/CV or your approach needs to be tweaked. Maybe let some other people look things over and see what they think? You're obviously motivated, so I think you're one step ahead of a lot of people already...

Because it's a strategic risk for a hardware maker to be dependent on an outside company's software application to move hardware units. Reason being that the other company could take the killer app to another platform and quit supporting your platform altogether - and then your sales go down the tubes.

If it were the other way around: if women had to buy something in order to gain a man's affection and commitment, it would be considered a servile and sexist tradition. Yet somehow the tradition of men buying expensive engagement rings for women survives. I say the heck with that. If she gets an expensive ring, then I want an expensive ring too. Equal rights! :)

You're missing the point: of course it's not in BP's interests to have a well explode, but the people making the important decisions are often not making those decisions based on sound engineering, but on political pressures and incentives from above.

Richard Feynman showed an excellent example of this after the Challenger disaster. He was on the Presidential task force after that disaster, and he asked NASA management and engineers, separately, to quantify what they felt the odds of a catastrophic failure resulting in crew loss were prior to the disaster. The risk values quoted by engineers and by management were something like 2-3 orders of magnitude different (with the engineers quoting the much more likely value)...

"Gmail has become unusably slow"

If it's that bad, then it begs the question: why do you continue to use it? There's plenty of alternatives. Vote with your feet and let them know.

The only way this can ever happen, I think, is if humans are able to model the building blocks of the brain (i.e neurons) and the processes that created it (i.e. evolution), because there's just no way we'll ever understand all of the emergent behavior of a human brain, as I see it. After all, don't you need something vastly more complex than the thing you're studying in order to understand it?

It may be easier to just conceptualize it as a singularity that was always existing and always exploding in a single, simultaneous moment of time.

Then again maybe not... :)

BTW, if you read the thread on AtariAge.com and were wondering, Curt Vendel is the head of Legacy Engineering, who designed the 'Atari-on-chip' that was used in the Atari Flashback 2 that was sold in stores a couple years back.

Apparently he doesn't think too highly of Nolan Bushnell...

Unfortunately for Apple, the average user doesn't care about any of this. The average user just want to go to a website and have it work. IJW technology: It Just Works.

Incarceration rates in the United States today, which are due largely to the anti-drug get-tough policies of the last 30 years, should alarm anyone who believes in the principles of liberty that this nation was founded on, IMO:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

Of course aliens could do that, but would they? The evidence so far says that humans in possession of a superweapon, at least, don't annihilate one another simply because of the possible threat of superweapon acquisition posed by the other - otherwise we would have annihilated the Russians and/or Chinese in the 40s and early 50s.

At any rate one would think that aliens would at least understand the concept of mutually assured destruction and realize that we would not destroy them if they were capable of retaliating in kind...

...and then we wake up the next day and Google search and YouTube have "mysteriously stopped working" in all Safari browsers...

Doesn't matter. You aren't allowed to shoot wounded combatants who are out of the action.

According to the Geneva Conventions, you are not allowed to shoot wounded combatants who are out of the battle... period. End of story.

It also specifically provides protections for civilians who are trying to assist wounded soldiers, so it's immaterial whether or not they were official responders or not.

Either way this is a war crime and needs to be prosecuted as such. Those who conspired to suppress it should also be charged as co-conspirators.

guest@xkcd:/$ man next

Request confirmed; you will be reincarnated as a man next.

I think the main problem may actually be in not setting a price. If you don't specify any price whatsoever, people will be more reluctant to donate because they'll be worried that their donation will be perceived as too cheap, so instead they just choose to remain anonymous and donate nothing at all. On the other hand if you come right out and say 'even a dollar is a welcome contribution!', then who knows...maybe people will only donate a dollar, but maybe a lot more people will donate too...

I'm always kind of suspect of these 'programming language popularity' measurements because they usually rely on search engine result volume. I think a more meaningful metric would be, say, job openings by programming language.