We're pretty much at this point with retail cashiers right now.

Back when I worked retail management as a starving student (admitted a couple decades ago, now) we had to fire a girl because she didn't know how to make change. Like the cash register reads 37 cents, now which coins to you hand to a customer? She simply could not figure it out. Even after trying to teach her to count up, she simply couldn't add numbers fast enough. I'm sure she's probably a CEO or accountant now.

I've always enjoyed watching the recorded HOPE and debconf videos, I looked at the schedule and there's a few I'd like to see, but not at the $1000 (approx total) it would cost me to attend... does this con video the presentations and then distribute? A pitiful attempt at searching did not yield previous con videos, but its awful hard to prove a negative. Not living on the coasts means I can afford to drop $1000 without blinking (well, without blinking too much) but I'm too cheap and over scheduled to go.

I LOL at cons that make a big deal about both advertising to the entire world and reducing the ticket price from $50 to $40 or whatever. Yeah that is a big deal for the local student population, but only a couple percent of my airline ticket / hotel / meals / whatever. You could let non-locals in for free, or charge non-locals $400, and it wouldn't really change the overall individual's budget very much. Also I'm not 18 anymore so spare me the claims that I can hitchhike to the con, sleep on a park bench and catch and roast pigeons so its not really that expensive, if I'm taking a vacation I'm taking it easy... Looking the other way, isn't LA kinda like Manhattan where a years worth of rent there is more than my entire suburban house cost, so the locals should be able to drop $500 at a blink just like me... Its something I've never really understood about con economics.

Or more directly, is that your personalized ringtone and what was salman's reaction the first time he heard it?
I used to have a personalized ringtone that said something like "Wife Alert" whenever my wife called, she was pretty pissed about it, still don't know why. Probably thought I had a "Girlfriend Alert" ringtone too.

Google for CLEP tests, older than dirt or at least older than me.

One school I attended only allowed two CLEP tests per semester. I have absolutely no idea why both in this practical situation or in theory. Also they only accepted CLEP tests for certain classes. I'm pretty sure calc was one of them, but if there is a CLEP test for diffeqs and you pass yet they refuse to accept it via the xfer process, you're pretty much SOL other than the appeals process.

Potential employers don't seem to care about much other than granted degrees. HR doesn't care about anything other than Bachelors, Masters, and Doesn't have a PHD.

To help google for it, its an old TED talk maybe came up in the rotation a year ago. I saw the presentation you've only heard of. It was fairly cool.

Lead dev, eh? I'm betting you sit in on lots of spec definition meetings. Maybe with The Man himself. Does he give informal presentations just like the real lectures or ? Feel free to lie if the answer would get you fired. Hmm maybe this question sucks.

Ah F it that was dumb lets ask something more realistic. I always ask coder/tech types whats their coolest hack / coolest piece of code. Not something else someone else did, not some giant overall project or vague thing like "world peace" just your coolest isolated to one individual "thing" hack. Something they did personally not hired someone else to do, or something their boss did. Maybe in your LOB its an amazing caching technique, or an astounding way to compress video or whatever. Or some astounding workflow thingy. A short story just a paragraph no more. The kind of thing a /. audience would respond with "cool!" when they read it.

Short summary of the whole thing, /. comments and all: Pointless intermediation doesn't improve the experience or outcome. Doesn't seem to matter if its .edu software or most anything else.

As a guy who learned assembly in the early 80s, its not a bad choice. There are architectures that are absolutely beautiful and nearly perfectly orthogonal, like the 6809 and 68000 and dec pdp-11 but thats not real world anymore. MIX and MMIX literally are not real world and the simulators that exist usually don't provide much training in device driver development (if any). Stuff like IBM BAL or whatever its called is too high level CISC'y. Stuff like ancient (pre-pic24, pre-pic32, etc) PIC microcontroller assembly would simply scare the kids away. Hell, it used to scare me. Overall you would do worse by selecting most anything other than 8086 assembly. Have you got a better suggestion?

Yeah either that or booze. Or both as in rum -n- coke, which I enjoy on rare occasions.

I believe there is a constant quantity of junk food but the variety varies by decade. When I was a little kid we had a whole aisle of cake mixes and frostings, which has imploded down to maybe 15 lineal one sided feet and at most 10 different flavors of frosting. I was actually kinda depressed last time I wanted to bake a cake from a mix. I had to "settle" instead of picking what I wanted. The energy drink category and bottled water category have exploded in size since I was a kid. Also, tea. You couldn't buy canned/bottled tea when I was a kid, just poisonous tasting instant powder mix and bags. Now they've got looseleaf in the store, and an whole section of different types of bottled (heavily sugared) teas. Another category that's exploded: refrigerated ready to bake "stuff", when I was a kid they had ready to bake rolls in tubes and thats about it, there is now a 10 foot wide section of ready to bake cookies etc. We have almost nothing to chose from anymore WRT jerky and nuts, which is too bad because I like those snacks.

I think its more a chronic issue. 5% less fructose doesn't sound like much, until you think of a hard core addict drinking 3 cans/day thats 1000 cans/yr or about 5 kilos less of fructose.

Kind of like "low tar" cigarettes. Yes quitting smoking is the best "low tar" solution, but its better than nothing.

No coincidence. Real programmers (or at least real old programmers) program in 36 bits.

911. The bad guys won.

The body count in the war on drugs is pretty high too

Its interesting that the LAPD has shot at more innocent civilians than Dorner has. The primary difference is that the LAPD is so unprofessional they haven't successfully killed as many innocent civilians as Dorner, at least so far, although they're trying their best to even up the score. I have faith in the LAPD, they'll catch up soon enough.

But the excursions from the background are also not actionable data. Right back to my original example, OK the important part is not that 15% of the dirt villagers like Bieber, its that 85% actively dislike Bieber. Still not actionable because the subject of discussion is useless from a military tactical / strategic / logistic perspective.

I will say that you could see a meta-pattern of peoples behavior when they know they're being monitored. Like if you have people faking data, poorly, to make it look like an empty booby trapped dirt village is currently populated, but it only contains poison gas cylinders. Of course a IR satellite shot would be simpler and we've already got that tech deployed... Basically a psyop detector would be kinda interesting. Somebody could make a synthetic flash mob artifical data generator that makes it look like we're gonna riot at the west gate, but we're all actually going to the east gate... That kind of thing.

Look at it from a hard science perspective. You're running a really big complicated experiment and have one (of many) really noisy input streams and there may or may not be a signal buried deep in the noise. Stick a 10x amplifier on it is not necessarily gonna help the SNR. In fact "demodulating" that noisy input stream may very well be impossible because there's nothing actually there. If you're smart enough or have enough AI maybe you can make a demod, maybe... Or maybe there's just no useful data from that source because its a junk source.