TBH, I can't really say how much a programmer makes here. I'm not a programmer by trade (though I do a little programming in my job anyway). I just know they make a lot less here than they would in say... Silicon Valley. If I were to guess, entry level may be at $40-50k. Solidly Middle Class for Arkansas.

A friend of mine handles databases and writes in Oracle SQL or whatever they call it, and I think he makes 80k. That's a university job, so I'm not sure if that's a little higher or a little lower than usual. Also, he's been there a while.

This isn't even physics. This is geometry. Light follows a straight path. Mirrors reflect it almost perfectly. Now get your laser range finder, and point it at a mirror. What happens? The range finder reports the total distance between you and the mirror + the mirror and the diffuse object it hits.

For a more accessible experiment, hold a mirror up in your face but at an angle so you can see the world behind you as well as your eyes. Your eyes are heavily crossed when focused on the dust on the mirror itself, but not so much when focused on the reflected world behind you. The position of your eyes determines what you focus on. In fact, you could determine distance by recording the angle of your eyes and using basic trig. The variables would be the distance between your eyes, and the angles of your eye positions. Laser range finders use a different method for determining distance, but the result is the same.

In my line of work, I use something called a laser scanner/LiDAR. This device is basically a laser range finder on steroids. It spins in every direction and creates a "point cloud" of the environment around it. The points in the cloud are calculated with basic trig - laser angle & distance can give you xyz coordinates and establish one point. A completed point cloud has millions of these points. If you put mirror in front of it, it'll record those points as though the mirror were a doorway into a reversed room. I have to delete these points afterwards.

Nukenerd is right, and you are wrong.

I'm not sure why you're down-voted. That's the idea I believe Asa is trying to capitalize on. We'd cost more than India, but we're in a closer time zone and speak your language. You can even fly in for meetings and such without suffering extreme jet lag or cost. There's a lot of untapped creative potential here too. I believe AR has a future in tech, but we have to work for it.

30k would put you in the middle class here in AR. The cost of living here is low enough that your idea of a "low-wage, no-future" job is more than enough for the average Arkansan. I believe Arkansas is in a good position to be the place to "in-source" software and technology labor here in America. India's on the other side of the planet and there's a language and culture barrier. Send your work here please; you won't have any trouble understanding us, we're in a timezone you can tolerate, and we don't have an unintelligible accent.

Bonus: your customers won't give you grief for it like they do when you send labor overseas.

Sounds unworkable and unenforceable.

Right on.

Also:

There's more white people on welfare than there are black people alive. Yet when people talk about welfare queens and lazy fucks and say that's the reason we need to cut back on welfare, they point to black people. Then these anti-welfare guys get elected, make cuts, and their own constituency suffers because guess what? Most people on welfare are in conservative areas. Most people on welfare are white, and even in percentage terms, blacks beat them by just a couple percentage points.

I bought a cheap camera three years ago. It's wireless and has a battery. Everything after that is just a matter of using a UPS and hiding the computer or DVR somewhere. I use a computer, and can set some free software I found to upload images and alert me when ever it detects something.

Newer cameras are better, and have all that stuff built in. There's no "line" to cut anymore.

I'm black and I've got a pretty technical job. It's not IT, it's better (to me). I could easily get a low level IT job if I wanted to.

When I was a young teen, I saw a few kids like me but not very many (black OR white). Computers were very much a "nerd" thing. This was about 15 years ago, so I doubt anything has changed. These days it might even be worse, since back then it was a necessary evil, which can now be worked around with tablets and smart phones.

I learned Basic in just such a place. The library in a Boys and Girls Club. They didn't have the internet until shortly before I moved on. They had rows of old Apple //e, Macs, and old DOS systems. I was practically their unpaid IT person, fixing all of the things the other kids would break. They even gave me one of those computers my last day there when I moved out of town.

That doesn't answer your question exactly. Suffice it to say, kids don't want to be nerds if they can help it, especially black kids. Oh well. More jobs for me.

Cube 2 missed an opportunity, I think. I loved that octree-based map engine. Here was an accessible and powerful cube based engine from before Minecraft was a twinkle in Notch's eye. To this day, I don't know of any other engine that lets you collaborate with multiple people in real time as though it were part of the game - and with level editing so easy, it could have fostered the kind of mapping community not seen since the days of Doom, Quake, and Unreal (1/UT/2004).

Now everything is "model it in 3DSMax, Maya, or Blender." Complicated tools, meandering workflows, just a time consuming process in general. Even Unreal is like that now. Why use the shape editor when you can just import your model? Does the new engine even have that tool anymore? No it doesn't. Just import or use an existing mesh for your complex details. Want to make your own but don't know how? Time to learn this other tool over here.

I'm not complaining exactly. I'm pretty good with Max and Blender. I'm just reflecting (as an amateur) on what mapping felt like in the past, and how it compares to today. It was pretty straight forward back then. There was probably a lot of pent up creativity from people who didn't have the time to learn multiple tools. Minecraft quenched their thirst, but the Cube 2 engine could have been the thing to do that. If only it were better documented, and positioned better as an engine for hobbyists.

The farthest I got with it was map editing and compiling it from the source. So I know what you mean. It's been a while, but I doubt anything has changed. Sorry to hear about the state of your game.

I don't believe there's anything wrong with the idea. But it's just an idea, it's not a theory, nor is it anything you can test just yet. I have a similar idea, but it's not anything I can ever be certain of or claim as true, much less anything worth writing a book about. That would be called a religion, and as an agnostic, I automatically avoid doing such things anyway.

The idea doesn't make him crazy, what does is his confidence in an idea that is not a theory and cannot be tested. That's magical thinking.

Somewhat related: Newton's Flaming Laser Sword

Google bought them off. They don't understand the internet anyway.

A horse smart enough to memorize a city, is smart enough to learn to use restrooms built specifically for them. The only issue would be expanding the existing sewage infrastructure to handle the extra load.

Great point, as I've read this before and it's definitely worth mentioning. But the wormhole and the black hole were two separate objects in the movie. The wormhole was much smaller, and found in an orbit around Saturn.

I thought that was the point.

This kills the self-driving car. Seriously. A sapient horse could learn the city like a London cabbie, and at your command, take you where ever you want to go.