Where else can you build a fake submarine cave filled with cages to trap mermaids and merfolks and eventually partially drain the cave to allow your dwarves to go pick up the baby mermaids to be sold as meat and baby-mermaid-bone trinkets.

His fund has an impressive trading record. He had the big advantage of starting early, in 1982, when almost nobody was doing automated trading or using advanced statistical methods. Their best years were 1982-1999. Now everybody grinds on vast amounts of data, and it's much tougher to find an edge. Performance for the last few years has been very poor, below the S&P 500. That's before fees.

The fees on his funds are insane. 5% of capital each year, and 45% of profits. Most hedge funds charge 2% and 20%, and even that's starting to slip due to competitive pressure.

Simons retired in 2009. You have to know when to quit.

It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable

Agreed.

I started buying CFLs 12 years ago. I have had four fail in that time, out of 40, spread over two different physical houses. 90% lasting over a decade? I'll take those numbers over replacing every single one every 3-6 months!

That said... "It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable" that they last two months when everyone else has them lasting for several years. Someone in this discussion has stated an irrational conclusion. Me, I still have 36 out of 40 CFLs working more than a decade later, so I don't think I have the logic problem...

BTW, all those "sensitive" electronics you describe? Each and every one of them have beefy power supplies designed to deal with brief poor power conditions, whether they simply turn off or buffer a few seconds of suitable power to make it through momentary rough patches. A 3-for-$10 CFL has no giant filter caps hidden in some nearby pocket universe to help it magically weather a brownout that would cook all those devices you describe if they didn't possess exactly such safeguards.

The only bad programmers I've ever encountered, are programmers that are inconsiderate.
Those who do not consider that the purpose of a computing language is to communicate with other developers, not just the computer. That's really the main common-factor I've found among "bad programmers". It's a skill, that can be learned, but it's an emotional skill. Some people can be very intelligent, brilliant even, and still not want to learn that one crucial skill.

Generally speaking, anything with lots of parts has more points of failures. Since CFLs all have ballasts, my experience has been that spikes does take a toll, by virtue of them dying after the storm.an incandescent is just a big resister. Yes, it can break but it is fairly tolerant by virtue of being tungsten and having no other parts. This is why I spend the money for the better CFLs. I've been using CFLs for well over a decade now. Been using them since the 90s, so not an expert, but I've owned a lot of them.

yes

Abelson and Sussman is a delightful book for programming theorists. Scheme is a big improvement over Common LISP. Learning Scheme from Abelson and Sussman is straightforward for people who can get into MIT.

This is not most of the programming population. As someone else pointed out, programming today is mostly the creation of glue code to tie together a number of (usually buggy) components. Neither the webcrap crowd nor the appcrap crowd needs Scheme. In fact, if you have that strong a theoretical background, you tend to overdesign simple programs.

If Microsoft hadn't built such insecure operating systems, the problem wouldn't be so big. This is the company that brought you Active-X, autorun, and the ability to invoke programs from spreadsheets and documents.

Python isn't a bad first language. It has all the important advanced concepts - objects, dictionaries, closures, and threads. The syntax is reasonable. Some people are bothered by the forced indentation, but for new programmers, it will seem natural.

Most of the problems with Python are performance related. They come from obscure features of the language, such as the ability to do "getattr" and "setattr" on almost anything, including objects running in another thread. So everything has to be a dictionary. (This is sometimes called the Guido von Rossum Memorial Boat Anchor.) PyPy is struggling hard to overcome that, with some success. (The optimization approach is "oh, no, program did Obscure Awful Thing which could invalidate running code" - abandon compiled JIT code, shift to backup interpreter, flush JIT code cache, execute Obscure Awful Thing, wait for control to leave area of Obscure Awful Thing while in backup interpreter, rerun JIT compiler, resume running compiled code.)

Wait!!! What happened to Pascal?!?!? On a more serious note, Pascal was the premier teaching language back in the day, but it really wasn't used much in the real world. It was a stepping stone for learning C, which is where the real power was at and what "real" applications were developed in. I believe there is less disconnect today between the popular learning languages and what is actually utilized in the real world.

Insurance only works because of uncertainty. The very concept of getting people to buy insurance depends on aggregating risk over a sufficiently large population.

When the insurance companies can actually offer people rates that come within a small margin of actual payouts (plus a hefty bit extra for the insurance company's cut) - Why would any sane person still pay for insurance? Put the same money in the bank and cut out the middle-man.

And at Martian gravity? Or at a pressure that compensates for the difference in gravity?

Mars has lower gravity than the Earth. If it works at Mars pressure and Earth Gravity, it will work better actually on Mars.

That said, I''d say the GP's assertion requires a cite - As far as I know, virtually no "Aero"dynamics-based means of propulsion or lift works on Mars. Any viable copter on Mars would require blades the size of a football field, which leads to a not inconsiderable problem of how you mount more than one of them to a probe the size of a small car.

True. Removing the fog is very expensive. It can be done, though. Watch Fog, Intensive, Dispersal Of (FIDO)

Well, that is where the instruments are.

IFR isn't an automated landing. The pilot is still flying. They're just using various beacons and displays instead of their eyes to see where they are.

But then it occurred to me, it's not the card/usb-stick the dogs are smelling, it's the fact that some human touched it

No, the dog simply smells the chemicals in the device - Hell, if we can smell them, so can a dog. We just can't smell them well enough to find one hidden inside four containers at the back of a filing cabinet, whereas a dog can.

To your other point, however...


There's no way the dog can smell certain memory cards with certain content on it

Absolutely true, but largely irrelevant. They had a warrant to seize storage media, plain and simple. The dog just helped them find all of it.

That said, I still see a dog alerting to the smell of electronics as increasingly useless in the modern world. Assuming no malicious intent on the part of the handler (false, but let's roll with it for now), a drug dog can sniff out your bag of weed precisely because you don't have hundreds of bags of hypothetically-legal weed hidden around your apartment and they need to find the one illegal one. With electronics, however, I do have hundreds (possibly in the thousands) of circuit boards randomly scattered around my house - I'd dare say that even Joe Sixpack easily has over a hundred boards around the house, when even things like car keys and teddy bears and thermostats have them nowadays.

So while the police might love cataloging 150 individual drug charges for every seed they find in your carpet, they won't take quite the same sick pleasure in documenting your three computers, your smoke detectors, two external HDDs, your TVs, 18 thumbdrives, random old PC parts you have lying around, a third of your kid's action figures, your vintage SNES and dozens of games, a few hundred burned DVDs... And then someone actually needs to check out almost all of those to decide whether or not they have any storage capacity, and if so, what they contain? In all seriousness, if they raided my house for storage media, even narrowing it down to "real" storage devices (HDDs, burned DVDs, flash drives... as opposed to every recordable greeting card etc), someone could literally spend the rest of their life trying to decide whether or not they had found anything incriminating in the collection.