digler999

I agree with you. The poor can be affected by this as well, in the case of fines. A $150 speeding ticket isn't more of an inconvenience to most of us, but a poor person could be ruined by it. Nobody should escape consequences entirely, but I think the poor should be given some exemption from the governments iron-fist policy with fines, penalty fees, and bench warrants when you dont pay them.

I dont like articles that bait and switch. The title says "into the woods" when it should read "squatting in vacant cabins: how this homeless man lived off other peoples' supplies and shelter for a quarter century".

I'm responding to your comment based on the information you provided. You should direct him over to /r/socialskills. If he's neither "neurotic nor dysfunctional" then he just needs to polish his social skills.

> One of his big motivators is that dealing with people is hard, even for just the brief interaction of paying for his purchase.

this is a fine line though. If you have some level of social anxiety, avoiding social contact is about the worst you can do for it. It's allowing the fear to control you. A better solution is to work your way through the social anxeity, learning organic ways to "grease the gears" and make situations pleasant to both parties.

I had to learn this in my late teens/early 20s. I was withdrawing more and more, stone-faced all the time in public places such as the grocery store. I'd park behind the store just so I didn't have the hassle of interactions in the parking lot. That's letting anxiety reign over you. Cognitive distortions [1] can send you on a downward trajectory where avoidance is the norm and you to go greater and more extreme lengths to mitigate the "problem". I learned that a smile, saying "hi, how are you?" or "excuse me" seem to make most interactions at least 50 "percent" less uncomfortable compared to unemotional silence, which I've seen in psychology books as a sign of hostility.

Now, if you are autistic and have something inhibiting your ability to understand social cues, then "just facing it" wont work, but even people on the spectrum can learn to improve their situation through a skilled therapist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion

I was wondering about his dental hygiene. I've never had a major toothache before, but I've heard they are off-the-charts painful. Maybe he went to the dentist, too, off his stolen goods ?

> I don't know that owners were really put out as much as all that

They were "put out" for the exact value of the items he stole. Whether the theft results in a direct detriment to the victim is irrelevant.

I dont even think it's worth reading about him. He's a criminal who got away with it for a long time because of geography and the supply and demand relationship between cold weather and unoccupied cabins.

just to save everyone the suspense: he "survived" so long by stealing resources earned by other people who worked for them. Apparently the so-called "hermit" didn't mind people that much.

Generally yes. My gripes in assessment were mainly with science classes that asked subtly different questions on exams than what was covered in class, and english/humanities teachers who had broad reign to judge your performance based on whether you found some highly subjective moral or nugget of wisdom in the literature material. Both cases to me felt more like Three Card Monte [1] than a straightforward "Here's some information, learn it, we'll test you on it."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte

I'm jaded to the point that I'm skeptical of any posts starting with the words "Why" or "How". It's creeping closer to the phrase "these n easy steps".

what makes other encodings hard ? The two things that come to my mind are byte length and comparison function. If the encoding had a fixed-length byte length, then it should be just swapping n-bytes at a time instead of 1-byte. What else is difficult about non-ascii encodings ?

> if something is "required."

Allow me to play Freud here for a moment. Perhaps that question more points to anxieties about not knowing 100% of the material (which, I think we can both agree is ok. nobody retains 100%. But the student may not realize that).

So maybe they ask that question seeking approval, hoping to hear "No, thats an advanced concept for advanced students wanting to learn {special advanced concept}". Obviously thats not the case, but I could see a student asking that to soothe their worries that they understand other things, but not the difficult concept.

> SO hits which are mostly just noise.

I completely disagree. I'm an experienced dev from C++ learning Android/Java dev. Literally 90% of what I need is on SO (the rest usually from mkyong), thanks to google some of the answers even bubble up to the search page so I dont even have to click on them. I would be much worse off without SO.

What I meant was if you expect them to die, and discard them on some regimented schedule instead of expecting them to last forever. Flash-based USB storage (and even platter-based HDDs ) suffer degradation and/or bitrot, just at different rates/probabilities. Even optical media only has a few years of expected lifetime.

> whereas in C++ you'll need to manually chain coroutines.

Boost has stackful coroutines:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_63_0/libs/coroutine2/doc/htm...

Makes perfect sense to me. Why upgrade some critical piece of infrastructure if upgrading can only hurt you, but can never help you ? Assuming they didn't have ongoing problems such as bit-rot with floppies, why upgrade to USB ? There have been at least a few major attacks using either auto-run , auto-mount, or even infections in USB firmware over the years.

If you dont need the extra capacity or speed that USB or optical offers you, don't upgrade. I mean this specifically for infrastructure-size projects where the "thing" / entity that is controlled costs multiple orders of magnitude more than the computer system controlling it. Say I have a hydro-electric dam, or any kind of power plant (not just nuke), or train switch controller, submarine, aircraft carrier, etc. Stuff that can't break. Its just cheaper and safer to keep using the same tech, keep replacing known-working parts, than it is to risk updating the system to "stay current", and risk a costly outage (or some kind of catastrophe, even if theres only a 10^-7 chance of it happening). I dont blame them one bit.

> but it works depressingly well

I dont think it "works" though. paypal can withdraw funds from your linked bank accounts too. I think you would need to create an LLC , open a bank acct under that LLC, then sweep funds out of that LLC account to be "safe".

you bet whoever's paying for it knows exactly how much fuel each ship consumes.

> The harder the enforcement, the more potent this selection pressure gets:

And the higher the potency, the easier it becomes to smuggle. Contrast marijuana, where they have to haul the stuff over by the bale, vs even one brick of super potent opioid which could supply half the country for a couple days.

I remember reading that they choose locations because their names aren't trademark-able. So if you try calling your product SuperCPU, then a competitor rushes to trademark the same name, they could force you to rename it, thus tactically interfere with your marketing plan. But if you call it "Chicago" they can't trademark it because its a place.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a deformable mirror using a combination of liquid mercury chemically bonded with a ferromagnetic metal (if mercury isn't already magnetic). Then theoretically, you could use an electric current in a coil to shape the liquid into a precise shape.

did you disable password authentication (to allow only ssh keys) ? If not, why ?

double win: it could put to "work" the hoards of unemployed, recent JD grads. Nice try border-guard, but I can't unlock this smartphone because my attorney is "reviewing" my European vacation photos.

My reading of the article about windows 10 ads in File Explorer was abruptly stopped by an intrusive, full-screen ad video.

There is a middle ground, which is that you dont allow the free import of heroin into the country. Where you have uncut, known-quality heroin available as a tool to treat addicts going through withdrawal (or any other effective substitute), and where you (optionally) pursue only high level smugglers - people who are getting filthy rich peddling a deadly and addictive substance.

If we took even 1% of the total we spend prosecuting addicts and used it internationally, we could probably put a much more severe dent in supply. We already invaded Afghanistan, but in many cases helped the farmers instead of shut them down (this is a complex issue, opium is a much more valuable crop than food - but its a problem money can solve ). We could work with other countries to disincentivize coca production (again - the farmers that grow it can choose coca or bananas, guess which is worth more ?)

There are so many other ways to shut down the drug war, but the first place is to stop prosecuting people for possession.

This is like the opposite or corollary of the "$5 rubber hose" cryptography cracking device.

Thanks, I corrected my response. Was I partially correct about the gaseous reflective coating helping to smooth over any micro-imperfections?

Depends on what you mean by perfect. its very precise, but I'm sure if you examined the surface with an electron microscope you'd still see imperfections.

Edit: was incorrect about what I said below. Leaving it for posterity

It's important to remember that the final surface - the one that actually reflects photons - is created chemically by releasing a gas inside a vacuum that very evenly coats the surface with reflective metal atoms. I'd wager that process fills in the ~last nanometers~ or so of imperfections. Or at least averages them out enough to not affect the optical performance.

I'd imagine the math to be off-the-charts complicated, but I'm interested in the signal processing software people have created for correcting optical aberration (and how effective it is). I believe they pioneered this technology for the hubble's mirror defect. If it's effective, then manufacturers could reduce costs by not even needing to try for perfection, just staying within the limits of what software can fix.