"It's 100 miles to Chicago. We've got a full tank of gas, a half pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."

"Hit it."

And get uncensored news from buzzfeed

Don't get me wrong, Tor is a great enabler for countering censorship, etc... but advocating that these people need access to facebook and twitter? Honestly. Nobody needs that.

Anderson isn't aiming to supplant Bitcoin, or even challenge the money-exchange model that drives society. But he's hoping it will change the way people think about currency

Ah, so the whole thing's just a performance art piece, not a serious proposal. Good to know. Now we can just ignore him until he goes away.

There is such a concept as aiding and abetting, or being an accessory to, a crime. Many people have been tried and convicted who themselves did not directly commit a crime.

If you don't believe that concept is applicable here, I'd like to know why. If someone else believes it does apply, I'd like to know their reasoning as well. I don't see how "liberal" or "conservative" has anything to do with it. It's a question of ethical responsibility, not political ideology. By failing to understand that, you're handwaving and dismissing a valid and worthy question about the nature of pervasive advertising and its effect on the population.

Adblock doesn't block youtube videos. They are the ONE advertising seller that "gets it." All other ad sellers do not trust the content providers to host or to count the hits on the ads. So Adblock is effective. But then again, Youtube is an ad seller AND a content provider, so the trust is within itself. Heaven help us when content providers are trusted by ad sellers.

Ads and marketing in general have evolved from simple, respectful "hey, try this! It's good" into manipulative nonsense. Few people can see through it and the result has been devastating to them. It has shaped and certainly harmed the culture of the US and even results in violence in some extreme cases where people want things so badly they hurt and kill each other to get it. Though most will disagree exactly when things have gone "too far" few will disagree that they have.

When wages go down as prices don't, that's actual hardship. It's called "cost of living" rather than "cost of luxury" for a reason.

This is very true as people shop at Walmart, not because of the amazing people that visit there, but because they can get a lot of stuff cheaper. I won't complain about that.

What I will complain about is the outrage expressed by Microsoft sucking at the teat of government because they want to bring said cheap labor into this country while telling lies to the people and that same government. This is NOT a free market while these kinds of things are going on.

But if this senator is really upset, I wonder how much attention he will pay to various appropriations when it comes to alternatives to Microsoft?

This is all just a lot of saying what people want to hear and then doing nothing about it.

How many of us have tried to do something and wished we had (at least) a third hand?

I would pay a *lot* for a third hand, as I do a lot of my own construction work (building an interior into an old church we now live in.)

I can't even guess at the number of times I've had to wait until I had someone at my side to hold, turn, twist, drill, cut, brace, etc.

This stuff is great to hear. Love the idea of extra fingers.

Although it does put me strangely in mind of that scene in Heavy Metal where a robot, after having "done" a very sexy human female, spins his fingers around with a "whiiizzz", while commenting something on the order of "human woman love sex with mechanical assistance" lol

For most programmers, recursion seems to be a tool to completely -- but unpredictably -- blow out the stack. Cynical, I know, but that's been my experience.

Although I gotta tell ya, one of my favorite recursive things is a particular area fill routine for rectangular pixels. Simple and beautiful. Just elegant as all get out. Once I understood how it does what it does, it was like someone washed my mental windshield with Windex. That was a great day. :)

Yep. One of the things you discovered is that your school was one of the (many, many) schools that are horrible at teaching things, and in particular, math. Welcome to the real world. :)

So... how's your luck been in convincing employers (if you go that way) that your Coursera work is worthy of qualifying you for jobs?

I'm going to go with this:

The vast majority of programming is fairly simple manipulation of states and symbols, which are themselves a small subset of numbers. yes and no are 1 and 0, etc.

The way those manipulations work together quickly becomes very complex.

You can do a boatload of things with just that knowledge. Entire video games. Many types of process control and dedicated controllers. Most reasonable scripting jobs, most "webby" stuff, database stuff, etc.

But then adding some knowledge of math, in the purely technical sense, gives us more symbols to manipulate, and more ways to manipulate them, and this, like any major skills enhancement, definitely makes you a better programmer. Some mid-level math concepts -- very simple in nature, actually -- amplify what you can do so much it's just amazing.

I suspect -- I can't actually tell you because my math is only mediocre to fairly good, nor have I ever knowingly come in contact such a person -- that *really* advanced math skills combined with *really* advanced programming skills (which I can lay claim to) would combine to create a true monster programmer.

But...

I think there's something about the essentially concrete nature of programming, and the incredibly abstract nature of higher math, that makes these dual-facet powerhouses the rarest of the rare. In my experience -- admittedly, just one person's career -- serious math heads tend to be pretty lousy programmers. Lots of bugs, poor structure, little to no sensitivity to shortcuts and loading. Then really great programmers seem to be only sorta capable with math (although what they can do with what they have tends to be quite surprising.) Just an IMHO based on my experience. Something I've found interesting enough to contemplate many times. Having said that, I sure would like to meet Mr. or Ms. combination-o-both. :)

http://www.businessinsider.com...

While that is still part of the organization's core function, today less than half of the NRA's revenues come from program fees and membership dues.

The bulk of the group's money now comes in the form of contributions, grants, royalty income, and advertising, much of it originating from gun industry sources.

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

But around 2005, the group began systematically reaching out to its richest members for bigger checks through its "Ring of Freedom" program, which also sought to corral corporate donors. Between then and 2011, the Violence Policy Center estimates that the firearms industry donated as much as $38.9 million to the NRA's coffers. The givers include 22 different gun makers, including famous names like Smith & Wesson, Beretta USA, SIGARMS, and Sturm, Ruger & Co. that also manufacture so-called assault weapons.

Some of that funding has given the NRA a direct stake in gun and ammo sales.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

One of the NRA's 27 websites calls such donors "corporate partners," while another says the association is "not affiliated with any firearm or ammunition manufacturers or with any business that deals in guns and ammunition."

I'll grant that a plurality of the NRA's funding seems to come from dues, but the majority of its money comes from those with a direct or indirect financial interest in the sale of weapons and ammunition, as inconvenient that is to the NRA's projected public image.

The Virtuix Omni is basically an omnidirectional treadmill.

You use it in a VR environment and to move forward, you walk forward on the treadmilll.

This should solve the simulator sickeness issue.

Sure until you reach some stairs, or a ladder, or need to jump down from a ledge. Or crouch. Or do anything interesting with a portal gun.

And where do I put the keyboard and mouse? Or do I have to line up my shots with a toy rifle instead?

Thus being wasted by people playing in a chair with a keyboard and mouse, because I'm tired from running, and have gorilla arm from pointing. Hell, even the xbox controller crowd will finally have advantage over someone.

Not saying i don't think it would be cool I was actually on a VR setup with a treadmill like this years ago at a tech exhibition (Duke Nukem 3D was the game they used) and it was neat. But it was really neat as a 5 minute tech demo... and that's about it.