plikan13

The war of drugs has been done badly. Of course it's ridiculous that people's homes get raided because they have some pot. That doesn't mean legislation needs to jump to the other end of the spectrum. You can forbid trade of cannabis and at the same time NOT put users in jail.

Legalization may provide a net health benefit for Mexican gang members. Whether legalization will provide a net health benefit for American citizens is still a point of contention.

Generally there is not much happiness in software development. More often than not the job is little more than prostituting your brain for some cause that you don't really care about. That's why many people have shitty attitudes, in spite of their royal paychecks.

It's a junkheap of human banality -- deleted my account many moons ago.

You still need an algorithm to decide when it's time to handle control to a remote driver. Who's going to handle the edge cases of that algorithm?

At some point you got to wonder whether the practice of programming itself can make people unhappy. Maybe it's just not natural to put your mind into that straightjacket of formal thinking for 8+ hours a day.

Yes, but the number which indexes the position in PI where your book starts will probably be longer than the book itself.

Likewise, if someone fails to use intoxicants or other recreational drugs responsibly and develops a debilitating habit, it makes more sense to do as we do for people who want to quit drinking or smoking, not as we do for people who rape and murder.

Does your scheme involve coercion of any kind? If not, then why is not working already? People are already free to seek help for their drug addiction.

I'm not sure history can be repeated so easily. Back in the eighties you were impressed when a program managed to change the screen from blue to green. With today's kids playing Counter Strike on high end computers, it's not likely they're gonne be very impressed with what they see, much less motivated.

It's funny how many people recommend exercise or meditation as if this is going to make you forget that you hate your job. If anything, meditation is only going to make this more clear. Hating your job is a pretty big problem that you will only solve by changing the circumstances of your employment. You don't owe anybody unhappiness, not even your wife or kids.

The problem is that when you hire the services of a prostitute, you will probably have no idea about the situation of that person. Maybe this person is in charge of his/her life and is making a well-informed choice. But maybe this person is coerced into prostitution. In that case you will be financially supporting a very wrong thing, and you have no way of knowing. I think the question whether prostitution should be legal is much less important than the conclusion that being a customer is morally indefensible.

Couldn't agree more. Evolution as a process has no regard for simplicity or elegance. The solutions that Natural Selection "comes" up with are random. I guess you could say that all organisms have a design, but that the design is irrational.

Except of course that evolution comes up with solutions that are so clever and so intricate that we, with all our scientific brains, have barely scratched the surface of understanding it. Now if it acts intelligently, walks intelligently and quacks intelligently, then maybe we should just call it intelligent?

is this really more profitable than actually making good games?

I know I'm going to sound like a terrible elitist snob, but the target audience for today's mainstream video games are not exactly the top layer of humanity. It's pretty much a tale of milking the stupid, i'm afraid.

My guess, and of course this can be no more than a guess, is that you are depressed because of loneliness.

Attitudes towards women in Tech would be a little more relaxed if a fair number of developers would have the courage to face the truth and come out of their closets.

a job market that doesn't need cashiers, janitors, gardeners, cooks, taxi drivers, car washers, many farmers, or most menial labor?

The job that I consider most threatened by advances in AI is actually the job of programmer.

  int get_number(char buffer[])
  {
    long int i = 0;
    char *p;
    if(fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), stdin) != NULL)
  {

  int get_number(char buffer[], int buffer_size)

Attitudes towards women in IT environments would become a little more relaxed if a fair number of programmers would have the courage to stop denying and come out of the closet. There, I said it.

My main gripe with Windows at the moment is the amount of time I'm staring at Windows updates. It gets ridiculous at times.

I have been visited by deceased relatives a few times in my dreams and for me these experiences were convincing enough to serve as evidence that death is not the end of things. Of course this is just personal, but it's good enough for me.

If you want to try this, don't wait too long. Being an electrician is a though job physically. If you're past 35 and you're used to sitting in front of a screen for a living, your body will have difficulties readjusting to the strain.

Source: I did this myself about 5 years ago, following a complete burnout on being a C++ developer. Worked as an electrician for about 18 months.

You ignore the fact that the radioactive potassium will be distributed more or less evenly over your body.

Secondly, and more importantly, you bring up this number of 4900 decays per second as if it means anything by itself. Those 4900 decays per second are caused by the presence of 18 milligram of Potassium-40 in your body. One of the elements released by Fukushima is Iodine-131. If you ingest 1 microgram of Iodine-131, this speck will generate 4,6 BILLION decays per second. So yeah, you're right that 4900 decays per second is not a big deal. But then you conveniently forgot the fact that the material released by Fukushima is orders of magnitude more radioactive than Potassium 40.

Aside from waste storage there's also the cost of dismantling old reactors. The Wikipedia article on nuclear decommissioning makes for some depressing reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning

The tl;dr being "with a few notable exceptions, it's just too damn expensive so we just ignore the problem"

The statement that nowadays reactor engines can be designed that are "far safer" always riles me up a little bit because, of course, a few decades ago the OLD designs were already sold to the general public with the promise that they were "perfectly" safe. And if you had the temerity to question this, you were of course a Luddite.

What people never seem to understand is that the proximity of the source matters.

Compare a tiny amount of radiation coming from a long distance (say the core of the earth) and a tiny amount of radiation coming from speck of decaying radioactive material released by Fukushima that is floating around in the air of your office room. You measure the radiation in the room and sure enough the radiation is very weak. You conclude "See? Fukushima is no worse than natural radiation". Now what happens if you're so unfortunate to inhale that speck of material and it settles in your lungs? Then the picture changes completely because some cells of your lungs will now be very close to the source of radiation and these cells -- and always the same cells -- will be subjected to a long period of intense radiation.

I've been wondering about another somewhat intuitive way to see the problem: suppose a third person enters the room and he is allowed to finish the game, knowing nothing of what went on before. In particular, he doesn't know your initial choice. Now it is obvious that his chances of winning are 1/2. It is also obvious that if you stick to your first choice, your chance of winning is still 1/3. Now it is odd that somebody who has LESS information about the problem has a better chance of winning than you. Meaning that you must have some way of getting at least the odds of the other guy. But there's only one thing you can do other than sticking to your first choice: taking the other door. So that seems the correct thing to do.

Before the conditional expression was introduced to Python I sometimes wrote things like

    foo = [baz, bar][qux is None]

I didn't read the book, but from leafing through Stephen Hawking's "On the shoulder of giants" I got the impression this book tries to reconstruct how Copernicus, Kepler etc... acquired their understanding of the universe, based on their original texts. So maybe that's the book you want?

You're right about the implicit conversions but "buffer" is not a pointer to char. The type of buffer is "array of 10 chars" and sizeof(buffer) equals 10, not sizeof(char*) which usually will be 4 or 8. Personally, being a lazy typist, the implicit conversions from array to pointer-to-first-element have never bothered me as it allows you to write terse code and the cases where stuff gets complicated are rare and can be clarified by typedefs, as somebody already pointed out.

I always thought the obvious reason for this is that it allows the banks to hang on to your money a little bit longer. At least that's how it works where I live. The money disappears from your account immediately, so essentially you give them a ~24 hour free loan. The banks win, so they have no incentive the change it.