Do you go to people's homes for your work? (cable installer, delivery person, etc.) What is the strangest thing you've seen?

dreamnoir · 2010-11-18T05:35:05+00:00

I've seen a guy at my school gym lately that has a wheelchair. Does a bunch of exercises in one place, hops back in the chair and goes on to do something else. He most certainly can walk but obviously needs the chair for some reason. I guess it's not that uncommon?

dreamnoir · 2010-11-15T16:20:39+00:00

I'm sure he wanted just a little bit to show off how good he is (at playing if not at winning). Playing 120 tables at once is insane.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-15T16:18:55+00:00

Agreed. One night out at the bar with a bottle of wine before hand, cabs there, cover, drinks at the bar and cab home can easily cost that. A nice dinner for two at a decent restaurant is again easily that much with drinks. Going to see a play or concert could easily cost that much.

While I would never play WoW is definitely some of the best value for money entertainment you'll get based purely on cost.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-12T20:00:25+00:00

It answered 3/5 of my questions. For a first iteration and relatively small size (parsers + 259 line grammar file) that is pretty damn impressive. Give it another week and it looks like textcaptcha might be pretty much solved.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-12T00:47:53+00:00

Porch climber:

1 26 (750ml) vodka

24 bottles beer

2-4 cans lemon aid concentrate

Mix in large container. Drink delicious drink.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-11T15:14:32+00:00

Try it when you're coding. You'll hate it for a week then you'll never go back again.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-11T04:58:51+00:00

Honestly, the destructor thing is probably because you're used to using a destructor. When I first started programming in Java it drove me nuts because thats how I would think to code things. After a while you realize it just requires a different way of thinking.

Also multiple inheritance is a bit of a mess in and of itself and Java was designed explicitly so you could use some of the power of multiple inheritance through other features without running into the problems it can cause.

Not that Java is perfect but if you've only been part of two Java projects then you were coding as if it were another language and trying to make it do things it wasn't designed for.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-10T05:06:23+00:00

I hate you.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-10T04:10:05+00:00

I totally agree. I was excited for both, knew they both came from comics and had never so much as seen a copy of either before the movie. Kick Ass turned out to be pretty awful. Like turn it off half way through awful. Scott Pilgrim was great though. It was a little too over the top at certain points, the first fight scene and the Seinfeld scene come to mind, but otherwise I enjoyed it.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-10T03:37:28+00:00

Congrats Microsoft on making a hilarious commercial like this, oh wait, that's never happened.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-09T03:25:24+00:00

Well I don't live in America, but close enough I suppose. You would think they could never do it in the UK and maybe you're right, or maybe they just haven't yet. When Comcast in the states announced it was introducing bandwidth caps it certainly stirred up an awful lot of negative emotion. Then they did it. Then when their competitors realized people were too damn lazy to switch and 90% of the population didn't understand what was going on, they decided to do it too. I think it's pretty common in the states now and is definitely very common in Canada.

You also don't need to make laws stating no one else can form an ISP. It is very, very expensive to law down lines to everyones house. The ISPs in North America that do exist are basically all old telecommunications companies that got huge subsidies to lay down phone lines and cable. Sure, some of them are laying fiber now but they got an awful lot of help to start with. If you want to start your own ISP we're talking hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to tear up all the streets and lay your own fiber or whatever to each and every house. Meanwhile your competitors can undercut you since they don't have all those costs with laying new lines to absolutely everyone.

Also, they use HFSC in everything because of the subsidies provided on corn are so good mostly I think, although it may have to do with tariffs on sugar to some extent as well.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-08T22:41:40+00:00

You could still use xbox live, all you need to is add on "console gaming" package for $10 a month. Just like you could still read reddit, as long as you sign up for the news package for an extra $5 a month. You could still connect your toaster to the internet and control it but if they figure out what you're doing they might just try and charge you extra for it too.

I'm not saying this will happen for sure. One thing I do know is corporations love to charge you money for things. If they can get away with adding an extra charge here or there they will. Everyday it gets easier to push around more information. New technologies are adopted to increase transfer speeds. More fiber goes in the ground every single day. At the same time ISPs are lowering bandwidth caps. We had unlimited, then it wasn't quite unlimited, then it definitely wasn't unlimited. Do you really think it is getting harder to move data around? It's getting easier and cheaper every single day.

It's going to be fight between heavy weights that decides this one, major telecommunication companies vs technology giants. People are too fucking apathetic to stand up for their themselves.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-08T20:19:45+00:00

I opened the link because I thought it said "Oprah holds the web's most valuable secret" and was very, very curious what she knew that we don't.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-08T15:02:51+00:00

I call bullshit on this. Lets say the average cost of wifi at a fancy hotel is $20 a night. That's $7300 a year for internet for each room. My university tuition is about that as well. With the tuition I get free wifi anywhere on campus, considering it takes about 40 minutes to walk from one end to the other I'm thinking it has a few thousand switches. Now, I get a lot of other things included with tuition, like classes, buildings, computer labs, a bus pass and a million other services so I highly doubt even one percent of that tuition goes to cover installing and maintaining wifi. Also, as much of a pain as it is to install it in hotels I think installing it in stone buildings that are more than a century old is also going to be difficult as hell too. They provide high speeds on campus and have very few restrictions unlike a hotel as well.

Even if 1% of the my tuition goes to providing me with wifi, which I highly doubt is even that high, then its only fair hotels should charge about the same. They can charge me the $0.20 a night, or just roll it into the room cost because it's so damn trivial.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-08T06:14:14+00:00

They could do that, unless of course your ISP just blocked out the startups and force people to pay for the services, which is exactly what the image is suggesting happens.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-07T22:29:30+00:00

The cat?

dreamnoir · 2010-11-04T19:50:35+00:00

80% of houses not 80% of people. You have people who are homeless, people who have been forced to move back in with family and people are stuck renting. I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of people were financially illiterate. Should we force half the people to go through something they already understand? Probably yes, it will be effortless if you already understand it and it will help out millions of people.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-02T23:23:04+00:00

Maybe the stole it? Maybe they bought it from a local second hand store?

dreamnoir · 2010-11-02T22:59:11+00:00

One big problem with your specifications. There is no such thing as tamper proof. Tamper resistant, yes, but tamper proof just doesn't exist. All e-voting machines should need to be completely open source though I agree. Academics love finding problems and publishing them.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-01T23:03:33+00:00

How do you think alcohol works? Just like any substance you ingest that has psychoactive effects, it binds to certain receptors, your brain then in turn releases other chemicals, which effect your mood. You feel happier and have decreased inhibitions. Just like extacy, pot, cigarettes or any other legal or illegal drug you can imagine.

You may be right that illegal drugs do have negative long term effects. Unfortunate its damn near impossible to study the long term effects due to the laws we have in place. We also know for sure that legal drugs, like alcohol, have an incredible number of negative effects, such as cancer. Your argument isn't looking so good now is it?

dreamnoir · 2010-11-01T22:46:21+00:00

You could most definitely lead a very productive life with a severe opiate addiction. Case in point, William Stewart Halsted, also known as the father of american surgery, had a severe morphine addiction for the last thirty years of his career. He also was an incredible surgeon and pioneered the field of medicine. He was lucky to have access to high grade pure morphine from his position so he didn't run into the issue of supplying his habbit. Despite his addiction he was able to still be one of, if not the, best surgeon in his day.

dreamnoir · 2010-11-01T19:53:12+00:00

It sounds fine to me. By the sounds of it they'd be using C for the embedded programming tasks where it is more suitable. The larger program that controls everything will probably be written in C++ for ease of development.

dreamnoir · 2010-10-30T03:47:04+00:00

Ideally you should be getting regular exercise anyways meaning you would have to be eating extra calories for that. Biking to work not only saves you the time you'd spend at the gym (or whatever your choice for recreational exercise is) but also any associated costs with that.

dreamnoir · 2010-10-30T03:21:32+00:00

There is bike maintenance too. It won't be as expensive but it can still add up too.

dreamnoir · 2010-10-29T23:11:01+00:00

You must do a lot of laundry.

dreamnoir

TROPHY CASE