Well considering it involves programs and hardware being designed to work as fast as possible (to the point where you are hitting pesky physical limitations such as the latency on the speed of light through a fiber), I'd say it qualifies as news for nerds.

Certainly compared to the trading that is done by a bunch of big dudes yelling at each other on a trading floor.

Yeah, I don't understand why Feedly is winning. Newsblur doesn't require a separate install AND it is open source so you can commit changes or roll your own if you don't like the direction they take.

Seems strange that this wouldn't be Slashdot's vote...but maybe it is a sign of the times.

Actually...at a 70k difference, I think you'd need to have more than one kid.

Can't speak to exactly how tax deductions come into play for tuition, but with one kid, a 70k salary increase for however many years you work there sure beats free tuition for one kid for 4 years.

figure tuition costs 40k (ignore housing/living expenses since you pay those in both situations). This benefit is then worth 160k (not sure if you have to pay taxes on the tuition reimbursement).
The 70k salary gets you 280k in the same time span...and if you pay 40% taxes on it, you are left with 168k (maybe more if you get extra deductions for the tuition). Now if you work the job for 2 more years after the kid graduates, those numbers are 420k and 252k while if you stay at MIT, its still only worth 160k (and thats only if your kid gets into an expensive school...worth a lot less if they go to a state school).
Of course if you have twins, then the MIT deal is worth 320k and beats the job over 4 years. But if you have the kids 4 years apart, the private sector job is back to winning.

I think the moral of the story is that you probably shouldn't base your life and career plans on how one specific benefit relates to hypothetical children.

Yeah, that's one thing that people always forget. Some things are priced the same everywhere.

New Yorkers always have the coolest toys. If pay is even partially adjusted for cost of living, buying an ipad in NYC takes a much smaller chunk of your income than buying one in Topeka. Why do you think there are so many camera stores in NYC? If you don't care about living in a large, beautiful home, most of the cost of living difference is gone.

Travel costs about the same everywhere (tickets might even be cheaper since you can originate from NYC airports). Mid-range groceries aren't really that much more expensive and often high end groceries are cheaper (since the compact NYC population can support specialty goods retailers that the population of Memphis cannot). Anything you can buy on amazon is the same price, and you get delivery fast courtesy of amazon prime and a warehouse just across the state line. It just depends what you value. If you love lounging around your big house, finishing up a carpentry project in your basement workshop, and then taking a spin in your sportscar, then the NYC area is a terrible place for you.

If its like other similar caliber schools, MIT will probably pay up to MIT tuition to any school for the children of faculty. I think you're still on the hook for housing/living expenses, but there aren't many schools that cost more than MIT so you are covered there.

Not sure they cut the same deal to children of "staff" like IT guys...probably academic faculty only.

Although I think it is especially true for the type of SAS/R programmer he is referring to.

These are programmers who get hired by places that don't employ developers. They use SAS as a tool to weed through data. There's not a lot of fancy programming, just a lot of programmign to pull together packages of stuff that would otherwise take 10 business analysts a week to do with excel. Lots of one-off programs rather than pieces of code that must be streamlined and maintained and packaged up as an application. The code has to work and has to be done now, but it doesn't have to be able to handle every conceivable input or have user-friendly features

To do this, you have to have a lot of domain knowledge. Most people I know who do this are not programmers by education. They are trained in the field they work in and picked up statistical programming as a way to help them analyze data faster and more efficiently which makes them much more valuable. Since the scope of the programming is not broad (and since best practices aren't as important on one-off programs as they are on public applications), you can quickly learn enough SAS or R to be an asset. In other industries, being that inexperienced of a programmer might actually be a negative...but working with data analysis, you can usually tell if everything is ok and be productive early on in the process of mastering the language.

They won't throw them away, they will just install windows 7.

Unless your computer is actually 10 years old from when XP was current, it will run win7. If you are on a corporate standard 3-year replacement program, odds are your last two computers came with a "Windows 7" sticker on them and was only rolled back to XP to be compliant with the rest of the infrastructure. You don't have to sell somebody a new PC for them to solve the problem of XP hitting EOL.

Newsblur is similar.

I couldn't stand what feedly and netvibes were trying to do. I imported my feeds into both The Old Reader and newsblur and newsblur is what stuck. The two things I didn't like about the old reader was that they were having trouble keeping stuff up to date and that they didn't wrap the content to a smaller, more readable width like Reader used to do. Otherwise I liked that they were even simpler than newsblur.

Yup, newsblur has been working great for me (well, except for the rush of server crushing users that came to every alternative service when google first announced their plans). I don't read enough feeds to need a premium account. If I did...I would probably just host the software myself.

I was also trying theoldreader and one other place I can't remember the name of. theoldreader was good but they were having growing pains with all the new users (feeds weren't updating well) and so newsblur was the site I kept coming back to.

I would guess that the proper response to the cops having a notebook of yours written in a language they don't understand is "GTFO and find a translator"

If they can't find a translator (maybe because its a language you made up), they are free to get a language expert to try and figure out your language like they might with a dead language. They might discover that it would take that guy 10 years of working day and night to be able to read your language...but too bad. Either they are going to have to wait 10 years to prosecute you (pretty sure statute of limitations can't expire while they are actively investigating something so they are good there), or they are going to have to find some other way to do it. No way could they force you to translate your language.

And the state is 100% free to keep trying to break his encryption. And they might do it with ease 10 years from now and have everything they need to throw this guy in jail.

Right now its more like he has a hidden safe and they are still looking for it. They know what county it is town in (his hard drive), but they don't really know where (the key). He doesn't have to tell them where. If they keep looking and find it (crack it or find the right key), then good for them...but just because this guy is probably a kiddie-toucher, doesn't mean he has to send himself to prison.

He also seems to think that murder is the only crime.

Earlier in his scenario, he mentions that "of course we should be able to refuse to answer what books we are reading". What if that's the question you choose not to answer? Trials can be about all sorts of things, and maybe the fact that you read a certain secret document would make you look very guilty of stealing trade secrets and thus you aren't going to admit to it. Most people done't refuse to answer the question "are you guilty of murder"...in fact they generally plead not guilty when the trial starts which is essentially their answer to that question.

Also, without the fifth amendment, you are basically forcing people to lie in many situations. At a certain point, if you compel them to speak, both a guilty party and an innocent party are going to answer the same way--with a bunch of reasons why they are innocent. I'd rather have a guilty party plead the fifth and get convicted based on other evidence than agree to testify but make everything up and create a drawn out trial where the prosecutor has to prove that they were lying and the jury deliberates forever.

It really seems like this guys premise rests on the idea that "wouldn't everyone agree that the public has a right to know if you would say you are a murderer". Setting aside that I don't agree that the public has that right, you still have to recognize that most trials aren't murders and that most murderers are going to lie in response to that question. A suspected terrorist organizer doesn't have to answer a question about whether his favorite book is the Quran if the only possible thing it could do is make the jury wield their prejudice against him.

I used to think certs were dumb (and I guess I still do), but I think my friend used one successfully in this type of situation to get a job at my company.

Basically, he taught himself something but had never done it in an academic/corporate environment. He got the impression after several interviews that people didn't see it as much different than when recent grads list the 7 programming languages they have ever touched (oh yeah, I used R in that one statistics class, econometrics had Stata, and the intro comp-sci class used Scheme) plus the foreign language they took in 10th grade. Without any experience to back it up (the job he had done for the 3 years since college was entirely unrelated), it just looked like he was listing a buzz word.

He decided to get the certification. I asked why? I program in it every day, as do most of my coworkers and not a single one has a certification or has ever considered it. But, he studied up a bit (gotta review all of the irrelevant stuff that the cert needs that would never get used at a job like this), went to the testing center, and got the cert. I think the cert really helped show that he was actually proficient in the language and wasn't just listing a something where he had copied a few lines of code from a textbook for a semester in college.

Obviously nobody has found an exception to disprove it yet. The dude wouldn't be offering a pile of money if he were just looking to disprove it...he would just funnel the money into some supercomputer time to step through an absurd amount of integers until he comes up with an exception. If your goal was to disprove, I would guess that this would be a better use of the money than offering a prize (unless you think you can get more computer cycles out of a group of people competing for a prize than you could get just by buying them).

So far, nobody has found an exception which means that it might be provable. To find a proof, you need actual people thinking about the question, hence the promise of a pile of cash.

Other comments have already said what you are missing and said that you might not be able to recapture it, at least not without the right setup. Its one of those films where you have to put yourself in a mindset where you remember when it came out and don't think too hard about what came after it (like showing someone Alien for the first time after the 2000s filled everyone's mind with fast paced, effects driven sci-fi).

I will say that the theatrical version is "wrong". Usually I think all of this "directors cut, extended cut, super duper directors extended special edition" stuff is trash (thanks Lucas), but in the case of Blade Runner, the theatrical cut is just wrong. It loses the message of the film and in doing so, adds some pretty ham-fisted elements (like the voice overs that are so bad that it is rumored Ford intentionally sucked it up to try and avoid their inclusion in the film), and removes some important stuff--all in the name of making such a dark film "happier".

The 1992 directors cut is a big improvement. Its not a true directors cut--more like somebody tried to rework the film back to the original working print and Ridley Scott approved it--but it fixes the glaring issues. The downside is some awkward silence when there is supposed to be voiceover but they took it out without shortening the scene or adding other noises. There is also the original workprint now on DVD with the 5-disc pack. I haven't watched this version but I suspect it comes off as unpolished (as it wasn't final). Its missing some things Scott wanted, but is also missing some things he didn't want that made it into the theatrical release (like the voiceovers).

The version to watch is probably the 2007 "Final Cut". It is the directors cut, but actually controlled by Scott. There is some cleanup work done to the film with modern techniques, but not in a bothersome way. Flows a little better than the 1992 cut and gets the message across, no voiceover, no happy ending. It doesn't stray too far though. There are a lot of deleted scenes that they include on the disk that an overambitious director would have tried to work back into the story--Scott kept them out, and I think it is for the better.