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kamjamon Occupy Google: Income Inequality Backlash Hits Silicon Valley

Yeah, Bali is not too far away, give me a remote worker job in Singapore and I can fly in for meetings every 2 weeks :-D

kamjamon Occupy Google: Income Inequality Backlash Hits Silicon Valley

I had this same discussion with an ex-colleague and he pointed out that if you managed to drive away all the lower paid workers, then who would clean your streets, stock your supermarket shelves, put our your fires and catch those criminals? He made a very good point.

kamjamon President Obama calls on every American to learn code

If you were using Excel, you code have just written a VBA macro to do it, or created another column with formula =CONCATENATE("http://domain/",A1) if that's what you mean

kamjamon President Obama calls on every American to learn code

How often does this actually need to be done? I know beginner coders who struggle with this, esp when it comes to AJAX. I very much doubt that someone with no interest in coding who is forced to code because of some government initiative for one semester is going to fare any better at that task.

The point is, unless you have some self interest in the subject then there is no point in forcing you to learn it, it is going to be of no benefit to you in your future life.

kamjamon The Mozilla Developer Network has a New Face

I hate this bandwagon of everyone jumping onto the MS Metro UI look for everything. The old site wasn't perfect, but please come up with something original.

kamjamon President Obama calls on every American to learn code

Everything you mention can be done by a non-programmer.

- Copy and paste your list of charities into MS Word and print it - Not sure what that is about - Create a blog on one of the many readily available platforms like Wordpress or blogger. Plenty of non-coders already doing this - Getting a grasp on technology has nothing to do with coding

kamjamon President Obama calls on every American to learn code

You seem to have a big gripe about the English language. There is nothing prestige about it, some of the upper class may like to pretend there is but it's just a means of communication like every other language and I would make the same observations about those too.

kamjamon President Obama calls on every American to learn code

Possibly, I presume you mean because it is not phonetic? But that is not going to be so easy to change... My biggest gripe of the modern school leavers is when dey ryt n txt spch & i hv 2 decifa evry wrd. That's ok in an actual text message, but I've heard of stories where it has been carried over to exams, CV's and the workplace.

Anyway, that's what grinds my gears :)

kamjamon President Obama calls on every American to learn code

Yes, that also. As a programmer, half the battle in trying to understand an issue exactly what you have just stated. In my job the second part is also very true, tech speak for other developers, business/marketing for everyone else. But I've found this applies to all walks of life.

To me, programming comes down to breaking a problem down into smaller pieces, which is basically like algebra. My first internship (way back) required us to carry out a written test: here are some simple algebra equations, you have a basic calculator with one (or two, can't remember) memory bank, write out the exact exact key presses to solve the equations. To me it was simple, but apparently not to everyone.

It's stuff like this which the education system should already be teaching, work on improving that rather than trying to get _everyone_ to code. Coding is not for everyone, your doctors, lawyers, actors, artists and many others are not going to need it

kamjamon How Apple’s Lightning-Plug Guru Reinvented Square’s Card Reader

Why? Because I don't want the inconvenience. If I call up and complain about unrecognised charges then my card is cancelled, then I have to wait 5 business days minimum for a new card and also a new pin to be issued. If you want my business and my money then get a proper credit card processing terminal, there are plenty of other merchants around.

kamjamon President Obama calls on every American to learn code

Except that not everyone will work with code monkeys. Basic computer skills and able to use applications is a lot more different than programming, and often the reason you have levels of middle management with technical and business ability to decipher and relay the important information.

kamjamon President Obama calls on every American to learn code

Yes, this is exactly what I meant. I'm not pedantic enough about the "you and me" stuff, or even fully correct in my own punctuation and I'm a native English speaker. But knowing the difference between "there, their and they're" is very important for example.

kamjamon How Apple’s Lightning-Plug Guru Reinvented Square’s Card Reader

Very nice and everything, but if I went into a store and the payment method was via a device attached to an iPhone then alarm bells ringing "card skimmer" would be going off in my head and I'd walk out the door.

kamjamon Ex-Napster exec fatally struck by sheriff's patrol car while biking

There's a lack of enforcement of a lot of motoring laws too. I've sped plenty of times without being caught, I haven't always used the blinkers and sometimes I've even parked illegally. I've jumped the occasional red light.

What you are saying about cyclists applies equally to motorists, so I really don't know what point you are trying to make. The _vast majority_ of both groups are law abiding people.

kamjamon Vast Freshwater Reserves Found Beneath the Oceans

Soon to be followed by shale fracking for water.

kamjamon Vast Freshwater Reserves Found Beneath the Oceans

Sometime in the last few years, we reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish

Nice link. This made me sad :'(

kamjamon President Obama calls on every American to learn code

I agree. How many of those making laws right now know anything about technology let alone how to code? So why does Joe Public specifically need to know how to code? It would be much better to teach people math and proper grammar, that would get them much further in life.

kamjamon A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

Same goes for anything you actually buy with currency also.

kamjamon A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

I don't think gold failed as a currency, I could pretty much go anywhere in the world with a bar of gold and exchange it for currency to buy whatever I want. It is still a universal currency, although not an everyday currency.

kamjamon Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site

I wonder how many hard drives are retrieved and then somehow rescued - which may no longer power up so expert help to recover data off the platters is required. Rinse. Repeat.

kamjamon [dead]

Nothing is really deleted, the NSA already has a backup copy and I'm pretty sure Google would be able to retrieve this from archive should it be required from law enforcement.

But agree, he could have just snooped around to gather whatever info he needed and also notified law enforcement.

kamjamon FDA Orders Genetic Testing Firm 23andMe to Halt Sales

I might be surrounded by idiots but I think I'm the only one in my entourage who read the instructions (I've told my friends numerous amount of time "What? You're not suppose to take more than 4g per day!").

Seriously? If they can't even be bothered to read the instructions on medicine (or anything they put in their body) then they have problems and need more help. Or need to learn to read.

kamjamon UK Prime Minister: We have put in place Internet filters to block extremism

The government works for us, not the other way round. There is no such thing as us being beat, there is such a thing as us not getting our shit together to do something about it.

kamjamon UK Prime Minister: We have put in place Internet filters to block extremism

Why don't they just take the site down? Oh wait, it's somewhere else in the world out side the UK jurisdiction. Ok, so the game of cat and mouse begins, we all know how well that's worked with the pirate bay.

kamjamon Responsive Design Won’t Fix Your Content Problem

No, that's not correct, at least in my experience. "Request desktop site" usually means "reload the same page, but send a User Agent string so the server thinks I'm calling from a full desktop browser". This works for websites where the server does some UA string sniffing and sends different html+assets for different types of devices.

The same works in reverse. In Chrome Dev Tools I can set the UA to iPhone/iPad/Android (http://imgur.com/mJY6lP6) and I should expect to see a mobile version of the site. Of course, with Responsive this does not work since responsive looks at screen size, not UA string.

For example, try changing your UA string in Chrome to iOS 6 and visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/

kamjamon Responsive Design Won’t Fix Your Content Problem

Indeed. The thing that annoys me about responsive design is when I browse on my phone and can't find what I'm looking for so I "Request Desktop Site" and it's the same! Grrr. Even worse when they STILL serve me all those images, but they are just hidden, eating up my limited bandwidth. Double Grrrr.

kamjamon DNA genius and double Nobel Prize winner Fred Sanger dies aged 95

I'm getting a lot of this feeling these days. This is an interesting post by the OP. I am going to investigate this more, it might up some avenues to explore further.

kamjamon The first Bitcoin post on HN

I'd call that pessimism. Or life. But not hating.

Urban dictionary definition of hater: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hater

A person that simply cannot be happy for another person's success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person.

Hating, the result of being a hater, is not exactly jealousy. The hater doesnt really want to be the person he or she hates, rather the hater wants to knock somelse down a notch.

I don't think his comments are really to do with not being happy about a persons success etc, it's nothing personal, he simply did not believe the idea would take off.

kamjamon The first Bitcoin post on HN

Make as many mistakes as you want, it didn't kill anyone (or yourself) and you can only learn from those mistakes.

The only person that I know that is always right is my wife.

kamjamon The first Bitcoin post on HN

usually people say something like "well, bitcoin has momentum" or somesuch

Which is exactly why its so difficult to replicate "easy functionality" such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al.