I'll probably build one, eventually. That's much more likely than me buying one.

Take advantage of the system

(1) Find the best college or community college that'll have you as an English teacher
(2) Teach English for small $
(3) Take advantage of the perquisite that you get to take some amount of free classes because you are faculty
(4) Finish an associates in a STEM field. An associates is transferrable, even if credits are not (I suggest microbiology)
(5) Either transfer as a student, or, if it's a good college, finish your bachelors degree there
(6) ...While still teaching, if you can; 1-2 years experience teaching at a college level puts you higher on the hire list

NB: "Good college" is relative; you will generally get out of any program what you put into it.

People without CS degrees tend to lack the vocabulary necessary to communicate efficiently with their peers about CS topics in situations where they are required to work on a team. Big "O" notation, names of algorithms, breadth of algorithmic knowledge, etc..

If you are not going to be working on a team (and it's the rare company who does not believe they will become larger in the future), then a portfolio of previous work is generally acceptable.

Because companies believe they will grow, you are most suited to being a consultant, or, alternately, working for a consulting firm.

I've frequently considered creating a "vocabulary test", along the lines of those multiple choice test games passed around on Facebook; the problem with doing that, however, is people would "learn to the test"; and while it would be a form of education for them, as a result they would successfully get their foot inside the door of place where they would ultimately not be successful. This would not be a service to either them, or the places which hire them. To be effective, it would have to end up growing to the point that it might as well be a certification exam. And still, people would learn to the test, instead of having any depth of knowledge necessary to communicate with those who do.

Linking Drought and Los Angeles: Easy To Do

Northern California sends most of their water south to Los Angeles so that they can grow water intensive crops like walnuts, rice, avocados, etc., when other crops would take hugely less water (but not be as profitable). Sadly, agribusiness pays a deeply discounted price than the rest of us, so we're effectively subsidizing their shrinking water bills with our ballooning ones.

If Los Angeles would just *catch* their run-off, instead of dumping it into the ocean using their huge drainage system you tend to see in Terminator movie car chases, and walked down at the end of Buckaroo Banzai, they wouldn't need to take all the water from Northern California, or most of the water from the Colorado river.

How much of the recent torrential rains in California that happened to land in the Los Angeles area do you think ended up in storage systems, vs. the ocean? I'll give you a hint: not a lot.

The human don't have to bother with smashed jars of pickles...

"Smithers! Release the Roomba!" "Yes, Mr. Burns head."

This is a brilliant idea!

More webcasts should have funerals, so we can bury them and move on, and there will be one less webcast!

I think the relevant points got left out... the summary missed the most interesting parts:

1G L2 - all of graphics memory now fits in the L2 cache

14nm design - someone needs to update Wikipedia; they can probably clock it faster than the op speed listed there

Quad core - this thing may be in the next MacBook Air

Memory bus - Apple's memory bus is still faster than everyone else's by a mile; pays to have the Alpha->NetScaler->PA Semi guys on the payroll

This things is probably going to beat the pants off every other ARM chip in a while. Oh yeah, forgot: they're already sampling.

Then don't expect things which depend on cookies to work, or bitch about them when they don't. You expect them to do a geolocation by IP address each time you make a request? How is your IP address any less identification than a non-cross-site cookie? And it's not all that accurate (e.g. if you use onion routing, it's random, and if you use a VPN, it's constant for the VPN location), so you're screwed if you browse that way.

You mean like the Spanish people pulling out of the country?

No one with the skills to do what they want done wants to live there. They want to live in a place they can walk out the door, go down two doors, and apply for a position at some other tech company, and have a new job pretty much instantly. Employers are fungible.

A line printer, a ton of green-bar paper, a lot of tape and scissor work, hang it on the wall, and then stand way, way back to find out you've been Rick-Rolled and it's the "woman in hat" picture again?

Pass a law in Spain that people must use it instead of other search engines?

I presume your middle option would be:

S: Pay us a lot for our content showing up in your search results and news!
G: No.
S: We have passed a law that makes you pay us, so pay us!
G: Buh Bye!
S: Savages! They should negotiate on the amount they will pay us! Have they never heard of under the table kickbacks?!?

Isn't that really how you are saying things should have gone?

Or were you thinking that Google should have charged your newspapers for listing them, an amount equal to the amount the newspapers were charging them for "their content" (but then pay Spanish taxes), so the newspapers get an expense write off on their taxes, they get the status quo, and the Spanish government gets more taxes out of Google?

I'm really curious to know what your idea of a negotiation would look like here...

Fixed that for you. You're welcome.

Badly designed browsers when doing private browsing don't allow for ephemeral cookies.

The problem is that you are geolocated by IP (and yes, it gets this wrong if you are using a VPN into a node in another country - it thinks you are in the other country; not solving this "problem" is intentional on the part of the IETF), and a attempted cookie is set saying "They are in Canada; redirect and use the google.ca domain to serve up the first page". So google.ca shows up.

This geolocation is not repeated, and the cookie is not reset subsequently, since it's a relatively computationally expensive reverse lookup operation; if the cookie is there, it's referenced, and if the cookie is not there, it's not referenced. Then your subsequent request comes in through that first page, the cookie is examined, is not seen, and therefore you get the default, which is the US response.

The proper thing for your browser to do is to set an ephemeral cookie when doing "private browsing"; that is, it allows the "set" of the cookie, but since it's "private browsing", the cookie is set in memory in the DOM, instead of being saved in permanent cookie storage.

So it's happening that way because your browser implemented has screwed the pooch on what it mean when you are private browsing, and just blocks all cookie sets unconditionally. In other words, your browser sucks.

NB: Chrome gets this wrong in "incognito mode", as well, in the other direction; it implements ephemeral cookies into the session, rather than the DOM. Presumably, this is because they want cookies for login sessions to persist across DOMs which involve Google properties. So it's possible for an "incognito mode" session to leak information to outside parties for cross-site purposes. You'll see this with "limited number of views per month" sites, like the NYT and other news sites, where if you use the same "incognito mode" session - which persists, even if you close the window and open a new "incognito mode" window. If you restart Chrome, then the cookies are flushed. It's not clear whether this is intentional or just bad programming.