dasmithii

I find it incredibly odd that I've never considered this before. I suppose end-to-end encryption is today's only defense against top-down surveillance.

That said, I wonder if meshnet protocol could be utilized as an alternative. Although the traditional mesh network is impractical at scale, a virtual version, or an email-serving proxy network of some sort, could be beneficial.

Well, beneficial if you'd consider keeping email off Google's centralized servers a good thing.

As essential as computational literacy has become, I feel a bit uneasy here.

Take mathematics for instance. What students learn in school is important, yes, but it causes a hatred toward math in general. In a typical high school, 90% of kids dread Algebra, Geometry, and PreCalc. These classes are miserable to them, and consequentially, they associate mathematics with their aversion from imposed education. Because of this, the wonderful world of numbers is reduced to mere repetition.

For those who appreciate the beauty in mathematics, this must be depressing.

I'm afraid that CS may have a similar downfall if we mandate programming curricula. Maybe a more subtle approach is necessary.

This is great - reminds me of a hackathon project, Scribe, from a while back. We never finished, but the idea was a three-step process.

1. Sketch a web app on paper.

2. Snap a picture of your drawing.

3. Our app generates a live site, displaying a link to share.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZAbQi_8y_A [video]

For productivity, ease of use, and general sanity, I'd recommend Meteor. It has an incredible amount of in-the-box functionality, which is perfect for prototypes as you say.

https://www.meteor.com/

Interesting. When I wrote my first lines, I was excited by possibilities, viewing code as a means to an end. But now, after a year or two, I often identify as a programmer.

I'm not entirely proud of this. It's like a carpenter who favors his tools over the product. A hammer swinger, rather than a home builder.

Interesting. This is a great example of the power in abstraction. By continually building upon available tools, we're able to develop new, higher level toolkits that can be used to further the process.

Ironically, this project steps back, abandoning modern utilities in favor of a more educational/interesting process (which is good, sometimes). I too enjoy passion-projects such as this.

If the ideal police officer is a mechanistic follower of written law, these cameras are perfect. No right minded officer would stray from instruction while their actions are recorded in plain sight.

But I'm not entirely convinced of their worth. While onboard cameras provide concrete evidence in court, and undoubtedly solve problems in our society, we might as well replace our officers with robots (this might not be a bad idea).

Although legal action against ISP censoring and monopolization sounds beneficial, I'd prefer that government entities remove themselves from open Internet pursuits entirely.

It should be by the people, for the people.

Has any large-scale genetic algorithm infrastructure been developed? I've often wondered if EaaS (Evolution as a Service) could ever function successfully. Surely it has potential.

This could be the future of stylistic education in literature. If a tool existed to generate rules for this editor to follow, aspiring students could practice the writing styles of famous authors.

Of course, serious writers shouldn't model themselves after others. More specific areas would be the focus. Narrower subjects like technical writing might be promising, since they aren't particularly dependent on individuality in style.

Macros are surprisingly useful in the unit testing context. Whether or not it's considered good practice, I like to embed my tests within the header files that they're associated with. With macros and gcc's -D flag in order to generate production and testing builds separately.

I'm new to the world of C, is this typical?

I'm wondering how feasible it would be to extract useful information from cell phone GPS data. Given a bird's eye view heat map of the ground, would it be possible to approximate road curvature?

This, of course, wouldn't correlate street names with paths taken by people; that would have to be done elsewhere.

While writing supplements for the Common App, I can't help but consider automated essay writing in the context of college applications. The questions are, for the most part, generic and repetitive - one decent A.I. could probably disrupt the entire process.

Unfortunately, that quote applies far to often. I'm hesitant to comment on threads like this for the same reason; I don't want to encourage such behavior with my attention

This reminds me of the Miley Cirus insanity of past months. She gained more popularity than ever before by acting erotic and capitalizing on peoples' disgust. People were promoting her name in insults and jokes around the world.

Here, the term "Rap Genius" is being popularized by controversy.

As much as I agree that students including myself are more likely to misjudge these situations than more experienced products of academia, the thought of admitting to inevitably bad decisions makes me cringe.

If myself and others in similar circumstance yield our own inspirations in favor of others' wise words, we'll be throwing passion and ambition to the ground. Although I accept that students are statistically better off under advice of elders, I purposely ignore the fact, assuring myself of my own self-motivation and curiosity.

Thank you for the reply. I really do appreciate your honest comments.

This is really interesting, especially from my perspective. I'm a senior in High School, planning on traveling after graduation. These tech hubs are clear attractions to young technologists, but posts like this cause me to reconsider.

Now, not knowing much about The Valley's history (other than the obvious), I'm wondering if these problems you speak of were caused by an influx of techies who feel entitled in the area. The glory of movies like "The Social Network" encourage ambitious young hackers like myself to move westward because of Hollywood-crafted fantasies, rather than necessity or convenience. Consequently, meritocracy is diluted.

Thoughts? These ideas are more from my intuition than anywhere else; I've lived in Boston from birth.

This is an interesting idea; however, it seems that it wouldn't necessarily help.

I'm uncertain whether the orders you speak of are reservations, or phonies with the purpose of circumventing the new bill. If the former is the case, drivers would still be unable to serve the greatest need - spontaneous rides. The latter could potentially work, but surely it would be caught eventually.

There's a good chance that they're gaining page hits from this controversy and, knowing the founders of Rap Genius (vaguely), I wouldn't be surprised if they capitalize and conjure as much attention as possible here.

On a slightly different note, it doesn't seem right for Google to intervene with specific companies' page rankings. Although Google isn't breaking laws, the "black box" type of generic algorithm seems more ethical. Rather than favoring individual groups/sites/corporations, I think Google should maintain credibility by encompassing all rules, regulations, and penalties within one algorithm. Search engine results shouldn't be subjective.

Despite my curiosity for emerging technologies, this type of bio-hacking scares me. I'm all for augmenting and virtualizing reality; however, embedding devices within the human body makes me cringe...

Imagine if Google's next big product involved a brain-computer interface in which the mind communicated directly with Google search. As great as this sounds, the phrase "security concerns" belittles ethical issues here. On the other hand, though, given medical resources, I would probably do the same myself. I guess my fears are caused by mass production, mandates, and lack of control, rather than the technology itself.

I've just begun writing my own compiler and this course provided a great overview of existing technologies. Highly recommended for anyone interested in building a language!

Users of this search engine can actually stumble upon my personal website without knowing it's exact url...

Meteor has little competition. It's essentially an all-in-one package (server & client side JS) built on top of Node.js. Check out http://meteor.com

thanks for the share! I hadn't come across any real applications before. This is exactly what we (will soon) need.

Cool idea! So many teachers "fork" course material already, but are limited by location, copyright, and inconvenience. The idea has huge potential; good luck!

Javascript + Cleverbot + Facebook Chat --> ?

I never would have started coding if it weren't for Processing. It's relatively easy to learn, but is also Java-based and super powerful. I still use it today!

Check out http://www.processing.org