maeon3

Humans do things in exchange for money, the low hanging fruit is gathered before the hard to reach fruit up top. Given a choice to make a million dollars making a website or making a million dollars building automated self-flying cars, rational beings will always choose the former.

It's cost benefit analysis and if you think that can be changed you are delusional.

Looking at this political story from a programming perspective... What software out there can help me accept as input millions of photographs, with timestamps, locations, angles and such, and generate as output a coherent time line of each individual in each photograph so we can identify the copycat bombers that will be occurring in the following years? Surly machine learning software could be made to find a person in one image from a different image based on analysis of the configuration and color value of the person's clothing alone.

It's George Orwellian, but it will be created one way or another. Is there some software that can help achieve this goal?

It is the first step of forming an alliance and symbiotic relationship between adversarial systems.

When two humans want to acquire all the assets of the other and make the other one the slave, the first step in starting an alliance is doing a cost benefit analysis of how things would be easier for both if cooperation was done. Often times the one persuaded is reluctant until one human takes a leap of faith and gives, in expectation of receiving. It's all highly mathematical and I could create an algorithm to describe it. But you wouldn't recommend that either.

I did volunteer work at a soup kitchen and through the connections I made there I worked with someone who kicked my butt and fixed my resume. If that hadn't happened i wouldn't be making the salary I am now.

The ancient wisdom: give and it will be given you is mysteriously powerful. Humans want to help those who help others, it's in our genetics.

I see the video as a reminder that the time you wasted watching this video is like a sand castle, wasted, forever.

He's making a big deal out of the fact that some evil human may concoct an evil plan and swindle an honest man out of his hard earned bitcoins.

He's missing the entire point, bitcoin was designed to stop the federal reserve and US Mint from systematically diluting the value of our money through systematic inflation, (taking taxpayer dollars and giving it to AIG buddies for bailouts and million dollar bonuses) while bribing the media to trick the masses that inflation is somehow "good" for us.

Yes, evil men exist, and they will swindle others with tricky transactions. The purpose of bitcoin is to stop the people who create the money from stealing most of the value of all wealth on Earth every 20 years or so through Quantitative easing, inflation, and "printing dollars and giving the money to your friends" which is running rampant in this country.

He's ignoring one of the primary strengths of bitcoin, that if you want to acquire bitcoins, you will have to either A: deprive another human of them through specific and traceable theft/deception, or B: to provide reasonable goods and services in exchange them.

It stops the "Government printing Money and giving it to buddies" inflation problem dead in its tracks. But who cares? It means 5 hours of human labor deposited into bit coin equals 5 hours of human labor back out 20 years from now. We don't have anything like that now. It is as revolutionary as the invention of agriculture.

Sadly his conclusion is right. When this thing starts taking off (especially in cyprus where the governmental theft is rampant), anyone who uses it significantly is going to find their head on the chopping block, having been convicted of aiding and abetting the domestic terrorists. We must think clearly, putting ourselves in their shoes, on how they will crush BitCoin like a bug, and be prepared for the counter attacks.

For me the reverse happened, back in 2009ish, lose the job then lose the girlfriend because you're not as spendy as before. I dodged a bullet on that one. In hindsight it was the best thing to happen to me. But while I was going through it, it was like the world was ending.

Now that I'm older and wiser, I've got my shit together, I don't see employment or love/girlfriends as a source of validation that you belong here and are appreciated.

When things get rough, I envision myself as a tiny bud on the tip of a branch on a tree. When life is created, it's not new, it's just a new branch and a new sprout, and when life ends, it's just the older buds making way for the new ones.

So love, and employment is a process by which the tree sustains itself. But the tree represents the entire DNA meta organism found on earth, from the bacteria, through the beetles, on up to us. Death and life are illusions, employment is simply a process, like photosynthesis, to expand the size of the tree. The reason I think this way:

1. Reproduction, having love, girlfriends, wives and kids is not necessary. The other branches of "you" will create plenty.

2. Having a good job, vs a sucky one, is in the grand scheme of things not all that important. You are one bud on a gigantic tree. You think if you can make the next huge thing, then you'll be more important. Not really, it's the cooperation between all the units that cause increases in the sentience of the whole.

The meaning of life is to expand the growth and prosperity of the tree (all dna based life), and eventually transcend biology and get off this rock so we can fill the universe with our proud waves. You either contribute a macroscopic amount to that goal, or take away from it. Look at yourself from the edge of our galaxy and tell me again how your situation warrants an emotional blog post.

I wasn't saying certain people should not be held accountable to certain laws I'm just pointing out the major theme of the phenomenon taking place here. As programmers we are a tremendous emerging power and it feels like programmers are being discriminated against from the U.S. much more so than say an Exec at AIG. Perhaps the programmer should be prosecuted, to uphold justice, to make an example to all programmers that you better watch-out before you go making a copy of some document you find laying on the ground while taking a walk in the park. Don't copy that floppy, you could go to jail for 10 years.

When everyone is a criminal all the time, with selective enforcement, it makes it easier to tax and control. When political winds shift, you can eliminate anybody you want, because you just make an excel spreadsheet of political enemies and then forward it by email to law enforcement for increased survallence, and whamo, felony convictions, how much you want? 1 year? 5 years? 10 years?

The government is just trying to maintain its power over the people, when federal reserve realizes there is no other alternative except to default on the US treasury, there is going to be a lot of unrest, and the internet will be a focus point of governmental rebellion, it's important everyone who accesses the internet is a felon. Especially the coders, like this one, who will be making the rebellion possible.

You got to put the fear in them. We may be the ones, like our founding fathers, who have to write up a new constitution, bill of rights, and spawn a new nation to break away from the defective one. Like the good men of old time broke away from Britain. The battlefield this time around will not be on the shores of Boston, the battlefield will be software, servers, clicks, and smart phones.

As with all battlefields, the side who wins is the one who prepares the most. This is why we are cracking down on website clicking by programmers, rather than cracking down on governmental corruption.

I like getting boilerplate responses from people, it's basically a message to me: You are worth nothing to me and if I can make a profit by throwing you under the bus, I will make no hesitation to do so, and you shouldn't expect me to.

It's actually a refreshing whiff of the jungle. Kill, or be killed.

The goal is to have a vehicle that can land on another planet and return to the surface of Earth in working condition with the only requirement as add fuel.

One hindering factor is the problem of having enough fuel to make the return trip.

There needs to be a better technology to harvest the massive amounts of energy wasted when decelerating from 30k mph to 1 thousand mph during re-entry. Convert the heat to a usable fuel. So we store the fuel needed for re-entry in the velocity of the craft.

A heat to fuel converter. If we could be 100% efficient at this, we would land with just as much fuel as we left to get into orbit.

Which means, if bitcoins were to 100% replace US Dollar today, the US Government would have to immediately default on the treasury.

I get the sinking feeling that when Bitcoin takes off for it to make any kind of fractional dent in society, it's going to be squished like a bug. After having been linked to WMD's and terrorism.

But how will the Federal Reserve be able to allocate new blocks of bit coins to give to one of the 12 federal reserve banks so we can fund more trillion dollar packages of spending borrowed money if all they can do is try to acquire bitcoins from other people who have them?

In theory, would inflation be impossible with bitcoin provided that the number of humans who are willing to exchange labour for coins always increase?

To transcend your genetic programming to create more of you takes a kind of self control few people in this world can muster, I don't even think I can do it. The problem is, the moment you achieve it, you immediately remove yourself from the gene pool, so your kids don't have your hardware. However, you do augment the fitness of your collective, as if they were your kids, then your ability to transcend desire to procreate is somewhat selected back into the genome because your presence enables human life (and continued reproduction) where it was previously not possible.

Wearing these electronics in front of your face makes you un-datable, and if you are completely OK with that, then you're a candidate for being a very-early adopter of the next thing that's going to be bigger than the invention of the Internet.

I spend several thousand dollars testing a few "eyesight for the blind" products by taking video on a head mounted camera, encoding the image as an 1 image per second audio file that is transmitted to the ears. I was actually able to get it to work as advertised, and I believe that given 10 hours a day practice for a month, you could detect a sense of depth perception and make out attributes in your environment through your audio cortex enough to walk around slowly without bumping into things. I had the blind friend test out the best I could do, and although it was a technological marvel, he actually didn't like it because it made people ostracise him even MORE than him being blind. He can move around slowly without bumping into things much more fashionably with the system he already had, a stick, good hearing, touch, and memory.

So a few insights:

1. If you are putting something in front of your eyes, or on your hat brim that looks like a hacked together bunch of cameras and wires and you wear it in public, there is millions of years of evolution causing people to ostracise you. It's so bad, that a blind person told me: "The ostracism from wearing it is worse than the ostracism from them realizing your blind."

2. You think you're confidant and can handle it? You aren't, inside you are millions of years of evolution to remove what is causing the ostracism. If you are the kind of person who can choose to remain single and lonely for life when you burn with passion for the opposite sex, then you have the kind of mettle it takes to wear cameras and wires on your head in public.

3. The experience I had with converting visual to audio and using my audio cortex was tremendous. For example objects that "popped out" at me during audio-vision were completely different than normal vision. Take a brick wall for instance: I could hear the distance between the bricks (cement) was smaller in one spot, and larger in another spot because of an anomalous blip in the audio file. When looking at it visually, you think "meh", it's just a brick wall. With the audio file, the different brick leaps out at you as an anomaly. Thus exposing the data structure/algorithmic differences between the visual cortex and audio cortex.

Doing visual as audio makes you an infant again, the tiniest changes in things leap out as fascinating. This experience I had could probably be sold to people bored to tears with life. A billion dollar idea! Be an infant again.

Two Programmers are walking along the sidewalk when both simultaneously spot a hundred dollar bill on the ground between them. They begin a lively discussion of the nature of the problem, what is right? What is moral, what is just? What would people of various religions say? Should we split it? Does might make right? They spend hours discussing the fascinating problem and what should be done about it. They finally decide to settle things like the enlightened manner appropriate for civilized beings. A game a rock paper scissors. While performing the game, a Religious figure runs up, grabs the money, waves around a knife and disappears back into the crowd.

Programmer asks for some advice on what data structure to best map his family tree:

2nd Programmer says: For you I would suggest a "directed acyclic graph".

When reading/reviewing a particularly bad piece of code in front of the person who wrote it, say:

If your language had true garbage collection, the compiler would have deleted this program upon execution.

When you have the attention of more than 3 passionate guru programmers, ask:

"Does the curley brace go on the first line of the for loop or on the next line?"

Laugh at any opinion given, calling them "silly".

My program won't compile, I think I've lost one of my bits, can you help me find it? I think I dropped it on the carpet over there, it may have rolled under the desk.

When Chuck Norris throws an exception, it’s across the room.

Working on a coding project, one programmer asks the other who wrote up these project specifications?

Other programmer says: I can't tell you where the specs were designed, but be careful, the paper is still hot.

While pair programming: "There!! It compiles!"..... SHIP IT!

If you are using an IDE like Eclipse or anything with auto code completion, syntax color-highlighting, and syntax error highlighting, get rid of that while coding up the exercises in the PDF.

Use Notepad++ or kwrite and disable those features, if your coding speed grinds to a halt under these conditions, good!

That's the point of the exercise, like trying to jog at 30 thousand feet, as you overcome the hindrance up there, and you come back down to normal level, you feel like you can leap over a car. Same with coding, you feel like you can code blindfolded. And your ability/productivity increases by an order of magnitude.

What would impress me is an entire car, made stem to stern from 3d printers, even if it took a year using Titanium 3d printers and plastic 3d printers.

Also he would probably make more waves/growth if he were to print up things like all-plastic parts for the Honda accord and sell it to local garages for 1/100th of the price.

And thus, the Government became a listening party to every data transmission that will ever exist for the next thousand years. Voice, video, conversation. The talk with your kids. Everything. We need to do something about this. The internet is the future data transfer medium. It's the substrate we will be using to think among ourselves. Our government is trying to get inside our MINDS. By becoming our mind before the neurons have a chance to join up.

I'm just doing a little startup with me and my friends, I'd like to have a website, or broadcast to everyone around the world, but I can't afford to broadcast information to all the people like the big fat-cats who have paid off the government can.

This is step 1 of 10 in turning the Global internet in a controlled apendage of the american government, to be metered, spliced, diced, fast-laned, slow-laned and policed. There will be "pay me money to use this part of the internet" signs everywhere. And the taxes will be reasonable, at first.

The government will own the internet, and you will have to pay them dearly to use it. Even when the internet is simply a data transfer between two consenting adults that stand next to eachother.

The government then took a large step to becoming a God, omnipresent. Privacy? Out the fucking window. Kthx

Critical thinking is hard to teach, because people have it beaten out of them. Where I came from, raised in a church during the formative years of my mind, I was trained that Critical thinking, Scepticism, using logic and thinking very deep into things were considered sin and to be reprimanded.

So the question becomes, why is it so hard to undo the damage that Religious powers in this country have worked hard to achieve: transmogifying segments of the populations into rule-obeying sheep that follow commands from others, without considering that the right/wrongness of an action is based on what God says, rather than an analysis of the thing itself.

The right to bear arms and the human bill of rights is not up for re-interpreting and re-writing. Why are you trying to unwravel what the Utopia that our founding fathers created by making us more like Russia and China?

Could it be a stunt by a particularly intuitive student to prevent a shooting incident by creating a false alarm, to get everyone to tighten up security, thus reducing the probability of an actual shooter event really happening?

Shooters are probably smart enough to pick their targets, and they would be unwise to pick one that's on edge from a recent incident. </conspiracy theory>

You are right. I was not looking at the whole picture. But still, if Bill is putting that money into another growth vehicle, that means that he believes Microsoft isn't going to rise to superstar status again. It's not a place where his money will even retain it's base value. He wants to get it out as soon as possible without crushing the stock. A decade long opinion that Microsoft isn't going to get better with time.