nobody3141592

Yes "self-inflicted" is a medical/legal term which includes suicide.

In some jurisdiction there is a difference if "the balance of mind was disturbed" or if the coroner believed it was an attempted suicide (cry for help) that 'went wrong'

It is a particle, just because it has a wavelength doesn't mean it's not a particle.

An elephant has a wavelength it's just that it's rather small compared to the elephant

It gets even funnier in government. In the 80s I worked in a special government lab (where 'critical' event wasn't a euphemism!)

To get the young mathematicians and programmers we needed we had to pay the same rates they would get in industry - but the pay scales were all set by rank. So the only solution was to promote 21 year old maths grads to the heights of the command structure.

There were senior site meetings that had a 'general' rank head of each dept and 20 or 30 'general' rank 20 something maths specialists!

It's generally hard enough persuading someone that you can measure something from a picture - also telling them that they can't use 'normal' computer software is even harder.

Of course back in the day, when it had to be a Sparc station crammed full of custom i860 boards it as even harder!

At least they teach you the maths of separable convolutions -

they don't teach you that the defualt opencv built with vs will clash with Qt libs built with mingw but the ing system won't tell you this!

To install all you need is opencv, scipy and python

in my experiecne the hardest part of machine vision (on a pC) is getting all the bits installed and playing nicely with each other

Pink Floyd and shuffle play don't really go together somehow

Stock options vest in the future if you are still working there. The idea is that it keeps you committed - otherwise everybody cashes in on the day after an IPO and walks, and it rewards people who were the reason for the success.

You can't leave and then expect to get unvested options = otherwise people would simply sign up for every startup, stay a month and move on - then come back years later when the company is a success and ask for their million dollars.

It's abused when companies deliberately fire people before the options vest - this is relatively rare, since any sane company knows that getting rid of all your talent is a rather short term option.

This is what Oracle did when they took over Sun - they fired almost all of the VPs before the deal so they would have no share. In their case it was more justified, these people hadn't contributed to Suns future (it didn't have one) and weren't the reason for the Oracle takeover - there was no reason why they should gain from Oracle being in charge when the music stopped.

Although legally they might be safer firing everyone and re-hiring them post IPO. Although I would hate to work with anyone that they got to agree with this!

In a startup stock options are a future promise to make up for lower salary. You are gambling on the company doing well.

What they are doing is like hiring a salesman on low salary + commission and then firing them the day before the commission is paid.

But it's pretty difficult to prove unless you are a protected minority and the boss shows up in a white robe and says "we are firing all the N.....s" or you fire a secretary after he/she refused to sleep with you AND you got the refusal in writing!

Usually the employee only wins because the company messed up the paperwork.

Doesn't matter if it's unvested stock. They simply fire you without cause the day before your stock vests.

All they are saying is - give back the stock and we won't fire you the day before it vests.

There is a similar clause in patent applications but I have never heard of a defeated patent involving a prosecution for perjury!

I suspect the burden of proving that it was a deliberate lie to damage the other guy , in a criminal trial, is rather too high.

Wonder what the long term effect is on something like polyester caps and delaminating multilayer boards

Fire suppression is going to be fun.

A Mr Kirchof would disagree with you if he wasn't dead.

A perfect emitter facing an infinite cold sink is in perfect equibirium at the temperature of the cold sink.

And those penalties are based on the cost to the other guy. So if warner falsely demands your youtube video is taken down - you lost no money so even if they lied the penalty is zero.

If you request a Warner file to be removed they will prove that they lost $billion dollars. After all, an industry that claims star wars made a loss can prove anything.

I assumed that XAML was the silverlight team (why duplicate effort) and if silverligth is gone how much core knowledge stays in XAML?

Personally I stuck to C++ and moved MFC->wx->Qt !

.Net is interesting for the way it allows things like Ironpython and F# in as first class languages and wpf is fun to play with, but if you can't write something like Office or photoshop in it then it's just a toy.

The jury is still out on exactly how bad nano-tubes are but the good news is that they are generally too small to block your lungs in the same was a soot particles and too soft to cause any mechanical damage.

Asbestos fibres are much larger and much stronger - it's like comparing steel drill swarf to chocolate flakes!

If you are facing something really cold and black - like space then the blacker your radiator is the more power you can emit at a given temperature.

In theory a perfectly reflective silver object would never cool down and a perfectly black one would cool to -270C however much power you dumped into it

If all the Silverlight team have been taken out and shot does XAML have a future?

Will keep all the useless staff

What do you do to keep the good ones that could get a job that pays $11K/year more and so in 5 years they would have $55K ?

One code stream for obsolete windows a different one for new windows, another for iPhone/OSX, another for Android......

I would love to know what Microsoft's strategic direction is.

While announcing lots of C++ love for Visual Studio and promises of C++11 compliance they don't have an API for writing native code apps on Windows

The 'official toolkit' is WPF and whatever managed C++ is called today. But with Silverlight dead what future does it's under regarded cousin have?

So no problem we all switch to it's new tablet/phone OS. Only they won't tell us which of the windows phone toolkits are going to be on tablets and PCs - if any.

Or are we supposed to be developing all our apps for Azure and the cloud now?

Or are they just abandoning the PC like HP and we write everything in HTML5 for the browser?

The year before the Silverlight team were saying that WPF is dead and Silverlight is the future.

Good job we all switched to Qt and C++

The USA

You don't have to join the party here - just throw a few $1000 at a fundraising dinner to get the guy offering the biggest tax breaks elected.

Welcome to a land where the local rich can press money out of party functionaries!

Not just houses - if you somehow managed to own the 'peoples bicycle factory' on land right next to the port that is now a Foxconn factory you are likely to have done OK out of the deal.

Or like a tax refund they could give one to every adult in the USA!

Israel might be a good place to trial this. It's fairly small so fewer 100mi trips, most commutes are relatively short.

They have more strategic reasons than most countries to minimize their dependence on oil.

You generally don't need lots of waste heat from the engine for 6months of the year.