Are we assuming all transactions humans do are with merchants?

Naive as hell !

Crappy list of examples, I'm sure there are hundreds of examples:
1) What about if I want to buy your [insert bike or computer or whatever]?
2) Baby sitter?
3) Kid's allowance?
4) Pay some kid kid to mow yard.
5) Underground transactions (illegal stuff)

  It already happens in Africa, with cellphone to cellphone transactions. You take some money from the bank which goes to your cellphone account. You spend your cellphone account and get more money. Taxi drivers receive cellphone cash, and visit the bank to convert some of it to cash, but use the cellphone money to buy gas, food, etc.

Why cellphone. Printing money that wears out or is germ laden does not pay. And the cellphone technique limited to small transactions works.

The importance of cash will continue to decline with transactions with merchants, but it will never remotely approach "cashless".

Good luck everybody

This is not at all about the French/US competition, the big French sites like fnac.com are subjected to the same rules of course.

You can think one thing or another about the rules, but they are about the big sites killing off the small local shops.

I worked on the beginning of Regan's Star Wars project. We viewed the problem as one in which you try to stop a bullet with a bullet. Add long range and intelligence to the bullet and the problem gets harder.The problem is hard and physics places many constraints on the solution. At one point management thought that space based defense was what we wanted until we showed that the time/distances were too great to be effective. Now we just have a scaled back terminal defense with very limited capabilities.

After all these years the only value that I think that missile defense has is PR. Effective? Not really. Forget Star Wars the movie. It's not going to happen.

Uh, yeah. Most judges rubber-stamp search warrants.

Also, does concealing a memory device now automatically imply child porn?

The cops get bolder every year, and people just go along.

Cop: "I asked him for his ID, and he went fishing in a pocket. IT COULD HAVE BEEN A GUN OR KNIFE, SO I SHOT HIM".

The other side of that coin is:

Is the new opportunity worth the hassle of starting over in some locale where the COL is 3 times higher, your rights are much more restricted, no big game hunting because of the population density precludes the use of even a bow and broad heads, despite the fact that you'll wreck a car a year running into said big game, and its 4 hours to someplace where drowning a worm might get you fish for dinner.

That occurred to me when a head hunter called me, offering 10% more to be the Chief Engineer at a tv station in the top 25 market. But it would have come with all of the above limitations. Even at 200%, which said tv station could well afford, it wasn't worth it to me.

Basically I had found my place back in 1984. I can walk to hunt deer or fish, COL is 1/2rd that of the big city, the house that came with the girl I married in 1989 has been paid off for 15 years, and stayed here till I retired 12 years ago. Technically, my reputation for being able to walk on water when the boat has already sank has been well established, and I still get yells for help occasionally. As a technician who can actually fix things, I am a C.E.T. & have what used to be a 1st phone license before the commission threw us under the bus, we are a dying breed, literally, and I find that I have, at nearly 80 yo, inherited some of the local radio broadcasters, because the engineer they were calling when the cash cow laid down and went dry, had died.

But the surprising detail most find hard to believe is that I am not a "papered" engineer, I have an 8th grade education, but was good enough with electronics that I quit school in the middle of my freshman year in high school, mostly due to health/allergy problems, and went to work fixing what was then these new-fangled things called televisions. Circa 1948-49. And yet the medical help locally available is pretty good. In early June, about a month ago, I woke up, just barely conscious and couldn't breath, on the bedroom floor while trying to tie my shoes to take the better half out for dinner, a pulmonary embolism that damned near punched my ticket. The better half, sitting in the car waiting, finally came back in to see what the holdup was & called 911. They got me to the local shop, started the clot-buster, and shipped me off to a larger facility. I am not 100% yet, but getting there, and TBT I feel better now than I have in years.

The guy from ultrasound looked at my heart with its blown up 2x right half as it was trying to pump into the blockage, for about an hour. I presume looking for places that ought to be bypassed or stented, couldn't find any and said once its shrunk back to normal, you ought to be good for another decade. 2-3 months to shrink again. Sort of feels like getting a warranty renewal but there is no such thing in life.

So I'll be here to pester you folks for a while yet, offering my comments on having observed life for nearly 80 years now. Some comments will come from my experience as a working joat, I am a decent mechanic and am now playing with smaller CNC machinery. I've also made some furniture & remodeled a few guns over the last 50 years.

I rather enjoy being close to the biggest frog in the pond, even if the pond is just Pedersons Puddle. It has its advantages.

Cheers, Gene

Look. On the one hand, it will be virtually impossible to make the technology disappear that allows any government unprecedented surveillance powers.

Based on the historical evidence of the governments of men, it would also be rather reasonable to expect there will exist elements within our governments willing to exploit national security fears to abuse surveillance powers.

With awareness, ignorance is left off the table as a selection. At least if we are made aware, we then choose to make a difference or play along.

I'll call you on your trolling and bs. My wife works in the Comp Sci department at a major university and also works *with* people in the programs at others. Well over half the grad students in most programs are born and raised in the US, and many of the best candidates are from the US. This story is about outsourcing based on cost, not on 'deep understanding of theory'. If you're not trolling you're just woefully wrong.

It would be more like what is happening in Germany. Massive investment in wind, solar, wave and geothermal, but crucially also a massive investment in a new smarter grid to support it all.

I have no doubt that it will happen in Europe, but the US is going to find it hard. Things like subsidising residential solar are seen as un-American and socialist, even though it's fine to heavily subsidise companies building fossil fuel or nuclear plants. The grid is a money-making privately owned infrastructure, not something that is supposed to work for the public's benefit. In other words, the problems are all cultural.

R has more single function high level commands devoted to stats, these are done right internally and are self consistent with other functions for further processing. But its not as general a programming language as python. if you want something different than the canned functions in R then you will need to write them yourself at which point you might as well be using python. however if you like SAS then chances are R will seem more like what you are hoping for.

R has more single function high level commands devoted to stats, these are done right internally and are self consistent with other functions for further processing. But its not as general a programming language as python. if you want something different than the canned functions in R then you will need to write them yourself at which point you might as well be using python. however if you like SAS then chances are R will seem more like what you are hoping for.

But it is impossible to "not use any confidential information he had access to" without surgery. It's in your brain, you will use it if the situation arises.

"Please don't do an audio countdown. It doesn't work for us hard of hearing people."

Where I live, they have audio ticking for blind people. They make a ticking noise when it's green for pedestrians.
Although some of them seem to be made for almost-deaf blind people, since it's very loud even during daytime.

Take the semicoln in C. It's not needed. It's really just a pleasant confirmation to the compiler to let it know that your current statement is done.

It certainly is needed, if you want to keep white space insignificant. C compilers can skip over every space, tab, and line break that isn't part of a string. Getting rid of semicolons would needlessly complicate lexical analysis.

That you think C aids in expressiveness over Perl, Python, Ruby, awk, Go, Swift, Rust, D, C#, Scala, Clojure, or even C++ shows you're talking out the wrong orifice

I expect we're using the word "expressive" differently.

C is a lot of things, but it is not terribly expressive or high level.

Definitely not high level.

C lacks concise and easy to use language syntax to express ideas, but almost any idea that can be imagined can be expressed (implemented) in C. That is what I meant by expressive.

Higher level languages provide all sorts of direct language support for ideas that are not directly present in lower level languages, but all high level lanagauges ultimately compile down to machine code, which can be represented by assembler. Therefore, nothing that can be expressed in any language can't be expressed in assembler. Therefore assembler is maximally expressive. Anything else is just a subset of what you can do with assembler.

However there is PLENTY you can do in assembler, that you can't do in any other language, and C, is the lowest level language above assembler, and while there are some things that can be done in assembler that can't be done in C, there's not a lot that can be done in a higher level language than C that can't be done in C.

Not easily. Not concisely. And not safely... because if you implement a reference counting garbage collector in C to do your memory management (and you can) there is nothing in C stopping you from directly manipulating the GC state to achieve all kinds of stuff you can't do in the higher level language ...and should probably never do!! -- but this isn't about *should* -- its about *can*.

From the article, "City officials said the first units in Boston will be funded by Cisco Systems, a leader in development of smart city solutions, at no cost to the city."

As for why Boston got them first, rather than other cities around the country, my guess would be because they're a local product. "The high-tech benches were invented by MIT Media Lab spinoff Changing Environments, a Verizon Innovation Program."