A culture without loyalty is doomed. Now we will see what happens when loyalty is not only worthless, but actively detrimental.

Their kind simply doesn't fucking get begin and end even in pseudo code

Huh? IIRC, pseudo-code most often uses indentation to indicate the level of nesting. I always thought that this was why Python used it in the first place; it's a good idea, even if I don't like it.

And you may as well say that C/Pascal/whatever spoils you into thinking that braces are magical. It's just syntax. If your employees really can't figure out fucking braces then there's either something seriously wrong with your company, or you should stop hiring from the Special Needs school. It's not Python's fault.

(The colleges aren't supposed to be there just to provide training for your company anyway, but that's another story.)

yeah, but beautifully broken. I don't like it much personally, but the restrictions do make it harder to write obtuse python code, which makes it much, much better for collaborative projects or introductory education. its wide use is another good reason to teach intro with it; even if the student doesn't take more classes, they have more opportunities to self-educate. even if you think it's a bad language (and, imho, it's not bad, just unremarkable), it's still a reasonable choice for a first teaching language.

I think it depends what perspective you want to approach this from. "Orchestration engine" suggests to me that its purpose is to manage manpower, i.e. it's a description of the problem domain. This is perfectly reasonable. The problem domain combines the fields of rules inference (expert systems), scheduling (constrained optimization, dynamic programming, and so on), probably some real-time statistics/quasi-supervised learning, and a few others (user interface, feedback, etc.).

The funny thing is, "expert system" was a description of a problem domain to begin with. It just happened to become associated with "rule-based inference" which is how the first expert systems were developed.

It doesn't help that "expert system" is one of those things that AI kind of failed to deliver on when they were introduced. Expert systems can be hand-coded or automatically inferred, and these are totally different games. Some very useful expert systems have 10 (or fewer) decision nodes, while others have a lot more, especially if you consider Watson to be an expert system (which it is; or at least, it's an "ensemble of expert systems").

See, "expert system" isn't very precise and never has been. There are dozens of methodologies for them, and running through a tree or list and picking a result is simply the most primitive one. The new statistical hotness is boosted/bagged learners and ensemble methods. So, "expert system" was an imprecise term to begin with and has now been burdened with a lot of baggage. I would toss it myself, it's basically meaningless now. These things happen.

this is utterly moronic. i guess if you want to give your grandkids some stolen bitcoin (whatever it'll be worth by then), or you want to make a dramatic deathbed confession that you provably murdered someone, you have a solution. it's not a great solution, but it'll do.

however, most of the time, criminals don't keep records of their crimes after they're finished, since that would be extremely stupid. electronic data you can't access is essentially nonexistent. drug dealers have address books because they need them. child porn enthusiasts have thumb drives of child porn because, presumably, they want to wank to it, not to feel smug about the evidence they have hidden in their plumbing. that's why we use encryption, rather than embedding our hard drives in blocks of cement, or sealing them and throwing them in the ocean.

as for intimidation factor, yeah, that's definitely part of it. i don't see how it's relevant here, however.

that's the minimum wage, you dolt. the Texas state average wage is $15-20.

yeah, but in Manhattan it's about $30 (median).

The rural Chinese hourly wage is more like fifty cents, so yeah, I was right, it's about a month's income to fob off one of these dev kits.

Yeah, so just replace one of the cells with [whatever] and jump the wires around that one.

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind not to point this out to the agent who insisted that I power on my laptop. The battery was dead, so I offered to plug it in for them. The agent just rolled her eyes and let me by. I think she was delighted to have confiscated my open bottle of gin. Still wasn't as fun as the time I was dressed military surplus fatigues and playing a tin whistle; the National Guardsman with the M-16 was nice about it, asked a few questions, and let me be. Another time I was asked if the picture of Gauss on my laptop was of a Frenchman. He was happy to learn that he was, in fact, German.

Life was a lot more fun when I was bugshit crazy. Remember kids, the Somebody Else's Problem field is real. No one likes hassling someone who is weird enough to actually be (or at least seem) unpredictable.

no, I was unfamiliar with that. it's actually a weird AD&D (1st edition) reference; long story.

Yeah, selling expensive, failure-prone hard drives to criminals so that dogs can't find them and the police will instead tear their house to pieces to eventually find a specialized sealed hard drive for avoiding detection which only a (very, very stupid) criminal would want.

Sounds like a real business opportunity, are you selling shares?

I don't even want to know what you think the "few layers of aluminum foil" would be good for, but I am certain it wouldn't work, whatever it is.

I think WWJBD's point is that the dogs are actually useless exactly because they can't make this distinction, and that it was all a bullshit PR exercise; the subtext is that this is similar.

the average hourly wage in Beijing is about US$4. you can imagine what it's like elsewhere. if the profit on scalping one of these is $120, that's roughly a week's worth of pay, probably closer to a month if you're in the boonies.

also, and maybe i'm going out on a limb here, i suspect it's not that hard to fake identification in China, at least to the point of transacting with a non-Chinese company. your solution won't work. there's just too much incentive to subvert these rules, and not enough infrastructure (or even desire) to prevent the fraud.

frankly, i don't see why they even bothered trying, if reselling was going to be a problem. maybe it's so they can say they tried? or maybe they actually wanted the publicity? i dunno.

fecal vomiting is a thing. it's often a symptom of a serious problem, as is vomiting blood.

YES I FUCKING KNOW THAT. How do I know that, without being a UI design nigger? Gee, it's because I've used a checkbox and I've used a radio button, and I figured out the fucking difference in about two seconds.

That's why it doesn't cunting matter how it fucking looks. At the very worst, the user will be momentarily surprised at their previous choice disappearing when they check a new box. Then, if they aren't functionally retarded, they will figure out that this check box is different from other check boxes.

"How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!"

christ i hate chihuahuas. a yapping pestilence second only to mosquitoes, and they can't even pick crops for subsistence wages. useless.

if every American would just kick one to death, they'd be gone in a few days. problem solved.