My theory is that there was a flash fire that pretty much instantly went from "Do you smell smoke" to "Ahhh my face is melting" then one of the brave pilots managed to dial in a rough turn to home into the autopilot before either fleeing the cockpit or dying. Then the plane filled with toxic smoke and sailed along with a dead bunch of occupants until it ran out of fuel. The autopilot then greased a perfect landing in the ocean keeping the plane largely intact where it slid peacefully to the sea floor.

This would explain the oddities, the lack of contact, the rough homeward direction, and its eventual destination.

I don't buy the suicide part because the pilots would assume that the plane would be found. Whereas they could simply screw up the landing and that would make them look stupid but not necessarily suicidal.

And the whole bit about him practising weird things with a flight simulator that is what most people do with flight simulators. A pilot would be the last person on earth do do something normal with a flight simulator. So either he is going to practice edge cases as a skill building exercise or he is going to slalom a 747 through a huge city because that is fun.

My personal bet is that the first bit of debris will show up in New Zealand and this will allow searchers to backtrack the currents to its actual destination.

What this all screams to me is that planes should be sending a regular report up to the satellites. It could even be an efficient system where the satellites don't even bother transmitting it back to earth unless requested. Or they could transmit a summary such as transponder, altitude, direction, speed, fuel, and maybe a vague summary of the system health back to earth and leave the details available upon request only.

This whole attempt at automation is trying to replicate a system designed for humans. But other options could make things easier for robots.

• For instance putting something like an RFID tag on clothing so that the robot doesn't have to do a complicated visual assessment of the clothing.
• Most washing machines are also very much designed for humans. But a washing machine that was altered for robotic use would be far better.
• For instance a machine that dumped the clothing out when it was done would be better than a machine where a machine has to reach in and pluck stuff out;
• as would a unified washer/dryer.
• Also the set up of a typical laundry room would be again poor. So to have the machine dump the clothing out onto a rimmed metal surface where the robot could pick things out (remember the rfid tags).
• And folding the clothing would be more based on the clothing itself. The manufacturer could identify the optimal folding pattern (from the rfid tag) that the robot would use.
• Then there are steps like ironing where again a robot wielding a traditional iron would be stupid. But one of those roller press things would be great.

It would be like having a self driving car actually have hands and feet that can operate the steering wheel, tickers, gearshift etc while using eyes mounted on its head inside the car.

To me there are two kinds of elite. The classic one that generally serves only the rich elites is a university that is very hard to get into.

But the second kind would be one where they teach hard things to high levels and thus it is hard to graduate from. With an online scenario it could be possible to let pretty much everyone in and let the actual courses be the filter.

That said, I have a nephew who recently graduated from a third rate university's engineering program. Basically they taught them shit but worked them to the bone. If you didn't have a fantastic work ethic and discipline then you may very well not complete the course. But the engineering skills learned would be borderline useless.

So what I would love with an online truly elite university would be basically opensource courses. That is all the materials, videos, tests, etc would be published. This way they would have trouble concealing the fact that their course sucked.

She messaged me in fear from some article that said the new uTorrent would set her motherboard on fire. She probably doesn't know what a motherboard even is. I can't wait to see the stats on uTorrent market share over the next month or two.

There must be an economics term for when a good product gets more and more exploited by the MBAs who take over until they haven't just damaged the reputation of the product but basically lynched their own brand.

For instance I am certain that if it weren't illegal that Air Canada would use their employees and probably their passengers for fuel. Only regulators have generally kept the MBAs that run that company from setting itself on fire.

I watched a news magazine show where they were able to meet up with Nigerian "my uncle the king needs you to transfer $200 million" scammers. They had little trouble meeting them in Montreal Canada.

They went to the authorities and asked them why they didn't pursue these sorts of things and they blah blah'd about getting cooperation in Nigeria. The reality is that many of the contacts are with Nigerians in places like Canada and the UK.

The reality was that too hard actually translated into "not easy enough"

All they need to do is to pay the scammers with a CC and watch where the money goes. Then go knock some heads.

As they say, follow the money.

Actually I hate how many people beat the crap out of templates. I love the cleaner implementations of templates when used for things like vectors but I was looking at this guy's code and he was using templates in some obtuse way to literally initialize integers. I forget how he did it but he made "int x=5;" very very complicated.

The other thing that I see people doing is the nightmare of "future proofing" their software with templates. They will write functions that only take a single input type and return a single output type and use templates so as to make this generic. Except that this isn't some API situation but just a function that will probably never ever ever ever be expanded.

I lump these people in with those who will comment like this:

// This function will get the user's ID from their username
// Takes one parameter username which is the user's username
// Returns one integer representing the user's ID.
// Returns zero if the username is not found
// CREATED BY: Unknown [IP:123.123.123.123] on Jan 1, 1970
// MODIFIED BY: Unknown [IP:123.123.123.123] on Jan 1, 1970
// MODIFIED BY: Unknown [IP:123.123.123.123] on Jan 1, 1970
// MODIFIED BY: Unknown [IP:123.123.123.123] on Jan 1, 1970
// MODIFIED BY: Unknown [IP:123.123.123.123] on Jan 1, 1970
int GetUserIDFromUserName(string username)
{
//Set the user_id to its default value
int user_id=0;
.... some kind of username lookup ...
//When complete return the user's id if any matches found. Otherwise return -1
return user_id;
}
Now these same pedantic asshats are doing the above function using templates just in case the user ID become boolean or something or the username becomes a float.

Basically some asshat at NeXT chose Objective-C and that has sort of percolated through Apple. Originally the only way to do iOS apps was Objective-C; so I learned Objective-C. I hated every minute of it. All those damned, [][]][[. The moment I found an environment where I could go back to C++ I was gone.

So if you have to make an iOS app and you must use the iOS SDK then I guess you should learn objective-c. But under any other circumstances learn C++.

One other bit; I looked at godot and I would suggest that you just jump in with cocos2dx. It is great if you are 100% 2D. What I am looking at doing is what some call 2.5D and this is where I am having the most problems with cocos2dx.

Already a few disappointments. One is that the installed app is around 250Mb for what is effectively hello world. Also the whole environment is slow as molasses and I have a mac pro 2013. On the good side I think that I could develop just about anything that popped into my head. I am a bit worried about this being one of those silver bullets where the normal parts are developed so quickly that the project is seemingly 90% done in no time but the fiddly bits then take 10x as long. One other thing is that I like to release my iOS apps going back to iOS 5.1.1

I love cocos2dx but I am starting to balk at the 2d part. They are introducing 3D so that is good. The documentation for cocos2d is sparse. The executables are small and the startup delay isn't too bad. It is 64 bit for IOS (critical). Very multi-platform (Win, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and I think mobile windows). Their release schedule is very fast. Also the C++ is pretty close to the bone which means that the project sort of marches forward at a steady pace including the fiddly bits.

I recently played with Gameplay3d and was actually quite impressed. Very simple and it just sort of works. The only huge thing was that importing assets in from something like Maya was cumbersome and sort of sucked. The documentation is nearly nonexistent (documentation with useful examples) their sample code was trying to show off how they were such efficient coders and didn't separate out each bit of functionality.

The platform that attracts me the most is Openframeworks. Except that they don't yet do 64 bit on iOS which is a show stopper. They are promising this with their 0.9.0 release.

But I might have spoken too soon. I am going to continue now with cocos2d and probably deploy version 1 of my present project in that. But I am going to spend an hour an evening seeing how hard I can push Unreal.

What worries me is that with Unreal I might alter my game to fit their environment which might make for a very beautiful game that isn't much fun instead of the ugly game that I make that is fun.

Ah, but then it will just reappear. You have to go to some other spot and delete the album from your account. If I understand correctly Apple put out a U2 removal tool; like it was a virus or something.

Thanks epic. I literally just started re-coding my game from Cocos2d to Unreal. My only regret is not doing this sooner; once I saw how well this worked with mac and the clean C++ just wow.

Seeing that AVG is now in the bloatware business they will have to make these from solid lead.

Joking aside, this might be the first AVG product that I have wanted in years. The only problem is that camera people can solve this by putting IR filters on their cameras.

I was clicking on it over and over in different ways in an attempt to erase it. So yes I listened to that song way more than taylor swift or pretty much any other song.

Hardly anyone says, "I don't use Google+". I know people who say, "I don't use Facebook", or "I dumped facebook." but with G+ it is just sort of assumed. Sort of like it is assumed that people don't use MySpace.

The only time anyone I know mentions G+ is when they blah blah about how G is being an ass about linking it to other things. Google tried to make it relevant but offered nothing that was really new. I found the whole circles thing a confused mess.

In fact the only people who I find tend to have a google plus presence also seem to have something to do with Google. Either they work for google or do something with Stanford and thus probably are surrounded by googly people.

I would be curious to know how much money has been spent trying to prop up G+?