I think this study kind of explains when you learn something so well (say, by doing it so many times), you can do it "by reflex." Perhaps what that really means is you no longer need cognitive ability to do those tasks, such as riding a bike, driving in clear conditions, or typing.

I think what they've found is that the brain becomes more reliant on on older parts of the brain that operates in the sub-conscious, perhaps like the brain stem. So doing something over and over might move the ability from the cortex down into lower parts, not unlike programming something in Java, vs assembly. Both languages can accomplish the same thing, but they way they do it is very different, as they are at different layers of abstraction.

Can't you just find a fresh water stream and drink that? Hell there are like 10 just in my area, not including fresh water lakes that are technically drinkable within 15km.

Against the Slashdot rules, I read TFA and watched the entire video.

Unless I'm mistaken, all they did was create a giant array of possible motor combinations for movement, and then the robot just randomly tries them until it finds one which lets it more-or-less go in the same direction. It may not be the best one, but one that mostly works (it just stops at the first one that mostly works).

Is that really a super big breakthrough? If the robot dynamically adapted to the broken leg, and figured out how to move using some semi-intelligent algorithm, I would say that is really awesome. But this is literally just trial and error through pre-created movement specs, randomly, then just selecting one that is mostly okay.

Not trying to downplay other's achievements or research or anything, but it just doesn't seem like a big break through, unless "brute force" is something novel.

This is quite possibly the worst financial advice I have ever seen. Forget about credit. You realize credit cards provide you with free money for 30 days, that is INSURED against all fraud/false claims, and most importantly, offers cash-back (or travel/movie/your interests) rewards by using it?

If you are responsible and pay off your credit card and never accrue/pay any sort of interest, you will actually gain money by using them (through rewards, and the ability to invest the money you spent for free for 30 days!), and be protected by VISA/MasterCard/whatever against bad purchases (someone trying to rip you off).

The only people who say "never use credit cards" are those with no self control, and thus wrongly assume others have no self control either. I have never held credit card debt (unless it was special 0% offers), and every year I get a few hundred dollars just for using it (no annual fee). In addition, several times I have made online purchases, but never received the item, called VISA, and they immediately refunded my card and dealt with the seller.

You mean because I'm not specifically linking you to what I started with, then going into depth about the modifications and ethos I developed from there? Of course I'm not going to, that's between me and my company. Figure it out yourself.

Well, what can I say. jQuery is used by 80% of the top 10,000 most visited sites (jQuery). How about you make something that is used by a small percentage of that, and then you can bitch about his ability. But then I am sure you have done nothing, and you are nobody, so I don't know why you think you know what you're doing, nor how you became so arrogant.

Yes I agree 100%. Languages and platforms are a tool, what matters is the person choosing and using them.

Using prototype is part of the approach of our inheritance pattern, which is based off a methodology from John Resig.

The only person who failed here was you, for trying to be a smart ass. There are many people who are good at coding aside from you, and probably many who are better, or at the least, not a dumbass.

I've been working in software development for about 15 years now, and I've worked professionally with all the majors (C++ a bit, Java, PHP, Perl, VBScript which was awful, C# extensively which I like a lot). For the last few years I've been tasked with writing a very large client-facing web application, where my team was mostly responsible for the front-end (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) that communicates with a large RESTful service provided by another team. This included writing an API in JavaScript with documentation.

The first thing I did was set ground rules on how my team should program in JavaScript, the structure we would use, how we would use the functional language to maximize its abilities and have some class-like things (properties, inheritance, etc.) too. Now we have a full blown web-app with a JS front end with over 900 JavaScript files (when in debug) that are very nicely sorted and categorized, full class/inheritance structures, and many other things. We use Visual Studio 2012/2013 with a few custom JavaScript extensions, and along with Chrome's debugger, it is more than manageable. But we also don't need to target any old browsers. Nothing pre-HTML5.

I'm not saying JavaScript is the best language in the world or anything like that, it definitely has its problems, and it certainly doesn't fit as a choice in many situation. But programming for it these days is not the nightmare it once was (assuming you don't need legacy browser support), and in many cases, it's actually rather refreshing after 13 years of strictly typed non-functional languages, because you can do some interesting things.

You're a CTO of a company with 4 plants, and you make more doing after hours work than what your job pays you? I'm not sure what to make of that, except that perhaps you're underpaid, and also appear to be working insane hours.

I also love my job, and what I do, but there is a balance, and I like my life outside of work as well and am glad to make enough from it to not have to worry.

How many miles were in snow or dense fog or severe rain? I drive in this conditions all the time and its totally different than a sunny day in California.

I had to sell something once, so I needed it. For buying, I just use paypal and anonymous access. I hadn't logged into the account for 2 years.

As per my usual, my eBay account has all fake information and a throw-away password. eBay often tells me to make it stronger, but it's ironic, because had I of actually used a strong "normal" password (one of my strong ones I can remember), it would now have been possibly compromised.

I think this might be an argument for using crap usernames/passwords for sites you don't trust (which is most of them), because chances are, they're going to leak your information at some point.

I'm surprised this isn't the norm already? What kind of shitty environments/code are people working with?

At all the companies I've worked at (all Visual Studio), if you got source from TFS, it was guaranteed just pressing 'start' would compile and run it, regardless of whether it was WinForms, ASP.NET, Silverlight, etc. That's just expected, and if I ever started a job and the code didn't just run, I'd assume people there didn't know what they were doing.

I'm not American. Who's judging now?

I've never lived in Japan, but I've visited there many times over the last decade, and I disagree that it isn't "overcrowded." I never felt like I could be alone in Tokyo (I.e. >20m from another human). In addition, have you even used the Tokyo Metro during rush hour? Shinjuku station? They really do use polls on people, and you're packed in like a goddamm sardine. That's not life, that's not living. That's being a meat popsicle. No thanks.