Don't you mean Aperture Sciences? ~

I think if NASA adopted this "Dell business model" that you describe, space exploration would take about ten years before if became too dangerous for anybody without a powerful Anti-Debris Scan and Removable Tool. Unfortunately, the requirements of space are higher than the comparable code that McAfee and Microsoft churn out. The option to resign yourself to raising the white flag and start from scratch would have much more devastating results when you realize the Scan and Removable Tool has become overwhelmed.

On the other hand, this would pave the way for a huge Anti-Debris Scan industry which would create tens-of-millions of jobs to kick start the economy. Or is that just another example of the Broken Window Fallacy?

That's funny... I thought Albany was prosperous because of the Hudson River, the Rockefeller family with their railroad business, and Thomas Edison with his electric company. A quick peak at Wiki supports your claims, though. Nonetheless, being familiar with the area I guess it goes to show that cities need to evolve or die just like companies and countries do. I went to RPI for 4 years from 2001 to 2005 and during my tenure in Troy I watched it get nicer and nicer as the school poured money into the town improving campus as well as some hot spots downtown. I must say, though, that 4th street east of downtown looked like hell when I drove through in May. Many of those apartment tenements need to be torn down.

There are practical considerations why we don't use solar and wind power to run things. It's very inefficient and uses lots of resources to create it. I believe solar (using cutting edge tech that's been developed in the last two or three years) is slightly better than wind (which demands the right amount of wind for it to work).

I did some back of the envelope calculations a while back and (based on crude estimates) a population zone like New Jersey which consumes 8 GW of electricity would need to be completely blanketed in solar panels to get the power needed to run. As a comparison, the state currently gets 4 GW of electricity from 3 nuclear reactions that less than 5% of the population know about. In terms of staying out of the way of modern living, that's a major win.

My favorite part when I wrote it was rounding the value for pi down to 3.1 and then further truncating the 0.1 by casting it as an integer. But nobody *really* writes code like this. Right? Hopefully? I hope...

Wikibooks is the best source of open source educational books.

The folks at CK12.org also probably know a thing or two, since they get most of their content from Wikipedia and were recently distinguished by the governor of the state of California for producing three books which meets the state requirements for an elementary school text book.

I'm Cowboy Neal and I only write comments like this:

/* an integer for symbol A */
int A;

/* a double for pi */
double pi = 3.1;

/* set A equal to pi */
/* need to type-cast to avoid the warning */
A = (int)pi;

He correctly identified that you didn't meet what they were looking for in a candidate. By the sound of it, they didn't meet what you were looking for in an organization.

I've had similar interviews on both sides of the spectrum. One .NET shop was looking for a guy training in the Microsoft tools and looked down on the fact that I had general knowledge about comparable tools from other vendors. Another startup shop was looking for a whiz-bang Linux programmer who works long hours and writes lots of code really quickly. Neither environment really suited me. I fit better at a test-heavy, high-reliability shop who uses a good balance of proprietary and open development solutions. And that's where I wound up after my most recent job search a few years back.

Ben,

Thanks for the clarification and your efforts in the free books arena.

I took some time to look through a bit of what CK12 has available on their website and it's clear who the real champion of these free textbook successes is... Jimmy Wales and the work of Millions of dedicated people who have contributed to the Wikipedia project.

I take back calling you a liar.

Though, I'm not impressed with any of these deals. The lack of options for a phone you can pick is glaring.

Where? I daresay... you're lying.

And I reiterate, you pay $125 for 4 phones. That number does NOT scale down to $32 for a comparable monthly plan for a single phone. The best I've found is $40 a month for talk/text. I live without a dataplan because they cost more than I want to pay. I avoid "Pay-Go" because they don't come bundled with unlimited night/weekend minutes and so I'd have to estimate my usage at about 500 minutes per month instead of 300.

\

I must agree with GP. On a single line, I get 350 minutes, 250 texts, and no data for $39 after some 17% discount that I get because Verizon has a shady deal with my employer. The subsidy was at most $100... but that was about three years ago. So any "subsidy discount" has long since expired because my phone has lasted longer than it was designed.

Take out the "family discount" and sign-up for 4 individual lines with the stats described above and you'd be paying about $300 a month. Fuck... even for 2 phones they double the price of a plan so the savings don't start kicking in until the 3rd and 4th phone gets added to the plan. It's a damned rip off. And you know it.

Other types of life have evolved differently from us. We're the only type that has ever had the option to leave Earth. Thus, we're the species who would be responsible for saving species which we choose to save if we ever had to go find a new planet.

No, the ideal advanced life form would destroy its own habitable environment on a celestial scale.