http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/23/us-britain-downgrade-moodys-idUSBRE91L16M20130223
AUSTERITY!
"Moody's stripped the country of its coveted top-notch triple-A rating, dealing a major blow to finance minister George Osborne."
Even if she is 200 pounds overweight these games are fun. Get a Kinect and 2 ddr dance pads. Hopefully you don't know this game very well yet. When she sees you miserably failing she'll give it a try. I haven't played "Just Dance" but I have tons of DDR experience and this is a great game for men and women. It's great exercise and great fun. This is a good way to get into gaming and into the habit of turning on the xbox when bored. If you advance faster than her it's okay as you can play at different levels at the same time on the same song.
And calling cell to cell is the worst. It's much worse for conference calls with 3 people (or more). What happens is when one person stops talking the other 2 start in simultaineously and you get 3 words in before you realize two of you are talking and then you both stop for a whole second and then both start up. Plus the sound quality isn't as good because cell phone calls are overly-compressed.
There's probably less delay calling Australia on a land line than downtown to downtown cell to cell.
Cell phones are great - don't get me wrong - for a 1 minutes conversation. But a 1 hour intense business discussion - forget it.
The more sure you are about something the more you are willing to bet.
One of the reasons markets are more accurate than pundits is that some of them have inside information of sorts.
The reason intrade is useful for predictions is that the people who bet there do very careful research. For example when betting on American Idol vote-offs they look carefully at the data at dialidol.com. The people who don't look carefully quickly learn not to bet on intrade as they lose too much money. They also used to be able to look at download quantites on itunes for the previous week's singers songs. There is data out there that is tricky to find and the people who find it sometimes jump on intrade and make a bet. Instead of trusting someone to integrate all the data, it's easier to let the people betting at intrade do it for you. Also some of those people are friends and they chat about the data and how they interpreted it and argue about what it all means. The smarter people make the most money and keep at it, and they are the ones with their bigger bets that set the market price accurately.
There were hundreds of poll results but making heads or tails of it and including the electoral college of each state and figuring out which polls are biased and so on is a lot of work. Easier to just check intrade - let the experts (not pundits) make the bets.
If democrats tried to fool intrade by betting on Obama, then why did Obama's price go down so much after the first debate?
Maybe manipulating intrade isn't that easy in a big market like presidential win?
You shouldn't let people bet on things that are strongly affected by murdering one person such as election results or who wins american idol. Or if you allow this then the max bet needs to be well under the cost for a cheap hit.
On one picture you can see how the visual image and the gamma radiation agree at the corner of a wall. You can see that the radiation spot turns 90 degrees with the bottom edge of the wall and how the radioactive materials kind of puddled near the bottom of the wall. It's cool to see that the two images agree.
Also there is video of the actual camera which is pretty big and not so portable. You probably want to keep it in a car most of the time.
http://www.japanprobe.com/2012/03/30/camera-can-see-radiation/
Read about the canvas element. You should be able to write the whole thing in javascript. You should be able to get an extremely basic version up and running within a few hours. Just play around a bit in javascript and read about <canvas>. The physics is trivial - you store the x,y vx,vy value of everything that is moving (velocity x,y). You add vx to x every cycle through your loop. You adjust vy by gravity through every cycle. Also known as ay. And you also adjust vx,vy by every gravitational point nearby. You calculate the distance sqrt((x1-x2)^2+(y1-y2)^2 ) to each object and use gravity formula which is realted to 1/distance squared so you can get rid of that sqrt and make the code more efficient. Then find the portion of accel that is due to x and y. Anyway, it's just a few hours work. Just give it a shot - don't read any books - just find an html primer website that talks about <canvas>.
Yeah, I know - it's hard getting people in Timbuktu, Idaho with 15 years of PHP & Javascript experience who will work for $8/hour
I'm in the Boston area and I already told you. Zero experience in javascript or any specific language is required. And we pay very well. Because we have to. Because the only people we can find we have to hire away from other companies. But damn it, you better know how to write code in *some* language. I figure they can learn javascript after we hire them. My ad in Monster got 20 responses over a month and when I called them all back they all had found jobs except for 4 crappy programmers who didn't know how to make for loops and one we made an offer to who also went elsewhere (he had 3 offers and ours was the highest). I keep hearing ads for Mathworks which has 200 open requisitions. I have neighbors who work there and they say they are able to find programmers but it is a struggle.
Good programmers are very hard to find right now. If you can write good clean code that is easy to maintain and read by others and if you are reasonably fast it shouldn't matter how old you are. I'm having a hell of a time finding anyone - I would love those skills (php, javascript especially) but I'll just take someone who knows how to write in java or c and train them. I think we may have finally filled both our positions (fingers crossed) but it took 18 months to fill 2 positions! It sucks out there if you are trying to hire. Other's I know who are trying to hire programmers have a similar story. Programmers have their companies by the short hairs right now. All of us should be asking for raises (the good programmers anyway).
Also you should know that there is much less age discrimination with contract programmers versus permanent programmers. And the pay is better. If you are in an industry were someone with just 1 year javascript experience gets $50k then you can get $50 per hour ($90k, $90 per hour, etc this is the general rule but doesn't always work for every situation). Your second contract that rate will go up and within a few years you should be at $100 per hour. If you are good. Also if you go through an agency for the first few gigs you will find that they market you in ways that you can't market yourself ("his coworker, John, said he's the fastest programmer he ever met" or whatever). And life is less stressful for contract programmers because there is a little less emotional investment and also less meetings.
We are happily using prism for our customer's (also in law enforcement) whose IT department refuses to let them install "firefox". Right now prism is great but it would be nice to eventually get those ff ver 4 and ver 5 faster javascript interpreters (engines?).
I'm not sure if using --chrome would help us because I suspect I would have to use the firefox setup.msi file which would give away our secret as usually the IT department is the group going around installing our software on our user's machines. Unless creating my own ff installer is simple (I'm experienced creating an msi file but the prism one is so simple because all it does is copy files - no registering of dlls or registry changes).
"I've got some amyls. We could either party later or, like, start his heart." -- "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie"