I tried to do this not too long ago, but (at least in the US) all of the mobile networks are switching to LTE, and shutting down their 2G and 3G networks. I was unable to find any "dumb" phones with LTE support. The closest thing I found was some overpriced Android phone with most of the smartphone features stripped out.
The decision I most regret was moving to a city without many tech jobs (Philadelphia). The difference in number of available jobs, salaries, working conditions, and even the intelligence of coworkers is kind of mind-blowing, now that I've moved back to a city with a lot of tech jobs (Seattle). The cost of living is higher here, but it's worth it.
In Cambodia, I got what I assume must have been a less serious case, because I didn't have any vomiting or diarrhea, only the worst headache I've ever had in my life. Luckily the lack of air conditioning wasn't a big problem, because it was close to the coldest part of the year.
It permanently reset my pain scale. When I later had a pulmonary embolism and appendicitis, the doctors were confused that I said my pain was only 7 on a scale of 1 to 10.
The drug I took for it (mefloquine) didn't give me any unusual dreams, but it permanently altered something in my brain.
I don't agree that DDT is necessary to eradicate malaria. See for example that malaria has been eradicated in Thailand (except for border areas), but not (yet) in Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar, despite having the same climate. A combination of regular pesticides and flood control are sufficient - if the government is competent and dedicated. It's a political problem, not a technical problem.
When I converted a CPU-intensive program from OCaml to MLton-compiled SML, without changing any of the algorithms, I got a 30% speedup. That was more than 10 years ago though, and both compilers have seen some improvement since.
I wrote this for parsing CSV in Awk: http://yumegakanau.org/code/awk-csv/
It maybe doesn't handle all the CSV out there, but the cases you mention (quoting and commas) it does handle.
I usually load CSV data into PostgreSQL to do anything with it; mostly wrote this Awk library for fun. So I'm not going to argue that Awk is the best language for doing this kind of thing, but it is possible.
Well, I majored in both political science and computer science. I don't think the two cases are different at all. I find it very irritating to deal with both political people who don't understand any math, and computer people who can't write a coherent sentence.
However, if I had to pick one mathematical subject everyone should learn, it wouldn't be algebra, it would be statistics.
Your wife could move to the US, get even a minimum wage job, and sponsor you for an IR-1. This would require living apart for probably at least a year.
Or, if she has any family or friends in the US, they can sponsor you. This is what I did for my wife's visa - my brother sponsored her.
Or, if you have some savings, you can use that instead of income. Savings counts 1/3 as much as income.
Or... you really should not go to the US on the visa waiver program with the intention of filing for adjustment of status after arriving. But, if you do enter the US without that intention, you can then file for adjustment of status.
I would not bother filing for any other type of visa, personally. Permanent residence will, among other things, make the job search easier.
"Vim is, without question, the worst C codebase I have seen."
From the example you give, I agree it must be bad. But if you want to see something worse, check out PHP. No, not the billions of programs written in the PHP language (which are, indeed, almost all terrible), but the C source to the PHP interpreter.
Obviously PHP was invented by someone who just doesn't care about creating a decent programming language. Everyone knows that; it has been pointed out so many times that it's a cliche. But if you look at the source to the implementation, you will find that it was developed by someone who is so incompetent that whether they care or not is beside the point. Dealing with that codebase (and thinking about how successful PHP has become) made me question my will to live.
I guess this is talking about price-to-book? In some other countries, price-to-book is usually close to 1, or even below it, which always struck me as strange. Either something is wrong with their stock markets, or companies are not as profitable as they might be for some reason. (Maybe a good reason; profits aren't everything in life). I'm not familiar with the Q ratio so maybe it's a slightly different concept...
It makes sense for a single company, if it is so unprofitable, even including future potential profitability, that it really should be shut down and stripped for assets. But ordinarily I would expect a company to be worth significantly more than its book value. Otherwise, you could easily recreate the company by just "replacing" the assets. But this is only true if the company is based entirely on easily replaceable, low skill labor. Are there any large companies like this anymore?
In reality, there are intangible assets - and I'm not talking about software etc. - that are very difficult to measure, and guarantee that any worthwhile business should be valued at more than its tangible assets. Some things are hard to price, but might be possible to sell off: brand identity, customer base, marketing data, etc. Still, replacing these things is hard.
Some things are very hard to sell off. Businesses have employees, and employees are in an organizational structure where they know how to work with other employees to get their jobs done. As well, there are relationships with contractors and vendors. Replacing these is extremely hard.
Another issue, comparing the MLton FFI and the Ocaml FFI, is that the FFI in MLton is somewhat slower. When I converted an Ocaml program to SML, I discovered that a small portion written in C ran much faster when I rewrote it in SML. In Ocaml, writing portions in C is almost always a performance win, just because the Ocaml compiler doesn't optimize very well. In MLton there's a bit of overhead just for the FFI (possibly because the code generator allocates registers very differently from how it's done in C). That overhead goes away if you use the C code generator instead, but usually the native code generator performs better anyway.
If I remember correctly, it has been proposed to rewrite the MLton floating point conversion in pure SML for precisely this reason.
I am American and my wife is Cambodian. We live in a Cambodian neighborhood in the United States. We have a daughter, born in Cambodia, who is now 4. I speak to her in English and her mother (and everyone else in the neighborhood) speaks to her in Cambodian. Until she started preschool last September, virtually everyone except myself talked to her in Cambodian.
Not too long ago, she asked me why some person (I think it was a waiter at a restaurant) spoke English and not Cambodian. For her, everyone spoke Cambodian, and then some of them also spoke English. I tried to explain that in America, most people actually speak English and not Cambodian. After that explanation, she kept asking "is this place America?" everywhere we went for a few days.
Given that by far most of the water in California is used for growing food, an interesting question would be: at what point is it cheaper to grow the food somewhere else where water is more abundant? Of course the amount of sunlight, temperature etc. would factor in too. But with enough energy, you can simulate the conditions of California anywhere.
When I was living in Cambodia, I heard someone talking about how you could buy citizenship there. I assumed that it would be involve bribing a government official, since that's the kind of place Cambodia is. But I found out that in fact, Cambodian nationality law explicitly says you can apply for citizenship after donating 1 billion riel (about $250 thousand) to the government. But you still have to pass a Cambodian language test (which I've heard you can bribe your way around anyway - total cost I've heard is about $500 thousand).
Unfortunately though, a Cambodian passport is almost worthless. You get visa-free entry to ASEAN (Southeast Asia) countries and that's about it. My daughter has Cambodian citizenship, but I never bothered to apply for a Cambodian passport for her, since her US passport is totally sufficient.
That deal on Cypriot citizenship seems like a pretty good deal though. An EU passport would be more valuble than just about anything else. I imagine it won't last though; I would bet the other EU members would try to stop it.
I wonder who actually does care about the Dow? Are there actually a lot of investors that don't know any better? Or is it just people who think the stock market is important (itself questionable) but don't know anything about it?
This is not really my area of expertise, but is the Harvard CS department actually in the same league as Stanford? When I think of top CS schools, I think of MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley. Neither Harvard nor Yale come to mind. Maybe they are trying to play up the HYS rivalry for people that know even less about this than I do.
I live in South Philadelphia (7th and Oregon), and while I have neither Comcast nor Verizon service, it seems like I can get either. They both mail me at least once a week, and occasionally come to my door, asking me to sign up. I investigated signing up for FIOS, but the cost was $90/month, and it just isn't worth that much to me. I have FIOS at work and it's fantastic, but my employer only pays $25/month for it.
From what I understand, Verizon is not expanding their FIOS service area anymore, because so many people are like me, and don't want to pay much for it.