It's not competition, it's service. The government is meant to serve the people, and sometimes that means providing utilities for the public, with the public's input and desires accommodated.
As long as we keep private enterprise from buying up the regulations anyway.
Arguably, 'internet access' can be broken down into two (broad) components, one a fairly natural 'utility' and one much easier to build a functional marketplace for.
The last-mile bit pipe between your house and whatever the local aggregation point is is, like most 'utilities' strongly inclined toward being a natural monopoly. Not as bad as something like roads(where running multiple competing roads simply wouldn't fit, in most cases); but between the cost and the disruption of laying additional runs, there is very, very strong pressure toward a sharply limited number of, typically incumbent, wireline players, with maybe a feeble wireless competitor that is compelling if you use under 5GB a month.
Once you hit the aggregation point, though, anything that flows over IP can, relatively easily, be offered for hookup to your pipe. Cheap residential ISPs, fancier offerings with loads of static IPs and symmetric bandwidth, assorted VOIP and video offerings, anything you can shove down a pipe.
Keeping the connection between me and the aggregation point installed, maintained, and lit seems like a perfectly sensible function for either the local municipality, or a suitably-tamed contract operator(It's a matter of pragmatism and local choice whether the work be done by municipal employees or an outside firm; but natural monopolies are to be kept on very short leashes). Once you hit the aggregation point, though, the more the merrier. Subscribing or unsubscribing is just a few ruleset changes, so can be fairly frictionless, and this avoids any...potentially unseemly....favor or disfavor by the municipal government toward specific content or services. They just keep the lights on, you buy what you want, or nothing at all(though, even if you buy nothing, it might well be cost-effective for the municipality itself to still offer access to its own site, emergency services contacts, etc. to residents, since traffic on the LAN costs near zero.
Some sort of metadata tag might be better. I'm pretty sure that the Unicode Consortium would object if they were informed that "Y'know planes 0-2? Those ones you've spent ages fighting about? Well, it's time to carve out three more, exactly like 0-2, except sarcastic. And no, I don't actually care whether 'line feed' or Linear B can be used for sarcastic purposes, they are getting defined anyway."
Unless they are somehow fundamentally different from civilian medical services, I'd be inclined to suspect that the arm of the VA that is doctors and hospitals may have a very different attitude than the arm that is essentially a medical insurance agency...
Especially if the fight is over some relatively large epidemiological class ('Post-Vietnam C-123 crews') potentially being blanket-added or default-denied, that would be where the cost-reduction guys come slithering out from under their rocks.
I'd be inclined to suspect that economics has more influence than culture when it comes to the 'one size fits all' aspect: the degree to which you are pretty screwed without a degree(and often with one) has reached rather alarming levels across the developed world. This creates a certain incentive for people with that option to pursue economic stability first, breed second; because their odds of achieving those things in reverse order are not pretty, and for people who lack that option, or try anyway, to enjoy some seriously adverse family-raising conditions.
A plan doesn't really need supporters when it has those sorts of mean, ugly, numbers available. Now, if the developed world is interested in having their wrinkly asses wiped by anybody other than immigrants or robots in their old age, they might want to do something about that; but barring economic change, culture warriors of any persuasion are of deeply secondary relevance.
Just in case I didn't make it sufficiently clear, I was attempting sarcasm there. The 'good old days' weren't. Hence the heavy drinking and high levels of coercive violence.
Makes you wish for the good old days, when people didn't defer marriage because the social costs of doing so were overwhelmingly high, and divorce rates were low because they were hard to get...
There are substantially more and less pleasant ways of reaching that end, with what we call 'medicine' having a considerable focus on nudging our trajectory...
If anything, killing the big, fuzzy, charismatic ones and leaving nothing but horrid insects and burbling bioslurry probably makes the naming challenge substantially more difficult. Back in the good old days, when 'biology' consisted of going out, shooting things, having the servants stuff them, and then deciding which ones looked most like the other ones, you could get away with all kinds of sloppy naming because there just weren't that many species on the table.
Now that we have these kids with their fancy 'genomes' and whatnot, you can probably identify more species within a single block of the megacity 12 slums than we did in the entire pre-genetic history of biology.
You would definitely know better than I about what it can and can't do, I'm just surprised to hear that SYSVOL replication, rather than any of the zillions of arcane MS-specific behaviors scattered across AD, would be the notable issue: Given the OSS-community love of building tools, I would have expected exactly the opposite: a situation where Samba4 plugs GPO storage and SYSVOL right into the capable hands of one or more of the modern revision control systems, offering lovely automatic versioning of all GPOs, painless replication and (mostly) painless merges, and all matter of neat stuff; but suffers some sort of painful issues somewhere else entirely.
Linux will inherit the Earth. Tremble, M$ Office paperclip.
Not that it's a real problem, Linux is a decent embedded OS(arguably markedly worse than some designed for the purpose at Hardcore Embedded Stuff; but familiarity and smooth scaling from fairly tiny embedded systems to supercomputers counts for a lot); but the 'ChromeOS' is something of a historical irony:
Remember, back in '95, when Marc Andreessen threatened that Netscape would reduce Windows to a "poorly debugged set of device drivers"? That struck MS as plausible enough that they squished Netscape as hard as they could and (slowly) got off their ass on IE development; but look upon ChromeOS, and observe the OS reduced to a set of device drivers by the browser..
iTunes is a grotesque abortion, which would make access to data on the necessary protocols and interfaces to get your non-fucked software talking to components that expect iTunes useful.
Thankfully it matters less with iDevices, now that those all have network connections of their own; but it's slightly tragic how much remains locked up from that 'iTunesU' fad, where Apple managed to convince a bunch of schools that the best podcasts are ones that you can only get to with Apple software, and which are only useful on the go with Apple hardware....
I don't see the source code for Aqua or iTunes anywhere in that link.
To Apple's credit, they do release more than they are legally obliged to (unlike the assorted assholes who will fight the SFLC to the last man over some penny-ante hack to a GPL2 package in a router probably worth less than $20 of their lawyer's hourly rate, for reasons that defy human understanding).
Of course, Apple is a practically canonical example of the (not bad, certainly pragmatic, and arguably a lot healthier than doing a lot of dumb reinventing of the wheel) 'Use OSS to lower the cost of providing production-quality implementations of commodified components, keep your actual selling points locked up tight.' strategy.
The market rate for 'eh, mostly BSD' is approximately nothing, unless it comes with expertise or customization, the market rate for everything you need to build something interoperable with OSX? You could probably buy a collection of small dusty countries for that...
As much as I'm pleased to (for the newer gear) not have to fuck around with innumerable license keys and so on, Apple licensing is actually obnoxiously inflexible, and very consumer oriented. At work, I've become the mac-wrangler-by-default because most of the rest of the department are Microsofties from way back. Fine by me, more variety, more experience, all good. And the desktop and laptop gear is pretty good. Impressive industrial design, not too many freaky issues (though opendirectory is still a pale shadow of ActiveDirectory and Group Policies. Those things can be a byzantine mess; but they sure are powerful).
However, there are some rough edges: You need to buy new gear to replace or expand an existing lab/laptop rollout? Well kid, I'm afraid that Apple's OS support is as follows: The earliest supported OS is whatever the machine shipped with. The last supported OS is the version before the version that has your model in the 'installer will refuse to try' list. Oh, you wanted to expand a lab running OSX version N-1 without upgrading the entire lab to version N? That's so sad, good luck.
Even more vexingly, Apple has largely left the server business (they don't have a single device with redundant PSUs, their 'preferred' OSX Server config is a mac mini with two HDDs); but they steadfastly refuse to simply sell licenses that 'bless' VM instances(not running on physical macs) to run OSX Server. For $1000, they'll ship me their little mini, with its two laptop drives and OSX Server; but they don't even offer a 'keep your shiny little toy and enjoy the higher margins, just let me spin an OSX VM on my institution's preexisting, high-reliability, physically-distributed, high-uptime, SAN-backed, etc, etc. VM infrastructure. We have the cores, we have the RAM (with ECC and stuff, crazy!), we have the SAN, with the fancy disk monitoring and redundancy features. Why won't you take our damn money?
At retail, $35 can get you 2GB of RAM from somebody you might actually respect, 4 from somebody who probably doesn't just sneak into competitors' factories at night to steal the stuff that failed QC...
$35 is also, depending on the phase of the moon and where you fall in AMD and Nvidia's release cycles, enough to get you bumped a tier or two in GPU capability. HDDs are a similar story, you aren't going to do anything radical for $35 bucks(say a switch form cheap 'n capacious HDD to screaming-fast SSD); but you can probably squeeze 1 'unit' of additional capacity, exactly how many gigs that is depending on the conditions of the day and whether you are buying HDD or SSD, out of your vendor for $35.
The less-visible-at retail stuff like fit-and-finish, case materials, what gets to be metal and what gets to be plastic, are harder for me to comment on; but 'just $35' can likely buy you 1 'bump' in any of the major spec areas, or some additional classiness in build quality. Especially if your ass is being kicked on industrial design grounds, or user dissatisfaction with your failure prone PSUs, that's not something to dismiss lightly...
Given how much volume (if not necessarily profit) is handled by the middle tier, I'd be a bit surprised if all the major OEMs aren't having a...forceful...chat with MS right now about a licensing deal that either has more tiers, or is directly based on 'x percent of cost, capped at $y'.
It certainly makes no sense at all for a $250 device to have a $50 Windows license attached to it(regardless of what MS, or anybody else, wants); but it also isn't obviously in either MS' interest, or in the PC OEM's interest, to have an abrupt 'death zone' where the devices that fall just above the cut-off used to live.
3) non-English language support (especially Chinese and Japanese) is much better than Windows 7.
Are you a walking ad? You're concerned about support for English, Chinese, Japanese, and another language too?
Many people have no use for that particular feature; but (if you are one of the unlucky souls consigned to a need to know about the arcana of Windows licensing) it's actually somewhat notable: Language support has traditionally served as a market segmentation mechanism: can't have filthy non-corporations engaging in international arbitrage trading, now can we? So companies (including MS with earlier versions of Windows under many of their assorted licensing schemes) have tended to gimp multi-language support to greater or lesser degrees in order to keep people from being able to trade copies purchased in different areas with people in other language areas (aside from expats, and copies with the necessary language files cracked in).
Localization isn't free, so there is an argument to be made that Joe User, EN-US, is buying less software than Joe Cosmopolitan Translator of the 19 Tongues, and should pay less; but my memory is that, historically, getting additional language support in Windows has been a bit painful. It didn't come by default in the most common versions, you couldn't purchase it from them one language at a time; and you sometimes could only get what you needed by buying the 'we just threw in absolutely everything' edition, or some sort of enterprise-support-contract edition.
When somebody is talking about an allegedly 'data-driven' mechanism, hearing such...quality...statistics being used in place of actual evidence is concerning.
That's what concerns me (both about that specific quote, and about the practice generally). Anyone who thinks that students aren't acutely aware of anything useful to the noble causes of shame and bullying without adult assistance is fooling themselves. The feral little bastards certainly are. And if they aren't, they'll invent something and carry on.
The trouble is that the current fads for 'accountability' and 'data driven' and similar buzzwords tend to be severely lacking in the sort of expertise required to actually represent an improvement. Statistics is a perfectly valid field; but without expertise and care it's just bullshit with error bars. And is anybody optimistic enough to suspect that the teachers most in need of improvement are the ones who were just waiting to set loose the power of their statistics degree, rather than doing some cargo-cult implementation of 'best practices'?
Doing statistically driven work (especially given the bottomless supply of confounding variables in the social sciences) isn't easy, so the odds are less than inspiring when you see an educational fad that (allegedly) brings The Power Of Statistics to classrooms whose teachers are in dire need of reform. You really think that the teachers you are worried about are proficient in statistics? Or that the teachers who are proficient or better in statistics are the ones you need to worry about?
Barring a meltdown so clean that it probably happened in physics experiment land, I suspect that that is a very good way to send all the stuff with low vapor pressure merrily on a world atmospheric tour, along with anything that burns, forms finely divided oxide dusts, or is otherwise ill-mannered.
If they, say, had it under some sort of control, and could just let it melt under a shield gas atmosphere of their choice, they could probably call the process 'in-situ vitrification' and declare victory; but their whole problem is that they are working from a point well below that.
The drone is obviously vital to bees in the long term; but aside from mating, it takes no part in the productive activities of the hive (and, if memory serves, a queen bee needs mate only very infrequently, so each drone won't even be required to do prodigious... service along these lines.)
Based on the absence of either drone's-eye-view PETA releases or ground-level shots of triumphant hunters holding up birdshot-riddled drones, I'm inclined to think that it was two publicity seekers engaging in a codependent relationship, rather than anything actually hitting the air; but I wasn't able to authoritatively confirm or deny.
I was including those sorts of attacks. I'm, obviously, not in favor of explosives going off in crowds of civilians; but at a population level the risk of such is hanging out so far below various far more banal causes of morbidity and mortality that it just seems illogical to concern myself overmuch. It's tragic for the people who end up holding the short straw; but I'm incrementally more concerned that I might become one of the ~35,000 deaths/year caused by traffic accidents, among assorted other more-dangerous-things.
When it comes to crazy, I'm not sure that even the Russians, back in their glory days of dubiously-wise white elephant weapons have anything on Project Pluto...
I have to admire the sheer craziness with which they operated back in the day; but I can't say that I'm sorry to have missed the Cold War's greatest hits outside of playing Fallout.
As for 8-engined helicopters, my naive-because-it-isn't-his-problem! engineering assessment is that you could probably build one by bolting together enough lesser helicopters and borrowing the feedback/stability control systems from the little octocopters; but barring a contract to airlift an oil rig, assemble a prefab skyscraper like a layer cake, or some other slightly nutty project, I'm having a hard time thinking of what you would use such a monster for...
I'd hope that drone control systems are using encryption by now (though, given that military Predators and Reapers were, at least originally, being sent up with what was essentially a lightly modified satellite TV transmission system, easily attacked with the tools used for pirating satellite TV, I wouldn't bet too much money on it). As for malicious payloads... I'm glad that I'm not a VIP, and that the world is (all impressions to the contrary) apparently made largely of people who are either decent, painfully incompetent, or lazier than they are malicious.
If it were my job to guard somebody who occupies an office with, um, 'high medical turnover', I'd be shitting myself about the capabilities that drones bring to the table. Since I'm not, nor do I occupy such an office, I take comfort in the fact that bombings and similar incidents of all types are statistically well below my preference for video games and coding rather than exercise in terms of mortality risk, and that (to my knowledge) a drone has yet to be involved in such an attack, except as an agent of state force and under color of something vaguely resembling 'law'.
I'm definitely no military historian; but my understanding is that the desire for practice targets somewhat less dangerous than sending up a manned aircraft to drag a target at a (hopefull) safe distance existed at least in theory back to the dawn of the 20th century, and practical models were being built and shot at somewhere in the late '40s/early '50s at the latest(just on general principle, I'm going to assume that the Nazis came up with a scary-advanced one; but had resources enough to only build a prototype, just because that seems to be the backstory for practically everything in the air at that time...).
What I can't find (any kind soul with an institutional OED subscription?) is how 'drone' in the sense of 'parasitic, unproductive, scrounger' came to be attached to the notion of remote-controlled (or just 'light the fuse and hope the aerodynamics work out') aircraft. The connection isn't wildly counterintutive; but it also isn't immediately obvious. Just slang? Did some early model make a particularly distinctive buzzing sound? Was Sir Somebody Somebody, 3rd Earl of Something both an amateur apiarist and a crucial figure in early RAF training doctrine?
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It's not competition, it's service. The government is meant to serve the people, and sometimes that means providing utilities for the public, with the public's input and desires accommodated.
As long as we keep private enterprise from buying up the regulations anyway.
Arguably, 'internet access' can be broken down into two (broad) components, one a fairly natural 'utility' and one much easier to build a functional marketplace for.
The last-mile bit pipe between your house and whatever the local aggregation point is is, like most 'utilities' strongly inclined toward being a natural monopoly. Not as bad as something like roads(where running multiple competing roads simply wouldn't fit, in most cases); but between the cost and the disruption of laying additional runs, there is very, very strong pressure toward a sharply limited number of, typically incumbent, wireline players, with maybe a feeble wireless competitor that is compelling if you use under 5GB a month.
Once you hit the aggregation point, though, anything that flows over IP can, relatively easily, be offered for hookup to your pipe. Cheap residential ISPs, fancier offerings with loads of static IPs and symmetric bandwidth, assorted VOIP and video offerings, anything you can shove down a pipe.
Keeping the connection between me and the aggregation point installed, maintained, and lit seems like a perfectly sensible function for either the local municipality, or a suitably-tamed contract operator(It's a matter of pragmatism and local choice whether the work be done by municipal employees or an outside firm; but natural monopolies are to be kept on very short leashes). Once you hit the aggregation point, though, the more the merrier. Subscribing or unsubscribing is just a few ruleset changes, so can be fairly frictionless, and this avoids any...potentially unseemly....favor or disfavor by the municipal government toward specific content or services. They just keep the lights on, you buy what you want, or nothing at all(though, even if you buy nothing, it might well be cost-effective for the municipality itself to still offer access to its own site, emergency services contacts, etc. to residents, since traffic on the LAN costs near zero.
Some sort of metadata tag might be better. I'm pretty sure that the Unicode Consortium would object if they were informed that "Y'know planes 0-2? Those ones you've spent ages fighting about? Well, it's time to carve out three more, exactly like 0-2, except sarcastic. And no, I don't actually care whether 'line feed' or Linear B can be used for sarcastic purposes, they are getting defined anyway."
Unless they are somehow fundamentally different from civilian medical services, I'd be inclined to suspect that the arm of the VA that is doctors and hospitals may have a very different attitude than the arm that is essentially a medical insurance agency...
Especially if the fight is over some relatively large epidemiological class ('Post-Vietnam C-123 crews') potentially being blanket-added or default-denied, that would be where the cost-reduction guys come slithering out from under their rocks.
I'd be inclined to suspect that economics has more influence than culture when it comes to the 'one size fits all' aspect: the degree to which you are pretty screwed without a degree(and often with one) has reached rather alarming levels across the developed world. This creates a certain incentive for people with that option to pursue economic stability first, breed second; because their odds of achieving those things in reverse order are not pretty, and for people who lack that option, or try anyway, to enjoy some seriously adverse family-raising conditions.
A plan doesn't really need supporters when it has those sorts of mean, ugly, numbers available. Now, if the developed world is interested in having their wrinkly asses wiped by anybody other than immigrants or robots in their old age, they might want to do something about that; but barring economic change, culture warriors of any persuasion are of deeply secondary relevance.
Just in case I didn't make it sufficiently clear, I was attempting sarcasm there. The 'good old days' weren't. Hence the heavy drinking and high levels of coercive violence.
Makes you wish for the good old days, when people didn't defer marriage because the social costs of doing so were overwhelmingly high, and divorce rates were low because they were hard to get...
There are substantially more and less pleasant ways of reaching that end, with what we call 'medicine' having a considerable focus on nudging our trajectory...
If anything, killing the big, fuzzy, charismatic ones and leaving nothing but horrid insects and burbling bioslurry probably makes the naming challenge substantially more difficult. Back in the good old days, when 'biology' consisted of going out, shooting things, having the servants stuff them, and then deciding which ones looked most like the other ones, you could get away with all kinds of sloppy naming because there just weren't that many species on the table.
Now that we have these kids with their fancy 'genomes' and whatnot, you can probably identify more species within a single block of the megacity 12 slums than we did in the entire pre-genetic history of biology.
You would definitely know better than I about what it can and can't do, I'm just surprised to hear that SYSVOL replication, rather than any of the zillions of arcane MS-specific behaviors scattered across AD, would be the notable issue: Given the OSS-community love of building tools, I would have expected exactly the opposite: a situation where Samba4 plugs GPO storage and SYSVOL right into the capable hands of one or more of the modern revision control systems, offering lovely automatic versioning of all GPOs, painless replication and (mostly) painless merges, and all matter of neat stuff; but suffers some sort of painful issues somewhere else entirely.
Linux will inherit the Earth. Tremble, M$ Office paperclip.
Not that it's a real problem, Linux is a decent embedded OS(arguably markedly worse than some designed for the purpose at Hardcore Embedded Stuff; but familiarity and smooth scaling from fairly tiny embedded systems to supercomputers counts for a lot); but the 'ChromeOS' is something of a historical irony:
Remember, back in '95, when Marc Andreessen threatened that Netscape would reduce Windows to a "poorly debugged set of device drivers"? That struck MS as plausible enough that they squished Netscape as hard as they could and (slowly) got off their ass on IE development; but look upon ChromeOS, and observe the OS reduced to a set of device drivers by the browser..
iTunes is a grotesque abortion, which would make access to data on the necessary protocols and interfaces to get your non-fucked software talking to components that expect iTunes useful.
Thankfully it matters less with iDevices, now that those all have network connections of their own; but it's slightly tragic how much remains locked up from that 'iTunesU' fad, where Apple managed to convince a bunch of schools that the best podcasts are ones that you can only get to with Apple software, and which are only useful on the go with Apple hardware....
I don't see the source code for Aqua or iTunes anywhere in that link.
To Apple's credit, they do release more than they are legally obliged to (unlike the assorted assholes who will fight the SFLC to the last man over some penny-ante hack to a GPL2 package in a router probably worth less than $20 of their lawyer's hourly rate, for reasons that defy human understanding).
Of course, Apple is a practically canonical example of the (not bad, certainly pragmatic, and arguably a lot healthier than doing a lot of dumb reinventing of the wheel) 'Use OSS to lower the cost of providing production-quality implementations of commodified components, keep your actual selling points locked up tight.' strategy.
The market rate for 'eh, mostly BSD' is approximately nothing, unless it comes with expertise or customization, the market rate for everything you need to build something interoperable with OSX? You could probably buy a collection of small dusty countries for that...
As much as I'm pleased to (for the newer gear) not have to fuck around with innumerable license keys and so on, Apple licensing is actually obnoxiously inflexible, and very consumer oriented. At work, I've become the mac-wrangler-by-default because most of the rest of the department are Microsofties from way back. Fine by me, more variety, more experience, all good. And the desktop and laptop gear is pretty good. Impressive industrial design, not too many freaky issues (though opendirectory is still a pale shadow of ActiveDirectory and Group Policies. Those things can be a byzantine mess; but they sure are powerful).
However, there are some rough edges: You need to buy new gear to replace or expand an existing lab/laptop rollout? Well kid, I'm afraid that Apple's OS support is as follows: The earliest supported OS is whatever the machine shipped with. The last supported OS is the version before the version that has your model in the 'installer will refuse to try' list. Oh, you wanted to expand a lab running OSX version N-1 without upgrading the entire lab to version N? That's so sad, good luck.
Even more vexingly, Apple has largely left the server business (they don't have a single device with redundant PSUs, their 'preferred' OSX Server config is a mac mini with two HDDs); but they steadfastly refuse to simply sell licenses that 'bless' VM instances(not running on physical macs) to run OSX Server. For $1000, they'll ship me their little mini, with its two laptop drives and OSX Server; but they don't even offer a 'keep your shiny little toy and enjoy the higher margins, just let me spin an OSX VM on my institution's preexisting, high-reliability, physically-distributed, high-uptime, SAN-backed, etc, etc. VM infrastructure. We have the cores, we have the RAM (with ECC and stuff, crazy!), we have the SAN, with the fancy disk monitoring and redundancy features. Why won't you take our damn money?
At retail, $35 can get you 2GB of RAM from somebody you might actually respect, 4 from somebody who probably doesn't just sneak into competitors' factories at night to steal the stuff that failed QC...
$35 is also, depending on the phase of the moon and where you fall in AMD and Nvidia's release cycles, enough to get you bumped a tier or two in GPU capability. HDDs are a similar story, you aren't going to do anything radical for $35 bucks(say a switch form cheap 'n capacious HDD to screaming-fast SSD); but you can probably squeeze 1 'unit' of additional capacity, exactly how many gigs that is depending on the conditions of the day and whether you are buying HDD or SSD, out of your vendor for $35.
The less-visible-at retail stuff like fit-and-finish, case materials, what gets to be metal and what gets to be plastic, are harder for me to comment on; but 'just $35' can likely buy you 1 'bump' in any of the major spec areas, or some additional classiness in build quality. Especially if your ass is being kicked on industrial design grounds, or user dissatisfaction with your failure prone PSUs, that's not something to dismiss lightly...
Given how much volume (if not necessarily profit) is handled by the middle tier, I'd be a bit surprised if all the major OEMs aren't having a...forceful...chat with MS right now about a licensing deal that either has more tiers, or is directly based on 'x percent of cost, capped at $y'.
It certainly makes no sense at all for a $250 device to have a $50 Windows license attached to it(regardless of what MS, or anybody else, wants); but it also isn't obviously in either MS' interest, or in the PC OEM's interest, to have an abrupt 'death zone' where the devices that fall just above the cut-off used to live.
3) non-English language support (especially Chinese and Japanese) is much better than Windows 7.
Are you a walking ad? You're concerned about support for English, Chinese, Japanese, and another language too?
Many people have no use for that particular feature; but (if you are one of the unlucky souls consigned to a need to know about the arcana of Windows licensing) it's actually somewhat notable: Language support has traditionally served as a market segmentation mechanism: can't have filthy non-corporations engaging in international arbitrage trading, now can we? So companies (including MS with earlier versions of Windows under many of their assorted licensing schemes) have tended to gimp multi-language support to greater or lesser degrees in order to keep people from being able to trade copies purchased in different areas with people in other language areas (aside from expats, and copies with the necessary language files cracked in). Localization isn't free, so there is an argument to be made that Joe User, EN-US, is buying less software than Joe Cosmopolitan Translator of the 19 Tongues, and should pay less; but my memory is that, historically, getting additional language support in Windows has been a bit painful. It didn't come by default in the most common versions, you couldn't purchase it from them one language at a time; and you sometimes could only get what you needed by buying the 'we just threw in absolutely everything' edition, or some sort of enterprise-support-contract edition.
When somebody is talking about an allegedly 'data-driven' mechanism, hearing such...quality...statistics being used in place of actual evidence is concerning.
That's what concerns me (both about that specific quote, and about the practice generally). Anyone who thinks that students aren't acutely aware of anything useful to the noble causes of shame and bullying without adult assistance is fooling themselves. The feral little bastards certainly are. And if they aren't, they'll invent something and carry on.
The trouble is that the current fads for 'accountability' and 'data driven' and similar buzzwords tend to be severely lacking in the sort of expertise required to actually represent an improvement. Statistics is a perfectly valid field; but without expertise and care it's just bullshit with error bars. And is anybody optimistic enough to suspect that the teachers most in need of improvement are the ones who were just waiting to set loose the power of their statistics degree, rather than doing some cargo-cult implementation of 'best practices'?
Doing statistically driven work (especially given the bottomless supply of confounding variables in the social sciences) isn't easy, so the odds are less than inspiring when you see an educational fad that (allegedly) brings The Power Of Statistics to classrooms whose teachers are in dire need of reform. You really think that the teachers you are worried about are proficient in statistics? Or that the teachers who are proficient or better in statistics are the ones you need to worry about?
Barring a meltdown so clean that it probably happened in physics experiment land, I suspect that that is a very good way to send all the stuff with low vapor pressure merrily on a world atmospheric tour, along with anything that burns, forms finely divided oxide dusts, or is otherwise ill-mannered.
If they, say, had it under some sort of control, and could just let it melt under a shield gas atmosphere of their choice, they could probably call the process 'in-situ vitrification' and declare victory; but their whole problem is that they are working from a point well below that.
The drone is obviously vital to bees in the long term; but aside from mating, it takes no part in the productive activities of the hive (and, if memory serves, a queen bee needs mate only very infrequently, so each drone won't even be required to do prodigious... service along these lines.)
I don't know if they actually every did it or not; but they managed to make enough noise that illinois introduced and passed legislation intended to stop them.
Based on the absence of either drone's-eye-view PETA releases or ground-level shots of triumphant hunters holding up birdshot-riddled drones, I'm inclined to think that it was two publicity seekers engaging in a codependent relationship, rather than anything actually hitting the air; but I wasn't able to authoritatively confirm or deny.
Sounds like a problem that can be solved by invoking carbon nanotubes and abusing the engineers!
I was including those sorts of attacks. I'm, obviously, not in favor of explosives going off in crowds of civilians; but at a population level the risk of such is hanging out so far below various far more banal causes of morbidity and mortality that it just seems illogical to concern myself overmuch. It's tragic for the people who end up holding the short straw; but I'm incrementally more concerned that I might become one of the ~35,000 deaths/year caused by traffic accidents, among assorted other more-dangerous-things.
When it comes to crazy, I'm not sure that even the Russians, back in their glory days of dubiously-wise white elephant weapons have anything on Project Pluto... I have to admire the sheer craziness with which they operated back in the day; but I can't say that I'm sorry to have missed the Cold War's greatest hits outside of playing Fallout.
As for 8-engined helicopters, my naive-because-it-isn't-his-problem! engineering assessment is that you could probably build one by bolting together enough lesser helicopters and borrowing the feedback/stability control systems from the little octocopters; but barring a contract to airlift an oil rig, assemble a prefab skyscraper like a layer cake, or some other slightly nutty project, I'm having a hard time thinking of what you would use such a monster for...
I'd hope that drone control systems are using encryption by now (though, given that military Predators and Reapers were, at least originally, being sent up with what was essentially a lightly modified satellite TV transmission system, easily attacked with the tools used for pirating satellite TV, I wouldn't bet too much money on it). As for malicious payloads... I'm glad that I'm not a VIP, and that the world is (all impressions to the contrary) apparently made largely of people who are either decent, painfully incompetent, or lazier than they are malicious.
If it were my job to guard somebody who occupies an office with, um, 'high medical turnover', I'd be shitting myself about the capabilities that drones bring to the table. Since I'm not, nor do I occupy such an office, I take comfort in the fact that bombings and similar incidents of all types are statistically well below my preference for video games and coding rather than exercise in terms of mortality risk, and that (to my knowledge) a drone has yet to be involved in such an attack, except as an agent of state force and under color of something vaguely resembling 'law'.
I'm definitely no military historian; but my understanding is that the desire for practice targets somewhat less dangerous than sending up a manned aircraft to drag a target at a (hopefull) safe distance existed at least in theory back to the dawn of the 20th century, and practical models were being built and shot at somewhere in the late '40s/early '50s at the latest(just on general principle, I'm going to assume that the Nazis came up with a scary-advanced one; but had resources enough to only build a prototype, just because that seems to be the backstory for practically everything in the air at that time...).
What I can't find (any kind soul with an institutional OED subscription?) is how 'drone' in the sense of 'parasitic, unproductive, scrounger' came to be attached to the notion of remote-controlled (or just 'light the fuse and hope the aerodynamics work out') aircraft. The connection isn't wildly counterintutive; but it also isn't immediately obvious. Just slang? Did some early model make a particularly distinctive buzzing sound? Was Sir Somebody Somebody, 3rd Earl of Something both an amateur apiarist and a crucial figure in early RAF training doctrine?