mappy

I really, really, really doubt that.

I agree. And it goes beyond just being cooped up.

Having a planet's atmosphere to burn up flying space debris or at least being inside of a cave in an asteroid (as long as it is really a cave) can provide a lot of protection. A high-speed space rock could easily tear through the one foot of protective wall in your space station, and all of the pretty plants and oxygen in your biosphere will be dead from having been almost instantly frozen, even if you patch it up.

If we want colonization, we not only need orbiting stations/stations at Lagrangian points, we must be colonizing big rocks. Once you perfect your shields, it's another story, but we are nowhere near the energy requirements or technology of a ship or viable station that is safe for humanity to live in long-term. Even if I live to be 1000 years old, I'd never want to take my chances in a station or ship that isn't at least in orbit, protected by a large planet on one side, for any great length of time. And our orbit is filled with space junk- not very safe.

Now, if it were a Firefly-class ship, that'd be different. I'd live in that in a heartbeat. Or the original Enterprise or the Tantive IV.

A life without direction is like a car careening down the highway without anyone driving. Sure, you could do it, but it can be dangerous to yourselves and others. I've personally been affected by people that have lost direction, and affected others negatively whenever I've been without direction.

For those seeking a reason to why we exist, there is no better reason than to love. Trying to get us off of the planet and explore the universe is love. Taking care of the homeless and hungry is love. Saving some animal species is love. Having dinner with a neighbor and listening to them tell their stories is love. Doing your best at your job to help others grow is love. Calling a family member or friend to see how they are doing is love.

Personally, I believe in loving others and loving my God and trying to do the best I can with what I have. That's my meaning and that's the real truth for me, and it could be for a number of people.

I don't believe in the concept of a "meaning game". It's not a game.

There really is very little to understanding life's meaning, regardless of age, despite all the philosophers and theologians still trying to figure out the details. It comes down to this:

Life is first and foremost about loving everything and everyone. I don't mean that you have to be happy, but if you show your love through your actions, and they are not selfish, but you still take care of yourself, then you will have done all that you can. If you've not been given the ability to interact with the outside world, that's ok too- you just do the best that you can.

If you have been given the ability to do something that is better than your other abilities, you should try hard to use that if it shows your love. Your love may be playing triangle in a death metal band, and that's ok. You may not always have that ability, and if more people did what they did best for the benefit of their craft and others, the world could be much more interesting. You often don't have to quit your job to do it, though quitting is fine also.

If you get to the point where you become less able to do something, don't dwell on that. Just do the best you can do with what you have. You might fail, miserably. It's not a guarantee of success, but if you do your best and keep doing your best, then you'll have few regrets. You may have wasted many years- it doesn't matter. You may do incredible things through small interactions with people that no one may ever learn of, because all of us see only a small fraction of what's really going on. Whatever you do, just don't give up.

I'm over 40 and I didn't understand this post. Maybe someone else can summarize it.

I think the only dirty secret when it comes to passing 40 as a software developer is that you become more and more in the minority and notice that there is a greater percentage of older people looking for work. So- it's a little scary.

In addition, Stratasys is also not a consumer peripheral company. They primarily make software and printers for the industrial 3D manufacturing market. But making the mistake won't hurt them much; they're still well seated in the industry.

They also don't have to worry about losing MakerBot because 3D printing/additive manufacturing is going to be freaking insanely big. Companies want to shorten R&D time and generate new products quickly.

Also, 3D printers for the purpose of manufacturing products won't be big in the home anytime soon. Why? Except for the new HP Multi Jet Fusion printers which are a small step towards the end goal with their ability to use different agents within a single part, most 3D printers only have the capability to print in a single material at a time. This is great for parts, but not good for consumer goods which are made of many different materials. Today's 3D printer is very far away from a Star Trek replicator. There is a lot that goes into part design, determining how to best build the part, doing the design of the build which is different than the part specification so that parts can be built as designed, knowing how to use the printer along with maintaining/dealing with quirks caused by how the parts are built (which depends on technology/machine/material used and many other things), and removing structural supports and power/resin from parts after they are built.

Even when all of that becomes less complicated, and it will, home technology will almost always be behind the level of technology that exists in a company dedicated to manufacturing. Consumer 3D for most products is just not going to be a good market anytime soon.

The exception is food. Food is not nearly as complicated of a product as other consumer goods to make, and people love to make beautiful custom food at home, so 3D food printers could very easily become a staple in the kitchen. They could be every home within 40-50 years and in many food production facilities within 20 years.

Personally I think all companies should be using pair-programming or contract to hire

You should qualify that with "all companies by which I want to be hired", because not all teams/developers pair program or want to pair program.

The team I'm on does a phone tech interview, then an in-person interview where we dig into history, then a mix of problem solving, pseudocode problems, OO/schema design, and web app design/technologies/approach, and then more interviews with the extended team. While we will sit with each other to help out at times, sometimes for hours, we don't strictly pair- that is just when help is needed. We rely on some up-front design and all PR's code reviewed for quality control, in addition to QA and approval by application owner.

Very cool. Looks really slow, though.

Congrats, rms!

Those pictures on the page are horrible, though. Really bad photoshopping.

I'm really surprised nothing like this has existed before

But how would you monetize it?

Unlike an RSS feed, you really don't know how the JSON response would be used, so you can't inject ads into it.

And if you charge for it, wouldn't people assume it would continue to work, but site "scrapers", regardless of how they are configured, are likely to break, so it would be tougher having customers pay for something that could break at any time leaving them having to figure out if its the service that's changed/broken or the page that's changed.

Don't get me wrong- some great businesses have been/are based on "scraping" in one way or another. However, as cool as this is, it's just another way to "scrape". If the person hosting the page would provide an API or JSON view instead, you'd be loads better off.

They've been slopping about for the past several months, and it looks like they've finally given up on it.

Really, how difficult is it to have a site and service that stores links and tags? Even at a high volume of data, in this day and age it should be trivial unless the money's not there to support it.

According to http://blog.delicious.com/ , they cancelled the premium service in January, attempted to monetize it again via sponsored links in RSS feeds in March, failed to revise the site successfully in March, then had "site problems", and finally said this month that they would be transitioning back to del.icio.us, but they seem to have been unable to do that either. Now the site's either down or stating that it has too much traffic. They've completely screwed the pooch.

It's really sad.