I live in South Florida. Lionfish is available with just a short drive down to the keys. It has a good taste and even better, no guilt whatsoever. I think it's just natural that we should eat them. BTW, Florida lobster down this way (they call them crawfish up in the Northeast :/ ) were once so plentiful that it was given to prisoners. If it's edible, someone will find a way to eat them.

Go to usajobs.gov or the FBI's website.

I don't think lack of visibility is their problem here. I've entertained moving over to the FBI, but I'm trying to get out of the DC region.

I'm trying to do a similar thing. I'm pretty decent with Perl (or at least used to be) and know enough C and Java to get myself in trouble. I'm trying to learn Python now.

So... my other hobby is video production. One of the things that's expensive to do is to track a camera so that that it can be replayed to CGI software. This allows almost seamless effects. For example, film an object against a green screen as the camera pans. In normal chromakey, it's quite obvious because the background doesn't track the same way as the camera. You can minimize this by choosing distant backgrounds but this limits you quite a bit. Anyhoo, I'm trying to use the positional sensors in a smartphone to track the movement and later replay it to software such as Blender. It hasn't been easy. In the process I am learning a lot about a lot of things.

What I'm trying to say is that you may learn a lot from complex projects even if you don't succeed in your goal.

"$100 (current book rate), paying a fee to cover the loss beyond the initial $100 should the package become lost, stolen, or damaged. That sounds a lot like the lay definition for insurance to me."

The devil's in the details...
http://www.pressroom.ups.com/F...

Just because the lay definition of declared value sounds like insurance, it isn't. With insurance, if you are at fault the insured item may still be covered. E.g., if you crash your car it will often be covered even if you are at fault. With declared value, if you improperly pack your item and it is damaged then UPS is not liable.

People watch too many Seinfeld episodes.

Yes, that is true. Except for the insurance part. UPS doesn't really provide "insurance", per se.

Don't be fooled by the optional 'high value' stamp, which allows you to declare a higher value. Rightfully so, it's not "insurance" but just allows you to claim the proper value if it is lost or damaged.

If it's really important, ship it via a UPS customer counter or Mailboxes facility.

I used to work there a couple decades ago. One of my roles was to process computer claims. Considering that many items can fall from belts and "Fragile" means "Throw me hard, please!" in UPS-ese, I'd make sure to ship any critical items through their desk with a proper declared value.

Not that FedEx is much better. I think at one point they were but if you've seen what goes on behind the scenes it's a wonder that anything gets to its destination in one piece.

Might as well talk about the USPS too. (BTW, UPS is not USPS; some are not aware.) I shipped a display stand once. It was a fairly sturdy unit, cube shaped, of some expensive teak wood with brass corners. It could easily bear my weight (and I am not a slender dude). When the first piece arrived, my aunt asked what it was. "It's a stand," I said.

    "How do you put it together?" she said.

Eh?

Apparently they'd shipped a piece of my broken stand with a piece of someone else's broken furniture. The label from my box cut out and taped to this other box. I still don't know what happened to the rest of my display stand, but presumably someone is wondering what the heck happened to the rest of their chair.

Hell, sounds like the best way to get cool software is to piss of Linus.. :D

I'm seeing subsurface show up in the weirdest, non-techy places now.. Apparently it's quite an improvement over other products.

I subsisted on Ramen and chicken pot pies because they were cheap (4/1$ for Ramen, 2/1$ for chicken pot pies). Even the cheapest dollar meal at the local fast food didn't have as many calories. But, no, I didn't worry about food all that much.

First thing is to learn to cook. It's generally cheaper to buy family portions and make your own than to buy individual meals. For example, a bag of rice is $10, but can act as bulk in many meals such as fried rice, chicken & rice, steamed rice with butter & onions.. Yeah, doesn't sound too appetizing, but it can be. Fried rice, for example, is easy to make. For about 20$ worth of ingredients, you can have 10 meals. Just need rice, an egg or two, onions, salami/pepperoni, etc.. You can buy a pack of miso for around $4. Add firm tofu ($3) or chicken chunks ($4) and dried seaweed ($3) and you can make soup for 10 people. Buying a bulk pack of 50 tacos will set you back around $10; add a couple pounds of beef (10$), lettuce (2$), cheese ($5), etc., and you can feed 10 people for $50 or so.

Next, use coupons and shop of two-for-one days. You can easily save 50% of your bill just by using coupons and shopping on the right days. Avoid individual meal items such as can soda and even White Castle burgers.

You can also show up at friends/relatives around dinner time but use that only as a last resort unless you're really tight with them. Make friends with someone who works at a pizza shop. I knew a guy in college who would take leftovers from the restaurant. At a Denny's, for example, he'd order a coffee. When people were about to leave he'd run up and ask if he could have their leftovers. Bizarre, but he saved a few bucks. He's also gotten pretty wealthy since those days so I guess it paid off. I figure that one day he'll find a way to end up in jail just so he could get a free meal and bunk. :/

Oh, and forget about corned beef. Back in my day it was cheap, around $1.50 a can. Now it's close to $6 a can. I remember many days eating corned beef and cabbage, corned beef and scrambled eggs, steamed corned beef, corned beef sandwiches. No more.

I'm not so sure. How many cases end in capitulation due to lack of funds?

Never tried reaching behind the computer trying to plug in a USB peripheral have you?

Space reefer madness!

Microgravity has an odd side effect of causing astronauts to temporarily lose their sense of smell.

What is being purchased in a buyout doesn't have to be what was profitable to the original company. Consider the classic farm example.

A farmer is making a living with a decent $10,000 yearly profit on his 100 acres. He provides the local community with fresh produce, pays his taxes, and is putting away a decent amount into his savings. By all accounts, his business is doing well. He then receives an offer to buy his farm, as-is, for $3,000,000. The farm is sold.

However, the company that purchased the farm lets the equipment rust, the fields go fallow, and the barn collapse. Why would they purchase a profitable farm if all they were going to do is let weeds grow and shut it down. The answer comes later, when 400 future housing plots are identified for sale at $400,000 each. Turns out, while the farm was profitable, the land was worth MUCH more as a housing development. Rather than earn $10,000/year in profit through hard work, the purchasing company turned a $3,000,000 purchase into a $160,000,000 real estate deal.

The farm could have continued, as it was making a profit, but it wasn't making nearly as much of a profit as it could have made. (not that I like farm's beind developed, but I think this is a good example to demonstrate why seemingly profitable enterprises get shut down after a buyout)

This is about future societies. There was a time when we speculated about what our current policies meant for a far future society. These far futures have a way of creeping up on us, as did 1984 and the new millennium.

We take many of our current policies for granted and assume they are on an ideological high ground.

There was a time when killing the offspring of your enemy was once the moral thing to do. Arranged marriages were more common. Eight year old children once worked in factories. People still are thrown in jail for years for minor offences.

If we look at our current penal system, and what it moving towards, it's not that ethical. For one, private companies run most jails and they are motivated by profit, not rehabilitation. There are arguments on both sides of the capital punishment debate and each side holds apparently contrary thoughts on related subjects such as euthanasia and abortion. Now I'm not stating agreement with any particular side on the issue of punishment, but I think we should speculate. Speculations such as these, though they are otherwise useless, at least open the debate about our current system.

We have one guy that understands build processes. I have done any serious code in years, but some of the crappy code I've seen is pretty horrid.

Here's an example:
Just over a year ago we had some Java developers doing some web code. This was on a Linux/pSeries hardware. I.e., it's a Power chip, not Intel/AMD. I was asked to install the JVM software by the developers. They gave me an Intel binary. OK, no prob. I asked them to send me the Power installation package. They responded that it was Java and the underlying hardware didn't matter. Oh really? One of the developers actually got pissy and started trying to explain that he ran it on his Windows machine and another guy ran it on his Mac. Tried again to explain the difference between the jvm executable and the jar but then I realized that if he didn't understand that, it wouldn't be much point.

The guy we brought in knows that. Lots of other things too.

Yes. The 'how' is very important.

If a plane suddenly crashes mid-flight, and I'm due to fly on that same model next week, I'd be concerned. If the crash was due to a fundamental flaw in the fuselage, I'm cancelling my flight. If it turns out the crash was due to the plane flying over rebel-held lands and being shot by a missile, my concern about my flight from Maryland to Vermont is greatly reduced.