Succinctly? :P
297 karma · joined May 15, 2017
Details the battle of Verdun (France v Germany), one of the longest and bloodiest battles of WW1 with around 700000 dead, more than 1 man killed every minute for 10 months. A slaughter of men by machinery. I've read a bunch of books about the great wars and they are all affecting, some of them deeply, but this one showed me in stark relief the mindless brutality and utter futility of war. People talk of wars as necessary, of actions as heroic. It's sad that a civilized species, capable of high reasoning, can still resort to base violence so easily. It wasn't very long ago, and there's been a lot of violence since, some of it on comparable scales. We don't learn much.
Change needs to happen at the government level and be imposed on businesses in spite of what they think. It needs to happen at the alliance level (UN) because governments don't want to act against their economic interests unless they have to, even if their economic foresight is short (a presidential term, maximum).
That they (people with short term economic advantage) have succeeded in making climate change an optional belief is the biggest worry of all. Now we have sheeple (half the general population) blindly running to the precipice while loudly proclaiming anyone that can see it coming as stupid/liar/hands in ears/la la la.
Actually that's not quite correct, I believe it is not quite out of the atmosphere completely and as such there is a (very) small amount of air resistance and they have to fire engines to boost back into the appropriate orbit every once in a while.
Programming is a little different from typing prose, and intellisense helps if you're using an IDE that supports it, but even then, a few characters > tab > a few more characters > tab, it really helps to be able to hit those keys without looking.
If there was one skill I wish I'd learned as a young 'un it's how to use a proper text editor. I was 32 before I used Vim for the first time. I'm getting better at it, slowly, but I wish I'd been exposed when I was younger to give that skill a good decade of exercise.
When you can juggle you won't ever look at your hands, you just look at the space in front of your eyes and your hands will be where they need to be.
I can juggle 3 balls quite well, but I can not for the life of me juggle 4 (different pattern) or 5 (same pattern as 3, more balls). 4 is extraordinarily difficult for me. I approach it by separately juggling 2 balls in each hand (no ball swaps hands), but my left hand betrays me!
Some questions are clearly daft, the person hasn't done any prior research, the question is vague, the problem is not apparent and it's a big waste of time trying to help. These questions are often shut down mercilessly and I think that's probably the best thing for them, but I've no doubt it's a terrible experience for the guy asking the question. I think the SO blog post addressed it pretty well by outlining a more streamlined question form with clear prompts for each part of the question.
Other questions are not daft, but perhaps are not asked well. They need to be edited, re-framed, boiled down to the essential parts, an example included, the expected output included, that sort of thing. It's tiresome to run into questions like this over and over, and I can understand how people might comment out of frustration, but it's good to prompt the OP to fix their question up so it can (and probably will) be answered well. Kid gloves and kindness are important here, it's not always easy to ask a good question. The SO blog post went a long way to addressing this and I look forward to seeing some changes on the site.
Overall I think SO is a fantastic resource with many amazing contributors, so it's good to see them responding to this problem and I hope they can make it even better.
I don't think we screwed customers. A new release was $5 (AUS) for a night, that's hardly extortion. Almost all of our profit was made on new releases in their first week. The rest of the stock in the shop turned an almost insignificant profit and merely existed to buff the selection a bit and keep people in the store.
Late fees were an annoying issue but a necessary evil when you only have X units of stock and if they aren't returned you can't rent them out again. We were pretty lenient on reducing late fees to sensible amounts but some people were terrible at bringing things back and incurred ridiculous fees.
Physical rentals are a pain. On top of the X units issue, you have to keep them in good rentable condition and customers weren't very obliging on that front either. Digital delivery makes so much more sense now that we have the bandwidth to acommodate it. I can see a small market might still exist, but you can't afford to scale it anymore. Blockbuster was always going to die.
I haven't listened to a popular radio station in a long, long time, and I don't use any streaming services either. I find music the old fashioned way I guess, but I wouldn't have it any other way. There's no real substitute for getting your hands dirty and digging around for the gems. I found 3 excellent new (to me) bands just this month!
We all have our passions, however, and it takes considerable time and effort to dig. For some, I guess they have other hobbies that consume that time and they're happy to hear whatever comes their way on the radio (or the stream).
The longest journey starts with a single step. The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. Many hands make light work. There is precedent for accomplishing great things by 'just starting and keeping at it until you get there'. Start local. Start small.
Waiting for a 'tech breakthrough' is akin to waiting for 'the rapture'.
I finished a comp sci degree with a major in computational mathematics and I don't feel like I could accomplish very much with my bachelor level skillset in an industrial context. I didn't learn enough mathematics in 1-2 years to be a good applied mathematician.
I wish I did a mathematics degree in hindsight!
If I try to line up every shot perfectly and concentrate on my cue action, I inevitably make a bad shot.
- e; The story of a number (Eli Moar) - An imaginary tale; The story of -1 (Paul Nahin) - The Poincare Conjecture (Daniel O'Shea) - The man who loved only numbers (Paul Hoffman) - Prime Obsession (John Derbyshire)
They're part biography, part history, and give a little colour to the subject that isn't available from your typical college textbook.