Doesn't matter to me what you think really, but I just wanted to mention that all I did was notice an article here on slashdot about bitcoin when it was first launching, said to myself "huh, this looks like an interesting concept", grabbed the client, mined a couple blocks of 50 coins in a matter of days with a mediocre video card, then turned it off and forgot about it. When the price skyrocketted, I knew it wasn't sustainable, and this neat little experiment had gone too far, so I sold most of them at that point, on an exchange. What part of that was me being a scammer?

I know, right? I got a pretty good crash course in Spanish after moving to Mexico for a year in 2000, to a city where almost no-one spoke English. So now I'm fairly fluent in English, French and Spanish. Since leaving Quebec almost 30 years ago, I only speak French with anyone once every few years as a bit of a novelty. Spanish? Absolutely never in the main cities in Canada. I work in IT, and I've only ever met one guy who spoke Spanish. The order is, and has been English, Chinese, Russian, and German, with Hindi floating around on either side of Russian, and Japanese down near the bottom (but still way above Spanish) more or less exactly as you stated, in every corporate environment I've working in for the last 20 years. That includes the teams several other countries. Conclusion: The secondary languages I've learned have absolutely no use in any business I've conducted throughout my entire career in IT.

You mean like this? http://hexus.net/tech/news/dis... I don't care what anyone else says about what's "right", because people are idiots. I'm buying one of these.

Alternate Reality Games. Love 'em. Hard to classify though, since the best ones have a heavy 'real world' puzzle solving component, and aren't necessarily confined to an online experience. That part alone would make me consider them video games, but some of the late night phone calls I've gotten, and weird places I've gone to, definitely elevates this type of game into a class by itself.

Wait...you're asking for a boycott on Samsung, but not Apple? ...and you think that Apple hasn't tried (and succeeded) in lawsuits defending their frivolous patents by outspending their competition on fancy lawyers? While I agree that Samsung has pulled a lot of crap that is boycott-worthy, the way you've stated the case is, to put it nicely, disingenuous.

Well, there are reasons beyond that to be fair. Thinking of the reasons why some of my previous jobs were in large corporations:

- More likely to get training when you're starting out and wet behind the ears, be surrounded by people with more experience you can learn from, and not have to be the guy with all the answers when you're so junior.
- A certain level of job stability and good benefits when you have bills to pay, and people you're supporting.
- Something recognizable to other employers for your future job hunting.

Having said all that, you're right about one thing. If you stay in IT long enough, and you're good at what you do, there does come a point where, if you've worked for large companies for a while, you realize how crap it is, and that you deserve better and can get it in a smaller shop, or startup.

[citation needed] Specifically I'm saying, citation of someone with no domain experience in a type of business starting one, and becoming wildly successful that wasn't due to either luck or downright unethical practices. One example please...just one. Thanks.

My favorite one was the space/sci-fi one. My memory is fuzzy, but there was a page where something really cool happens, but it was an unreachable, unlinked page that you couldn't normally get to. I found it because I had a practice of putting a little pencil mark on the corner of every page I read, so I could see which pages I hadn't read, and try to figure out how to get to them.

As phantomfive also said, thanks. I have a copy of Einstein's Relativity right here that I was planning to re-read soon, but I think I'll take your advice and read up on tensors first, to enhance my understanding. You've given me a reason for looking forward to this more than I already was. Wish I had mod points for ya!

I love bitcoin. I've mined them, bought them, sold them, bought real tangible (completely legal) things with them, donated to worthwhile causes with them, and have read enough to understand how the whole system works...and even I think this is a downright retarded idea.

I'll add, if it was me, I'd bring the couple of Raspberry Pi kits I've had kicking around for months and never had the time to play with, plus the handful of soft copy guides I've got kicking around on a laptop, and finally do something with them, like I've been meaning to for ages. You will have access to electricity, I assume?

I came here to say this. People commenting here don't seem to have the experience to back it up. I spent a year in a beautiful place where the climate and culture were a 180 from where I'd spent most of the rest of my life up to that point, and hardly anybody spoke a word of English. It was an awesome adventure, but I still had a whole heap of Cisco training materials on a laptop, and managed to write my CCNA exam when I came back. I had enough downtime over the course of the year, and sometimes I just wanted use the time to learn something radically different from my current surroundings, and more related to my former life. It helped me stay sane when I started to feel like a stranger in a strange land, and it made me remember that I'm not an idiot. When you spend a year trying to function in a place where you don't speak the language too well (especially at first), you can start to feel like you've lost too many brain cells. As for what to bring, that's hard to say, but I'd recommend something that's formatted as a course with study guides and practice tests, just because then you can gauge how well you're absorbing the material without needing to be online to confirm it.

Totally this. I work for a company that has a 5TB database that's currently holding all granular transaction data for a few thousand companies over 10 years. The main transaction detail table grows by 1-200k records per hour on average (around 50 new inserts a second), which amounts to about 1-2 GB a day. With the way things are ramping, we're on track to increase by around 1 TB a year on that database. We allow several levels of reporting to those companies, with details vs. aggregation, and all kinds of data warehouse slicing and dicing for everything they could possibly want. There are issues with some reports being slow sometimes, and data warehouse problems occasionally making it fall as much as a whole day behind (oh, the horror!), but it generally works.

As a rule of thumb, we don't consider this anywhere near big data. A large Oracle database, and some standard (by now we could call them "traditional") tools for cubes and data warehouses is all we need.

I know right? I actually have 3 copies of it, 2 of which were thrown into those "buy this whole shoebox full of 2600 carts for $10, but you have to take them all" garage sale deals, and 1 of which is still in the original packaging (although not sealed).

Yeah, I wonder about this. It's extremely hard to come up with numbers. You typically end up with specific cases hitting the news in chunks, like this: http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

Then there's my own anecdotal evidence from copper mining, where my friend left his management position at one Canadian mining company shortly after a Chinese company acquired 51%, only to have another Chinese company buy a 40% stake in the next company he ended up at. Now he's waiting for the other shoe to drop, when the additional 11% acquisition quietly happens with no press. I've heard the same stories in every natural resource sector I know people in, but I just spent an hour googling this, and I can't find any top line number for just how much of Canada is actually owned by China. I suspect it's truly shocking.