If you do upload your wallet to "the cloud", you should definitely encrypt it with strong encryption and with a password of appropriate entropy. Otherwise, you're just asking for someone to steal your coins.
I have successfully removed bogus credit dings from my report. You have to follow a lot of steps and document everything well. If the creditor or agency doesn't respond correctly, you can sue them in small claims court for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The lawsuit always gets their attention!
I spent a large part of my career working for a small company in Silicon Valley that became a Very Big Company.
One of the things that the CEO liked to do for a while is have a "lunch with the interns” during the summer. He’d chat with them and give them an opportunity to ask questions. As the manager of a lot of interns, I was also invited, and I often went. I was (and still am) on a first-name basis with the CEO.
One time an intern asked, “what do I need to become the CEO of a company like this?” The question made me laugh, because I already knew the answer. The answer is that there is no answer. You must have a vision about what you can do, and you must believe it. If you allow every idiot in the world to draw a box around your behavior, you won’t accomplish anything.
I know that the Kindle (with wifi off) isn't going to crash the airplane. Amazon knows that the Kindle isn't going to crash the airplane. So why should I respect the opinion of the flight attendant? The flight attendant is, after all, a flight attendant because they would have never had make it through differential equations without sleeping with the professor. So why should I give that ditz any respect?
This isn’t about ‘entitlement’. Take all that crap your professors at the university told you and put it in /dev/null where it belongs. Reframe the issue in terms of what is right and what is possible.
If you want to be truly successful, you must learn about breaking the rules. (And by “truly” successful, I mean truly successful. If your goal is to accumulate $800K in your 401K and own a house in Sunnyvale, California outright… well you can do that by following all the rules and following Company Policies.)
Write your own rules in life.
Perhaps I already answered your question, “And what's so difficult about following the rules and being inconvenienced for 20 minutes.” And if you don’t feel that I did, it means that you’ll never find the answer.
Maybe you’ll find success. Or maybe you won’t. But the feeling will be liberating. There is no man like a free man.
Fortunately, FAA regulations also seem to require the flight attendants to sit in their seats during takeoff and landing.
Once the flight attendants are done "policing" the isles and get in their seats, I just take out my Kindle and start reading again.
So far, I haven't caused any aircraft crashes... and my fellow travelers have never called me out on it: apparently they also think the rules are stupid.
I worked as a manager at a major semiconductor company in Silicon Valley for many years. I interviewed thousands of candidates, many of who were older than me.
I noticed that older engineers seemed to bifurcate into two groups: the ones who were curious about everything, and the ones who stayed in their box.
The ones who were curious about everything remained great engineers. They tinkered with new technologies, read books about software project management, wrote cool little programs in unusual languages like Haskell or Scheme, etc. These guys were invariably great engineers, and their experience was just icing on the cake.
The ones who stayed in their niche of writing x86 assembly, COBOL applications for mainframes or writing the same class of network drivers for Linux for fifteen years were usually awful.
I don't doubt that there is actual ageism out there. However, when I did interviews I never cared. However, I also noticed that the "lazy engineers" hadn't really done anything in their career to expand their skill set beyond the minimum their employers required them to do, and I could see why they were not employable. The older "curious, passionate" engineers I hired worked out awesome.
I am the same 'greenlander' that is referred to in the article. LOL, it's a small world.
The only thing I can suggest to all you of guys out there (and I know that 90%-95% of the readership here is 'guys' and not 'chicks') is to get educated.
The problem is that you must have the confidence to write your own rules in life. If you speak with confidence, move with confidence, dress with confidence, and act with confidence, you'll have your choice among women.
The irony of it is that you only get confidence from past success. You must move beyond your nerd persona from high school. If you adopt the mantra "I AM the prize" and actually truly believe it, women will believe it too.
I cleaned up my act. I was just a cubicle nerd in Silicon Valley. (Although I must have had something going for me: I became a manager.) I hired a personal trainer and started to hit the gym like a wild animal. My abs came out: I hadn’t seem them since high school. I changed my diet. (Hint: The Paleo/Atkins diet works.) I started a relationship with a tailor and ordered a lot of made-to-measure clothing. I subscribed to GQ.
I read HN every day. The technical articles are fascinating, and the writing brilliant. Yesterday I spent a large section of my day reading a set of about 450 slides about subtleties in the C language that was linked from this site. Today I spent a good fraction of my morning reading about elliptical-curve cryptography. I am a nerd at heart.
Yet, I’m not a nerd in the sense that you think of. When I meet a new girl, my frame is “I’m going to bend you over my kitchen table and fuck you like the dirty ho that you are.” She knows it just by my speech, my body language, and how I act. Obviously, some women won’t step into that “frame”. It doesn’t matter: the thing you have to realize is that men display, and women select. The key to catching women is approaching more women. Depending on your perceived status, a certain fraction of women will ‘select’ you. Don’t waste time with women who don’t ‘select’ you. Focus on the ones who do.
I can already hear the shrill cries of “oh, no GOOD girls would select a guy like that.” It’s a fallacy. Women are emotional, and when they step into the strong frame of a man with whom they resonate, all bets are off. The nice HR girl you took to dinner at a fashionable restaurant on University Ave. in Palo Alto will screw a guy in the back seat of a car if he has high enough status. Give up your good girl/bad girl dichotomy.
The problem I have now is described as the “players’ curse.” The sheer numbers of women riding the “cock carousel” (i.e., slut it up in your 20s, find the beta provider in your early 30s) has distorted the market. (If you don’t believe me, shut the fuck up and go read the reference sources I cited above.) In my 20s I dreamed of children and family in my 20s. Lots of men are simply dropping out of the “mating market” and simply jerking off and not dating because women in their 20s don’t select their twentysomething equivalents. A man in that situation has two choices: to kick up his game a notice, or just to retreat into porn and World of Warcraft. The paradox is that a man of willpower and clarity that can put effort into cleaning up his act can break into the side of “the selected” and score plenty of vj. Once you understand that, you can see modern-day feminism for the hoax that it is. It is a pox on the civilized world.
I can already foresee that somebody out there is going to some ‘white knight’ jerkoffs who are going to call me a ‘misogynist’. For the record, a misogynist is someone that HATES women. I’m not a misogynist. Roissy/Heartist is not a misogynist. Roosh is not a misogynist. Usually, the ‘misogynist’ stick is used to say, “you’re not being politically correct.” If you want to say, “greenlander, you’re not being politically correct,” I’ll accept that. I’ll accept it even if you want to say, “greenlander, you’re a self-absorbed, narcissistic, self-deluded dickhead.” It’s the truth. But don’t call me a misogynist: I love women. One must simply see them for what they are.
The great thing is that it doesn’t matter how many people out there slander me with politically-correct ad-homonyms. A man who is ready to see the truth will follow the path if even a tiny morsel of the truth is laid before him. And if I even help one nerd change his life for the better by nudging him in the right direction, the past hour I’ve spent writing this post will not have been in vain.
I can see your point, but as someone with a long sting as a manager in Silicon Valley I can tell you what happens in real life. Employees divide into two groups: the "honest" ones and the "work the system" ones.
The honest ones take sick days when they are sick. Out of ten sick days they take one or three or eight. The number they take each year depends on how sick they got and how often.
The "work the system" ones take the full allotment every year.
It's actually even worse than that, because the employer is paying an additional 6.2% + 1.45% on your behalf. But from the employer's point of view, it's just another cost of having an employee. It's a zero-sum game. The employee is really paying 28% income + 14.4% social security + 2.9% medicare = 45%. (Actually a hair less because the employer's contribution is not considered taxable income, but in any case the effective tax is > 35%)
I worked at a major semiconductor company in Silicon Valley for many years. I interviewed thousands of candidates, many of who were older than me.
I noticed that older engineers seemed to bifurcate into two groups: the ones who were curious about everything, and the ones who stayed in their box.
The ones who were curious about everything remained great engineers. They tinkered with new technologies, read books about software project management, wrote cool little programs in unusual languages like Haskell or Scheme, etc. These guys were invariably great engineers, and their experience was just icing on the cake.
The ones who stayed in their niche of writing x86 assembly, COBOL applications for mainframes or writing the same class of network drivers for Linux for fifteen years were usually awful.
I don't doubt that there is actual ageism out there. However, when I did interviews I never cared. However, I also noticed that the "lazy engineers" hadn't really done anything in their career to expand their skill set beyond the minimum their employers required them to do, and I could see why they were not employable. The older "curious, passionate" engineers I hired worked out awesome.
All the candidates I gave serious consideration to write lots of code (as did my staff who also interviewed them). But I can't interview everyone whose resume I receive: I can only pick the best resumes. When a candidate failed the interview process, I tried to figure out the error I made (if any) in order select better resumes in the future.
And I agree that schools are different. I occasionally considered candidates from schools that people snicker about, like San Jose State. But they had better have aced everything and really stand out from the pack to overcome that handicap. Sometimes, great people have life circumstances that corral them into lame schools. On the other hand, I'd give pretty serious consideration to a candidate from Harvey Mudd or CalTech with a 3.1. (But even at those great schools, the < 3.0 rule seemed to apply: candidates with a really low GPA couldn't pass the technical parts of interviewing. You'd be surprised how many CS graduates from top schools can't implement the C library strrev() function or return a pointer to the nth element of a linked list.)
I interviewed thousands of new college grads. The guys who I made offers to were almost always guys who did stuff on their own. Right before I retired, the last guy I made a job offer to showed me an app he had written for his iphone that simulated how particles diffuse in a solvent, and his resume showed a link to the code that he wrote.
His GPA was only a 3.5. But I totally got him: he was great because he had a passion for digging into stuff, and not just for jumping through professors' hoops.
In general, the correlation I found between GPA and competence was this:
Below 3.0, something is wrong. This person doesn't get fundamentals: he will write convoluted code and won't get a lot of basic concepts. He either isn't very bright or highly undisciplined or both.
3.0 - 3.5, this guy isn't good at jumping through hoops, but he might be great if he has a passion for programming and has done lots of side work. It's a mixed lot but there are a fair number of diamonds in the rough.
3.5 - 3.9, this is the sweet spot. Lots of great people in this category who did both great and school and also did stuff in their spare time.
3.9 - 4.0, oddly, the quality seemed to go down here a little bit. These are the people who spent all their Friday and Saturday nights studying instead of developing social skills, and didn't really do much besides jump through the professors' hoops and get an A in everything.
A great engineer doesn't just blindly jump through every hoop. In the real world, the amount of work is highly unbounded, and a great engineer will be able to sort through it and figure out what's REALLY important and what's not. And they'll be able to articulate why they think that and negotiate with others. Sometimes, the 4.0 candidates were obsessive-compulsive people weren't grounded in the real world and couldn't think in practical terms.
Obviously, I'm generalize and there are always exceptions. But if you interview thousands of candidates you see the trend.
I second the "100W sustained" number. I did the math once with the assumption: 2000 kilocalories/day diet, 4.1852J/calorie, 86400 seconds/day, all input calories are eventually given off as heat.
jaxbot, I was a hiring manager at a major Silicon Valley semiconductor company for many years before I retired.
Unfortunately, the CS degree really does open doors. If you're good, you can skip the degree. But you must be really good. Honestly, the best engineer I worked with in my whole career (and who was on my staff) was a high-school dropout. But he was incredibly great, and devoured books on languages and software engineering. He is the kind of guy that would have a relevant input about "Is Haskell or Lisp a better language?"
But not having a degree did limit his career. He always had work because everyone loved him and knew he was brilliant and humble. But doors that might have been open to him were closed. Every choice in life has a cost.
There really is some benefit to doing the degree. It will force you to dig into some areas that you might not have dug into manually. Algorithms, data structures, discrete math, linear algebra, calculus, compilers, languages, computer architecture, etc. You need all that stuff to be a great SW engineer.
My advise to you is to get the degree but treat it as your "day job." Then, do what you're really passionate about. Take grad level courses, or just do random stuff that you think is cool and put it in github.
I interviewed thousands of new college grads. About 75% of them absolutely suck. The guys who I made offers to were almost always guys who did stuff on their own. Right before I retired, the last guy I made a job offer to showed me an app he had written for his iphone that simulated how particles diffuse in a solvent, and his resume showed a link to the code that he wrote.
His GPA was only a 3.5. But I totally got him: he was great because he had a passion for digging into stuff, and not just for jumping through professors' hoops.
In general, the correlation I found between GPA and competence was this:
< 3.0, something is wrong, don't hire this guy
3.0 - 3.5, this guy isn't good at jumping through hoops, but he might be great if he has a passion for programming and has done lots of side work.
3.5 - 3.9, this is the sweet spot. Lots of great people in this category who did both great and school and also did stuff in their spare time.
3.9 - 4.0, oddly, the quality seemed to go down here a little bit. These are the people who spent all their Friday and Saturday nights studying instead of developing social skills, and didn't really do much besides strategize about how to jump through the professors' hoops and get an A in everything.
Obviously, I'm generalize and there are always exceptions. But if you interview thousands of candidates you see the trend.
And they probably won't do that until they've convicted "Dread Pirate Roberts"