Hahahaha. Have you ever visited NYC, let alone lived there? Getting a cab can be a pain in the ass even in mid-town. "Oh, look the 500th fuckin cab that's full or off duty! Might as well stand here with my arm in the air for another twenty minutes like a fucking tourist!"

The MTA may get you where you want to go, but might take two hours to do it. JFK to BX w/out MNR, anyone?

Seriously tell me hailing a cab is easy after you've tried to do it while standing in the snow an hour after bars close and you don't want to take three more God-forsaken hours to get home to an outer borough shithole apartment that costs $waytoofuckinmuch... Not that I'm bitter. :)

It sure is terrible that EA is trying hard not to go down the tubes. The cost of modern games is enormous, a lot of them never even recoup their losses, and yes EA is trying to eke out every penny from games that do succeed. That way, they can be in business one more year.

I think you're wrong.

For what it's worth, there are issue trackers offered alongside even the free levels of both github and bitbucket.org (which lets you use both git and hg). Bitbucket's free tier even lets you have a private repo if your source needs to be private (issue tracking and wiki instantiation are configurable via admin there, and should be offered as part of project repo creation). This way you get source control for your personal work as well as an issue tracker. ;)

I vaguely recall that Sourceforge also has some sort of bug tracker as well, if you'd rather use cvs/svn. (It's been a long time since I looked in that level of detail at SF though, so ymmv.)

All of these are "cloud" (blech) solutions that don't require any server setup on your part. If you aren't familiar with source control, that's kind of another matter, but there are quality GUI clients for OSX for most of the common protocols and cvs, svn, git, and hg all have reasonably good documentation publicly available in various forms.

I just watched the video, and it seems they're talking about having a car just hit the gas and brakes for you to simulate YOU driving in stop-and-go traffic. But, uh, isn't the point to do it better than a human?

Wouldn't the software be able to calculate the average rate of speed and just putter ahead at a constant rate instead of accelerating and braking like people do in rush hour traffic?

I can't tell if the video example is bad, or if they're actually suggesting making software that drives your car as poorly as you do.

The public drug companies are required to file financial reports with the SEC, which generally detail their budgets (at least to a sufficient level of granularity for this discussion). EDGAR is one avenue of getting at them (10-Q for example for quarterly reporting). But yeah, he's not lying, R&D expenditures are not the majority line item for most large pharmaceutical companies. If anything, Big Pharma has been on the whole aggressively cutting R&D over the past few years.

Just for one concrete example, here's Pfizer's 10-Q from late last year:
http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/DisplayFiling.aspx?TabIndex=2&FilingID=8236559&companyid=5709&ppu=%252fDefault.aspx%253fcompanyid%253d5709%2526amp%253bformtypeID%253d13

Click into "Financial Statements" there. I think the given figures are in units of "millions," so they spent about $2.1Bn on R&D during the given quarter, compared to $4.6Bn for "Selling, informational and administrative expenses" (which probably includes marketing) and $3.7Bn for "Cost of sales" (not sure, might be raw materials and manufacturing?).

I couldn't get past "They are all to happy". YOU. HAPPY! Now! DO IIIIIITTTTT! Everybody!

Best of luck. I've been here since the main use in going to your website was finding the latest news on Enlightenment, and I really appreciate all of your work.

Can't you just look at your Facebook settings to see what information is available to other people who are logged in to Facebook?

The main branch of the NYPL uses the same system, albeit more floors that aren't as tall, and human workers handle pick and place.

An original illustration here, sorry for the ugly url: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PotguXM3PJk/TKh0YeRyQMI/AAAAAAAAF_c/WiOrMXEWdQc/s1600/nyplstacks.jpeg

"I am, or have as a significant other, a graduate student." ;)

I think you're making a logical error. You are comparing the value of the certificate as a predictor of success (that is, how much - if any - weight to give their degrees and certifications when deciding whether to hire them) and the value of the training process - yes, completely ignoring the certificate at the end - for someone that you've already hired and whose ability is not in question.

The question isn't whether someone with less intelligence or no experience in the subject matter can become an expert on a subject from a training program; the question is whether the smart and knowledgeable person you hired (let's at least assume that you hired someone who meets your standards, and have ruled out potential hires that would not cut the mustard without the certification or degree) can come out with much more and deeper knowledge of the subject.