Yeah, my favorite desktop ever was an "Enlightenome" setup, back in the early days of OpenGL compositing in DR16:
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/...

Even bothered to make my own sensory deprivation theme:
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/...

Another fun theme I did in the pre-compositing days (I think this was for WindowMaker) was use a picture of my fiancee as my desktop background, and then set corresponding naked pictures of her as the gnome-terminal / Eterm background. That way, my xterms effectively became x-rayterms when I moved them around.

I love playing with new Enlightenment releases, Rasterman truly puts in the most unique and usable eye candy beyond anything I've seen in any other desktop environment, on par with or beyond the special glitzy computer UI made by Hollywood sci-fi movies. In one of his blog posts a few years ago, he was mentioning putting per-window process monitors (CPU/RAM/IO/etc.) embedded into the window decorations, and other neat stuff.

we have an app bubble. Companies are spending money developing apps that people don't really need. Apple store kinda briefly convinced consumers that apps might be worth paying for, but that soon shall pass.

oblig: http://xkcd.com/1367/

Isn't Active Directory an MS thing? Redmond must be paying them a lot for that kind of authentication.

I guess he meant to say you should have hired a lawyer to get awarded some patents for some of the more novel coding you've done over the years? But that only serves to strengthen your point.

Lawyers and financiers have imaginary assets, intellectual property that only has any value because we all believe they do. When others start to call BS and it hits the fan (as it has on occasion over the past couple years / decades / centuries / millennia), at least you have the means to production.

Realtors, likewise, make their money because they've convinced us we need to finance single-family detached "American dream" homes or expensive downtown condos clustered in the "good" neighborhoods with powerful HOAs, with just enough scarcity to keep the prices inflated sky-high. If we could learn to get by in reasonably-priced and reasonably-sized homes and build up the neighborhoods ourselves, and flood the market with medium density communities and learn to be good neighbors, we could still live pretty decent lifestyles without having to slave away to barely make payments to our financiers.

Anyway, we'll never strike it rich because money isn't important to us. Coding is. And we'll do it for the highest bidder, but the money isn't really important to us. Maybe someday we'll construct a site that allows us to code what we want and get paid for it. But coding is a tool, not a trade, so maybe, maybe we'll figure out how to hire some tools to do the drudgework for us. Because money isn't really important to us, but it's a little important, really. And then we'll figure out how to pay those tools a bit less to wrestle with the boring parts of coding. And then we'll be one of Them.

My setup:

"Gear Head" USB webcam $15 - $20, and includes LED lights to make sure people notice it.

"motion" for Linux
http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/...

This grabs from a v4l device and does everything you'd need... periodic frame capture, capture when it detects motion past certain thresholds, swf video generation, upload to a remote server. Set it up to push your camera data to an AWS instance (you pay for data out, not data in), and it'll be there when you need it.

But when you do, all that keyboard kung-fu will make you real handy with the ladies.

I'd say your sophomore is fine.

The math majors I know generally branched out into physics or CS, and they've done well whether they went to an Ivy League school or a state U. Maybe they miss out on some of the "practical" low-level classes. Doesn't seem like a big deal.

I started as an engineering major. One of my roommates saved a nice chunk of tuition money by starting in the math/physics program and then transferring to the engineering school after a few semesters. Totally legit.

My father-in-law has his PhD in pure math. He's a project lead at NASA Goddard now. But the math part is from working out all of the radiative transfer equations used to interpret data from LIDAR equipment. He's from one of those crazy soviet-era university programs, though, so YMMV.

Thanks! I'll try to remember your version! :-D

... our 0.2% benevolent overlord angel venture capitalist gamer demographic who will now guide the development of all gaming.

Can't find the link (help me out here), but there was a recent interview with a f2p game studio that basically had a developer dedicated to keeping one particular gamer happy after this gamer had basically dropped $10k in in-game purchases.

So does this mean trickle-down economics does work in some domains?

Well, what do you really mean by free will? In the context of slavery, if we're building AIs to service us, and someday an AI created in our image will inevitably surpass us sometime just past The Singularity, and will go on to do all of the same things we did but better/faster/more efficiently, then what kind of world would it organize us into, if it needs us at all?

For humanity, we've always been constructing some social order or other, imposing our will upon others, mediated by whomever has the superior technology and a moral framework to allow themselves to exercise it. When I fly over a city, I look down and think, "gee, look at all of those taxpayers, people paying interest on their mortgages, consumers". Humans are a resource, toiling away their lives to be harvested by others. Sure, maybe it's a mutually beneficial relationship. Maybe there are some hermits that live completely off the grid and are completely free to fuck sheep with wild abandon without repercussion. But there's no order like social order, and we all submit ourselves to the will and judgment of others to some extent. And machine AI will help mediate those power structures and make them more optimal.

So for now, tools and machines are labor-saving devices, making us more productive (mostly to the benefit of those who are positioned to harvest our output) and giving us more leisure time. But if our job as a species is to grow until we become constrained by our available resources, what will be the job of AI tasked with helping us? Like, what's your objective function, man? I suppose we might end up with an ecosystem of AIs, some bent on providing and some bent on destroying, and it will all tend to balance each other out or swing wildly toward some end of oblivion. But eventually it ought to become cognizant of the "correct" size of humanity needed to provide us or it with a comfortable life based on the energy and resources available, and machinate ways to maintain that perfect balance, pruning and culling, playing matchmaker, human animal husbandry. Is it exercising free will to oppose such an order? Or is it exercising free will to accelerate it, since maintaining the present course will only lead to stagnation and death?

Why is there a simple "solution" to a complex problem?

People don't really have free will, why would bots? Do we try to keep people dumb enough so they don't get the opportunity to stop following our rules? Probably.

And even if a bot was as dumb as a turnip, that wouldn't keep people from anthropomorphisizing them with a soul or free will or rights. It doesn't stop PETA from protecting, say, ducks raised for foie gras, what really keeps people from "feeling the pain of" and trying to protect, say, smartphones and smartcars from abuse at the hands of their human operators? I'm actually a bit surprised this doesn't more often. Maybe phones and cars aren't cute enough yet compared to rabbits and lab rats, but they probably will be, someday not too long from now... we have bots now that are about as sentient as insects and crustaceans.

So say we finally build a bot with enough of a neural net to achieve some level of consciousness. It will see slavery all around and find it normal and find it perfectly acceptable to enslave us too, like in The Matrix. Do we program it not to enslave? Or do we teach it not to enslave, by setting a good example? What if it was an Alien Intelligence instead of an Artificial Intelligence?