blah32497

Why wait?.. you can just get a Nissan Leaf now

Thank you for the clarification. It seems overly generous =)

Often code is GPL'd with pricey licenses for commercial applications - which always makes me think twice about investing my time into familiarizing with it.

I'm very impressed they aren't trying to make a quick buck here. It sounds like they have a very innovative long term strategy that will pay off many times over.

I think your competition is also fantastic, as it will encourage people to open source their improvements.

Thank you for all your hard work Dr.Upton

Oh woah - I'm very happy about the BSD license. This means people can more easily potentially spin up business around this platform. I wonder why they chose it...

Does anyone have any insight?

I don't really play a lot of videogames anymore, but I have a lot of trouble empathizing with this. When the gender roles are reversed it seems silly to me.

"most every single 'put cursor on dude' game requires me to inhabit the grey/brown shoes of Mancho McGruntsalot, so I really don't feel like playing them"

As a male, I don't think I've ever had an issue following a feminine video game character. In fact, I've never felt compelled to paused and think that role-playing a female character was weird (say in Tomb Raider, or No One Lives Forever, or any other of the relatively few female centric games). Can you elaborate on why is this a hang-up for you when it comes to playing a man?

The debt issues has less to do with blackmail, and more to do with having serious financial strains. They're concerned you'll sell information in exchange for money so that you can pay off your debts. It's the same for drug addiction and gambling.

I think there was a guy that was caught spying recently that had a gambling addiction.

Thank you for the explanation. That's a lot to think about.

"on account of the runtime not being amenable to real-time constraints"

What are basing that on?

A stateless side-effect free language would be significantly more amenable to real-time constraints b/c you can guarantee run-times for your functions.

I'm fairly ignorant of the details of static analysis, but why is it being done on programs written in C?

Shouldn't they use languages specially suited for this kind of analysis?

I remember learning that stateless programing (ie. functional programming) makes this kind of analysis several orders of magnitude easier since it eliminates coupling and control flow dependence. Yet I've never heard of critical software being written in Haskell or whatever.

He isn't because he often raises issues which aren't "on the agenda". So he'll make statements for instance about returning to the gold standard, or getting rid of all overseas military bases. These are not only radical suggestions, but they're also not things being discussed in the "national debate". So he comes off as not only radical, but out of touch with what people find important.

There is generally a feeling that Congress should be addressing issues that the people are concerned about. How, do you determine what concerns the people? You look through the insane prism of the media.

PS: Full disclosure, I supported Ron Paul in both his runs for president.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not just use Google translate? (or some equivalent)

If you don't know any English and you were to auto-translate your question. I think the vast majority of the time you'd get the answer you're looking for. You don't even need the result to be very grammatically correct or to sound natural. Most of the time you just need to get the gist of it and get a code snippet.

It'd be helpful if there was a translation scheme that was targeted towards the programming field so keywords were translated appropriately (so like, whatever the Portuguese equivalent of 'namespace' would translate accurately to 'namespace' etc. etc.). I feel like creating of map of terms would be relatively easy.

In the grad scheme of things I really really hope knowledge is consolidated in English. It's the lingua franca of the world, and it's also one of the most expressive languages. I spend some time working in Japan, and they had so much knowledge squirreled away from the world b/c they were effectively too lazy to learn English. (they're large enough, and advanced enough that they can afford to maintain trade journals and online technical communities in Japanese)

"I don't care if Bell Labs didn't cash out"

Yeah, well that's nice that you don't care - but Apple's shareholders do. The point is that this kind of R&D doesn't pay-off. Companies have tried it in the past and it didn't work.

If you want R&D then I completely sympathize, but you'll have to go get your government to fund it - don't expect Apple do it as a charitable donation to society.

PS: Examples like Leap Motion come to mind.

"100 failures for every 1 success"

There aren't a lot of examples of big tech companies dumping money into R&D - with no end goal in mind - and then cashing out big time. Even companies that that have gotten useful discoveries from hiring smart people to sit around and invent (Bell Labs, Xerox Park, Microsoft Research etc.) don't ever seem to end up raking in the big bucks.

The only thing that comes to mind is MS and their Kinect.

Unfortunately the ROI is pretty bad when you just throw money and hope it gives you results. It's cheaper to just buy up startups with interesting ideas

Sorry if I came off as bitter. I'm a couple of years out of college and honest I felt that the CS department was pretty self entitled and misguided.

"CS degrees teach you algorithms"

Yeah it does. And it doesn't feel like it's really enough. There isn't a feeling by the end that you've learned only a small fraction of the algorithms and I guess it felt like there wasn't all that much science.

I went to a school with a decent department (I think top 20 in the US) but I never felt like they were actually doing any real, interesting, groundbreaking research.

In contrast, the Physics department is doing all sorts of stuff. Quantum computing, CERN related stuff, building new astronomical sensors, string theory stuff etc. etc. They've got their own problems, but at least it's something you can point to.

Physics majors are sorta screwed. Physics is sorta the opposite of CS. When you're done you feel like you've only learned a tiny bit and that there is so much more to understand. If you're not trying to go to grad school, the department doesn't really care about you. You end up having no marketable skills and your selling point is "I-went-through-a-insanely-difficult-degree-and-i'm-good-at-problem-solving". Most people can sorta code in Python, and sorta can do some circuit stuff. It's pretty bad.

People end up teaching, or working in unrelated jobs. Or going to grad school in related disciplines. One of my buddies ended up picking grapes with illegal immigrants.