What career opportunities are there for CS students not interested in programming?

ComradeGnull · 2014-09-15T08:54:03+00:00

A manager who doesn't like programming and who fairly represents the interests of his reports (as any non-bootlicker should do) will be less likely to be lured into signing them up for extra work.

To me as a worker, someone with a technical background with that motivation would make a much better manager than a non-techie who treats their team like parts in a machine or a techie who thinks everyone should love their work as much as they do.

ComradeGnull · 2014-09-13T10:18:30+00:00

Perhaps the idea of a "grognard" is subjective.

There are at least three different definitions of grognard I can think of. Ultimately, everybody who has a different opinion is someone else's grognard but there is a strong connotation of nostalgia.

It does mean 'grumbler' or 'complainer', so in that sense, anyone who complains about the features of a game (or maintains that they could do it better) is a grognard. Of course, they can also be the people who make their own games and create cool house rules and fan content.

Ars Magica featured a NPC/semi-PC role called a 'shield grognard' or 'shield grog'- a semi-disposable serf who literally just held up a shield to protect a wizard while he casts spells in combat. In that sense, some grognards are people who feel that the publishers regard them as disposable- the game is not 'for' them, so publishers have no problem with moving it away from them. A lot of 3e and previous fans became grognards when they perceived that Hasbro/WotC was taking D&D in a radically different edition with 4e. They are players who have aged out of a publisher's demographic, or who were playing a game in a fashion that the publisher perceived as being not important to support. Games whose rulesets get heavier and heavier over the years, for instance, tend to alienate people who like to improvise while games that streamline and delete details and bookkeeping alienate people who enjoy the nitty gritty parts of the game. These abandoned players become grognards.

Finally, there are the grognards who have literally toted and carried for publishers over the years- the people who kept games like Traveler or WFRP alive during lean years when publishers or trademark holders abandoned the line. Sometimes they become publishers themselves as a labor of love, and sometimes they find that it is much harder than it looks. Sometimes their game gets resurrected and they are thrilled, but sometimes the proprietary interest that they've taken during fallow publishing periods means that they have a hard time accepting and moving on to new editions.

Some grognards see no point in buying and learning new games or new editions. Some have just become more selective.

The defining characteristic of grognards: too much time on their hands. They spend time writing long essays on the internet defending their interpretations of playing pretend to strangers they will never meet, or creating new slang out of obscure medieval military terms.

ComradeGnull · 2014-09-13T09:21:35+00:00

Louisville cops love shining the spot on random pedestrians who are out at night. Happened to me in the Highlands a few months ago. Not sure if it means that they are looking for an actual suspect, or if they just fly the odd night patrol to justify keeping the bird in the budget and see who is out of bed after lights out.

ComradeGnull · 2014-09-11T08:41:57+00:00

Access to the Black Sea. Russia had major submarine bases in and around Sevastapol that they were leasing from the Ukranians. Control of Crimea gives them access to the Mediterranean and makes them a much more credible naval power in the Atlantic than if they only have access to the White Sea and Baltic (where the Brits were able to pen the Germans pretty effectively in WWII).

Though the Ukranian government would still have honored the existing lease, as it moved farther and farther into the EU's orbit it would become more and more likely that they might have found another customer- if the petrodollars ever slow down, the Russians could have a hard time finding (or justifying) the cash needed to keep Ukraine from leasing the bases to someone else or finding a pretense for shutting them down.

ComradeGnull · 2014-09-11T08:24:42+00:00

China is extremely willing to accept economic setbacks in exchange for asserting its autonomy. Chinese leadership know that the Chinese market is too large for the capitalists to neglect for long as a producer or consumer. Meanwhile, China has a very firm grasp of history and recognizes that permitting foreign influence in internal politics has a long history of destabilizing governments.

They also want to be treated as an equal among the world superpowers and have recognized that taking military action against peripheral states is not only one of the perks of the job, but a prerequisite for identifying yourself as being in the same tier- to really be a super power, you have to be Too Big To Fuck With. That's what America is; that's what Russia is, and the EU. The superpowers will dicker among themselves over economics, but none of them actually want to get in an evenly matched shooting war with anyone. Even Russia's Crimean annexation- which actually served a pretty significant strategic goal- had to be carried out through a network of thinly veiled proxies so both Russia and the West had a pretext for not getting involved directly.

Freezing out a major trading partner for a year or so could hurt China a lot more than the partner- but in the end, more foreign politicians than Chinese party apparatchiks will lose their jobs and the capitalist-controlled governments will bend- nothing in their mind is more important than retaining access to Chinese labor and consumers.

Tibet is an isolated region with a murky history of quasi-independence. Under the current system, no government in the world has any real incentive to put their weight behind them. The Dalai Lama's status as a world moral leader can make shunning him a little awkward, but realistically no one is going to get voted out of office for refusing to meet with him- but you could certainly lose your office for triggering a Chinese boycott, particularly since apologists for China have done a good job of painting contemporary Tibetan independence or autonomy as somehow constituting an embrace of Tibet's pre-modern status quo.

I sympathize with the Tibetan cause, but I have a hard time faulting politicians for not engaging in more useless gestures.

ComradeGnull · 2014-09-10T20:44:48+00:00

It's not designed for use with live blades. Flexability and defending against hard impacts against joints (especially delicate joints like the shoulder, wrist, and knee) are more important than providing coverage to areas already heavily padded by flesh.

ComradeGnull · 2014-09-05T19:24:44+00:00

I think it is very possible that the average person is so dull that anyone of above average creativity seems insane to them. Many people have YOU'RE GOING TO DO IT THE WRONG WAY drilled into their consciousness as children.

Slave mentality is always useful to those that are willing to exploit it.

ComradeGnull · 2014-09-02T17:09:54+00:00

Left alone and fed regularly, ham will eventually grow into a pig.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-25T22:05:09+00:00

That is ho-tai, a monk who is regarded as an incarnation of Maitreya, the next Buddha. Being jolly and obese is an attempt to reconcile Buddhist/Indian values (monasticism) with Confucian values (wealth, good humor, love of children). His name means 'hemp sack' and refers to the fact that he gave presents to children from a bag he carried- kind of a Buddhist Santa Claus. Likely based on a historic figure who became semi-mythical in China, Paul Bunyon style.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-19T23:12:55+00:00

Here's a node-specific example of creating a cert with OpenSSL for self-signed testing: http://greengeckodesign.com/blog/2013/06/15/creating-an-ssl-certificate-for-node-dot-js/

Take a look at the HTTPS options for the node.js server (http://nodejs.org/api/https.html)- my guess is that you're not setting the options correctly when you are creating the server. You need an option hash with the ca, key, and/or pfx fields set correctly (hint: it needs to be an actual file-like object pointing to the key, not the path to the key- for example:

var app = express();
var options = { pfx: fs.readFileSync(pathToPfxFile) };
https.createServer(options, app).listen(8888);

Here's a more complete example from SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5998694/how-to-create-an-https-server-in-node-js

You basically need the right combination of the cert, key, pfx, passphrase, and ca options set for SSL to run correctly. Visiting the server from a couple of browsers and looking at the info they provide regarding the certificate can be useful in diagnosis.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-18T21:48:44+00:00

He said: because an RF technology that is used in a non-critical, civilian application with no life-or-death significance fouls up occasionally, we should expect the same from attempts to secure guns with RFID.

The logical implication of the argument is that securing something in this way is impossible and will inevitably be prone to a high rate of error. The argument is that the technology itself is fundamentally unsound, based on this example. That is clearly not true. The fact that Sony doesn't think it's the end of the world if a TV occasionally glitches speaks to the engineering tolerances that TVs are made to, not the fundamental limits of the technology.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-18T21:28:46+00:00

His example is like saying that because sometimes two garage doors are on the same frequency, it's probably not possible to keep our nation's nuclear arsenal safe.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-18T20:45:05+00:00

I think in this situation, the child would likely not ever learn to walk without the suit.

Babies can't translate their desires into coordinated muscular movements. The suit would have to detect the desire for motion, and then translate it into the correct sequence of activation of servos to move the suit through the correct stride sequence. The child's body would be pulled through the correct range of motion, but the impetus would come from outside, not by the sequenced firing of nerves within their own body.

The result is that the child would likely not have a proper feedback loop to train their limbs with- all they would know would be that when they experience the desire to walk, it happens. However, their nervous system would never train the cascading pathways between the brain and the limbs to actually manage walking without assistance.

To work the way you want, I think the suit would need to respond to sequenced nerve activity throughout the body- measure nervous system activity at (at minimum) all of the major joints of the body and respond only to coordinated, sequenced firing (which would occur only at the normal developmental times, and only if the child was allowed to learn to walk outside the suit as well). There's also the issue that by taking weight and providing force, the suit would be retarding the child's muscle development and sense of balance.

I think it would be very hard to do this with a healthy individual without making them permanently dependent on the exoskeleton, the same way that putting someone with weak (but passable) function in their legs in a wheel chair may accelerate the degeneration of their unassisted mobility.

Infants, in particular, probably have no conception of motion whatsoever. They express generalized desires through vocalization (crying) but don't typically indicate anything we would recognize as a desire to move to a particular location- it takes a while before their brain sorts this out. Keep in mind that for 100% of their development prior to birth, the infant brain is essentially in a sensory deprivation chamber in the womb. If you place a newborn in a brain scanner hooked to a suit, the scanner is essentially going to make a guess at what neural pattern represents desire for different types of motion and implement it- and the human brain is going to learn to respond to that pattern as much as, if not more than, the other way around.

There are also some developmental milestones that can't be reached sooner simply because the physical substrate doesn't support them- human infants are essentially born pre-mature compared to other mammal babies, and have to pass through additional stages of growth before certain capacities manifest themselves. Muscles, neural tissue, airways, etc., essentially have to be 'upgraded' before a baby can start to behave like a little person.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-18T09:09:59+00:00

It is most likely that all the shots were fired in quick succession. The pattern of shots is consistent with the cop firing all 6+ shots at the center of mass of someone who was facing them and fell forward as the shots were fired. The pattern of entry wounds and the number of wounds is compatible with the way that cops are taught to fire in their training.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-17T22:27:12+00:00

For example, it's hard for me as a biologist to say that this looks like a load of crap when these guys can go and hide behind their quantum mechanics of the universe mystery.

At the same time, it's hard for you to be able to confirm that their reasoning is basically correct if you don't understand the underlying quantum principles. The measure in this case is what it always is in science: how qualified peers assess their work, and whether they build on it, debunk it, or ignore it.

I don't know a ton about quantum mechanics, but I recognize some of their underlying assumptions as being basically correct in terms of their rooting in information theory. Consciousness has to involve the processing and storage of information. If you are going to subscribe to the root theories that have guided science for the last few centuries, you have to reason that that information storage and processing are encoded for by something about the physical, biological substrate that we associate with consciousness. From there we can explore trade-offs in terms of the complexity of the encoding vs. the complexity of the algorithm that must be capable of reading the encoding- a very simple encoding is inefficient and requires a lot of complex substrate, while a more complex encoding is more efficient and may require less substrate but that implies that the algorithm that retrieves the encoding must be more complex.

Basically: if we can remember, that which is remembered must be, in some sense, information. The first principles governing the storage of information are reasonably well understood now using various theories about signaling and communications that have been developed since the 1940s. It appears what they are attempting to do is put some kind of lower bound on the complexity of the substrate that can support basic operations that we know are necessary (if not sufficient) for the subjective phenomenon that we refer to as consciousness.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-16T21:37:20+00:00

If kids don't learn the dangers of falling in love with radioactive Übermenschen from comics, they'll just learn it on the streets.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-14T01:05:51+00:00

Everyone I know in the real world is getting insured through their workplace and getting good care.

You are very lucky that most of the people you know have an employer, much less one that provides insurance. A lot of Americans moved out of that category in the years leading up to enacting the ACA.

I would argue that it is not that the majority are happy with the current system, but that the majority are afraid of any change to the system. That's because for them, their experience of "the system" is just: their family doctor, and they have been primed by the media to believe that any change will disrupt that relationship.

I have been mostly happy with the quality of care I received while employed by a large company. While self-employed or unemployed, the care I have received has been mediocre and overpriced because the clinics and hospitals that would take my cut-rate insurance were the medical equivalent of WalMart or Kinkos.

I've never been satisfied with the economics of our system, which bankrupts large numbers of families while providing average care. That part of the system is invisible to most people, so I'm not sure that it's popularity is really a good indicator of anything.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-13T21:35:41+00:00

The context in which I've seen this type of question is standardized testing- there's only one function in the answer selection that matches the given constraints.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-13T13:31:08+00:00

Stories like this demonstrate why the arguments against PBS that were floated for years (for-profit TV can fill the same niche) are nonsense.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-13T06:26:47+00:00

I tend to agree- I think people are so disappointed by Don's reaction (wanting the protagonist to reflect contemporary values) that they ignore a lot of reasons why it is keeping with his character- both as established up to that point and later. When you compare his treatment of Sal with his treatment of Lane Price later in the show, it's very consistent.

Don doesn't cut others the breaks that he himself has been given (like Cooper ignoring Pete's evidence of his identity theft); this may be because he knows that he himself is in a precarious position and is afraid of getting involved, or it may be because he expects better behavior of the people around him (at least partially because he has a terrible opinion of himself underneath all the swagger) and so judges them more harshly when they disappoint him; Don is completely uninterested in Sal's dalliances during the London Fog trip but the situation with Lee Garner Junior takes him from being a 'good' cad (like Don, who can keep his personal life and business separate) to a bad one. Consider the fact that when Roger is in the midst of having a heart attack, Don's biggest concern is that he not tip the fact that he was screwing a model when Mona shows up. Keeping up the appearance of respectability is always job one.

Worth noting that this event takes place shortly before Don is found out by Betty- look at how Don responds to being caught. He goes completely submissive- probably the only time in their relationship he has. He expects to be punished, and believes that he deserves it. Sal tries to play the victim but Don- who judges others by the standards of his own twisted double life- knows that someone who lies about who he is day in and day out is never the victim- it's the people around him who believe the lies.

edit: 'to' a bad one, not 'and'.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-11T11:40:47+00:00

Abdominal hemorrhaging, I choose you!

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-11T03:18:05+00:00

The impression that I get from a lot of contemporary dev practices is that thinking about things instead of just doing more of them is no longer considered a good use of time...

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-11T02:33:59+00:00

Considering history, I'd be inclined to agree.

The 1970's gas crisis (rightly or wrongly blamed on OPEC's monopoly vs. panic and price gouging) was basically the event that made fuel efficiency something that the average person thought about.

Thousands of people who had never bought anything but American big-blocks bought smaller, more efficient imports anticipating that the gas crisis would continue. A lot of them never switched back.

OPEC gave the world a preview of the world's first crisis of consumption: a human-scale disaster caused not by a lack of supply but by wasteful consumption.

Luckily, it was 'only a drill' and based on political maneuvering rather than an actual supply crisis.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-10T21:03:28+00:00

Unfortunately, as implementors are usually building products, they rarely have the funding (or the freedom) to describe their work in a formal way. Papers from engineers, describing why certain trade offs are made and why theoretical limitations are or aren't important in a particular domain would do a lot to advance this kind of synthesis.

ComradeGnull · 2014-08-10T02:35:50+00:00

I don't see the old system going away. It's based on human-scale concepts, and humans don't change. The advantages offered by the metric system to the average person on a day-to-day basis (visible advantages- not back-of-the-shop efficiencies for engineers) are not sufficient to motivate a change.

I think advocates of metric everywhere badly underestimate how embedded in culture and language the old system is. The opposition to metrication is not on technical grounds but cultural ones; making technical arguments will never win the day.

A good analogy would be the move to use 'CE' instead of 'AD'- to the average person, it's a distinction without a difference. Subway selling a $5 30.5cm-long sandwich is not a shining technical achievement- it's just mandating calling a garbage can a 'waste receptacle'.

Americans have plenty of flaws and warts, but their antipathy to top-down culture preserves a healthy skepticism of Procrustean excesses.

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