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cgoreon Twenty Reasons to Believe Oswald Acted Alone

A few years back I bought a Carcano, the rifle used in the JFK assassination. I had always remembered every year some "firearms expert" being trotted out and claiming that there was no way that shot could have been made.

I don't think I could reliably make that shot, but a really good shooter could. It is actually a pretty accurate rifle. It is really unreliable though (although that might be just because it is from WW2). So whenever the TV tries to tell you something about firearms, just remember that most news reporters haven't been near anything more powerful than a NERF gun in their entire lives.

An interesting little bit of trivia. Mussolini was a really hard-core atheist, to the point where he even tried to get rid of the Christian year system. And I don't mean just trying to replace BC/AD with BCE/CE, he restarted the calendar at the date in which he took power in Italy. Mine was stamped "1941 XIX", 19 years by Mussolini's count.

cgoreon Seattle Restaurant Ejects Customer Wearing Google Glass

"But it's my right to make 24/7 video recordings of people I don't know eating at restaurants I don't own!"

cgoreon Silicon Chasm: The class divide on America’s cutting edge

London is always going to be a worst-case scenario. You guys don't just have the journalist-making-a-hyperbolic-statement sort of royalty, you still have the for-real kind.

cgoreon What It's Like to Fail

The baby boomers are a major demographic event, and those will always have economic impact.

cgoreon Langner’s final Stuxnet analysis comes with surprises

On a government project? Never.

cgoreon What It's Like to Fail

Before the 1970's most professionals and union workers had fixed-benefit pensions run by large corporations, supervised by accountants with very serious looks on their faces. As 401(k)'s became common for normal workers, instead of just perks for C*O's, all of a sudden their was a massive influx of money into the DJIA and NASDAQ, just as the baby boomers "save for retirement", mostly influenced by people like Jim Cramer and other dancing-finance-clowns.

Also notice that the housing crash happened just as all the baby boomers' children go off to college and they decide to down-size from their McMansions since they are empty-nesters now.

Thirdly notice how now medical expenditures nationwide are climbing greatly now that they are all becoming old and sickly. The next 10-15 years are a great time to be in the medical field, even with ObamaCare. But then as they die off it will be a horrible place to try to get a job.

cgoreon BTC correction happening?

It is a snarky form of the statement, but basically the idea is that fiat currency is similar to corporate bonds.

If you think General Motors is going to tank, you don't want their bonds, nobody does, they are junk. If Google were to issue a corporate bond series, everyone would eat them up like candy though.

Because the USA is the only remaining military superpower in the world, it's fiat currency is going to be #1 in the world. The Eurozone is #2 militarily, and it isn't a coincidence that the Euro currency is also #2. And places like Zimbabwe have jokes for militaries and jokes for currencies. A few years ago someone gave me a 100,000,000 Zimbabwe note as a gag gift.

cgoreon BTC correction happening?

The US Dollar is based upon the full faith and credit of the American nuclear weapons stockpile.

cgoreon What It's Like to Fail

36-54 is exactly the years that you will be told by everybody you know to go to a financial planner and "get serious about retirement".

cgoreon What It's Like to Fail

The legal structure that replaced pensions with 401k's and the like is considered the main source of the bubble. It isn't a coincidence that the dot com bubble happened right as all the baby boomers were hoping to retire.

cgoreon How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

There are a few dietary supplements that voluntarily submit to FDA inspection of their facilities. Most don't. The protein powder I use is one of them:

http://www.1stphorm.com/products/men/level-1

I wouldn't really consider using anything that isn't, but lots of people do every day, probably mostly from ignorance.

cgoreon 75% of techies don’t give regularly to charity. Here’s why.

Politicians are typically quite rich, actually.

cgoreon 75% of techies don’t give regularly to charity. Here’s why.

Lots of people in the third world live on as little as $1 a day, so $50 is a huge help to them. And if you really want to keep it local, there are always local food banks and the like that you could donate directly to. It is good to volunteer too, for them and even more so for you.

cgoreon The Cheapest Generation

Probably around that long. Perhaps less if things go well.

cgoreon 75% of techies don’t give regularly to charity. Here’s why.

Lutheran World Relief will gladly take donations over the web (even from atheists :-P ). They have a four star rating from Charity Navigator, which is a pretty good rating. All of their financial statements are available online.

http://lwr.org

http://lwr.org/about/reports-finances

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...

cgoreon The Cheapest Generation

I make a lot more than a lot of GenY, and have less student loan debt, and it is a MAJOR part of my budget. I don't see how someone with an average salary and average student loan debt could get a loan for a car or for a house.

cgoreon Russia: Hidden chips 'launch spam attacks from irons'

Another good reason for irons, they are a bit heftier than a lot of other small goods, giving less variance from the weight of a small chip.

cgoreon Custom-printed Moleskine notebooks

The notebooks I use:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/home-gift-patina-brown-drago...

It has a dragon fighting a gryphon, which makes it much cooler than the moleskines. It's $50.

On a serious note though, everybody should keep a daily journal, and a $0.99 cheapo from Wal-Mart will do the job.

cgoreon Where Have All the Geniuses Gone?

I think all men are created equal and when someone looks way smarter than the rest, most often he is just faking it?

I think all men are created equal and when someone looks way taller than the rest, most often he is just wearing platform shoes?

cgoreon 19th Century Emoticons

Even older: Shakespeare seems to have invented :)

http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/shakespeare-and-emoticons/

http://fifthcolumnistblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/shakespea...

cgoreon The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

For my own references, I have a git repo in my home directory, ~/references/, which has everything I consider important stored as PDFs that I "printed" via Firefox. It is the only way to make sure it is still around.

cgoreon Who exactly is crawling my site?

At the bottom of the page he mentions Yelp, and looking at their robots.txt they have this weird stuff for each of the allowed bots:

  Disallow: /biz/outlook-autumn-market-fundamental-catwalk-flimsy-roost-legibility-individualism-grocer-predestination-0

And over and over ten times. Trying to see if the bots ignore robots.txt I guess?

cgoreon Scott Adams: How to Be Successful

Yes, in the USA, it is considered normal to take showers daily, at least with the middle class, and quite weird to not do so, to the point of being a major social impediment ("hey hippie, take a bath!").

cgoreon Twitter CEO's Unexpected Advice on Preserving Startup Culture in Your Company

More space, less crime, parking, cheaper rent or mortgage, cleaner air, quieter, more green spaces, and typically only a 20-30 minute drive from the city if you actually want to go to something big-metro-specific, like the opera/museum/theater/etc.

cgoreon Twitter CEO's Unexpected Advice on Preserving Startup Culture in Your Company

The rent differential can be explained by nothing more than the natural dynamics of the situation. Want to live in a big city? Probably really want to live in NYC or SanFran, right? Whereas if you want to live "in the burbs", you can go pretty much anywhere. And if you want acreage, you have even more options (assuming you can telecommute).

cgoreon Rubber Ducky Logs

What he is describing is basically an engineering notebook. I prefer paper, even for software, it just seems more natural to me. Plus I can easily add sketches and diagrams then.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/General_Engineering_Introductio...

cgoreon Microsoft's Surface 2 will replace paper manuals on all Delta aircraft

I worked on this one for a little while:

http://www.astronautics.com/index.php?q=content/electronic-f...

I have trouble imagining either the iPad or the Surface being used for anything critical.

cgoreon How to get bias into a Wikipedia article

And this is why trying to keep to some mythical "Neutral Point of View" is impossible.

cgoreon Paying For Privacy?

The whole article of theirs is nothing but a rehash of Hitchens' book. This is just character assassination and nothing more.

http://www.catholicleague.org/canadian-atheists-rip-mother-t...

It is also telling that Hitchens' book had no citations for any of his claims either.

cgoreon 3D-print a Norwegian fjord from your browser

I like backpacking, and often spend money on topographic maps because of this (typically from mytopo.com). I do like this site's idea. It obviously wouldn't work as a map, but it might be nice to integrate a lot of standard topographic map features into the models themselves. Especially if you can do it on really small-scale areas, architects might really want it.