ActiveX wasn't the first plugin support, for starters. NPAPI beat them by a year, and Java applets were capable of most of what people wanted ActiveX for.
IE did have the first CSS support, but it didn't mean much. CSS was more or less unknown until the IE4/NS4 era. Yeah, IE3 had some support for it, but CSS wasn't taken seriously back then.
I notice you don't mention IE had the first implementation of the marquee tag. Why the omission?
And if we're talking firsts, I don't think IE is going to beat Netscape here. Netscape's influence on the early web far outweighed IE's. I'll just drop the word "Javascript" here, as a conversation starter.
Microsoft did lure businesses and customers over by being installed by default on desktops. Microsoft did break compatibility with web standards - that CSS you mention was a half-assed implementation at best. Remember how long it took them to fix their messed up box model calculations? Microsoft did target businesses with ActiveX (because only the insane would allow its use outside the intranet), a feature that no other browser wanted to support even if they could, for the horrible security problems. And I'm assuming you never had to deal with ActiveX applications that only worked on IE6, even years after IE6 was out of date, because of incompatibility problems.
Superior performance and memory usage? Have you met users? They don't care about that. They use what's on the desktop. They click that icon that says "Internet" placed oh so handily on the left side of the screen under the recycle bin, or in large print at the top of the start menu. That's what the whole antitrust lawsuit was all about.
The saving grace of it all is that Microsoft is just so very bad at all things internet-related. If they had kept working on IE instead of sitting on their laurels, Mozilla would never have been able to make a comeback, and Microsoft would be dictating the standards.
Linus interprets the GPL in a way that allows for binary drivers (I'm sure RMS doesn't agree, but it's not RMS' software). AMD has a binary driver, which is what this article is about.
NVidia has a proprietary driver as well, and it's basically the same code on both Windows and Linux (and FreeBSD, I believe). There is some GPL shim code that allows the kernel to talk to the binary blob, but the driver itself is closed source.
Binary drivers aren't just for video cards. Note that due to the way the vast majority of WiFi chipsets work, Linux would have little to no driver support for WiFi without the GPL exception - the kernel has to load binary firmware into the radio. It's a legal thing; FCC regulations prohibit this firmware from being open source.
As far as why they'd bother, I don't know how it is now with Intel processors having integrated video, but back in the day most servers came with ATI/AMD video chipsets. Some products do use a graphical system on the server. Linux might not have a huge following on the desktop, but servers are a different matter.
NVidia uses the same driver core for Windows and Linux, and it works fine (assuming you're using their driver, of course, and not the open source one).
Intel has issues with OpenCL from what I hear, although I don't have any Intel graphics systems that run anything more than a console. Most users won't run into that, but if you need GPU processing, NVidia's better supported in Linux at the moment.
I couldn't say about AMD, but I never hear anything good about their Linux support, so I haven't bought one of their cards in a decade and a half.
A moon base offers similar, if not greater, benefits as a Mars mission in terms of science and technology development. The point of building a moon base isn't to save money going to Mars - it's to have a research and hopefully manufacturing and mining platform on the moon. The base justifies itself, even if we don't plan to go to Mars.
What the MIT study shows is that if you already have a moon base, going to Mars will be cheaper. It's an added benefit, not the justification. It's similar to how we didn't spend half a trillion dollars on an interstate system to make it easier for people to visit their relatives.
As far as water is concerned, we know that water is there. We don't know how much water is there, but there's certainly enough in shadowed craters to support all the Mars missions we're likely to have in the next century along with a moon base or twelve. We also suspect that there is water all over the place near the poles, but we don't know how much and how feasible it would be to collect it - which is what the guy in TFA wants to find out.
I haven't looked at your tram comment, because it really doesn't have any bearing on the study. We're going to need water and fuel not matter what - after all, we have to catch the tram and then slow down after we jump off. I doubt such a thing would be useful for supplies (if you're going to spend the delta-v to catch the tram, you're already up to speed to go to Mars anyway), but it would be handy for crew quarters.
The impact probes would be equipped with aluminum foam to cushion them as they hit the lunar surface. Then each of these probes would measure the surface hydrogen as well as the neutron signature of volatiles on the moon where they land and then transmit their findings to an orbital craft for relay to Earth.
I don't know enough about orbital mechanics to know how they're going to pull this off, but I assume they'd do something to shed most of their delta-v in lunar orbit and drop from there.
A lot of people feel that going to Mars is a mistake, and that we should be focusing on the moon. Going to Mars with our current infrastructure would be another Apollo - go there, look around, come back, and then abandon the whole thing altogether.
The "cost" of a moon base in regards to a Mars mission would be negligible, if you consider that a moon base justifies itself. Only the money used for equipment and research that is directly related to the Mars mission would be counted as part of the cost.
This study shows that both sides of the moon/Mars debate can get what they want - at least in a fantasy world where NASA can keep the same mandate for more than eight years.
You see those everywhere, though. Try driving in Atlanta or Dallas sometime.
Ohio (as well as a few other states) has a law that if you pass a commercial truck, you have to get a good deal ahead of the truck before you move back over. I really wish that law was more common - following distance on an 80,000lb. vehicle is a lot greater than that of a small sedan.
Up north, they tend to keep the roads pretty clear. Down south, they don't need to. It's the states in the middle that tend to have the worst roads in the winter and the best drivers, generally speaking. There are exceptions, of course.
Of course, in Texas, they make up for all that by not knowing how to drive in the rain. I once saw a woman in Dallas pull out of a parking lot and lose control of her car and do a 180 and slam into the opposite curb. It was a rainy 80 degrees that day.
I left a truck stop in Michigan around 4am and passed at least ten wrecks in the first ten miles, all near bridges - the bridges had iced over, and the salt trucks hadn't been out yet. You don't see that in, say, Illinois, where the drivers know about icy bridges.
That still doesn't explain Kansas, though. They get snow and ice that stay on the road for days. I'm from northern Oklahoma, so I'm in a similar situation, but for some reason the drivers here mostly drive around the speed limit, while the drivers there don't. I have no idea why.
You're one of these false pedants who doesn't realize that quoting something irrelevant in authoritative detail is not helpful or informative.
And you're one of those people that jump right to personal attacks, apparently. I may or may not be a pedant, but you're certainly an asshole.
Look up the law about Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. I'll give you a hint: you quoted a thing about highways. Neighborhood Electric Vehicles are not operated on highways, they are operated on streets with a speed limit of 35 or less, and they themselves are limited to 25 mph. They're intended to be slow moving vehicles that sometimes are slower than other traffic.
Oh, hey look, from TFS: "...The officer stopped the car and made contact with the operators to learn more about how the car was choosing speeds along certain roadways and to educate the operators about impeding traffic per 22400(a) of the California Vehicle Code. The Google self-driving cars operate under the Neighborhood Electric Vehicle Definition per 385.5 of the California Vehicle Code and can only be operated on roadways with speed limits at or under 35 mph. In this case, it was lawful for the car to be traveling on the street as El Camino Real is rated at 35 mph."
22400(a) is the law I posted, and I posted right below that:
Granted, that says highway, but I know people who have been stopped on regular streets for the same thing in my state. I would imagine Google could have argued the "reduced speed is necessary for safe operation" part.
So, what's your point again?
Let's take a look at California Vehicle Code, shall we?
385.5. (a) A “low-speed vehicle” is a motor vehicle that meets all of the following requirements:
(1) Has four wheels.
(2) Can attain a speed, in one mile, of more than 20 miles per hour and not more than 25 miles per hour, on a paved level surface.
(3)Has a gross vehicle weight rating of less than 3,000 pounds. (b)
(1) For the purposes of this section, a “low-speed vehicle” is not a golf cart, except when operated pursuant to Section 21115 or 21115.1.
(2) A “low-speed vehicle” is also known as a “neighborhood electric vehicle.”
Let's see what else is in there. Hrm, not required to be registered in some circumstances... Seller has to inform a buyer of the vehicle's maximum speed and the potential risks of driving a low-speed vehicle... Can be driven on highways if the local authority approves and makes regulations for it, but only for distances of a mile or less and within a mile of a golf course... Local authorities can designate highway crossing areas... Ah, here we go:
21251. Except as provided in Chapter 6.2 (commencing with Section 1962), Chapter ( ) 7.1 (commencing with Section 1964), Chapter 8 (commencing with Section 1965), and Chapter 8.1 (commencing with Section 1966) of Division 2.5 of the Streets and Highways Code, and Sections 4023, 21115, and 21115.1, a low-speed vehicle is subject to all the provisions applicable to a motor vehicle, and the driver of a low-speed vehicle is subject to all the provisions applicable to the driver of a motor vehicle or other vehicle, when applicable, by this code or another code, with the exception of those provisions that, by their very nature, can have no application.
One can safely assume that means drunk drivers are not allowed. I'll return to this in a moment.
And here's something interesting:
21266. (a) Notwithstanding Section 21260, local authorities, by ordinance or resolution, may restrict or prohibit the use of low-speed vehicles.
Lemme requote the summary:
"...The officer stopped the car and made contact with the operators to learn mo
22400. (a) No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, or in compliance with law.
(As an aside, my grandmother was ticketed in LA for driving the speed limit on the freeway - everyone else was speeding, so she was impeding traffic.)
Granted, that says highway, but I know people who have been stopped on regular streets for the same thing in my state. I would imagine Google could have argued the "reduced speed is necessary for safe operation" part.
Besides, cops often will pull over slow drivers even when there is no other traffic, just to check if they're drunk.
In the US at least, speed limits are technically upper bounds, but from a practical standpoint, they're not. They're the suggested speed. The appropriate speed to travel is the speed of the cars around you, which is usually around the speed limit. Too fast, other cars become obstacles. Too slow, you become an obstacle.
My grandmother was pulled over and ticketed in California (Los Angeles, I think) for driving the speed limit on the freeway. Most of the cars around her were going 10+ mph faster than the speed limit, and she was impeding traffic.
The only other country I've driven in is Japan, mostly in Okinawa. There's always so much traffic there that you rarely get close to the speed limit anyway. I just loved the two hour trip to the beach... thirty kilometers away.
This has been my experience too. I was a truck driver for some years.
Driving is a cultural thing. You learn your habits from the traffic around you.
Texas was always my least favorite state to drive in. It has a very aggressive driving culture. Kansas was pretty bad for the opposite reason - so many drivers driving at 10 or more MPH under the speed limit. Northwest Arkansas drivers used to drive really fast everywhere (although it's not as bad as it used to be, after the Fayetteville boom).
The midwest does seem to have the best driving culture, from what I can tell. I70 from Illinois to Pennsylvania isn't bad at all, and the cities in that area are nothing like the horrible mass of insanity that cities like Atlanta or LA are.
Attorney-client privilege is tied very strongly to both the fifth and sixth amendments. Those are the same rights that prevent forced self-incrimination and execution of a person without due process, and closely tied to the eighth amendment which prohibits torture.
So the comment you're replying to is not an exaggeration. It carries a different emotional impact, but from a legal standpoint, it's the same.
Those rights can't be taken away from anyone, US citizen or not, on US soil. It has been very well established in the courts, and it is not a right that prisoners lose. That's why we have all those people in Guantanamo Bay.
Cases have been lost and presumably guilty people set free because attorney-client privilege has been broken. It is in no one's best interest (except possibly guilty people who would be set free) to break it.
What I don't get e.g. why people insist to use def for both variables and functions... other languages use func, var, val, let.
Some LISPs do this, for very good reason.
In LISP, symbols are a data type by themselves. Some LISPs, like Common LISP and elisp, use different "special forms" to declare functions and variables and assign them to symbols (defvar vs. defun, for instance). Others, including Scheme, use the same special form for both (define).
In either case, you can treat functions as data. Passing a function is done the same way as passing a variable. A function can be manipulated just like data. This is because LISP code is written and stored in the "standard" LISP data structure - your code is data.
Very few languages support this concept, mostly for performance and security reasons, and because it tends to break your brain. It's very powerful once you get the hang of it, though.
I highly recommend watching MIT's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Languages." It's not a Scheme course per se, but it's a very good introduction to working with first class functions. One of the instructors was the co-inventor of Scheme.
Radio is an imagined construct created through a collective agreement our population has with our reality.
Radio is the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through space.
It's the same everywhere in the universe. Mankind didn't "invent" radio, we discovered it. It's a major side effect of one of the four basic forces of the universe.
We're too distant to pick up communication (unless that communication is intentional and either aimed right at us or very powerful - or both). However, if the aliens are using microwave power or space-based RADAR, we might be able to pick that up.
Logic suggests we need to look for evidence of visual and auditory beings leveraging more than just radio waves.
We're doing the visual part (which is just higher-frequency radio, really) with telescopes. That's how they found the "objects" in the first place.
As far as auditory goes, I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do.
I believe the normal science fiction solution is throwing comets at it. The comets can add water and various gases (although ammonia and methane probably aren't what you want for a liveable atmosphere) along with various organics.
I'm not sure it would do us a lot of good, but it might give Mars a chance to develop life of its own, especially if seeded with simple life from Earth.
Honestly, If we're going that far, I'd say a better target is Venus. Venus has no water. One of the theories for why Venus lacks a magnetic field is that its crust is too inflexible to support plate tectonics without water, which means the core doesn't cool fast enough to allow convection. Adding water might be all it takes to restart the magnetic field on Venus. The technology for all this is so far out there we may as well assume we have a way to get rid of a large chunk of Venus' atmosphere (maybe move it to Mars?), reducing the pressure down to levels where people could survive on the surface.
I don't think any of this will actually happen, mind you. It's fun to think about, though.
I'm on shakier ground here, but the impression I got (from some discussions in bars, mostly) is that Japanese people have a period of their life where it's more or less OK to go out and be wild. It's mostly the early to mid 20s, but it's not a hard-set rule.
Once you get a bit older than that, you're expected to take your place in society and live a more conservative lifestyle.
Just like anywhere, there are people who don't fit into the system. Some do well, and some don't. I never got deep enough into the culture to really know what kind of blowback those people get, though.
If it HAD been free and open, there would have been no Linux, we'd all be using MINIX.
Doubtful.
Tanenbaum was against unfettered development of Minix. It had an explicit purpose; it was designed as a teaching tool, no more, no less. Bug fixes were welcome, features were generally not. It wasn't until Minix 3 that he allowed it to expand.
Now, someone might have forked it and created something that fits into Linux's niche, but it wouldn't have been Minix.
I didn't have to deal with it a whole lot myself, but I have had some dealings with it, and know people who have had more.
First, there's the whole sempai/kohai system. Basically, that guy that was hired five minutes before you? Yeah, you're his bitch. But that's OK, 'cause the guy we hired five minutes after you is your bitch. Shit rolls downhill. You try to make it up the ladder so you're the one doing the shitting rather than getting shit on.
Then there's appearances to consider. The guy that finished all his work for the week and went home at the end of the day? Bad employee. The guy that spent all day playing minesweeper and put in overtime (to play more minesweeper)? Good employee. Results? Who cares?
And when the end of the day (and overtime) is over, time to go home, right? Nope, now it's time to "bond." Which means it's time to go to the bar with the coworkers and get drunk. Oh, and the sempai/kohai thing is still in effect. You're allowed to loosen your tie. Maybe.
I'm sure not all businesses in Japan are like this, but I've seen some that are, and I've heard of more.
Slashdot Mirror
They're easy enough to make, with CSS animation or Javascript.
That's why you use Japanese unicorns, which love sweet potatoes.
Any Japanese person can tell you it's sweet potatoes that make you fart.
That's not quite accurate.
ActiveX wasn't the first plugin support, for starters. NPAPI beat them by a year, and Java applets were capable of most of what people wanted ActiveX for.
IE did have the first CSS support, but it didn't mean much. CSS was more or less unknown until the IE4/NS4 era. Yeah, IE3 had some support for it, but CSS wasn't taken seriously back then.
I notice you don't mention IE had the first implementation of the marquee tag. Why the omission?
And if we're talking firsts, I don't think IE is going to beat Netscape here. Netscape's influence on the early web far outweighed IE's. I'll just drop the word "Javascript" here, as a conversation starter.
Microsoft did lure businesses and customers over by being installed by default on desktops. Microsoft did break compatibility with web standards - that CSS you mention was a half-assed implementation at best. Remember how long it took them to fix their messed up box model calculations? Microsoft did target businesses with ActiveX (because only the insane would allow its use outside the intranet), a feature that no other browser wanted to support even if they could, for the horrible security problems. And I'm assuming you never had to deal with ActiveX applications that only worked on IE6, even years after IE6 was out of date, because of incompatibility problems.
Superior performance and memory usage? Have you met users? They don't care about that. They use what's on the desktop. They click that icon that says "Internet" placed oh so handily on the left side of the screen under the recycle bin, or in large print at the top of the start menu. That's what the whole antitrust lawsuit was all about.
The saving grace of it all is that Microsoft is just so very bad at all things internet-related. If they had kept working on IE instead of sitting on their laurels, Mozilla would never have been able to make a comeback, and Microsoft would be dictating the standards.
Doesn't he realize no one's going to listen to him unless he jumps up and down like an ape, repeating the same word over and over?
Or maybe throw a chair?
They're not forced to GPL their code.
Linus interprets the GPL in a way that allows for binary drivers (I'm sure RMS doesn't agree, but it's not RMS' software). AMD has a binary driver, which is what this article is about.
NVidia has a proprietary driver as well, and it's basically the same code on both Windows and Linux (and FreeBSD, I believe). There is some GPL shim code that allows the kernel to talk to the binary blob, but the driver itself is closed source.
Binary drivers aren't just for video cards. Note that due to the way the vast majority of WiFi chipsets work, Linux would have little to no driver support for WiFi without the GPL exception - the kernel has to load binary firmware into the radio. It's a legal thing; FCC regulations prohibit this firmware from being open source.
As far as why they'd bother, I don't know how it is now with Intel processors having integrated video, but back in the day most servers came with ATI/AMD video chipsets. Some products do use a graphical system on the server. Linux might not have a huge following on the desktop, but servers are a different matter.
That has not been my experience.
NVidia uses the same driver core for Windows and Linux, and it works fine (assuming you're using their driver, of course, and not the open source one).
Intel has issues with OpenCL from what I hear, although I don't have any Intel graphics systems that run anything more than a console. Most users won't run into that, but if you need GPU processing, NVidia's better supported in Linux at the moment.
I couldn't say about AMD, but I never hear anything good about their Linux support, so I haven't bought one of their cards in a decade and a half.
There's no accounting magic involved.
A moon base offers similar, if not greater, benefits as a Mars mission in terms of science and technology development. The point of building a moon base isn't to save money going to Mars - it's to have a research and hopefully manufacturing and mining platform on the moon. The base justifies itself, even if we don't plan to go to Mars.
What the MIT study shows is that if you already have a moon base, going to Mars will be cheaper. It's an added benefit, not the justification. It's similar to how we didn't spend half a trillion dollars on an interstate system to make it easier for people to visit their relatives.
As far as water is concerned, we know that water is there. We don't know how much water is there, but there's certainly enough in shadowed craters to support all the Mars missions we're likely to have in the next century along with a moon base or twelve. We also suspect that there is water all over the place near the poles, but we don't know how much and how feasible it would be to collect it - which is what the guy in TFA wants to find out.
I haven't looked at your tram comment, because it really doesn't have any bearing on the study. We're going to need water and fuel not matter what - after all, we have to catch the tram and then slow down after we jump off. I doubt such a thing would be useful for supplies (if you're going to spend the delta-v to catch the tram, you're already up to speed to go to Mars anyway), but it would be handy for crew quarters.
Oh, my bad, I misunderstood.
That's a good question.
From TFA:
The impact probes would be equipped with aluminum foam to cushion them as they hit the lunar surface. Then each of these probes would measure the surface hydrogen as well as the neutron signature of volatiles on the moon where they land and then transmit their findings to an orbital craft for relay to Earth.
I don't know enough about orbital mechanics to know how they're going to pull this off, but I assume they'd do something to shed most of their delta-v in lunar orbit and drop from there.
A lot of people feel that going to Mars is a mistake, and that we should be focusing on the moon. Going to Mars with our current infrastructure would be another Apollo - go there, look around, come back, and then abandon the whole thing altogether.
The "cost" of a moon base in regards to a Mars mission would be negligible, if you consider that a moon base justifies itself. Only the money used for equipment and research that is directly related to the Mars mission would be counted as part of the cost.
This study shows that both sides of the moon/Mars debate can get what they want - at least in a fantasy world where NASA can keep the same mandate for more than eight years.
You see those everywhere, though. Try driving in Atlanta or Dallas sometime.
Ohio (as well as a few other states) has a law that if you pass a commercial truck, you have to get a good deal ahead of the truck before you move back over. I really wish that law was more common - following distance on an 80,000lb. vehicle is a lot greater than that of a small sedan.
I agree.
Up north, they tend to keep the roads pretty clear. Down south, they don't need to. It's the states in the middle that tend to have the worst roads in the winter and the best drivers, generally speaking. There are exceptions, of course.
Of course, in Texas, they make up for all that by not knowing how to drive in the rain. I once saw a woman in Dallas pull out of a parking lot and lose control of her car and do a 180 and slam into the opposite curb. It was a rainy 80 degrees that day.
I left a truck stop in Michigan around 4am and passed at least ten wrecks in the first ten miles, all near bridges - the bridges had iced over, and the salt trucks hadn't been out yet. You don't see that in, say, Illinois, where the drivers know about icy bridges.
That still doesn't explain Kansas, though. They get snow and ice that stay on the road for days. I'm from northern Oklahoma, so I'm in a similar situation, but for some reason the drivers here mostly drive around the speed limit, while the drivers there don't. I have no idea why.
You're one of these false pedants who doesn't realize that quoting something irrelevant in authoritative detail is not helpful or informative.
And you're one of those people that jump right to personal attacks, apparently. I may or may not be a pedant, but you're certainly an asshole.
Look up the law about Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. I'll give you a hint: you quoted a thing about highways. Neighborhood Electric Vehicles are not operated on highways, they are operated on streets with a speed limit of 35 or less, and they themselves are limited to 25 mph. They're intended to be slow moving vehicles that sometimes are slower than other traffic.
Oh, hey look, from TFS: "...The officer stopped the car and made contact with the operators to learn more about how the car was choosing speeds along certain roadways and to educate the operators about impeding traffic per 22400(a) of the California Vehicle Code. The Google self-driving cars operate under the Neighborhood Electric Vehicle Definition per 385.5 of the California Vehicle Code and can only be operated on roadways with speed limits at or under 35 mph. In this case, it was lawful for the car to be traveling on the street as El Camino Real is rated at 35 mph."
22400(a) is the law I posted, and I posted right below that:
Granted, that says highway, but I know people who have been stopped on regular streets for the same thing in my state. I would imagine Google could have argued the "reduced speed is necessary for safe operation" part.
So, what's your point again?
Let's take a look at California Vehicle Code, shall we?
Let's see what else is in there. Hrm, not required to be registered in some circumstances... Seller has to inform a buyer of the vehicle's maximum speed and the potential risks of driving a low-speed vehicle... Can be driven on highways if the local authority approves and makes regulations for it, but only for distances of a mile or less and within a mile of a golf course... Local authorities can designate highway crossing areas... Ah, here we go:
One can safely assume that means drunk drivers are not allowed. I'll return to this in a moment.
And here's something interesting:
Lemme requote the summary:
"...The officer stopped the car and made contact with the operators to learn mo
Impeding traffic is a thing.
California Vehicle Code:
22400. (a) No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow
speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of
traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation,
because of a grade, or in compliance with law.
(As an aside, my grandmother was ticketed in LA for driving the speed limit on the freeway - everyone else was speeding, so she was impeding traffic.)
Granted, that says highway, but I know people who have been stopped on regular streets for the same thing in my state. I would imagine Google could have argued the "reduced speed is necessary for safe operation" part.
Besides, cops often will pull over slow drivers even when there is no other traffic, just to check if they're drunk.
In the US at least, speed limits are technically upper bounds, but from a practical standpoint, they're not. They're the suggested speed. The appropriate speed to travel is the speed of the cars around you, which is usually around the speed limit. Too fast, other cars become obstacles. Too slow, you become an obstacle.
My grandmother was pulled over and ticketed in California (Los Angeles, I think) for driving the speed limit on the freeway. Most of the cars around her were going 10+ mph faster than the speed limit, and she was impeding traffic.
The only other country I've driven in is Japan, mostly in Okinawa. There's always so much traffic there that you rarely get close to the speed limit anyway. I just loved the two hour trip to the beach... thirty kilometers away.
This has been my experience too. I was a truck driver for some years.
Driving is a cultural thing. You learn your habits from the traffic around you.
Texas was always my least favorite state to drive in. It has a very aggressive driving culture. Kansas was pretty bad for the opposite reason - so many drivers driving at 10 or more MPH under the speed limit. Northwest Arkansas drivers used to drive really fast everywhere (although it's not as bad as it used to be, after the Fayetteville boom).
The midwest does seem to have the best driving culture, from what I can tell. I70 from Illinois to Pennsylvania isn't bad at all, and the cities in that area are nothing like the horrible mass of insanity that cities like Atlanta or LA are.
Attorney-client privilege is tied very strongly to both the fifth and sixth amendments. Those are the same rights that prevent forced self-incrimination and execution of a person without due process, and closely tied to the eighth amendment which prohibits torture.
So the comment you're replying to is not an exaggeration. It carries a different emotional impact, but from a legal standpoint, it's the same.
Those rights can't be taken away from anyone, US citizen or not, on US soil. It has been very well established in the courts, and it is not a right that prisoners lose. That's why we have all those people in Guantanamo Bay.
Cases have been lost and presumably guilty people set free because attorney-client privilege has been broken. It is in no one's best interest (except possibly guilty people who would be set free) to break it.
What I don't get e.g. why people insist to use def for both variables and functions ... other languages use func, var, val, let.
Some LISPs do this, for very good reason.
In LISP, symbols are a data type by themselves. Some LISPs, like Common LISP and elisp, use different "special forms" to declare functions and variables and assign them to symbols (defvar vs. defun, for instance). Others, including Scheme, use the same special form for both (define).
In either case, you can treat functions as data. Passing a function is done the same way as passing a variable. A function can be manipulated just like data. This is because LISP code is written and stored in the "standard" LISP data structure - your code is data.
Very few languages support this concept, mostly for performance and security reasons, and because it tends to break your brain. It's very powerful once you get the hang of it, though.
I highly recommend watching MIT's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Languages." It's not a Scheme course per se, but it's a very good introduction to working with first class functions. One of the instructors was the co-inventor of Scheme.
If it's a Dyson Sphere, would radio waves pass through it?
Yes. Dyson Spheres aren't solid.
Radio is an imagined construct created through a collective agreement our population has with our reality.
Radio is the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through space.
It's the same everywhere in the universe. Mankind didn't "invent" radio, we discovered it. It's a major side effect of one of the four basic forces of the universe.
We're too distant to pick up communication (unless that communication is intentional and either aimed right at us or very powerful - or both). However, if the aliens are using microwave power or space-based RADAR, we might be able to pick that up.
Logic suggests we need to look for evidence of visual and auditory beings leveraging more than just radio waves.
We're doing the visual part (which is just higher-frequency radio, really) with telescopes. That's how they found the "objects" in the first place.
As far as auditory goes, I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do.
I believe the normal science fiction solution is throwing comets at it. The comets can add water and various gases (although ammonia and methane probably aren't what you want for a liveable atmosphere) along with various organics.
I'm not sure it would do us a lot of good, but it might give Mars a chance to develop life of its own, especially if seeded with simple life from Earth.
Honestly, If we're going that far, I'd say a better target is Venus. Venus has no water. One of the theories for why Venus lacks a magnetic field is that its crust is too inflexible to support plate tectonics without water, which means the core doesn't cool fast enough to allow convection. Adding water might be all it takes to restart the magnetic field on Venus. The technology for all this is so far out there we may as well assume we have a way to get rid of a large chunk of Venus' atmosphere (maybe move it to Mars?), reducing the pressure down to levels where people could survive on the surface.
I don't think any of this will actually happen, mind you. It's fun to think about, though.
I'm on shakier ground here, but the impression I got (from some discussions in bars, mostly) is that Japanese people have a period of their life where it's more or less OK to go out and be wild. It's mostly the early to mid 20s, but it's not a hard-set rule.
Once you get a bit older than that, you're expected to take your place in society and live a more conservative lifestyle.
Just like anywhere, there are people who don't fit into the system. Some do well, and some don't. I never got deep enough into the culture to really know what kind of blowback those people get, though.
I know pumpkins come in a lot of different shapes, but I've never seen one that was shaped like that.
They look more like footballs with a flat bottom.
Neat, though. It'd be interesting to see them in use.
If it HAD been free and open, there would have been no Linux, we'd all be using MINIX.
Doubtful.
Tanenbaum was against unfettered development of Minix. It had an explicit purpose; it was designed as a teaching tool, no more, no less. Bug fixes were welcome, features were generally not. It wasn't until Minix 3 that he allowed it to expand.
Now, someone might have forked it and created something that fits into Linux's niche, but it wouldn't have been Minix.
Japanese business culture is weird.
I didn't have to deal with it a whole lot myself, but I have had some dealings with it, and know people who have had more.
First, there's the whole sempai/kohai system. Basically, that guy that was hired five minutes before you? Yeah, you're his bitch. But that's OK, 'cause the guy we hired five minutes after you is your bitch. Shit rolls downhill. You try to make it up the ladder so you're the one doing the shitting rather than getting shit on.
Then there's appearances to consider. The guy that finished all his work for the week and went home at the end of the day? Bad employee. The guy that spent all day playing minesweeper and put in overtime (to play more minesweeper)? Good employee. Results? Who cares?
And when the end of the day (and overtime) is over, time to go home, right? Nope, now it's time to "bond." Which means it's time to go to the bar with the coworkers and get drunk. Oh, and the sempai/kohai thing is still in effect. You're allowed to loosen your tie. Maybe.
I'm sure not all businesses in Japan are like this, but I've seen some that are, and I've heard of more.