The last quarter or so of the patterns deal with interior space, but i think you might find it problematic to just apply them in isolation.

The patterns are meant to be applied in order, from largest effect with least detail, to smallest effect and highest detail.

So, for instance, if you take room that doesn't have "light on two sides"

http://www.patternlanguage.com...

there may not be much you can do, interior design wise, to save the room, without first trying some of the suggestions he has for how to deal with the lack of windows...

One other AC posted this, but it will probably stay buried at zero.

If you're interested in why some spaces feel nice to you and others don't, there's a series of books you want to read, by "Christopher Alexander"

The first one is "The Timeless Way of Building". The next is "A Pattern Language"

This guy was writing about the human factors in architecture -- why certain spaces make all people feel good, and how that developed over human history, and how it's largely been lost in modern architecture.

His next book, "A Pattern Language", enumerates 253 patterns his team rediscovered that help resolve social problems in architectural spaces.

The problem he noticed is that people could understand if they felt good in a space or not, but it was difficult to predict ahead of time if a building would have this quality or not. And that's obviously a huge problem if you want to build things that people love, because buildings are expensive and stay around a long time. Just cloning old buildings that people like doesn't quite do it either - because people didn't really understand what made those spaces great.

This series of books is what the Gang of Four looked at, and one of them said "hey, this applies to building software also - when the problem looks like this, there's a pattern that can be implemented many different ways to address that problem".

Thus, the design patterns movement in software was born.

If you're at all interested in houses, cities, planning, design, etc, I really recommend the books.

However, read them before you buy/build your next house -- not right after you just moved. You'll start to find explanatinos about where you currently live that explain why you don't use or don't enjoy certain things, and you'll be frustrated and want to start changing things :)

I think the next job would be to see what happens when it starts rusting a bit or gets scratched/nicked or gets heated up or temperature cycled. See how much of the strength is lost.

I wouldn't rely on the material for important stuff till I knew how the material can fail and how well it fails.

You should consider the business model of slashdot. How does slashdot make money? I suspect page views are part of it.

If i were running slashdot, I'd be able to tell you, based on over a decade of historical data, which types of articles generate the highest ad revenues. I'd make sure those articles appeared as often as possible, and I'd look for feedback effects to make sure I wasn't over doing it.

If you want to know why slashdot has lots of articles in Elon Musk, Tesla, Gender in CS, and Microsoft, it's because those stories bring the clicks, commenters, and critically, page views.

(I'm assuming)

And the point of submarines with nuclear missiles is to make a nuclear capable enemy more convinced that MAD is really MAD. They can't wipe out all your nuclear missile silos and survive because you have enough hidden "nuclear missile silos" aka submarines in the ocean to wipe them out.

The oceans are big places, you might be able to locate submarines that you already know the rough location of. But how are you going to bounce laser light off a hull if you're not even within 50km of the submarine?

Wake detection could work better, however if the submarines don't move that fast and if they are deep underwater they won't leave as big wakes.

It was not so long ago that rural residents exceeded urban residents in the US. While the balance has flipped, it has not dramatically done so.

I live in a rural area and when I go into the office it is a 20 mile one-way trip (that takes only 20 minutes, door to door). If I run any errands while I am in town I need to plan for at least 50 miles of drive on a charge. Given that it gets bitterly cold here (-30F is not uncommon), I wouldn't feel comfortable running a battery pack that didn't have a significant buffer above that range. Also, given that the posted speed limit is 75, and the roads are often empty, my actual road speed can be much higher than the 55-60mph that range testing is conducting at. Also, wind speeds here are often 30mph or more, so the car may be moving through the air at a 100mph or more speed equivalent. Drag increases exponentially with air speed.

When driving in winter, rear defrost, seat heaters, and front defrost will all be running at maximum.

The bottom line is that I don't think I could reliably do my daily commute on something approximately rated for my actual expected round trip mileage. The Leaf is rated at 70 miles at 55mph with intermittent AC usage. That's not enough margin for me to feel comfortable.

I have driven a Tesla 85 and it is simply magnificent. I'd be willing to experiment with the Tesla 60kw and I think it would reliably meet my normal needs, but any lesser EV I have no interest in.

Or have a "deadman switch" trigger a script to update it with preset/random stuff, or have some prankster update it for you: http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

e.g. Justin Morg: Oops... Looks like I'm dead. Damn... :(
Tuesday at 10:00pm

Justin Morg likes 10 ways to tell that you are really dead
Tuesday at 10:02pm

Justin Morg: Anyone have a res handy? Urgent!
                        Justin Morg needs a resurrection! Give him one and you'll get HadesVille points!
Tuesday at 10:13pm via HadesVille

Justin Morg: Where's the restore from quick-save option when you really really need it. Sigh...
Tuesday at 10:17pm

Justin Morg: On the bright side, I guess I don't have to show up for work tomorrow :) @Boss.
Tuesday at 10:20pm

Justin Morg: Hmm, wonder what time the funeral will be tomorrow. I'd hate to be late ;). Haha I kill me sometimes (but not this time, it was Professor Plum with the candlestick!).
Tuesday at 10:32pm

Justin Morg: I guess I'll call it a night, no point doing the graveyard shift, don't want to be like a zombie tomorrow...
Tuesday at 10:50pm

Justin Morg: Good morning! I'm up! OK not so good and not so up. Oh well. At least the mortician made me smile, put stitches in my side too.
Wednesday at 7:30am

Justin Morg likes What's worse than waking up early in the morning? Not waking up at all!
Wednesday at 7:32am

Justin Morg: I guess I'll skip breakfast, no stomach for it today... But I'd die for a cup of coffee :p.
Wednesday at 7:35am

Justin Morg: Wow, people are actually coming to my funeral!
Wednesday at 8:43am

Justin Morg likes a minute of silence
Wednesday at 9:01am

Justin Morg: Aww don't cry... OK so I'll really be forever in your debt, but hey I did say the payback's gonna be "out of this world" right? XD
Wednesday at 9:05am

Justin Morg likes The Sweet By and By
Wednesday at 9:10am

Justin Morg: @MaryNotMarried now's the time to ask that pesky aunt "When's your turn" just like she does to you at weddings... Haha!
Wednesday at 9:13am

Justin Morg likes short sermons and even shorter skirts
Wednesday at 9:20am

Justin Morg: ok Human Torch time!
Wednesday at 9:30am

Justin Morg: getting kinda warm in here... I hate stupid ties and suits.
Wednesday at 9:35am

Justin Morg: SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSMOKIN'!
Wednesday at 9:37am

Justin Morg: Flame on!
Wednesday at 9:40am

Justin Morg: The ultimate fat burning program... Watch the pounds melt away. And never come back- 100% guaranteed!
Wednesday at 9:45am

Justin Morg: ok I guess I can fit in that sexy "size nothing" urn now... Check out my new curves... Hey guys, I'm coming out of the closet! Just kidding! Don't look like you've just seen a ghost.
Wednesday at 9:55am

Justin Morg: It is very dark. I wonder if grues eat ashes.
Wednesday at 10:00am

Plus a lot of the calculations don't take into account a finite lifetime and low social mobility.

If you're some poor guy stuck in some minimum wage job, your odds of ending up with > $100 million are near zero. Now if you started your own business there's a higher chance of you becoming a millionaire or multimillionaire but the odds of getting >$100 million still are low plus the effort is much higher. There are also other risks involved- there are lots of people with failed businesses, just fewer of them sell books or give interviews on how they failed and failed again and still haven't succeeded.
Yes there are people who won the "genetic lottery" and have the energy and endurance to work 2 or more jobs and NOT die/break, but for the rest - what really are their odds of going from burger flipper to having hundreds of millions?

So if you're poor and wanted to be merely normal "rich" don't bother with lottery tickets - just try to invest what little you earn. But if you want to be swimming in hundreds of millions of dollars within your lifetime, buying a powerball ticket is a rational decision (especially when the jackpot gets big).

If you want philosophical, it could be something we might never know for sure.

For example, in theory we could create a simulation of a steady state universe with rules that we decide on. And inside that universe, by that universe's rules the "before" could have gone on for an infinity, and there's no way to know that wasn't the case.

But by our universe's rules we could have started up that simulation 10 seconds ago and taken a week to design it. Or we could even have made copies of it and started up slightly different versions, or even have a few big bang versions. How old would these universes be? Billions of years old? 10 seconds? Depends on your perspective doesn't it?

And how would those "inside" know what's going on for sure? Unless perhaps somehow told by those "outside".

When a bill declares that the measure is an emergency measure, it means that the changes enacted by the bill go into effect sooner than the typical implementation timeframe for legislative changes.

E.g. if the normal delay is house->senate->governor->july 1st of next year, an emergency measure might be house->senate->governor->15 days

The specific timing varies from state to state.

There are a handful of bills being introduced in my state right now that list "AND TO DECLARE AN EMERGENCY" in their bill abstract, which is terrifying until you read the bill text and then understand what the little postscript at the bottom saying "This is an emergency measure" actually means. (I had to ask)

I really like Hydro power, but

1) you can't simply put hydro power generation where you like it. Hydro power needs established geophysical features in order to work. And, as luck would have it, the things that make a location a good candidate for hydropower also make it a good candidate for farms, valuable waterfront properties, wildlife preserves, public parks, etc etc.

2) Believe it or not, it's not just nuclear power that environmental whacktavists have succeeded in choking out. There are dams that have been torn down to restore animal habitats, for instance. Building a small nuke plant is massively less environmentally disruptive than building large scale hydro.

The chief problem, in my view, with hydro is that you cannot put hydro plants out where people won't care. You have to put them where the water is, and often, people have reasons for wanting such natural water features left alone.

You can put a nuke plant anywhere you like - in a submarine, on a space craft, etc. You bring the fuel to it, you move the waste away from it. The nuke plant I think is fundamentally better adapted to the realities of power generation if for no other reason than fuel source portability. In this way, it beats hydro, and, to a large extent, solar.

A 100k john deere combine is several years old.

New, you'd be hard pressed to get one for under 400k I think.

This.

One of my first professional programming projects was to take a look at the custom C++ billing software our company had purchased from a contract programmer.

I had a long unix and programming background, and was back for a summer job after doing 1 semester of C++ in college.

My boss told me, since I was the only one who had C++ experience, to start documenting the system.

At the time, we were using IRIX, and so I was using the SGI compiler and tools suite, which were, I believe, licensed from EDG. The point is that there was a very nice call graph visualizer. This was helpful for understanding things at a superficial level.

However, what was even better was just running the program a bunch of times on test data and seeing what it did while under the debugger.

While my summer began with the task of documenting the system, as I learned things I'd report them to my boss.

By the end of the summer, I had re-written some fundamental parts of the system; I'd moved some of the processing outside, and I pre-processed and pre-sorted the data.

The overall execution time went from many hours to about 45 minutes to calculate monthly bills. THe key innovation was replacing the inner loop of the charge tabulation -- which was 2 or 3 levels of nested linked list traversal.

Instead, I used the standard unix sort tools to pre-sort the data files before being loaded into the system, and I changed the system to use a data structure that supported a binary search.

The majority of the code got left alone. By understanding the code under a debugger, and realizing that how it worked on production data was much different than how it performed on the test data it was originally delivered with, I was able to make a critical set of changes that had a huge impact.

In general, I spend as much time as I can not writing code, but instead, understanding how the existing system works. For a current project, I've spent the last two weeks playing with somebody else's code, and now I've expanded it so that it can also operate on my data sets, and I've probably changed fewer than 100 lines across about 5 different projects.

Your complaint about anonymity stems from the fact that you suppose that if people weren't anonymous, it would be possible to track them down in the real world and subject them to consequences.

That is precisely what I don't want. Not because I want people to threaten others with real world violence, but precisely because that is what I don't want.

You want to know who people are so if you don't like what they say, you can send others to track them down and punish them.

I went to trolltalk.com just now and was disappointed.

I actually very much like the idea of the internet being a place, or, at least having places, where there is no authority, no oversight, and no rule makers. Where if you say something that upsets people, you are mercilessly attacked -- with speech.

I think of my very early days on IRC - and all of the new ideas I was exposed to.. all of the people who said extremely offensive things... and there was nobody to do anything about it (except perhaps encourage it)... I had to learn to adapt, and I had to learn that other people's words were just that - words -- and that there wasn't any fairy angel to come and save me from not having to hear things I didn't like.

Society needs places like that.

You are correct that what twitter does is twitter's choice. I don't use or care about twitter, because very few people have the talent to say anything at all, much less say it well in 100 characters.

It seems that people are endeavouring to make the internet like the "real world" - where speech codes exist, where stupid people flourish, and where idiots expect others to put up with their idiocy.

I was hoping that the real world would become a bit more like the internet - where there are no rulers, no more identity than one wishes to have, and people come and where they please as they please.

I prefer the online company of intelligent people who are purposefully offensive much more than I prefer idiots who are purposefully offended.