If you're looking for artificial intelligence to distill knowledge from forum posts and write wiki pages in the manner of a human author then certainly that doesn't exist yet. But if you're just looking for tools to extract knowledge from forums and other "social media" you're probably not looking in the right price range. The tools exist but are specialized and expensive. Look at Clarabridge, Attensity, SAS, Teradata, Lucid Imagination, Polyvista, as well as services from IBM, Oracle, SAS, SAP, HP, an Dell. The phrase "text analytics" might be helpful in guiding your research.

It's doesn't come preinstalled, but you can download the installer .exe from www.vim.org

I have an iPhone 4S but I long ago concluded that Siri is useless. It doesn't understand conversational speech and requires pressing and holding the button every time you want it to do anything. Its speech recognition only gets about 50-60% of words correct. I tried dictating a text in the car about twice before deciding it was entirely reckless and dangerous.

Every example I've ever heard of using Siri has been stupid pointless stuff I would never do anyway. It would be nice if it had an AI capable of taking dictation accurately and understanding descriptive editing but as far as I can tell it is hopelessly inaccurate and not even remotely AI.

Pretty, but I still can't imagine the average person paying to have a machine at home to make either of those.

I've got too much decorative crap around the house already. It's far too easy to accumulate if you just go on vacation once or twice a year. Most people have absolutely no need to invest thousands of dollars in a machine to produce decorative crap. Souvenirs pile up over time, but at least they remind you of all the places you've visited and things you've seen and done. And who really needs to fabricate ultralight fractal based support structures at home?

Depending on your job it may make perfect sense for your business to own one or more 3D printers. If you work anywhere that makes objects of any kind then somebody ought to be at least evaluating a business case for buying a 3D printer. But for the average person, having one in their house or apartment makes no sense.

None of my stuff on Github has a license specified. But then the only stuff I have on Github is a random bunch of Arduino sketches that are of no use to anybody else. Github charges for private repositories but provides public ones for free. So it costs me nothing to be able to view my code from anywhere, even if I just get an urge to double check something from my phone or iPad when I'm out of the house.

I wonder how many of the projects they found without an explicit license are even intended for any distribution at all. Perhaps there are others like me who use version control for code (or perhaps even non-code) that is for their own personal use but is in no way personal or sensitive.

Opposite to what? Shintoism? Hinduism? Judaism?

What's the opposite of Ford? Is it GM, Honda, or a bicycle or a good pair of walking shoes?

Suppose your favorite brand of car is Ford. You're a devout Fordist (Fordian?) and you ask me if I believe Ford is the one true brand of car. If I don't have a car, live in the city, and honestly just don't even think any car is worth the hassle would you still insist that I have come to the "opposite" belief of your Fordianity?

The word "theist" is derived from the word for god and means someone who believes in one or more gods. The prefix "a" means "not" and an atheist is simply someone who is not a theist. This is really no different than someone who is not a basketball fan. They might hate basketball or they might simply not care. The mere fact that they are not a theist, doesn't tell you anything at all about their beliefs.

The word "gnostic" derives from the word for knowledge and refers to a set of beliefs about "knowability" which is more a branch of philosophy than religion. An agnostic is simply someone who is not a gnostic and thus does not share the Gnostics' beliefs on the subject of knowability.

Does the percent key in vim work?

The most important thing about braces to me is that in vim a single keystroke (%) allows me to bounce back and forth between the start and end of a block.

I haven't tried python yet but it would definitely be a big minus to me if the percent key no longer lets me bounce to block start/end points.

No, certainly not. What's the point of a shitload of money if all you do is save it? Are you going to swim in it like Scrooge McDuck?

There's no point in earning or saving money if you aren't going to do something with it. Spending money on children (and grandchildren) is something that a lot of people (though obviously not 100% of all people) get a lot of enjoyment out of.

Feel free to spend your money on whatever you like if you dislike children, but you're just ignorant if you think that raising children isn't an excellent way to make use of hard earned cash for the vast majority of the human race who like children.

Saving money so that you have lots of funds for spoiling grandchildren is also highly popular and a worthwhile way to spend money for many people, but it's a bit more difficult to have grandchildren if you don't have children (though not impossible obviously.)

It's a typical geek tendency to see everything in black and white. I have an iPhone 4s and a Samsung galaxy siii. I like the iPhone better but carry both all the time since I have to have to separate work and personal phones. I can easily distinguish between "the iPhone is better" vs "I like the iPhone better"

Too many geeks say the former when they mean the latter (s/iPhone/android as needed) and utterly failing to realize that "I like better" != "is better".

What is your source on the "Tech Salary" percentage? Is that the "standard" salary increase given on average across everybody for doing the same job overall? If so then it should be as close to zero as possible after accounting for inflation. If you're doing the same job today as you were doing six years ago then you SHOULD be making the same amount after adjusting for inflation.

Salary increases that beat inflation year over year should only be for those people who increase the quality and/or quantity of their work year over year.

If you increase the pay of everybody regardless of their performance we have a word for that. The word is "inflation" and the old phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats" is relevant.

Generally what people are interested in is how to increase their pay relative to other people, but in order to do that in a fair and honest economy requires increasing your own output relative to other people. You shouldn't expect "everybody" to receive increases that beat inflation because if RELATIVE wealth doesn't change then the numerical values of the pay figures don't matter.

Except for a handful of people, who's going to see it? If there are more than a couple people in a datacenter you're doing it wrong. Rack the equipment (preconfigured), plug in the cables and switch it on. From that point on no one should touch it until it breaks and needs to be RMA'd or scrapped.

How much money are you going to invest in beautifying a space that very few people will see?

That being said, there is some nasty stuff going on on wall street that very much needs to be strangled. Manipulations with total return swaps and similar instruments that put cash into the hands of folks with massive investment holdings without having to report the cash as income. I certainly don't understand all the machinations, but I fully support giving the IRS teeth to dig into the results, not the methods.

If you've got three yachts, five mansions, and twenty three luxury cars you'd better have paid income tax consistent with your level of spending. If it looks like income and it smells like income then as far as I'm concerned it's income. I don't care what elaborate financial transaction ultimately resulted into that valuable asset finding it's way physically into your hands.

If your houses collectively are worth 1000 times what my one house is worth and you're paying 1000 times the property taxes then I'm happy. If you're playing some trickery where they're not "really" your houses, you merely have exclusive access to them and control over them but they're "actually" expenses on the balance sheet of a Burmuda Corp that you own through seven subsidiaries then I've got a problem with that.

As long as the money just circulates through and never falls into any person's hands, who cares? At some point some human being is going to want another mansion or yacht. When they reach their hand into the pot that's when you grab them and take the government's cut.

Nobody is going to waste their life shuffling funds around and endless loop of shell corporations with no intention or method of eventually extracting some of it.

Imagine a Kennedy or Romney getting a house foreclosed on because the local government requires property taxes to be paid in cash. Or unable to restock on champagne and caviar because the clerk at the checkout doesn't accept "I own umpteen offshore corporations" as a valid method of payment. Or cleaning their own pool because every pool boy wants cash, no numbered Swiss accounts please.

The folks running these tax scams aren't doing it for kicks. They're doing it because they want to live high on the hog. As long as the taxes on their luxury lifestyles are in fair proportion to the taxes on us regular folks and our regular lifestyles who cares how the corporate books are structured.

Incidentally all those offshore shell corporations are setup by lawyers and accountants who ultimately want a cash paycheck to buy stuff with. If the CEO can buy another yacht by laying off the hoard of lawyers/accountants that spend their days fabricating shell corps he/she certainly will.

BTW, I support taxing cap gains same as income. If you had X dollars yesterday and X+Y today you owe tax on Y. I don't care where it came from or how you got it. If you're a human being you owe your fair share tax on $Y.

Well, that was a much longer and carefully structured comment on the preview screen. What's the point of a preview if what's on the preview gets truncated when you hit submit?

Oh well, I'm not going to retype that long and detailed dissertation.

How about we just eliminate the corporate taxes altogether. Instead ensure that all money paid out to individuals is properly taxed as income, apply sales tax to all purchas