Just took a Stanford MOOC on statistical learning. The best part of the course was the PDF textbook that the authors made available free of charge. The videos served to reinforce what I had already read in the textbook, and were by no means a substitute for actually reading the book. But I did appreciate them.

Yeah, soldering SMT is not that hard, at least for the larger packages and pitches. The no-lead stuff is hard without specialized tools, but with a decent iron, flux, good light, and a loupe you can accomplish a lot.

My strategy is to prototype on a breadboard, and use breakout boards for the SMT components. Then when the design has been thoroughly tested, design a PCB that either accepts the larger SMT stuff directly, or accepts the breakout boards. Requires lots of care in design, and all my projects have been relatively simple, but if you're patient, the result is good and not very expensive.

I've tried the print and etch process, but the pitches you can achieve are not small enough to make it worthwhile for me. The whole point of getting away from perfboard was to use SMT, and in my experience it's too easy to mess up small traces when etching at home.

Do you realize just how many potential mandatory voters don't file taxes every year? Or move beteween voting locales between elections? It's much larger numbers than you think. Mandatory voting would require the authorities to find them and, and this is the truly larger point CHARGE THEM WITH A CRIME.

Voting is a right. Mandatory voting is a compulsion. It changes the power of the vote from being something of the citizen over the government to a power the government wields over a citizen.

You can believe that power would be wielded honorably, but you'd quickly be proven wrong.

Bzzzt. Wrong. Voted in every national level election since 1988.

But of course you got it wrong because you have it backwards. Those the vote would be known, those that don't vote would need to be looked into, investigated, or dare I say, spied upon.

My post was relatively in jest, but partly serious.

The government can't know who didn't vote without keeping meticulous records, hmmmmm lets call them "metadata", about peoples voting habits and whereabouts on voting day.

And don't say that they'd just look at the voter rolls and compare them to census data, they'd need to be far more thorough than that in their tracking and monitoring to be able to effectively fine or charge someone with the crime of not voting (and it'd have to be a crime to not vote because "mandatory").

How can you tell if someone has cast their mandatory ballot if you don't spy on them?!

Annnnnd you've Godwinned a thread on daylight savings time.

Nice.

Of course the GP post is ridiculous. Want your base 10 time, move back to the twelve colonies.

You used the standard dictionary definition of waterway. But the EPA has expanded their, correct in my opinion, oversight of actual waterways to include standing water and even temporary bodies of water from storms. A willful expansion of their power. I think they are giving themselves a club to use against farmers who do other things they don't like but can't stop through their current regulations. So they bogusly expand the regulations they have.

You know, today's EPA also has changed regulations to make a pond be considered a "navigable waterway". These regulations are ridiculous. I am awaiting the EPA using their SWAT teams to come after farmers for mis managing their waterways.

So what?

It was an interesting bit of film.

One that does NOT ONE DAMN THING to detract from the "actual" Power Rangers.

If our fucked up copyright laws forbid something as simple as this then that whole "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" shit that was intended is totally gone to hell.

If we can't stand on the shoulders of giants (or dudes in tacky suits) and create "new" interpretations, then we've lost the real reason for copyright anyway. I'm not saying that Power Rangers doesn't deserve copyright, but I am saying that reasonable copyright terms should have put it in the public domain by now.

I am currently boycotting all songs from Tom Petty because of his crappy copyright challenge to Sam Smith's "borrowing his song" I mean come on, if we compare every song with every other song and "alter the tempo", and "vary the pitch" then we're screwed. Music reuses all kinds of things all the time. Fuck, soon people will try to copyrighting fucking chords progressions and beats. Yeah Sam Smith's song resembles one of Petty's, but only if you torture it enough. What's next, syllable counts on choruses? That shit was ridiculous.

Copyright has become a farce that no longer does any good for the public. And since thats what it was supposed to be for, I'd say its high time we scrap the whole decrepit edifice of modern copyright law and start over.

Maybe for some reason you want to constrain yourself to contemporaneous tech. D-Link made parallel port Ethernet adapters meant for use with laptops. I have a DE-620 that I've successfully used with Windows 3.11 on my Compaq LTE 386.

Interesting list. But I have issues with item's 5 and 6.

When you look at Boys who go into Technical Fields, including CS, you find quite a large number of them who were as children quite interested in video game systems. This and their curiosity propelled them to try and figure out how these things worked. Some of my first programs were simple games, and hacking your way around the DRM for some games was a key technical puzzle to solve when I was growing up.

Also a key feature for many boys that later go into tech was figuring out how devices work. Nowadays, the smartphone is one of the devices to analyze that way, especially if they get into rooting the devices and reinstalling OSes on it.

Now kids may play the games and use the smartphones and not become interested in CS, but I'm don't think thats because of those activities generally.

I think kids interested in science and engineering are the kids interested in how those games and devices WORK.

The article doesn't say. A ping flood? Attempted DOS? Attempt to connect to telnet port?

Sorry, but this guy is clearly exaggerating the number in order to try and get more money. Kind of like when Darryl on The Office wrote on his resume that he had overseen the "shipping of 2.5 billion units of paper material." I.e., pieces of paper.

Exactly. If the data being used against your arguments is so faulty, let it be put out there and publish your paper proving their conclusions wrong. Calling for overt censorship, from certain perspectives, looks no different than trying to hide something.

I think people in general are getting pretty sick of having islamic terrorists do horrific stuff and then the first thing the media does is point its finger at us saying "and don't you retaliate about this". In fact we don't, as individual citizens retaliate about this at all. There may be some instances here or there of poor treatment of muslims from some people, but they're constantly berating ALL of us to "not judge".

I think people are through with that, sick of being scolded for things we're not doing, while our leaders are developing habits of NEVER calling out these murderous islamic terrorists and stating that they are completely unacceptable in our world. They are only yelling at us to not ever respond in any way.

This is exactly it.

No one could bring themselves to believe the horrors that the Nazi's did UNTIL the pictures could be seen.

These things are hard to look at, but they must be seen.