Arduinos are yesterday's news. Get a Raspberry Pi instead. If you get an Arduino you'll be programming in the stone age, when they say "C", they mean a barebones version suitable for teaching a 4th grader how to code. With a Pi, you can use Python, C++, Java, whatever. And that's in IDLE, not a barebones text editor. Plus you're running on Linux, so you can actually write daemons, use sockets, and so on.

Arduinos are good for showing complete newbs how to interact with hardware, but you'll be out of options pretty soon. I have both an Arduino and a Pi, but the only advantage the Arduino has is analog inputs. You get an MCP3008 DAC for your Pi for about $3.50, and tada - you're in business.

Absolutely. The actual FCC regulation (Title 47 Section 333) states:

No person shall willfully or maliciously interfere with or cause interference to any radio communications of any station licensed or authorized by or under this chapter or operated by the United States Government.
(June 19, 1934, ch. 652, title III, § 333, as added Pub. L. 101–396, § 9, Sept. 28, 1990, 104 Stat. 850.)

So you can block wireless signals all you want, as long as no one is attempting to communicate. Just keep other people out of your house and make sure the jammer doesn't affect anyone outside, and you're not breaking any rules. One of my friends had a Faraday cage built in his basement to test Bluetooth jammers.

No. Security is NOT a profit center. If you think it is, then you are not understanding what the term "profit center" means. A profit center for a decentralized business generates revenues as well as incurs expenses. Most IT departments are not profit centers BY DEFINITION.

They're trying to bypass your decision making process and get to a deeper level - to get you to buy something that you don't logically want, but have a neurochemical need for. Making your food addictive is the best way to make money (David Kessler - "The End of Overeating"). And measuring how long you look at something to gauge interest is nothing new - look up the Abel Assessment for Sexual Interest that is used on pedophiles.

You don't need a professor to teach you how to program. Most of us who started using computers in the 70's and 80's were hobbyists, and we were self taught before going to college for CS. I don't use either one, so I'm not an expert, but in the immortal words of Yogi Berra - "when you come to a fork in the road, take it".

It will only take you 20-30 hours each to learn the basics of the language, so try both, and at some point you'll gravitate towards one.

What you don't get, on the other hand, is that all these integrated frameworks haven't worked. The reason that every time you turn around there's a new framework, is that the one that came out two months ago doesn't do the job.

What's the Linux kernel written in? How about the HTTP Apache server? How about World of Warcraft, the most successful multiplayer game of all time?

It's better to be able to write simple C code than spend 3 years learning a framework on top of a framework balanced on yet another framework with a framework on the side to support the IDE.

What "quality" software? I'm not a programmer, but all the software from the big companies is riddled with bugs. What we need it to simplify programming, there are too many people out there who use the latest Ruby-on-Rails-with-XHTML-and-JQuery-NoSQL-Hadoop technology, but then can't explain why their page crashes when you type in bad data.

Programming is a trade, like plumbing or electrical work. Yes, experience will lead to better finished product, but programmers who think they need an IQ of 135 and an undergrad in mathematics are fooling themselves.

You carefully avoided answering my question of how many police officers keep their guns in a safe every night. Obviously you're not one.

It's nice living in your world of unicorns and rainbows, but in my world, there are battered wives who know from experience how useless a restraining order is, corrections officers who have had their home addresses publicized, and people living 30 minutes from police response. Having a gun in a safe is useless for home defense.

Try again, "dude"...

> How many people are "responsible",p> Many gun affectionados I know think your idea of storing guns in a safe is the start of the
> guvernment taking them away. Same for a trigger lock. All of those things slow them down if some thug comes into their house.

Why don't you ask your local police department how many of the officers keep their weapons in a safe at night? Or use trigger locks? Include the ones with kids. When you figure out why THEY don't want to do it, you'll figure out why the rest of us don't.

It is too broad. Asking nerds what apps are good is like strolling into a literature forum and asking "I haven't read a book in 15 years - anything new out that you think is good?"

So you have a 10,000 core system. So what? Yeah, I can model a flying car with much less than that - in fact I think they did that in Halflife 2. If you traveled back to 1991 and told people that you had a lot of cores and a lot of memory, they would yawn in your face. The technology that you are working with today is fundamentally what a 1970's Unix guy would understand. What's the point in your web service that can scale indefinitely? To serve up more Youtube videos? We were supposed to have a semantic web by now at the very least. Instead, we're patching vulnerabilities in SSL which has been around since '94, and still worrying about running out of IPV4 addresses.

The extent of our machine learning has been to fake a conversation as a brain damaged teenager who does not speak English, to "pass" the Turing test. We're doing busy work in low earth orbit, when anyone in the 80's would have thought we'd be working in the outer planets by now. We still have to steer our cars and punch buttons for the elevator.

The problem is that everyone's doing incremental work. More gigs cheaper. No imagination beyond that.

Except the Silicon Valley crowd just THINKS they're changing the world. We were supposed to have flying cars, space elevators, real AI, and spacetime manipulation by now. Not communication in 140 characters, and better algorithms to search for Kardashian articles.

Everything you are talking about is memory management from a programmer's viewpoint. Understanding how compilers allocate memory, discussing garbage collection, these are all things that a programmer needs to know. An undergrad in computer science needs to be able to understand something like this:

http://airccse.org/journal/jcsit/0202csit12.pdf

This is just a random paper I found, and certainly nothing earth-shattering. But my point is that someone trained in computer science should be able to skim through this in 5-10 minutes and understand what's being discussed. A programmer is not expected to.

CS should be different from programming. Back in the day when I did my undergrad, the programming was something you mostly figured out on your own time. When I took Operating Systems 1, we were studying memory management, Belady's anomaly, semaphores, etc, but we were also expected to become proficient in Unix scripting by the end of the semester. The exchange on the first day of class went something like this:

Prof: Homework for this week is to write a tcsh script that will set your environment variables when you log in based on a menu.
Student: What's tcsh?
Prof: It's one of the shells in Unix, you can write scripts using it.
Student: How do I learn to use it?
Prof: The manual command is "man" in Unix.
Student: How do I use the "man" command?
Prof: Use "man man" to find out how to use "man".
(whole class looks bewildered for about 10 seconds - not sure if he's joking or if Unix is really that insane)
Prof writes across the top of the board: THIS IS A UNIVERSITY, NOT A TRADE SCHOOL. RTFM.

If you can't figure out how to learn the mechanics of Java, Python, whatnot on your own time, you really don't have the brain needed to do computer science. The problem is that everyone and their plumber is getting a 4 year degree these days, so it's become the equivalent of a high school diploma in the 80's.

I think a lot of programmers are overdue for an abusive tirade. Apparently the plethora of advice on writing good code hasn't been sinking in - from my perspective as an administrator, every time I turn around there are another hundred bugs I have to patch. If you're writing a compiler, and are this sloppy, you really shouldn't be expecting anyone to stand up for your delicate feelings.