Monday, December 31, 2012

Google Maps iOS?App????

??iOS 6?Google Maps App??????App Store?????48?????1,000????????????????????App??????????

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Source: http://www.ithome.com.tw/itadm/article.php?c=78115

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Sunday, December 30, 2012

Wall Street Week Ahead: Cliff may be a fear, but debt ceiling much scarier

(Reuters) - Investors fearing a stock market plunge - if the United States tumbles off the "fiscal cliff" next week - may want to relax.

But they should be scared if a few weeks later, Washington fails to reach a deal to increase the nation's debt ceiling because that raises the threat of a default, another credit downgrade and a panic in the financial markets.

Market strategists say that while falling off the cliff for any lengthy period - which would lead to automatic tax hikes and stiff cuts in government spending - would badly hurt both consumer and business confidence, it would take some time for the U.S. economy to slide into recession. In the meantime, there would be plenty of chances for lawmakers to make amends by reversing some of the effects.

That has been reflected in a U.S. stock market that has still not shown signs of melting down. Instead, it has drifted lower and become more volatile.

In some ways, that has let Washington off the hook. In the past, a plunge in stock prices forced the hand of Congress, such as in the middle of the financial crisis in 2008.

"If this thing continues for a bit longer and the result is you get a U.S. debt downgrade ... the risk is not that you lose two-and-a-half percent, the risk is that you lose ten and a half," said Jonathan Golub, chief U.S. equity strategist at UBS Equity Research, in New York.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said this week that the United States will technically reach its debt limit at the end of the year.

INVESTORS WARY OF JANUARY

The White House has said it will not negotiate the debt ceiling as in 2011, when the fight over what was once a procedural matter preceded the first-ever downgrade of the U.S. credit rating. But it may be forced into such a battle again. A repeat of that war is most worrisome for markets.

Markets posted several days of sharp losses in the period surrounding the debt ceiling fight in 2011. Even after a bill to increase the ceiling passed, stocks plunged in what was seen as a vote of "no confidence" in Washington's ability to function, considering how close lawmakers came to a default.

Credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's lowered the U.S. sovereign rating to double-A-plus, citing Washington's legislative problems as one reason for the downgrade from triple-A status. The benchmark S&P 500 dropped 16 percent in a four-week period ending August 21, 2011.

"I think there will be a tremendous fight between Democrats and Republicans about the debt ceiling," said Jon Najarian, a co-founder of online brokerage TradeMonster.com, in Chicago.

"I think that is the biggest risk to the downside in January for the market and the U.S. economy."

There are some signs in the options market that investors are starting to eye the January period with more wariness. The CBOE Volatility Index, or the VIX, the market's preferred indicator of anxiety, has remained at relatively low levels throughout this process, though on Thursday it edged above 20 for the first time since July.

More notable is the action in VIX futures markets, which shows a sharper increase in expected volatility in January than in later-dated contracts. January VIX futures are up nearly 23 percent in the last seven trading days, compared with a 13 percent increase in March futures and an 8 percent increase in May futures. That's a sign of increasing near-term worry among market participants.

The CBOE Volatility Index closed on Friday at 22.72, gaining nearly 17 percent to end at its highest level since June as details emerged of a meeting on Friday afternoon of President Barack Obama with Senate and House leaders from both parties where the president offered proposals similar to those already rejected by Republicans. Stocks slid in late trading and equity futures continued that slide after cash markets closed.

"I was stunned Obama didn't have another plan, and that's absolutely why we sold off," said Mike Shea, a managing partner and trader at Direct Access Partners LLC, in New York.

Obama offered hope for a last-minute agreement to avoid the fiscal cliff after a meeting with congressional leaders, although he scolded Congress for leaving the problem unresolved until the 11th hour.

"The hour for immediate action is here," he told reporters at a White House briefing. "I'm modestly optimistic that an agreement can be achieved."

The U.S. House of Representatives is set to convene on Sunday and continue working through the New Year's Day holiday. Obama has proposed maintaining current tax rates for all but the highest earners.

Consumers don't appear at all traumatized by the fiscal cliff talks, as yet. Helping to bolster consumer confidence has been a continued recovery in the housing market and growth in the labor market, albeit slow.

The latest take on employment will be out next Friday, when the U.S. Labor Department's non-farm payrolls report is expected to show jobs growth of 145,000 for December, in line with recent growth.

Consumers will see their paychecks affected if lawmakers cannot broker a deal and tax rates rise, but the effect on spending is likely to be gradual.

PLAYING DEFENSE

Options strategists have noted an increase in positions to guard against weakness in defense stocks such as General Dynamics because those stocks would be affected by spending cuts set for that sector. Notably, though, the PHLX Defense Index is less than 1 percent away from an all-time high reached on December 20.

This underscores the view taken by most investors and strategists: One way or another, Washington will come to an agreement to offset some effects of the cliff. The result will not be entirely satisfying, but it will be enough to satisfy investors.

"Expectations are pretty low at this point, and yet the equity market hasn't reacted," said Carmine Grigoli, chief U.S. investment strategist at Mizuho Securities USA, in New York. "You're not going to see the markets react to anything with more than a 5 (percent) to 7 percent correction."

Save for a brief 3.6 percent drop in equity futures late on Thursday evening last week after House Speaker John Boehner had to cancel a scheduled vote on a tax-hike bill due to lack of Republican support, markets have not shown the same kind of volatility as in 2008 or 2011.

A gradual decline remains possible, Golub said, if business and consumer confidence continues to take a hit on the back of fiscal cliff worries. The Conference Board's measure of consumer confidence fell sharply in December, a drop blamed in part on the fiscal issues.

"If Congress came out and said that everything is off the table, yeah, that would be a short-term shock to the market, but that's not likely," said Richard Weiss, a Mountain View, California-based senior money manager at American Century Investments.

"Things will be resolved, just maybe not on a good time table. All else being equal, we see any further decline as a buying opportunity."

(Wall St Week Ahead runs every Friday. Questions or comments on this column can be emailed to: david.gaffen(at)thomsonreuters.com)

(Reporting by Edward Krudy and Ryan Vlastelica in New York and Doris Frankel in Chicago; Writing by David Gaffen; Editing by Martin Howell, Steve Orlofsky and Jan Paschal)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wall-street-week-ahead-cliff-may-fear-debt-150342441--sector.html

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ESA Soc of Religion Call for Papers, Turino, 28-31 Aug | SISR ...

The 11th Conference of the European Sociological Association will be held 28-31 August, 2013 in Torino, Italy.

The Research Network Sociology of Religion (RN34) has issued its call for papers.
The call includes joint sessions with Sociology of Culture, Society and Sports, Sociology of Emotions, Qualitative Methods, and Sociology of Migration.
(Visit http://www.esareligion.org/)

Abstract submission opens on 12 December 2012 and closes 1 February 2013.

Call for Papers
RN34 ? Sociology of Religion
Coordinators:
Anne-Sophie Lamine? anne-sophie.lamine@misha.fr
University of Strasbourg, France
Heidemarie Winkel? hwinkel@uni-potsdam.de
University of Postdam, Germany

Religion has often been understood as a response to personal, social or cultural crisis. Classical scholars, such as Peter L. Berger and Max Weber, pointed out that it provides a theodicy of good and evil ? an account that gives ultimate meaning in a meaningless world. Religions, Stark and Bainbridge (1985) contend, are other-worldly compensators for individuals in crisis ? for those who are deprived from this-worldly rewards. Even advocates of the secularization thesis often acknowledge that crisis and rapid social change in society temporarily motivate the popularity of religion (Bruce 1997).
But religion, once considered to be in crisis under the secularizing powers of modernity, is alive and well in Europe. More than that: religion seems to thrive on what can now be called the crisis of modernity. Modern science, the nation state, capitalism, unrestricted consumption and the globalizing economy, have lost much of their credibility and plausibility in many European countries. In this cultural climate, the voices of traditional religious groups grow louder whereas, some say, we are witnessing a massive turn to holistic forms of spirituality (e.g., Campbell 2007). The atheist-secular worldview is more than ever contested by a fraction of Muslims, Christian creationists, Buddhists and other religious groups while a mirror-like process of anti-identification gives rise to alarmist discourses about the return of religions and particularly on the danger of the ?islamization of Europe?. Religion has once again become salient in the re-formation of identity and the construction of imagined communities: uprooted from tradition, modern individuals in identity crisis search for new (religious) values and meanings whereas some European nation states align themselves with their Christian heritage, long-standing traditions and religious pasts. Religion, then, can not easily be understood as the ?irrational? Other of modernity ? it is instead a common and valid response to the growing crisis of modernity. Jurgen Habermas (2005), once a furious critic of religion, argued from this perspective that intellectuals should include religious partners in the ?rational? conversation about modernity since both share a growing critique on the maladies of modernity.
Motivated by these observations, the Research Network Sociology of Religion calls for papers on crisis, critique and change in relation to religion.

Particularlypapers are welcomed that discuss the following topics:
01RN34.
Studies dealing with religion in crisis, i.e. the way religious traditions such as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and the like ? re-structure their organizations, beliefs, and practices and adopt, negotiate or resist processes of modernization, secularization and disenchantment.

02RN34.
Studies dealing with the ways religion provides answers to existential crisis and, particularly, the crisis of modernity ? i.e. how and why Islam, Christianity and other religious-spiritual groups formulate a critique of and alternative to modern science, capitalism, mass-consumption and individualism.

03RN34.
Studies dealing with the way crisis increases the salience of religious identities and cultural polarization, i.e., in what particular ways religion gives meaning in everyday life and if, how and why religious identity-formations induce processes of inclusion and exclusion; social cohesion and religious conflict.

04RN34.
Studies focusing on the way religion changes the modern world in Europe and beyond, i.e., how rapid social changes motivate the appeal and popularity of religion and if, how and why such religions transform private and public domains in Europe.

05RN34.
Sociology of religion (open)

07JS28JS34. RN34 Joint session with RN07 Sociology of Culture and RN28 Society and Sports
Sport and religion/spirituality
(Chairs: Davide Sterchele; Stef Aupers & Hubert Knoblauch)

Whereas the analogy between sport and religion has been criticized by many scholars mainly because of the lack (or low relevance) of the transcendent dimension in traditional sport practices, the recent sociological elaborations of the concept of spirituality seems to provide new interesting tools for interpreting the emerging forms of bodily movement. At the same time, the study of the analogies between traditional sports and institutionalized religions still generates relevant sociological insights.

In order to contribute to these streams of analysis and to open new horizons for further studies, the ESA research networks ?Sociology of Culture?, ?Society and Sports?, and ?Sociology of Religion?, invite potential contributors to submit abstracts to the joint session on ?Sport and religion/spirituality?. The session will thus provide a forum for exchange and sharing among sociologists of culture, sport and religion, who deal with these themes from different but overlapping perspectives.

RN34 web-page : http://www.esareligion.org/ 07JS34.
RN34 Joint session with RN07 Sociology of Culture Cultures of Religion ? Religious Cultures (Chairs: Hubert Knoblauch & Regine Herbrik) ?Religious Culture is quite frequently used, particularly in the French context (?culture religieuse?) relating both, to the general as well as to the specific religious patterns of culture. It may serve well not only to address empirical questions concerning the increasing cultural significance of religion within Europe as well as globally; it may also connect recent theoretical approaches in the sociology of culture on the one hand with approaches in the sociology of religion. For the joint session we invite, therefore, contributions addressing both empirical as well as theoretical issues concerning ?religious cultures?.

11JS34. RN34 Joint session with RN11 Sociology of emotions Affects and Emotions in the Field of Religion (Chairs: Stef Aupers & C?cile Vermot) Generations of scholars of theology and religious studies have viewed affects, emotions, and religion as closely related issues. What can be said about the certain shapes, characteristics and forms of this relationship in present times? How far is the research on emotions especially crucial for the understanding of religious life in Europe and for the coexistence, or even living together, of different confessions? What role do ?emotional regimes? (Riis/Woodhead) or ?feeling rules? (Hochschild) play with regard to the formation of emotional cultures both in religious groups and communities and with regard to the quest for salvation or spirituality of individual persons?

20JS34. RN34 Joint session with RN20 Qualitative Methods Qualitative Research on Religion(Chairs: Regine Herbrik & Bernt Schnettler) We also encourage participants to present papers concerned with methodological questions related to the specific problems of empirical research in the Study of Religions. Can we transfer methods from other fields of research to the sociology of religion or do we need special, field-specific methods? What can we learn from methods used in neighbouring disciplines? Which sets of methods can be recommended for empirical analyses targeting micro-macro issues in understanding religion? What role does the gender issue play in this? We are especially interested in papers reporting empirical research finding in the sociology of religion using qualitative research methods in combination with methodological reflections.

34JS35. RN34 Joint session with RN35 Sociology of Migration Migrant religions as a challenge to European identities (Chairs: Berta Alvarez-Miranda & Heidemarie Winkel) Already in classical sociological theory, religion functioned as a looking glass of change in times of crisis. At present, migrant religions are challenging and contributing to a critique of European identities. How do various European contexts accommodate migrant religions? What are the experiences, attitu?des and demands of their followers? How does the treatment of matters related to Islam inform on European identities and their current transformations? What conceptual and empirical tools does socio?logical analysis offer for the understanding of the varieties of internal and external religious critique?

Source: http://news.sisr-issr.org/?p=378

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How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?

Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, we at Slate have been wondering how many people are dying from guns in America every day.

That information is surprisingly hard to come by. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, for example, has a tally atop its website of ?people shot in America.? That number, though, is an estimate, based on the number of gun injuries and deaths recorded by the CDC in 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which statistics are available. It seems shocking that when guns are in the headlines every day, there?s no one attempting to create a real-time chronicle of the deaths attributable to guns in the United States.

Well, someone is. Since this summer, the anonymous creator of the Twitter feed @GunDeaths has been doing his best to compile those statistics, tweeting every reported death he can find. He was inspired, he told us in a phone interview, by the Aurora, Colo., shootings and simply wanted to call daily attention to the toll that guns take. Now Slate is partnering with @GunDeaths to create this interactive feature, ?Gun Deaths in America Since Newtown.?

Deaths since Newtown:

Age:

All

Adult

Teen

Child

Each victim under 13 years of age is designated "child"; from 13 to 17: "teen"; 18 and older: "adult."

Of course, this data is incomplete. Not all reports get caught by @GunDeaths? news alerts or his followers. Suicides, which are estimated to make up as much as 60 percent of gun deaths, typically go unreported. Nevertheless, we at Slate want to assemble this data as best we can.

And the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn?t represented here, please tweet @GunDeaths with a citation, and he?ll add it to his feed. (If you?re not on Twitter, you can email slatedata@gmail.com.) His data feeds our interactive feature.

And if you?d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it?s open. You can download it here.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=69ac6522a826ffe41ff70e9f2b4324be

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Saturday, December 29, 2012

UN envoy says Syrian collapse threatens region

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, welcomes U.N. envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi during their meeting in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, welcomes U.N. envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi during their meeting in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, and U.N. envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi talk during their meeting in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, and U.N. envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi shake hands during their meeting in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, and U.N. envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi meet in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov,right, and U.N. envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, center, shake hands as they meet in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)

(AP) ? The United Nations envoy for Syria warned Saturday that the country's civil war could plunge the entire region in chaos by sending an unbearable stream of refugees into neighboring countries, but his talks in Moscow brought no sign of progress toward settling the crisis.

Lakhdar Brahimi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov both said after their meeting that the 21-month Syrian crisis can only be settled through talks, while admitting that the parties to the conflict have shown no desire for compromise. Neither hinted at a possible solution that would persuade the government and the opposition to agree to a ceasefire and sit down for talks on political transition.

Brahimi, who arrived in Moscow on one-day trip following his talks in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar Assad earlier this week, voiced concern about the escalation of the conflict, which he said is becoming "more and more sectarian."

Brahimi warned that "if you have a panic in Damascus and if you have 1 million people leaving Damascus in a panic, they can go to only two places ? Lebanon and Jordan," and that those countries could break if faced with half a million refugees.

Brahimi said that "if the only alternative is really hell or a political process, then we have got all of us to work ceaselessly for a political process."

Russia has been the main supporter of Assad's regime since the uprising began in March 2011, using its veto right at the U.N. Security Council along with China to shield its last Mideast ally from international sanctions.

Lavrov reaffirmed that Russia would continue to oppose any U.N. resolution that would call for international sanctions against Assad and open the way for a foreign intervention in Syria. And while he again emphasized that Russia "isn't holding on to Bashar Assad," he added that Moscow continues to believe that the opposition demand for his resignation as a precondition for peace talks is "counterproductive."

"The price for that precondition will be the loss of more Syrian lives," Lavrov said.

Both Brahimi and Lavrov insisted that peace efforts must be based on a peace plan approved at an international conference in Geneva in June.

The Geneva plan called for an open-ended cease-fire, a transitional government to run the country until elections, and the drafting of a new constitution, but it was a non-starter with the opposition because on Russian insistence it left the door open for Assad being part of the transition process and didn't contain any mention of possible U.N. sanctions.

Brahimi said that while some "little adjustments" could be made to the original plan, "it's a valued basis for reasonable political process."

With the opposition offensive gaining momentum, there was little hope that the initiative would have more chance for success than it had when it was approved.

Lavrov has said that Moscow is ready to talk to the main Syrian opposition group, even though it has earlier criticized the United States and other Western nations for recognizing the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

On Friday, coalition leader Mouaz al-Khatib rejected the Russian invitation for talks and urged Moscow to support the opposition call for Assad's ouster. Lavrov said Saturday that al-Khatib's statement was surprising after his earlier contacts with Russian diplomats in Egypt in which they tentatively agreed on a meeting in a third country.

Lavrov argued that the coalition leader should "realize it would be in his own interests to hear our analysis directly from us."

Lavrov rejected the opposition claim that Russia's continuing weapons supplies to Assad's regime made it responsible for the massacre, saying that Moscow bears no responsibility for the Soviet-era weapons in Syrian arsenals. He said that defensive weapons like anti-aircraft missiles that Russia has continued to supply to Damascus couldn't be used in the civil war.

"We aren't providing the Syrian regime with any offensive weapons or weapons that could be used in a civil war," Lavrov said. "And we have no leverage over what the regime has got since the Soviet times."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-12-29-Russia-Syria/id-66ad8e7fac3947df8eefb9bf4cb57a49

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UFC 155?s Derek Brunson was a cheerleader before he started fighting

Long before he put together a 9-2 record and earned a spot against Chris Leben at UFC 155, Derek Brunson was a cheerleader. As he shows in his audition video for "The Ultimate Fighter," Brunson was an accomplished tumbler and stunter. Skip to the 2:10 mark to see him toss his partner up into one-handed stunts and throw a double-twisting flip.

He talked about his cheerleading past with MMA Fighting, and pointed out how difficult cheerleading can be.

"I can do flips, and I was like tossing girls in the air. That's where I got my strength from, just controlling girls in the air. You get core strength, your chest gets all big. It makes you really strong, like you look on steroids, but you don't have to take steroids because of cheerleading."

Though Brunson wrestled in college, he said he did have scholarship offers for cheerleading. Wrestling and eventually MMA won out. Brunson admitted that MMA is more dangerous than cheerleading, but it's still tough.

"Cheerleading is definitely hard on your body. That's why I decided to wrestle in college, not cheerlead."

Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/ufc-155-derek-brunson-cheerleader-started-fighting-145151565--mma.html

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China extends control over internet; now requires users to register ...

In this file photo, a Chinese man uses a computer at an Internet cafe in Beijing. China?s new communist leaders are increasing already tight controls on Internet use and electronic publishing following a spate of embarrassing online reports about official abuses. (Ng Han Guan /AP)

The Associated Press

China?s government tightened Internet controls Friday with approval of a law that requires users to register their names after a flood of online complaints about official abuses rattled Communist Party leaders.

Authorities say the law will strengthen protections for personal information. But it also is likely to curtail the Internet?s status as a forum to complain about the government or publicize corruption.

?Their intention is very clear: It is to take back that bit of space for public opinion, that freedom of speech hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users have strived for,? said Murong Xuecun, a prominent Chinese writer.

The rules approved by China?s national legislature highlight the chronic tension between the ruling Communist Party?s desire to reap technology?s benefits and its insistence on controlling information.

Beijing encourages Web use for business and education but tries to block material deemed subversive or obscene. It has steadily stepped up censorship, especially after social media played a role in protests that brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia.

The latest measure requires users to provide their real names and other identifying information when they register with access providers or post information publicly.

?This is needed for the healthy development of the Internet,? said Li Fei, deputy director of the legislature?s Legal Work Committee, at a news conference.

Li rejected complaints that the public will be deprived of a forum that has been used to expose misconduct.

?The country?s constitution protects citizens? rights in supervising and criticizing the state and government officials? behavior,? Li said.

The measure comes amid reports that Beijing might be disrupting use of software that allows Web surfers to see sites abroad that are blocked by its extensive filters.

At the same time, regulators have proposed rules that would bar foreign companies from distributing books, news, music and other material online in China.

The government has given no indication how it will deal with the technical challenge of registering the more than 500 million Chinese who use the Internet.

Microblog operators, two of which say they have more than 300 million users each, were ordered last year to confirm the identities of users but acknowledge they have yet to complete that task.

The main ruling party newspaper, People?s Daily, has called weeks for tighter Internet controls, saying rumors spread online have harmed the public.

The secretive ruling party is uneasy about the public?s eagerness to discuss politics and sensitive issues online despite threats of punishment.

In March, authorities scrambled to squelch online rumors about a possible coup amid a political crisis that led to the downfall of a prominent party figure, Bo Xilai, ahead of the party?s fall leadership transition. A dozen websites were closed and six people detained.

This week, 70 prominent Chinese scholars and lawyers circulated an online petition this week appealing for free speech, independent courts and for the ruling party to encourage private enterprise.

Communist leaders who see the Internet as a promising source of economic growth were slow to enforce the same level of control they impose on movies, books and other media, apparently for fear of hurting e-commerce and other fledgling online businesses.

Until recently, Web surfers could post anonymous comments online or on microblogs.

That gave ordinary Chinese a unique opportunity to express themselves to a public audience in a society where newspapers, television and other media all are state-controlled. Some of the most popular microbloggers have millions of readers.

It also made the Internet a clearinghouse for accusations of official misconduct.

A local party official in China?s southwest was fired in November after scenes from a videotape of him having sex with a young woman spread quickly on websites.

Web surfers can circumvent filters by using virtual private networks ? encryption software that is used by companies for financial data and other sensitive information. But VPN users say disruptions began in 2011 and are increasing, suggesting regulators are trying to block encrypted traffic.

Source: http://secondcomingherald.com/2012/12/china-extends-control-over-internet-now-requires-users-to-register-real-names/

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Friday, December 28, 2012

How many times can you recycle a piece of paper?

Torn Wrapping Paper What happens to wrapping paper after Christmas?

Polka Dot Images

At the end of Christmas morning, many holiday revelers found themselves sitting cross-legged in the center of an enormous pile of wrapping paper and empty cardboard boxes. Some of that wrapping paper is made of recycled paper. As one Explainer reader crammed her used wrapping paper into the recycle bin for another go-around, she wondered: How many times can a piece of paper be recycled?

Five or six times, on average. At a recycling plant, paper is heated and chopped into tiny bits to make a pulp. During that process, each of the long fibers that characterize virgin paper has an approximately 20 percent chance of being cut into a strand that?s too small to be useful to paper makers. (Short strands of wood fiber make extremely weak paper, and are suitable for newsprint or other applications in which quality is less important.) In theory, a strand could survive the pulping process unscathed for 20, 30, or 100 rounds of recycling, but the odds suggest that a paper fiber only has about five lives.

Even if a paper fiber were to maintain its shape after several instances of recycling, it would still lose some of its virgin qualities. Paper that has been dried and then resoaked in water undergoes a process known as ?hornification.? The internal structures contract, causing the fiber to collapse slightly and lose structural integrity. Recyclers usually add virgin paper to a batch of recycled pulp to combat hornification. In addition, paper fibers are often lost in the washing process that separates ink from paper. The paper?s brightness also fades each time it is recycled, which is why some batches of earth-friendly paper have a slightly grayish hue. (On a more positive note, recycled paper often has better opacity than the more porcelain virgin version.)

Since paper loses quality after each recycling, there is a hierarchy that paper descends on its way toward retirement. The fibers that make up a piece of writing paper, for example, may be returned to a notepad if they maintain most of their good qualities. As they age, however, they typically are recycled into something less distinguished, like facial tissues, milk cartons, or toilet paper. The corrugated boxes that carried to your home Christmas presents purchased online will eventually become shoe boxes or cereal boxes.

There?s a good chance you won?t get to see your cardboard box?s next life, no matter what form it takes after rising from the dead. Approximately 40 percent of U.S. waste paper is shipped abroad, often to China, which doesn?t have enough forestland to feed the country?s demand for paper. Waste for recycling is, in fact, the largest U.S. export to China, according to some experts. China?s hunger for used paper is a good thing for recyclers. At times, the price of a ton of recyclable paper has dropped below $5, making the business nearly impossible without foreign demand and government requirements that paper contain a certain percentage of recycled content.

Got a question about today?s news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Richard Venditti of North Carolina State University.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=02354743fae5c76c59a3f3d28d24305d

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Credit Card Interest Rate Roundup | Bankrate.com

  • 14.02% (all fixed)
  • 14.59% (all variable)

For all the credit card users -- naughty as well as nice -- Santa Claus delivered no change to credit card rates this week. The average annual percentage rate for variable-rate credit cards is still 14.59 percent, according to Bankrate's latest survey of interest rates. The average APR for fixed-rate credit cards stayed steady at 14.02 percent for the 10th straight week.

Single people are increasingly judging dates by their credit scores, The New York Times reported this week. Unfortunately, high student loans and poor financial decisions are stalling their relationships, as suitors wait for their credit scores to improve, according to the story.

Source: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/rate-roundup.aspx

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All About Business St. Louis Enters to Win Best Customer Service ...

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PRLog (Press Release) - Dec. 27, 2012 - All About Business St. Louis has entered to win Small Business Monthly?s Best Customer Service Award. AAB produces marketing videos that feature local businesses in the Saint Louis area that air Sunday mornings at 9 am on ABC 30. This award would solidify AAB?s mission to provide excellent service and outstanding work to all their clients. AAB has received its share of praise from their clients and is able to track their record with what they call a Net Promoter Score, a survey each client is asked to fill out at the completion of the project. AAB is reaching out to their clients through testimonials and social media to qualify their nomination.

?We wanted to create a product that adds value to our client?s current business. The professionally produced videos we are able to shoot not only create awareness of the client?s business but the versatility video provides allows for a great return on investment that the clients can really benefit from,? states Amanda Aschinger, owner of AAB.

All About Business approaches every client with a professional attitude and a genuine interest in their company, this understanding helps to create the best segment possible. ??The team at All About Business took time really getting to know our business and what we stood for. They were able to develop a clear direction for our segment that made us stand out from the competition. The producers were very knowledgeable and professional in their approach, they made all the brokers in our office feel comfortable on camera and eased any concerns they were having,? says William Behr, president of Insurance Source Inc.

Their other clients would agree. The results from the surveys are outstanding with an above 9 score on every category. The survey asks such questions as likelihood of referral, individualization of service, value of service and overall satisfaction. This has lead to repeat clients.

?My new customer loved the format of the show. She told me that being able to see how I interact in the field and the ability to see the quality of the properties really made the decision for her. With this one close I was able to easily cover the cost of the first video, doing a second spotlight is a no brainer.?- Joe Ord, Amoso Properties.

Taking home the prize for the Best Customer Service award for AAB would mean that all the hard work and client satisfaction they have accomplished has really paid off. To nominate AAB for the award send your submission to info@sbmon.com.

All About Business St. Louis television segments can be seen every Sunday morning at 9 am on ABC30 or on their website at www.allabout businesstv.com.

Source: http://www.prlog.org/12049920-all-about-business-st-louis-enters-to-win-best-customer-service-award.html

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Jobless claims fall to lowest in almost 4-1/2 years

17 hrs.

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment aid fell last week to nearly its lowest level in 4 1/2 years, a sign that the labor market is healing.?

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 350,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The prior week's figure was revised to show 1,000 more applications than previously reported.?

After spiking in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, which ravaged the East Coast in late October, the weekly levels of new claims have now dropped to their lowest levels since the early days of the 2007-09 recession. The four-week moving average fell 11,250 last week to 356,750, the lowest since March 2008.?

That suggests the surge in layoffs since the recession may have run its course, although companies still are adding to their payrolls at a lackluster pace.?

The report included a caveat, at least for the latest week. President Barack Obama declared Monday a holiday for federal workers and many state offices followed suit and were unable to provide complete data for last week's jobless claims. Data for 19 states was estimated, a Labor Department official said. Fourteen of those states submitted their own estimates, which tend to be fairly accurate because the state officials work with a significant amount of data, the Labor Department official said.?

Besides the federal holiday, there were no special factors influencing week's claims data, the department official said.?

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economywatch/jobless-claims-fall-lowest-almost-4-1-2-years-1C7657760

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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Winter storms hit eastern U.S., snarl post-holiday travel

WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina (Reuters) - The severe winter weather that hit parts of the central and southern United States on Christmas Day moved eastward on Wednesday, causing flight delays and dangerous road conditions for holiday travelers in the Northeast and Ohio Valley.

Some flights headed for New York, Philadelphia and Newark, New Jersey, experienced delays averaging one to four hours due to the inclement weather, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

About 1,300 U.S. flights had been canceled on Wednesday, according to FlightAware.com. Several airlines waived ticket change fees for affected customers.

All four runways at Philadelphia International Airport were open on Wednesday, but that didn't prevent cancellation of physical therapist Mindy Bartscherer's flight to Minneapolis.

She and her son Zachary Bartscherer, 24, a lobbyist from Washington D.C., had planned to visit family but instead waited forlornly in the baggage claim area for a ride back home. They expected to return to the airport early on Thursday to try again.

"We were going to have dinner and see my 2-year-old niece," Mindy Bartscherer said of their thwarted plans for Wednesday night.

The National Weather Service issued blizzard and winter storm warnings in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, as well as much of the Northeast, and cautioned that the wintry weather would create "treacherous" driving conditions.

More than six inches of snow might fall in those regions, while the area from western New York up into central Maine could get from 12 to 18 inches, the NWS said.

As of Wednesday morning, Bloomington, Indiana, already had nearly a foot of snow and Indianapolis had about seven inches, according to AccuWeather.com.

Severe thunderstorms and widespread rain were expected from southeast Virginia to Florida, the NWS said, and the eastern counties in North Carolina and South Carolina were under tornado watches or warnings for much of the day.

The wet and snowy conditions follow a major winter storm system that swept through the southern United States on Tuesday, spawning tornadoes in several states and causing the deaths of at least five people in weather-related road accidents.

Twisters struck in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, flattening houses and causing injuries, according to the weather service. The storm also dumped record snowfalls in North Texas and Arkansas.

Nearly 200,000 homes and businesses remained without electricity in Arkansas and Alabama on Wednesday.

Damage assessments were conducted in the 11 Alabama counties that reported varying degrees of property destruction from Tuesday's storms.

The city of Mobile appeared to be hardest hit, with damage to as many as 100 structures, including the historic Trinity Episcopal Church, according to the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

Governor Phil Bryant declared a state of emergency in Mississippi, where a dozen counties reported damage and more than 25 people were injured on Tuesday.

The severe holiday weather also contributed to a 21-vehicle pile-up that shut Interstate 40 in downtown Oklahoma City on Tuesday and caused power outages for tens of thousands of residents.

A Texas man died after an accident involving a toppled tree in the road, and icy roads contributed to the deaths of four people in auto crashes in Oklahoma and Arkansas, according to police.

About 1,000 people spent the night on cots at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport after some 400 flights were canceled there on Tuesday due to weather, said Cynthia Vega, media relations manager at the airport.

On Wednesday morning, some 50 more flights were canceled, she said.

"We're hoping to get passengers back on track," Vega said. "It's probably going to be a little hectic at the airport."

(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins; Additional reporting by Corrie MacLaggan, Eileen O'Grady, Steve Olafson and Dave Warner; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Gunna Dickson)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/storm-brings-tornadoes-white-christmas-parts-south-010903992.html

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Therapists Spill: My New Year's Resolution | World of Psychology

Therapists Spill: My New Years Resolution The end of the year is a time for self-reflection, while the beginning brings a clean slate, hope and new-found motivation, said Deborah Serani, Psy.D, a clinical psychologist and author of the book Living with Depression.

That?s why so many people use this time to create resolutions. In our monthly series, ?Therapists Spill,? we wanted to know what goals clinicians are setting for their fresh starts.

For instance, Serani is setting both personal and professional goals ? with an emphasis on realistic resolutions.

I like to set realistic goals for myself each year. Some are personal, like exercising more and eating better. Others are professional, such as researching a new subject or presenting at a conference. Of course, I don?t always achieve all these goals. But for me, I know that thinking about change leads me toward change. And that?s a good way to start the year.

Joyce Marter, a psychotherapist and owner of Urban Balance, has three resolutions for the new year, which focus on gratitude, mindfulness and self-care.

I very much believe in the power of gratitude as a way to encourage positive thinking and good energy that will attract blessings, such as positive people, experiences and opportunities in the New Year.

I love the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and Eckhart Tolle and am committed to continue developing my practices of meditation, deep breathing exercises, yoga and other mindfulness techniques to anchor myself in the present. Mindfulness practices keep me from obsessing from the past or worrying about the future and also help me be more aware of my emotional and physical state. I find that when I am rooted in the present, I am more conscious and better able to detach from my ego and live my life authentically.

As a mother in a care-taking profession, I have a bad habit of putting my needs last, to a fault.? Therefore, I am committed to a lifelong journey of practicing healthy self-love. To help myself with this goal in 2013, I put a small, framed picture of myself as a baby on my nightstand.? Each morning, I look at it and set intentions for self-care for the day (healthy diet, exercise, rest, fun, etc.).

Somehow, it is easier for me to validate my self-care if I take a moment to reflect that I am that precious child in the photo ? and that as an adult, I have the responsibility to take the very best care of myself so that I can live a healthy life personally and professionally.

Gratitude also is a goal for John Duffy, Ph.D, a clinical psychologist and author of the book The Available Parent: Radical Optimism for Raising Teens and Tweens.

In 2013, my plan is to be present, in each moment, and to be grateful. There are many, many things I intend to accomplish in the coming year, but if I can achieve presence and gratitude, I am confident that all else will fall into place beautifully.

Ryan Howes, Ph.D, a clinical psychologist in Pasadena, California, takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to setting resolutions.

I hate to be contrarian, but resolutions sort of drive me crazy. Part of me loves to target areas to improve, while another part strives for self-acceptance. New Year?s resolutions force me to pit these competing drives against each other. For this reason, I usually avoid making resolutions, but this year I?ll make an exception:

1. Run a 40 minute 10K

2. Measure happiness qualitatively, not quantitatively

3. Get a book deal

4. Be less goal oriented; enjoy the journey

5. Increase Facebook fans

6. Increase humility

7. Change bad habits

8. Accept self as-is

Jeffrey Sumber, M.A., a psychotherapist, author and teacher, resolves to focus on the people in his life for 2013.

Something I intend for the new year is to give more attention and care to my relationships rather than acquiring things, doing things or being someone I think I should be. I want to honor the people in my life and remember that they are the most important part of my life.

Christina G. Hibbert, PsyD, a clinical psychologist and postpartum mental health expert, doesn?t set goals. Instead, she sets a theme for each new year.

I do have a main ?goal? for 2013 ? to see the publishing of my book, This is How We Grow. But really, I don?t set ?goals? or ?resolutions? for the New Year. It?s actually something I share in my book ? several years ago, in an attempt to get away from the too-easily forgotten New Year?s ?resolutions,? I developed instead a yearly theme.

This theme would serve as my one ?resolution? for the entire year and give me focused, extended practice in mastering it. A few of my past year?s themes include: humility, charity, patience, gratitude, love, and joy.

At the end of each year I spend time reading through my past year?s journal (I?m an avid journal-keeper), allowing myself to reflect on what I?ve learned, where I am, and where I need to be headed. This helps me determine what my theme for the next year will be. Sometimes I know my theme a couple months before; often, I don?t know it until January 1!

So, what will my theme be for 2013? Right now I?m leaning toward ?Optimism,? but, since I haven?t done my ?year in review,? if you really want to know my 2013 theme, you?ll have to tune in to my blog in January and find out!

These resolutions have one thing in common: They focus on each person?s values. Whether you?re setting resolutions this year or not, consider striving for a life that honors what?s important to you and isn?t shaped by shoulds. Consider creating a life that respects your needs and wishes.

?

2013 photo available from Shutterstock

Margarita TartakovskyMargarita Tartakovsky, M.S. is an Associate Editor at Psych Central and blogs regularly about eating and self-image issues on her own blog, Weightless.

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????Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 26 Dec 2012
????Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.

APA Reference
Tartakovsky, M. (2012). Therapists Spill: My New Year?s Resolution. Psych Central. Retrieved on December 27, 2012, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/12/26/therapists-spill-my-new-years-resolution/

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Source: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/12/26/therapists-spill-my-new-years-resolution/

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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

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We've Got Live Tech Support To Answer Questions on All Your New Gadgets

Did you get a bunch of new gear today? Got some questions about how to use it? More »


Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/AYMzejAeh20/weve-got-live-tech-support-to-answer-questions-on-all-your-new-gadgets

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rubeldebnath2: victorrusso23: Shopping And Product Reviews: Toys

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As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Source: http://matkopliza9.typepad.com/blog/2012/12/shopping-and-product-reviews-toys-article-category-by-elleeatist.html

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Source: http://www.thefloorgeek.com/2012/12/one-of-the-simplest-ways-to-find-energetic-internet-hosting-coupon-codes/

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Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Snowboarder dies in avalanche at Tahoe-area resort

TRUCKEE, Calif. (AP) ? A 49-year-old California man died Monday after being buried in an avalanche while snowboarding at a Sierra ski resort, one of several avalanche-related emergencies in the Lake Tahoe area after recent storms dumped up to 3 feet of fresh snow.

Donner Ski Ranch, about 90 miles northeast of Sacramento, closed as rescue teams began their search.

The Nevada County Sheriff's Department identified the man as Steven Mark Anderson of Floriston, an unincorporated community outside Truckee, after notifying his brother.

The sheriff's department received a call about the missing man at noon Monday, nearly three hours after the avalanche. Deputy David Lade said it took that long for Anderson's friends to determine he was missing. The friends had not been skiing as a group, but rather went their own way in the morning, Lade said.

"They spent a lot of time trying to locate him," he said.

A search dog found the man's body about 1:30 p.m. under 2 to 3 feet of snow at the base of the avalanche. Lade said the wind had blown snow to depths to 7 feet or more where the man was snowboarding, which was inside the ski area's boundaries near the main lodge.

Anderson was believed to be the only person caught in the slide, Lade said.

Tahoe-area ski resorts received at least 3 feet of snow in a wind-whipped series of storms from Friday through Sunday, leading to perilous conditions even within ski area boundaries.

"With the extremely heavy snowfall we've gotten over the last three days and the conditions prior to that, it's prime avalanche conditions," Lade said.

Two neighboring ski resorts, Squaw Valley USA and Alpine Meadows, also reported dangerous avalanches. A veteran ski patroller at Alpine Meadows was taken Monday to Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno after being buried in a slide that had been intentionally set with an explosive device.

"The charge triggered the avalanche, which broke much higher and wider on the slope than previously observed in past snow safety missions," the resort said in a statement.

The patroller, who had 28 years of experience at the resort, was uncovered within eight minutes. Resort spokeswoman Amelia Richmond said she could not release his condition, and the hospital did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

The ski patrol team was doing avalanche control in Sherwood Bowl, which is within the boundaries on the back side of resort.

On Sunday, two skiers at Squaw Valley ? a 39-year-old woman and 16-year-old boy ? were treated for non-life threatening injuries after they were swept up in an avalanche, although neither had been buried.

___

Associated Press writers Tom Verdin and Judy Lin in Sacramento, and Scott Sonner in Reno, Nev., contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/snowboarder-dies-avalanche-tahoe-area-resort-024225725.html

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Why 2012 was a great year for gaming - SlashGear

2012 was an interesting year in many respects, but it was a particularly interesting year for gaming. 2012 had its share of ups and down, but looking back on the year as a whole, I?d say that it was ultimately good for gamers, developers, and the industry in general. A lot happened throughout the year, and even though we saw vitriol from gamers climb to pretty frightening heights in some cases, there were some pretty cool things happening that you may not have noticed. Needless to say, if 2012 was any indication, then 2013 should be one of gaming?s biggest years yet.

Journey screenshot

Before we turn our sights to the future, however, let?s look back at some of what went down in the year that we?re about to leave behind. It?s pretty obvious that we?re at the end of a generation, regardless of if Sony and Microsoft want to admit it. The problem we face at the end of a console cycle is that developers become hesitant to begin a new IP (more on that later). Because of this, we tend to see sequel after sequel, and in the triple-A space at least, 2012 was no different. This isn?t all bad though, as it gave indie developers a chance to shine.

Shine they did. 2012 was an excellent year for indie gaming. Minecraft came to the Xbox 360, thatgamecompany released Journey, a game that has quickly risen to the top of countless favorite lists, and we seemed to have a new Humble Bundle to go nuts over at least once a month. Indie games were in the news constantly too, with games like Hotline Miami, Lone Survivor, Faster Than Light, and Legend of Grimrock being discussed alongside the likes of Black Ops II and Assassin?s Creed III. That in particular is very encouraging, because if we can create an environment where a game developed by a pair of passionate gamers can get recognition just the same as games that cost millions to produce, everyone wins.

lonesurvior

Of course, great indie games have been given the attention they deserve for years now, so this isn?t some new phenomenon for 2012. It did seem like there were a really high number of indie games that managed to strike a chord within the gaming community, though. The year brought us some truly amazing indie releases, and there were almost too many to count. Whether you were playing Mark of the Ninja, Fez, Dust: An Elysian Tale, or Spelunky, the list of notable indie releases for 2012 was long and varied, with many of them giving us very unique experiences we couldn?t wait to rave about.

While we saw a lot of sequels this year, we also saw some developers take their chances with introducing a new IP. Some of these, like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, didn?t work out so well. Others like Dishonored are unquestionably just the beginning of something exciting. Square Enix found a winner in Sleeping Dogs, while Capcom surprised everyone with Dragon?s Dogma. Let?s not forget that 2012 was also the year that Nintendo listened to its fan and released Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story in North America. Now all we need is Pandora?s Tower and we?ll be set, so get on it Reggie.

Dishonored_image

Even though the end of the generation is unsurprisingly accompanied by a large number of sequels, the batch for 2012 impressed. 343 Industries showed us with Halo 4 that the series isn?t doomed to mediocrity just because Bungie is working on new projects. Ubisoft managed to revitalize interest in the release-heavy Assassin?s Creed series with Assassin?s Creed III, while Gearbox released one of the best games of the year in Borderlands 2. One of the biggest surprises of the year involved Far Cry 3 launching to critical acclaim, something many of us didn?t see coming. Oh, and did Sega just school Nintendo in the art of making a kart racer with Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed? I think it did.

Fans got riled up in 2012 too. Project Rainfall, for instance, was a major player in getting Xenoblade and The Last Story to North American shores, while angry fans for better or worse managed to get BioWare to change the ending to Mass Effect 3. That?s pretty big considering that BioWare stuck to its guns for a long time, saying for months that there weren?t any plans to change the highly controversial ending. Disgruntled players also got Ubisoft to back away from always-on DRM, which is something gamers and publishers went back and forth about all year.

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We also have to keep in mind how big Kickstarter was for gaming in 2012. When Double Fine kicked off a campaign for an old-school adventure game and asked for $400,000, no one could have guessed that we?d be calling 2012 ?The Year of the Kickstarter? by the time everything was said and done. The classic RPG Wasteland is getting a sequel after more than 20 years of waiting thanks to Kickstater, and Obsidian can now return to the computer RPG glory days of the past with $4 million in funding for Project Eternity. The biggest gaming-related Kickstarter of the year was unquestionably OUYA, the little Android console that raised a whopping $8.5 million in funding. Sure, some of the Kickstarters funded this year will ultimately fail, but we also have a number of great games to look forward to thanks to Kickstarter. This is made even sweeter by the fact that many of these games would have never seen the light of the day had it not been for Kickstarter?s very existence.

We also saw the big companies that run the show open up their platforms more in 2012. Microsoft changed around some of its policies so Minecraft players on XBLA could get frequent title updates, and it?s even letting free-to-play titles like Happy Wars on Xbox Live these days. Steam expanded its offerings to include non-software titles and rolled out Big Picture Mode so it can have a stronger presence in the living room. It also opened the floodgates for Linux users, as Steam for Linux is now in open beta. Welcome to the party Linux users ? we saved you seats between Team Fortress 2 and Torchlight.

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There were some bumps along the way ? as there always are ? but overall, 2012 was another great year for gaming. Developers can really flex their muscles with the hardware we have available, and Nintendo has already kicked off the next generation with the Wii U. 2013 is bound to be just as, if not more, exciting than 2012 was, due in large part to the expectation that either Sony or Microsoft will unveil their new console. Get excited, because I have a feeling that 2013 isn?t going to disappoint on the heels of 2012.

Source: http://www.slashgear.com/why-2012-was-a-great-year-for-gaming-24262120/

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Hamming: "dubious that great programmers can be trained ...

Hamming: "dubious that great programmers can be trained.."
35 points by BlackJack 1 day ago | 60 comments
I'm currently reading "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" by Richard Hamming. The book is based off of lectures he gave in a course by the same name. Here are a few paragraphs that I found thought provoking:

"I made the comparison of writing software with the act of literary writing; both seem to depend fundamentally on clear thinking. Can good programming be taught? If we look at the corresponding teaching of "creative writing" courses we find that most students of such courses do not become great writers, and most great writers in the past did not take creative writing courses! Hence it is dubious that great programmers can be trained easily.

Does experience help? Do bureaucrats after years of writing reports and instructions get better? I have no real data but I suspect that with time they get worse! The habitual use of "governmentese" over the years probably seeps into their writing style and makes them worse. I suspect the same for programmers! Neither years of experience nor the number of languages used is any reason for thinking that the programmer is getting better from these experiences. An examination of books on programming suggests that most of the authors are not good programmers.

The results I picture are not nice, but all you have to oppose it is wishful thinking - I have evidence of years and years of programming on my side."

What do you guys think? I disagree with his creative writing analogy because I don't think creative writing courses were taught much in the past, but otherwise I feel it's spot on.


I firmly believe great programmers can be trained, but it's not going to happen after six months. I firmly believe in the 10000 hours rule, and I think it applies here as well, but to become a great programmer, that has to be 10000 hours of:

* writing a lot of code,

* reading other people's code,

* evaluating and re-evaluating the code you've written and read,

* learning and using different paradigms, languages and tools, and

* being mentored by a great programmer who can teach.

And, not surprisingly, these are all things that nearly anybody you consider a "great programmer" would have done to get to that point.

Very few people who are not already inclined towards programming are going to be willing to put that kind of effort in. As a result, while I firmly believe great programmers can be trained, I think there are very few who actually are.

In the end, I'm not even sure that "trained" can even be used as a classifier. I think a better classifier would be "self-selection". So, can a person who has not self-selected to be a programmer become a great programmer? Can a person who has not self-selected to become a basketball player become a Michael Jordan? Genetics may say yes one in a billion times, but most likely not.

It may be easier for programming, thou, because you can spread those 10000 hours out over 15 years while still making a reasonable salary utilizing the mediocre skills you have today. Salary is a strong motivator, but I would be most people are willing to stay at the mediocre level.

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If you spend 10.000 hours playing the same simple tune on a guitar you're not going to be a great musician. Similarly, if you spend 10.000 hours programming the same mediocre kind of code, you will not have become a great programmer.

Programming is a craft, and like any craft it requires dedication to the craft to achieve a high level of skill in it. People without a passion for programming are not going to have that dedication, and therefore will not reach a high skill level.

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I'm not sure how you could spend 10000 hours programming the same mediocre code if you were actually doing the things I outlined. The whole point of the list is to ensure you aren't spending the time doing that.

I can't tell if you are disagreeing with me or not (I think you are), because you've said almost the same things I did. What you call dedication, I call self-selection.

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One of the assumptions of the 10,000-Hour Rule, as Malcolm Gladwell asserts, is that a person spending 10,000 hours on an activity naturally has a strong proclivity for it.

So working off that assumption:

IF 10,000 hours = passion

AND passion = great at a craft

THEN 10,000 hours = great at a craft

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That assumption is obviously wrong when you mix financial compensation into it.

I've worked with more than a few programmers who were in it for a paycheck, some of them were perfectly competent at creating code for their little niche (CRUD apps, whatever), but were single-language, single-framework, lots-of-maintenance types of guys.

Needless to say, them putting 10,000 hours into programming isn't the same as someone who is really passionate about it.

To paraphrase: "Some people put in 10,000 hours, some people put in 1000 hours 10 times".

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Two things people who put 10,000 hours have in common are:

- They are naive and believe they can conquer the world - or are discouraged about their original inability and hide it.

- They share a sense of destiny in what they do. They can't imagine a world where they wouldn't be working any more in their medium.

So if you wanted to predict who will become a great programmer you could look for naivety and commitment. You could look for people who can't tell what they've accomplished. And which continue to obliviously work on (naively ambitious) things only because noone was around to stop them.

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On (1) I point out naivety in particular because it's the most transparent and one of the most shocking. It's what you do not expect someone very capable to be. Paradoxical traits of personality in creative people are common.

On (2) MacKinnon suggested the successful creative individual had an ongoing belief in the worth of their creative efforts.

I don't claim these are the only two things to predict who will become a great programmer.

http://arrow.dit.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&con...

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Hmm. I'm not so sure about his analogy with writing. Of course, most people who take creative writing don't go on to become great writers; that pretty much goes without saying, most people in any field don't go on to become "great" (the very definition of "great" is that it's exceptional). So that part is a tautology.

Now, I wonder about how many people who go on to be "great writers" received training in writing? Of course, "creative writing" as an academic discipline is rather new, but English has been around as a discipline for years. From a quick poll of the authors mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century_in_literature and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century_in_literature, almost every one had at least a college education, mostly in the humanities (which generally require a lot of writing, and train you in writing). And most of them have worked at lower-level writing jobs before becoming great writers; copy editors, journalists, corporate writers, and the like. Several of the more recent "great writers" of the late 20th and 21st centuries have indeed gone through creative writing programs.

So his analogy, at least, seems to be false.

How about in writing software? Well, as I mentioned, it's pretty much tautological that no training program can produce entirely great programmers. The purpose of training is to turn lousy programmers into mediocre. Mediocre into passable. Passable into good. Good into very good. And very good into great. You are not likely to train all of your lousy programmers into great; so claiming that training does not produce great programmers is attacking a strawman.

I have seen plenty of people who have gotten a degree in computer science who are lousy programmers. And I have seen great programmers with no formal education. But on the whole, when I've looked at programmers with equivalent amounts of experience, but where one had formal training and the other did not, I would prefer the one who had some formal training. People who have not had formal training tend to not have much experience with reasoning about algorithms, or invariants, that can make their code a lot better.

While its true that nowadays we have many libraries and tools that mean that the average programmer can just use built-in data structures and do a pretty good job, I've seen enough code that was so horribly inefficient that even a little bit of algorithmic analysis upfront would have been helpful. Or a lot of code where someone just hacked away at a problem until they had something that worked, rather than trying to formulate a model that would underly it and keep the code well-organized and understandable.

And among those programmers who are self-taught but great, they have put in deliberate practice, and deliberate study, even if its on their own.

So sure, there are some people who are just untrainable; I've worked with some of them. And there are some people who are naturally brilliant and able to study independently. But all else being equal, I think that deliberate training definitely has value in improving the quality of programmers as a whole; and so yes, training will lead to more great programmers.

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"I made the comparison of writing software with the act of literary writing; both seem to depend fundamentally on clear thinking. Can good programming be taught? If we look at the corresponding teaching of "creative writing" courses we find that most students of such courses do not become great writers, and most great writers in the past did not take creative writing courses! Hence it is dubious that great programmers can be trained easily."

That's just a staggering misuse of "hence".

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The proverbial "10,000 hours" is not enough. Here are some problems with that.

* You get 5 focused, highly effective hours in an average day, possibly 6 days per week. You can work productively for 10-12 hours in a single day, but it's not effective in the long run. As an absolute maximum, your harvest for something as difficult as programming is going to be about 1500 hours per year. So if you really max it out, you're going to need 7 years to become a great programmer. That's if you're maximally efficient and control your own schedule.

* What you mentioned about bureaucrats becoming worse writers is probably true. It takes deliberate practice. It takes feedback and interaction and exposure. It may require a mentor. In fact, one of the most important "meta" skills is knowing when to recognize people are better than you, and to learn from them. Otherwise, you might be practicing doing things wrong. Most people at their paid jobs are doing just that, because the corporate world is one of oppressive mediocrity.

* The software industry sucks. Most of the work is busywork and most of the shit being done is being done wrong. Few people get any deliberate practice at their paid jobs. In fact, I would say that most paid software work is negative toward long-term greatness, because it forces you to do things wrong.

Programming is an especially hard thing to become really good at, because (a) to become a great software engineer, you must interact with the real world, but (b) the vast majority of the real world is dismally broken, and 99% of the real shot-callers are idiots who've never even seen a line of code except in the movies.

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Note that Hemming is using the word "training" precisely, to contrast with "education":
  > * Education is what, when, and why to do things   > * Training is how to do it   > Either one without the other is not much use.

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When asked, greater writers and programmers will both emphasize study and practice. They recognize they were once bad writers and programmers and got better via study and practice. I see no reason to doubt these self-reports.

I think Richard Hamming is out of his depth here, as evidenced by his use of naive anecdotes and analogies. If programming is like writing, it is like a severely restricted writing exercise, where you can only use certain grammatical structures, where you have to define a lot of words explicitly and where your stories have to explain to a machine how to achieve a slew of mundane goals.

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I don't know; I've never written much, and I didn't read nearly as much as I should have in my youth, but I always did seem to have a natural propensity for writing. For some kids in my class it was a war. They had to really battle to make the words come out on a page in a way that was as comprehendable as is their vocal speech, but for me I needed only to type and let it flow.

So I while I agree with the notion that one will become better with practice, I question the ideas that all will progress at a similar rate and that the "ceiling" for their abilities are at the same level of skill.

I think a bit of success bias is operating here. If you take the average NBA player and ask him why he made it, he'll likely cite hard work, having a winning attitude, or something to a similar effect. The fact that he is six foot six never enters into the equation. The chances of an athletically gifted giant making it to the NBA are inherently different than those of one who may have a natural tendency to programm.

To pretend like the two could switch places and, having put in a lot of practice hours, end up in the same place, is either na?vet? or self-deception.

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While you wait for confirmation that studying and practicing increases your changes of becoming Great at what you do, I'm just gonna go practice, expecting to race way ahead of you. I don't need an academic study to confirm the obvious: practice makes perfect.

If all survivors did A and none did not do A, then A is likely to be at least a precondition. But more than that: the number of people that choose to spend time deliberately studying and practicing is already so small that there is room for them all to be Great. I am convinced that nearly every single person that deliberately studies and practices to become better at what he does will become Great at what he does, because 'Great' is a relative concept and most people are easily contented.

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It was not intended aggressively, but rather rhetorically. We are not racing against each other, but if you intend to be 'good' at something, you are in a competition with a great many other. If you find excuses not to improve yourself, you will definitely not be 'good'.

If you practiced basketball every day for the next year, and enjoyed doing that, you'd be an excellent basketball player after that year. That you couldn't make it as a pro doesn't detract anything from that.

There's a near infinite amount of things every single one of us could do if they wanted to. The only problem is that we usually do not want to. The number of things that you truly can't do because it depends on some physical characteristic is fairly limited.

You could be a physics professor, an awesome captain, an excellent stock broker or a locally successful artist. You are just not interested in any of those things.

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It's a fact that you cannot become better at something without doing it. But it is not guaranteed that you become better at something because you're doing it.

The personality traits that let you become a great writer or programmer are not innate in everybody. And for the most part you can't reshape a personality to have the right traits. It's not talent, but the right precondition to make use of the practice.

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It is practically guaranteed that you will become better if you 'study and practice', which implies the explicit goal of becoming better. It's almost impossible to become worse by practicing with the explicit goal of becoming better.

I don't have any reason to believe there exists such a thing as an identifiable "personality trait that let's you become a great writer or programmer". Perhaps a predisposition towards "being good at what you do" and "practicing and studying to become better" is such a thing, but when I speak for myself I know such tendencies can thoroughly change over time.

I believe it's easy to engage in armchair psychology, while simultaneously thinking ourselves members of a special breed.

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Becoming better isn't the same as becoming great.

I don't think there is such a thing as an identifiable personality trait, not in the way you mean it.

Yet I'll propose to you a simple proof of two points. The first point is that there is more going on than simply applying yourself. And the second point is that whatever that is, it has to do with your personality.

To the first point: If there was a recipe to greatness (the Amadeus, Shakespeare, Einstein, Goedel, Knuth kind) then everybody would simply do it and we'd be a race of supermen. So obviously any argument for the existence of such a recipe has to be fundamentally flawed.

This presents us with a paradox, as we do know that great people did apply themselves to become what they are, and we know that within bounds everybody is equipped with the same mental facilities. How do we reconcile this?

To the second point: Great people applied themselves over decades and tens of thousands of hours. This level of commitment can neither be forced upon you, nor can you make yourself do it with discipline. You will have to find a drive inside yourself to do it. All things being equal and your personality being fully formed as you enter your teens, the answer obviously is that how that happens is your personality.

You cannot predict how the personality of a person will interact with that persons life and goals, so there is no "identifyable". But with hindsight you can analyze a person and see what made somebody apply himself consistently for decades. And every person is different, so you cannot predict if a person will become great or not.

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I think what makes one great in craft is deeply caring about the craft. It's not just a means to an end, it is something one truly feels passionate about. When one has that visceral calling for something, I think they find ways to get better at what they do. The greatest attribute of humans is that they adapt and learn.

I know several people who could be great programmers, in terms of the ability to solve complex problems, but they do not care enough about their code to do so; which is fine, they find passion elsewhere.

Programming is not for everyone, but I do think that it can be learned over time with patience, passion, and practice.

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HackerNews has always been enamored with the perception of the so called Great Programmer that seemed to attract the next logical discussions: productivity and compensation.

In a big scale software product, great programmer is only marginally important. In a startup, great programmer is definitely useful provided they do not come with "baggages" and asking for top notch compensation (how would you maintain your company's financial health if you are paying him tons of money and giving him stocks while it is your dream, passions, goals, and livelihood that is on the line).

Programmers love to talk about great programmer because that is their dream: fame, money, and freedom.

The real great programmers keep writing good code and act normally like any other workers...and I do not think that the bar is that high...most of us painted it otherwise.

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I don't think you should underestimate the essential contributions that great programmers make to large-scale software products. They can:

- Keep the entire system in their heads, which is of great help to other programmers who have questions about how the code works.

- See several steps ahead and thus avoid pitfalls that may not be obvious to others.

- Design stable and maintainable architectures.

- Debug nasty bugs that others on the team may never be able to solve.

- Mentor less-advanced programmers.

Without at least a handful of really good programmers to lead the way, a large development project probably has a very small probability of success.

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Hemming's point can be summed up with this pithy question:

Do you have n years of experience, or n * 1 year of experience?

Spending years on the job learning nothing or barely learning lots of programming languages does not make one into a great programmer.

My mother taught creative writing, and it's exactly the same. Writers got good ultimately by writing, not by reading books about writing or taking classes on writing.

(edit: Let me add that this is a central problem faced by educators: The good ones know that they can't teach/train success directly, rather that the students must take that training and educate themselves about how to use it to achieve their own success.)

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> Writers got good ultimately by writing, not by reading books about writing or taking classes on writing.

I'm not sure this is true. I've had a little success in short story writing, and have been pushing myself to get better over quite a few years now. At least for me, writing seems necessary but not sufficient. I have to:

    * Write      * Think hard about what I write      * Critique other writers      * Read books by people who know the subject      * Write some more 
The key seems to be reflecting as well as writing. It's essentially a constant struggle to improve rather than just cranking the handle. I think that's why the answer to:

> Do bureaucrats after years of writing reports and instructions get better?

is no. They're not striving to be better.

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Based on years of research by folks like Cal Newport and Scott H. Young, the bureaucratic world epitomizes the antithesis of an efficient learning environment.

To learn, one needs:

* A constant influx of new and increasingly difficult challenges.

* Opportunities to step back and review prior learning, in order to develop a more holistic understanding.

* As rapid and accurate feedback as possible.

As learning animals, we love video games because they hit all of those buttons of ours in rapid succession. The start-up world hosts a disproportionate amount of innovation and technical proficiency for the same reason.

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Two important issues to take into account: 1) The use of "worse" or "better" keeps the conversation very subjective. Better in what sense? What metrics are you using to measure the skill?

2) Deliberate Practice: same as with physical training if you practice in ways that strain your capacity, it will grow as long as the necessary amount of time is put into the activity.

Highly recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performer...

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Let's clear some facts first:

- You're not born a programmer, there's no such thing as "talented"

- Different people have wildly different levels of skill/proficiency in programming.

- Skill in programming invariably takes time to acquire, nobody has become a great programmer after programming for a week.

With that being said, what the author aims for is to predict who will become a great programmer, not just an average one, he's looking for the 99.9th percentile of programmers, for the 0.1%, the ones which outrank 1000 of their peers.

For most of the profession/craft of programming that doesn't matter. You're certainly looking for people to hire in the 80th percentile and above but between 1:1000 and 1:5 there's a huge difference. We know that you can train people to become proficient enough in programming to be useful in it.

As to the difficulty of "training" great programmers, it takes a long time and a lot of hours, persistence and passion to become one. Probably in the order of 10 years, 10'000 hours. Not everybody can do that. The simple fact that different people have different preferences, priorities, etc. ensures that most people on the path from beginner to great programmer fall somewhere along the wayside. But those few with the stamina to persist, who push themselves, for a decade or more, those people have a shot.

So can you train personality traits that will allow you to pull trough? I think it's unlikely. You can show so-inclined persons the way, and if they have the right personality they can walk it, and you can train them on walking the path well. But you can't reshape their psychology to fit the path.

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There are an infinite number of ways of solving the same problem. I have dozens of tools with which I can solve most of my problems; and I can choose to do it in many ways. Sure, there are only so many ways you can write binary search, in a given language. But that doesn't mean there is only one way to solve an actual problem.

For example, if your problem is looking up elements in a dictionary (key-value) structure, there are many ways to do it. A hash table? Binary tree? B-tree? Sorted array? Trie? Patricia trie? Linear search in a linked list? Linear search in an array? Are the arrays fixed sized, or variable sized vectors? All of these solutions may be correct, depending on other factors, and all of them have many variants.

And that, of course, assumes that you know that a dictionary structure is what you need. Maybe your problem actually would call better for a table with GiST indexes, or a quadree dividing up a two-dimensional space.

Above that level, even if your data structure needs are fairly simple or fairly well determined, there's how you structure and organize your code to minimize the chance of bugs, make it extensible, and make it understandable to future programmers. Most of my work isn't writing fresh code. It's finding and fixing bugs in existing code, and extending it to do new things it was never intended to do. Depending on how well organized it is, and how expressive the code is of its intent, that job can be much more difficult or much easier.

That's where a lot of the creativity comes in. Finding the write way to structure and express your code to fit the problem at hand. Writing code that will be adaptable to the future, easy to extend without introducing new bugs, easy to fix bugs in, but without including a lot of extra machinery for features that you will never need. It is easy to write code that does a single task, but will be fragile if someone ever tries to extend it to do something else. It is also easy to spend all of your time writing AbstractFactoryIteratorFunctionFactoryAbastractGenerators which are infinitely modular and extensible but don't actually solve any problems.

Great code is code which solves a real problem, and can be used tomorrow to solve five more problems that you didn't even know about today, but which doesn't suffer under the weight of being designed to be extended in ways that you thought might be useful later, but wind up never being so. And writing such software, and modifying in those five ways, takes a substantial amount of creativity.

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Creative writing is a good analogy. All artists have to be taught, even if they teach themselves. Same with programming.

When asked to say, draw a picture of this house, most trained artists, who have learnt the mechanics should be able to do a faithful rendition of that house. The same with a small program, most trained programmers will be able to make it, using their skills.

However, where both great artists and great programmers are the same is that they bring something more than the sum total of the parts to their work. This something more is what cannot be taught.

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I want to recommend "The Artful Edit".

It takes an all too infrequent approach to teaching how to edit and actually shows the before-and-after work of great authors. In this case, the reader sees quite a bit of Fitzgerald's process deconstructed. Having seen the changes required of the first draft, it left me with much higher hopes for leveling up my own writing.

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Programming is a creative process if you actually know what is programming. Programming is about coming up with an idea of a system that could fulfill a purpose and then implementing and evolving the system over a period of time. I don't think there is anything more creative then programming, if only you understand what programming is about.

In creative writing you express your thoughts using any of the human's natural language and in programming you do the same using a programming language and both requires logical and creative thinking. Just that in programming you can see your thoughts coming to life which makes it much more cool.

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As someone who writes both software and fiction, I've only found an increasing convergence between the two over the years.

Basically, fiction authors are writing obfuscated C, but doing so in Python, where the interpreter was compiled for a version of DOS intended for Windows 3.1 but coaxed to work on WINE, set inside of a virtual machine on custom-built ARM hardware with propriety drivers, with nothing but the AppleTalk protocol provided for communication between the author and the reader. If we get a buffer overflow in that environment, then we win.

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One way in which it is comparable is you make up the program as you go along.

You do have some sense of what you are about to write. But it's not that clear. You are not exactly sure what the program will turn out to be until you sit down to start writing. Like writing, rampant thoughts pull you in multiple directions until one seduces you into following it.

It's surprising how seemingly irrelevant factors affect the program. A recent conversation with a non-programmer, a change in the weather, where you are sitting, or music are enough to set you off in a different direction. If a sense of design isn't precisely what shapes a program, a programmer would do well to pretend that it is.

The counterpoint to the binary search analogy is that there are infinite ways to avoid writing a program that needs a binary search and write a different program instead.

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Agreed. While someone who saw my writing as a college freshman might have thought they had discovered a "natural", that would have ignored the years spent unwittingly honing my craft in online roleplaying environments.

Until we find a very proficient author with a demonstrable lack of writing experience, we have to assume they received direct or indirect training of some kind. The burden of that disproof lies with the proponents of the "natural/gifted" hypothesis.

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When you look back at when you started programming and where you are now, what surprises you the most?

What turned out to be the opposite of what you originally thought it would be?

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Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4959619

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