stackcollision

Yes, this is kind of like "of course the remote is in the last place you look, why would you keep looking once you found it?"

A little more than a year ago I was working on a very space-constrained device: only 2kb of program flash (an attiny23 for those curious). I had to use libusb with this, which ate up a huge portion of that space. My first shot at the main program put me over the limit by almost 500 bytes. By the time I was done, I had packed the program + the usb lib into the program flash with 4 bytes to spare.

Man, was that fun.

Thank you for mentioning this. Things have to get to their destination somehow, and if you replaced these ships with their equivalent carrying capacity of another form of transport you would probably get even more pollution.

This and "disrupt", please.

Ah, thank you. I was starting to get a bit of vertigo on how prescient this was, I felt like I was reading The Machine. Now that I know it's satire it makes a lot more sense.

Thank you for saying this, it's exactly what I've been thinking since the start.

Maybe that's true, but the fetishization of 'disruption' is getting a little ridiculous. I'm certainly downloading this.

To be fair, based on some of the other statements I've seen attributed to Churchill, I wouldn't be surprised if he had actually said that.

I recall a case where the courts did not agree with you. I can't remember names or many details, but the gist was that some guy realized that one of the pages was taking an fdat argument that was his userid, and by simply incrementing that number he could retrieve the data of any user he wanted. He presented his findings to the company (something major, like AT&T maybe), and they immediately sued him. He fought in court saying he wasn't malicious and was "white hat" as you say, but I believe he was convicted.

Does anyone remember this case?

My grandfather said that he went broke twice in his life: once when he was sued, and once when he sued someone else. Lawsuits are expensive, and if this game isn't making enough money to warrant that money-sink, they might end up putting themselves in an even worse position.

When I get into conversations about what space combat would really be like (if it ever even happens), I usually cite this book, and summarize the combat in one sentence: "The ships are taking evasive actions for shots which will hit them in 3 months." That's usually all it takes to make them really understand that space is nothing like you see in Star Wars.

On the other hand though, Heinlein makes a good case for interplanetary war never happening in Time Enough For Love. "The second best thing about space travel is that the distances involved make war very difficult, usually impractical, and almost always unnecessary. This is probably a loss for most people, since war is our race's most popular diversion, one which gives purpose and color to dull and stupid lives. But it is a great boon to the intelligent man who fights only when he must — never for sport."

An interesting digression, but he also makes the case for why a common currency between planets is completely impractical (like was mentioned in the news a year or so ago). The entire book is a great read, and it's probably tied for 1st in my list of favorites.

I've never used a piece of software from HP that I've thought was of any quality. We use several of their enterprise development tools where I work, due to an ancient contract and some political contrivances, and nobody is happy with them.

And don't even get me started on their printer ride-alongs. It's just a printer, HP. I don't need 10 programs to use it.

The slack action from a mile-long train is one of the most awe-inspiring, bone-jarring manifestations of raw power I have ever experienced. The first time I felt it, it established in my mind the idea that freight trains are forces of nature rather than vehicles.

Passenger trains also experience it (though the gear on these trains are slightly stiffer), but those cars are designed to have a much smoother ride, and they are also much shorter (8-10 cars instead of 80-100+). On a long train, it sounds like thunder coming from the front, and then a split second later the entire world shakes.

Absolutely true. I think when people say that robots are going to replace low-skilled workers only the uninformed are imagining an entirely self-sufficient factory that only has one door that the raw materials goes into, and another door that the product comes out of.

What we really should be imagining is a factory floor where instead of 50 people on an assembly line, or instead of 20 waitstaff at a restaurant, you only need one or two guys who know how to replace parts on the robots

As I said in my post, it's anecdotal yes, but I know at least two people who are in this situation.

Take one of them for example: She can't afford to eat every night. She can't get a good job in this economy, and she's got debts from the portion of college she did attend that are weighing her down. The loan providers aren't going to forgive those debts just because she didn't finish.

But yes, I knew someone was going to call me out on hyperbole as soon as I posted that. Perhaps a better way to say it is that the vast majority certainly don't become humongously successful like we are being led to believe they will.

If college really isn't for you then so be it, it's your decision. But dropping out because these famous people did it is really stupid. For every one dropout who turns into Gates, there are thousands who go hungry every night (anecdotal, yes, but I know at least two).

Dropping out != a path to success in its own right. The reason these famous dropouts are successful is because they were either intelligent and worked hard, or they got lucky (iirc, Zuckerberg only dropped out after he had a viable product, so that should hardly count).

It seems to me that the media is pitching dropping out of college as a magic pill. If you're ready to put your head down and work your butt off then more power to you, but getting out of school isn't even half of step one.