The US has the largest rail network in the world BY FAR (i.e. you'd need to add the rail networks of the next 17 countries together to get just half of what the US has), the vast majority of which is devoted to freight transportation. It's already incredibly economical, but people expect fast delivery (which generally isn't feasible via rail) and you still need a way to get from railway stops out to homes, so there's a need for a lot of trucks and planes.
I decided to give the article a read to see where they got that number. I don't even know where to start with how wacky their logic is. So far as I can tell, they're tying everything around the neck of the US that they can, regardless of how tenuous the connection is.
For instance, the US "killed" 1.8M in Afghanistan, not because of our post-9/11 invasion (12K deaths), but rather because the Soviets killed that many in the '80s, and the Soviet invasion is apparently our responsibility. That's on top of the 2.5M we "killed" in Cambodia, because Pol Pot. I kid you not. As it turns out, we also killed everyone who died in the Vietnam (7.8M) and Korean (4.5M) wars, all of whom were "victims", and not a single one of which was an enemy combatant. Likewise, we "killed" 3M people as part of the 1971 genocide and civil war in Bangladesh (née East Pakistan), since the country was a Cold War ally of ours, which apparently means that we pulled the trigger ourselves.
The article brings up some valid points (e.g. El Salvador), and there's no denying that the US bears some degree of responsibility in a number of these, but the headline is sensationalist garbage and nonsensical to the extreme. Were we to apply their logic to everyone else who also bears responsibility for these events, we would have collectively "killed" far more people than were even alive since WW2, let alone than the number who actually died.
Every political opponent will now send swarms of trolls that will essentially disable the ability of any politician to reach an audience through social media.
What? No, that’s nonsense. Worst case, they’d just disable the comments section/disallow posting to their walls, which, frankly, they should be doing already. Doing so categorically would not be a problem based on this ruling, since you’d be applying the block equally to everyone.
The infamous “goto fail” bug was fixed shortly after the PRISM leaks. It had apparently been added to the codebase at the time that the NSA claimed Apple joined PRISM and was rumored to have been discovered after a code audit of everything checked in around that time. It also would have allowed everything the NSA claimed it could get from Apple.
If we applied your logic, we should do none of those things because they're all tied to bad effects on your body.
If that’s what you think my logic is, then there’s been a failure to communicate between us. I’m actually on the same page with you. I was merely pointing out the disconnect between the researchers acknowledging the known, ill effects of a sedentary lifestyle and linking those effects to this activity while simultaneously using the fact that the activity is socially accepted to dismiss those effects as harmful when they are linked to this activity.
I agree with you (and them) that the way to deal with it is through moderation, not regulation, but that doesn’t change that there’s a certain dissonance between what they’re saying and what their findings say.
But Prof Russell Viner, the college president and an author of the evidence review published in the BMJ Open journal, said that while there was moderately strong evidence that screen time is linked to obesity (through TV snacking and lack of exercise) and mental health issues, the way to tackle it was not through universal curfews and bans.
“It is important that we recognise that screens are a modern way of being,” he said. “Reading we see as a hugely positive thing, but it is largely a sedentary thing. We have never done studies to look at the link between reading and adiposity [being overweight] but it is sedentary [lifestyle]. Five hundred years ago we thought it was bad for women’s brains to teach them to read. Reading and pamphlets have radicalised a lot more young people than screens have ever done. Yet we somehow worry about screens being different.”
So, basically, we think it’s tied to obesity and mental illness, but so are other activities we accept, so it’s “not intrinsically bad”.
Also 15% of 853 million isn't 256 million its 128.
Glad someone pointed that out. Also worth noting, this only affects new subscriptions or people who let their subscriptions lapse. Existing subscriptions are unaffected, and likely will be for the foreseeable future, so it’s not as if that $128 million is drying up overnight.
Being able to build things isn't the issue. That's fine. As is learning to design those things after building enough of them. That's fine too.
But if they have a contract in place that stipulates that the parts are to be built exclusively for the client and the designs are to remain confidential, there's a problem if they start building the parts for other clients (including themselves) or sharing the designs with anyone else.
To draw an analogy, it's fine if a contractor knows how to build homes. It's fine if they eventually learn how to design their own homes after building enough of them. But if your general contractor steals your custom home's blueprints and sells them to a developer who builds a neighborhood of copycat houses right next to yours, that's not fine.
I don't know what's being alleged here, but it seems evident to me that they aren't simply talking about China learning how to manufacture and design stuff on their own.
They had to have a way to maintain their revenue from selling $20 cables, and licensing the ability to sell authorized cables. I don't know how many lightning cables I've thrown away because they worked for three months, then Apple updated IOS and blocked them.
I'm going to disagree with you before agreeing with you.
For my part, I've been buying extra Lightning cables for years—not a single one of which was from Apple—and have never run into anything like what you're describing. I purchased extras from AmazonBasics (in 2013), Fordigi (2014), iXCC (2014), Kinps (2015), and Anker (2018), as well at least one other brand whose name I can't even remember in 2018, and I've never had a single one fail to work with a new device/accessory, with other people's devices/accessories, after a software update, etc..
Moreover, you're making it sound like customers have no choice: get gouged by Apple's brand-name markup or get gouged by Apple's licensing fee markup. In truth, that's a false dichotomy that couldn't be further from reality. Those AmazonBasics cables I mentioned earlier? They were a 3-pack of 6' cables for $16, fully licensed under Apple's MFi program. And that was back in 2013. These days, you can pick up a fancy, nylon-braided, MFi-certified 5-pack of varying lengths for only $13. Hell, just look at the list I provided in the last paragraph and it should be obvious I'm price conscious since I'm hardly sticking to brand names, yet every single one of them was licensed under Apple's MFi program, which means I've had none of the problems you're describing.
All of which is to say, it sounds like you've been going out of your way to purchase the cheapest Lightning cables you can find from companies of no repute. It's been my experience that when you work that hard to scrape the bottom of the barrel, you tend to get what you paid for.
Now I'll have to buy Apple USB-C cable, and HP USB-C cables, and Lenovo USB-C cables, and Nikon USB cables, and Microsoft USB cables. And, with OEMs promiscuously relabeling each others products, I'll never know which cable to use with which devices.
That said, just because I think that things are rosier in Lightning-land than you're making them out to be does NOT mean that I disagree with anything you've said about USB-C. Quite the contrary, I share your concerns about USB-C going this route.
Lightning certification works fine because there's only one fiefdom to which everyone using Lightning belongs. You're either in, or you're out. If the cable is certified, it will work. Simple. USB-C, however, is an interoperable standard with many players in the game. Enabling them to lock each other out means taking a "universal" connection and splitting it into a multitude of incompatible connections. As you said, it's just a matter of time before we see "certified" USB-C cables that don't working with USB-C ports because they weren't certified for that port. That's a world I do not want to see.
(Aside: It's also worth pointing out that Apple hasn't been waiting on this to transition from Lightning to USB-C. The 2018 iPad Pro already had a USB-C port instead of a Lightning port, and the MacBook lines began switching to USB-C charging years ago. As such, any Apple fans thinking they're shielded from these issues are living in a bubble that's about to pop. Likewise, any Apple fans who think that Lightning works fine so USB-C will too need to realize that the two are very different.)
1Password doesn't require a subscription or an account. While the company is definitely pushing customers that direction, they haven't stopped selling one-off licenses for the latest versions of their apps. About the only major features that non-subscribers are missing are the ability to sync via 1Password's cloud service and the ability to manage vaults for teams/families. They still have locally-stored vaults with the option to manually sync via Wi-Fi or automatically sync via Dropbox/iCloud.
I agree that the embargo makes absolutely no sense, but we're missing the point if we allow this to become a conversation about whether China has an incentive to develop AI. As you said, they unequivocally do. What this is actually about is whether or not other countries will be incentivized to work with China rather than the US.
I've never worked there, but I think it's safe to say that Silicon Valley (or, more broadly, the US as a whole) is more or less at the center of the current technological revolution. Because of that, the US (all of it: government, companies, and citizens) has been able to enjoy a number of knock-on benefits. For instance, Silicon Valley draws talent at an international level, giving the US a leg up at maintaining its technological lead. Being at the forefront gives American companies a first-mover advantage in their markets, providing a head start over international competition. Being first also means that you get to define how things work as you go along, meaning that many of the technologies developed in Silicon Valley have become the de facto standards in their respective markets. Supporting the de facto standard from day one (because you invented it) also saves American companies time and effort, since they don't need to retool later to support someone else's way of doing things. And because the US is already doing all of this and is willing to share much of it, the international community (both individuals and countries) have decided to invest in Silicon Valley's efforts by using its services, adopting its technology, and sinking their own time and money into furthering Silicon Valley's R&D efforts even faster. Those investments help propel new development at a faster rate while either growing revenues or reducing the amount of US money that needs to be spent on R&D by American companies, either of which benefits the US.
TL;DR, it's a virtuous cycle: being at the front draws talent and investment, which drives down costs and speeds development, which helps the US stay at the front.
If the US makes itself less appealing by establishing an embargo, it'll keep developing these technologies just as China will, sure, but the virtuous cycle may be broken. If that cycle breaks, China may be the one that gets to enjoy the knock-on benefits, which may help place it at the front of the next wave of technological development. That's what the conversation needs to be about.
The problem with Facebook isn't its value proposition. Clearly people (though perhaps not many of us) find value in using it. The problem with Facebook is the lack of informed consent.
I have no problem with people pissing away their privacy for some additional, marginal utility. That's their prerogative. But that person has a right to understand what it means when they do so: to understand what they're giving up in exchange for what they're receiving. That's a foundational principle on which transactions are built in functioning societies.
When I pay for goods in a store, the terms of the transaction make it clear what each party is giving up: I pay $X and in exchange I receive Y item. One or both of us may not properly value what it is that we're giving up (e.g. an eBay seller listing an item far under what it's worth), but there's never a question about what's being exchanged. But when comparable transactions occur between Facebook and its users, most users aren't even aware that those transactions have occurred, let alone what they've lost in the process. That's the problem.
If people want to throw away their privacy, that's their call, but force those capitalizing on it to make it clear what that means.
Judges are going to say that there is no debt involved
Not if they want to remain a judge they won’t. This isn’t just “theory” I’m tossing around. This is centuries-old case law and precedent that is currently being practiced by the courts. The courts have already been compelling shops to accept cash if they allow debts to first be incurred, but these cases go back far further. Factories, mills, and mines used to issue their own currencies in the old days. The federal government established the current rules specifically to ensure that people weren’t locked into using some form of Monopoly money after a debt had already been incurred. Without that protection, it becomes easy to trick people into something that’s effectivly indentured servitude.
Exactly this. Already got a hairdo? Already had your salad dressed? Already drank two beers? You’re in their debt and they are legally required to accept cash as payment for that debt.
The only way to go cashless is by charging up front, before any goods or services are rendered. I.e. They can refuse the business of anyone who will pay with cash, but they can’t refuse to accept cash for any business already done. That’s why a place like Starbucks can legally go cashless, and also why a typical sit-down restaurant can’t or won’t.
Just guessing here, but I’d imagine the reason you would want to strip away those benefits for employers is because employers enjoy group bargaining power. The reason employees let their employers cover insurance is because the company can negotiate a significantly better group rate than the individual can negotiate for and by themselves.
By taking away a primary incentive for companies to cover insurance, you eliminate much of the group bargaining in the system, which should put individuals on a much more even playing field. Or, as an alternative interpretation, by taking away that incentive, you force everyone over to individual coverage, which should put individuals in a much worse bargaining position against the insurance companies.
Here’s the thing: “Christmas” is a setting, not a genre. A rock is always a rock, regardless of intent (though it may not be a seat). A Christmas film is always a Christmas film, regardless of intent (though it may not be a comedy).
There are Christmas horror movies (e.g. Gremlins, Krampus), Christmas kids’ films (e.g. Jingle All the Way, The Santa Clause), Christmas dramas (e.g. It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street), Christmas romantic films, Christmas musicals (e.g. White Christmas), Christmas action films (e.g. Iron Man 3), and many, many more. We can debate until the cows come home what genre a film belongs to, but “Christmas” movies are defined by their setting, not their tone, intent, or thematic content. The fact that each of these films firmly established that Christmas was their setting was sufficient to definitively prove that they’re each Christmas films.
So, is Die Hard set during the Christmas season? Yes? Christmas movie. Simple as that. It’s only when you misidentify Christmas as a genre that you run into subjective territory.
Exactly. You teach concepts and techniques for learning new concepts. For the most part, you only teach tools and current methods inasmuch as they're necessary for teaching the things that actually matter.
None of what's being talked about here is actually new. Between my internships, hobby projects, and professional career, I've likely put dozens of programming, scripting, markup, and query languages into use at various points, not to mention countless frameworks and stacks, a huge percentage of which didn't exist when I graduated. My university's program did a good job of preparing me for all of that by exposing me to plenty of different paradigms while ensuring that I understood the benefits and drawbacks to each of them. It would have been a waste of time to make learning the languages or frameworks the point of the class, since languages and frameworks come and go, but their concepts continue to live on. Of course, it also means that the onus was on me to pick up those languages and frameworks once I got out of school.
That's why a lot of students feel like they learn more in their first six months on the job than they ever did in four years at a university: that's how it's supposed to work. Their university education has given them the frames of reference and context they need to quickly absorb that new information and put it to quick use. You don't need a university education to do so, of course, and I think most of us know people who made it in STEM careers without a four-year degree. That said, we tend to be biased by hearing about the rare success stories while never really hearing about the multitude of people who didn't make it. The ones who did make it have always been the exception, not the rule, and that's only becoming more true with time. As these industries mature, the door that used to let people in without a degree has been closing more and more.
Browsing is generally fairly bad at achieving anything close to line speed because there are so many round trips and connections to different domains.
I think you've misidentified the cause of the problem you're seeing, not to mention the benefit you'll get from 5G.
As things stand now, your mobile browser will establish concurrent connections to each domain as soon as it becomes aware that it needs a resource from them. Those connections operate in parallel with each other, so instead of waiting on a series of "many round trips" to different domains (as was the case up until the late-90s), these days you're simply waiting on the single, slowest round trip from that entire set of connections. With the sequential round trips of yesteryear, lowering the latency had a significant impact, since you'd benefit by performance improvement * number of connections, but with parallel connections, lowering the latency only nets you a benefit of performance improvement. As such, 5G won't actually provide you with much benefit at all.
If you're seeing slow page load times, the likely culprit is that the page is using an ad network that's running on-the-fly auctions for the banner/tower ad you'll be seeing. The winners of those auctions will then sometimes run a secondary auction for that spot, and so on and so on. Those interactions happen in sequence, rather than parallel, but they're happening between entities outside of your control, with your browser simply having to wait on them to figure out whose resource you should view. At the risk of summoning APK, the proper fix for your situation is almost certainly to use a resource blocker, that way you don't even ask for that resource in the first place. I'm a big fan of uMatrix (or uBlock Origin) in my browsers, as well as pi-hole on my home network.
So, in looking into it more, it sounds like I've simply been fortunate. At least across the US, the exempt vs. non-exempt classification is handled via federal regulations set by the Department of Labor, so it should be common across most states (though individual states are permitted to have stronger protections for employees). It specifically says that computer programmers (as determined by what we're primarily doing, not our job titles) are exempt, provided we meet a certain minimum salary threshold ($455/wk or $27.36/hr).
That said, and this is kinda where I was coming from in my previous post, there's nothing saying that an employer is required to classify employees as exempt, even if they qualify. Quite the opposite, in fact: employers are welcome to classify any employee as non-exempt, but if they choose to classify an employee as exempt and a dispute later arises about that classification, the legal onus is on the employer to defend that choice.
That an employer can classify us as exempt doesn't mean they should be doing so. Employers aren't doing it for our wellbeing. They're doing it for their own.
Whoa whoa whoa. Who says you're exempt? I'm a full-time software developer and I'm not exempt. I've never been exempt. I get paid time-and-a-half for every minute over 40 hours and always have.
If your employer has you categorized as exempt and is abusing it in the ways you're suggesting, you're at a bad company, plain and simple. The only valid reason I can think of to classify a programmer as exempt is if there's an expectation that they be on call, and if that's the case, there should already be additional compensation established. Anything less and you're working at a bad place. Leave.
I hear you, and I agree that such a response would have been warranted, but at least for me my go-to response is to lean into it further when there's stuff like this. You saw me trip and fall? Watch as I get up, take an elaborate bow, and pause for your applause. Now we both have a funny story to tell and we can all laugh as the awkwardness evaporates. I have to wear a silly hat at the corporate birthday party? Watch me pick the silliest hat and proudly rock it. Feel free to tell whatever stories you want about my wearing of said silly hat. I'm fine with you sharing them and I want you to know it. To me, there's no more reason to feel shame or embarrassment over situations like these than there is reason to cry over spilt milk. My pride isn't wounded when I trip and fall or wear a silly hat, and for anyone else with their priorities in the right order, I'd expect that the same would be true.
The only difference with this variety of troll is that they're trying to introduce shame into a situation where it doesn't exist. Leaning into it just makes it obvious how dumb that notion is without stooping to their level. Trying to make me feel awkward for bringing up my wife? Let me talk about how awesome she is, because that's just about my favorite thing to do and I'm incredibly proud of her. Anyone who thinks I'd be shamed by the suggestion that I mention my wife too much clearly doesn't know me.
Most trolls are ill-suited to handle forthright responses from people with nothing to hide, particularly when those answers point back towards something lacking in the life of the troll (going back to your point regarding jealousy). They almost invariably fall apart once you put them off-balance just a bit.
Besides which, as a general rule I prefer to elevate the level of conversation, especially when someone says something that's plain dumb. I'm not perfect, so I routinely fail to do so (as recently as yesterday, in fact), but I do try. And if I can't be bothered to try, I generally just ignore them. "Don't feed the trolls" seems to work most of the time, in my experience.
Thanks! I'd have counted myself fortunate to simply meet someone of such outstanding character, beauty, integrity, humor, and intellect as my wife. Instead, however, I got to marry her. Not only that, but she's from a wonderful family. How many people actually get to say that they have great relationships with their in-laws and look forward to when they visit? Not many, from my experience, yet I'm able to do so. I'm an incredibly fortunate man.
I don't drop "my wife and I" into every post, like you're suggesting, but I do drop it into the posts where it adds something or acknowledges her role in something, just as I would with "a coworker and I" or "a friend and I". For instance, the fact that my wife and I both enjoyed videos from this YouTuber would suggest that they have a broad appeal, given that she's a "normal", not a nerd. Alternatively, if I didn't do something by myself, it only makes sense that I acknowledge the role that others played in doing that thing, rather than trying to suggest that I was capable of doing or thought to do it by myself.
Fixer Upper has done a lot for the PR of Waco, but yeah, that whole situation really tarnished the city's reputation.
My company is in the general area (a couple hours away), so I've gone to the Baylor career fair a few times. It's actually a nice enough city. It's got a good mid-sized town vibe where you feel like you could know the place inside and out without feeling like it's restrictively small. It's a shame I oftentimes still internally think of it as "Wacko" because of the Branch Davidians.
I actually just deployed pi-hole this last week for the first time (rather than buying new hardware to run it, I'm using it via Docker on the Windows box we use as our Plex server), and while the answer seems to be that it used to block those YouTube ads, right now it doesn't. At least not out of the box. There are various block lists that people have compiled that you can add to your pi-hole deployment, but blocking YouTube ads via pi-hole is a moving target, since YouTube is serving the ads up from the same servers that serve the videos, meaning that pi-hole can't easily distinguish between them.
It's still worth it, since even with content blockers (uBlock and/or uMatrix, depending on user) in all of our desktop OS browsers, we're still seeing nearly 10% of network requests getting blackholed by pi-hole. I imagine most of those are ads in mobile apps and mobile browsers.
I have to admit, when I see a “YouTube star” claiming to be a “former NASA engineer”, my first assumption is he actually shlepped technical drawings around between departments - or was in charge of keeping their monitors clean.
His Wikipedia page suggests he's a proper engineer: he has a Mechanical Engineering degree and a Masters (presumably in a related field), and he worked at JPL for 9 years, 7 of which were spent working on Curiosity.
Prior to this video, my wife and I had stumbled on a handful of his videos over the years. He's clearly a smart guy who is interested in making science and technology more fun and accessible to a wide audience. The sort of person who is capable of inspiring kids to pursue STEM. While we don't subscribe to his channel or seek his videos out, we've enjoyed the videos of his that have popped up as recommendations.
Slashdot Mirror
The US has the largest rail network in the world BY FAR (i.e. you'd need to add the rail networks of the next 17 countries together to get just half of what the US has), the vast majority of which is devoted to freight transportation. It's already incredibly economical, but people expect fast delivery (which generally isn't feasible via rail) and you still need a way to get from railway stops out to homes, so there's a need for a lot of trucks and planes.
I decided to give the article a read to see where they got that number. I don't even know where to start with how wacky their logic is. So far as I can tell, they're tying everything around the neck of the US that they can, regardless of how tenuous the connection is.
For instance, the US "killed" 1.8M in Afghanistan, not because of our post-9/11 invasion (12K deaths), but rather because the Soviets killed that many in the '80s, and the Soviet invasion is apparently our responsibility. That's on top of the 2.5M we "killed" in Cambodia, because Pol Pot. I kid you not. As it turns out, we also killed everyone who died in the Vietnam (7.8M) and Korean (4.5M) wars, all of whom were "victims", and not a single one of which was an enemy combatant. Likewise, we "killed" 3M people as part of the 1971 genocide and civil war in Bangladesh (née East Pakistan), since the country was a Cold War ally of ours, which apparently means that we pulled the trigger ourselves.
The article brings up some valid points (e.g. El Salvador), and there's no denying that the US bears some degree of responsibility in a number of these, but the headline is sensationalist garbage and nonsensical to the extreme. Were we to apply their logic to everyone else who also bears responsibility for these events, we would have collectively "killed" far more people than were even alive since WW2, let alone than the number who actually died.
Every political opponent will now send swarms of trolls that will essentially disable the ability of any politician to reach an audience through social media.
What? No, that’s nonsense. Worst case, they’d just disable the comments section/disallow posting to their walls, which, frankly, they should be doing already. Doing so categorically would not be a problem based on this ruling, since you’d be applying the block equally to everyone.
The infamous “goto fail” bug was fixed shortly after the PRISM leaks. It had apparently been added to the codebase at the time that the NSA claimed Apple joined PRISM and was rumored to have been discovered after a code audit of everything checked in around that time. It also would have allowed everything the NSA claimed it could get from Apple.
If we applied your logic, we should do none of those things because they're all tied to bad effects on your body.
If that’s what you think my logic is, then there’s been a failure to communicate between us. I’m actually on the same page with you. I was merely pointing out the disconnect between the researchers acknowledging the known, ill effects of a sedentary lifestyle and linking those effects to this activity while simultaneously using the fact that the activity is socially accepted to dismiss those effects as harmful when they are linked to this activity.
I agree with you (and them) that the way to deal with it is through moderation, not regulation, but that doesn’t change that there’s a certain dissonance between what they’re saying and what their findings say.
There’s this quote later in the article:
But Prof Russell Viner, the college president and an author of the evidence review published in the BMJ Open journal, said that while there was moderately strong evidence that screen time is linked to obesity (through TV snacking and lack of exercise) and mental health issues, the way to tackle it was not through universal curfews and bans.
“It is important that we recognise that screens are a modern way of being,” he said. “Reading we see as a hugely positive thing, but it is largely a sedentary thing. We have never done studies to look at the link between reading and adiposity [being overweight] but it is sedentary [lifestyle]. Five hundred years ago we thought it was bad for women’s brains to teach them to read. Reading and pamphlets have radicalised a lot more young people than screens have ever done. Yet we somehow worry about screens being different.”
So, basically, we think it’s tied to obesity and mental illness, but so are other activities we accept, so it’s “not intrinsically bad”.
Also 15% of 853 million isn't 256 million its 128.
Glad someone pointed that out. Also worth noting, this only affects new subscriptions or people who let their subscriptions lapse. Existing subscriptions are unaffected, and likely will be for the foreseeable future, so it’s not as if that $128 million is drying up overnight.
Being able to build things isn't the issue. That's fine. As is learning to design those things after building enough of them. That's fine too.
But if they have a contract in place that stipulates that the parts are to be built exclusively for the client and the designs are to remain confidential, there's a problem if they start building the parts for other clients (including themselves) or sharing the designs with anyone else.
To draw an analogy, it's fine if a contractor knows how to build homes. It's fine if they eventually learn how to design their own homes after building enough of them. But if your general contractor steals your custom home's blueprints and sells them to a developer who builds a neighborhood of copycat houses right next to yours, that's not fine.
I don't know what's being alleged here, but it seems evident to me that they aren't simply talking about China learning how to manufacture and design stuff on their own.
They had to have a way to maintain their revenue from selling $20 cables, and licensing the ability to sell authorized cables. I don't know how many lightning cables I've thrown away because they worked for three months, then Apple updated IOS and blocked them.
I'm going to disagree with you before agreeing with you.
For my part, I've been buying extra Lightning cables for years—not a single one of which was from Apple—and have never run into anything like what you're describing. I purchased extras from AmazonBasics (in 2013), Fordigi (2014), iXCC (2014), Kinps (2015), and Anker (2018), as well at least one other brand whose name I can't even remember in 2018, and I've never had a single one fail to work with a new device/accessory, with other people's devices/accessories, after a software update, etc..
Moreover, you're making it sound like customers have no choice: get gouged by Apple's brand-name markup or get gouged by Apple's licensing fee markup. In truth, that's a false dichotomy that couldn't be further from reality. Those AmazonBasics cables I mentioned earlier? They were a 3-pack of 6' cables for $16, fully licensed under Apple's MFi program. And that was back in 2013. These days, you can pick up a fancy, nylon-braided, MFi-certified 5-pack of varying lengths for only $13. Hell, just look at the list I provided in the last paragraph and it should be obvious I'm price conscious since I'm hardly sticking to brand names, yet every single one of them was licensed under Apple's MFi program, which means I've had none of the problems you're describing.
All of which is to say, it sounds like you've been going out of your way to purchase the cheapest Lightning cables you can find from companies of no repute. It's been my experience that when you work that hard to scrape the bottom of the barrel, you tend to get what you paid for.
Now I'll have to buy Apple USB-C cable, and HP USB-C cables, and Lenovo USB-C cables, and Nikon USB cables, and Microsoft USB cables. And, with OEMs promiscuously relabeling each others products, I'll never know which cable to use with which devices.
That said, just because I think that things are rosier in Lightning-land than you're making them out to be does NOT mean that I disagree with anything you've said about USB-C. Quite the contrary, I share your concerns about USB-C going this route.
Lightning certification works fine because there's only one fiefdom to which everyone using Lightning belongs. You're either in, or you're out. If the cable is certified, it will work. Simple. USB-C, however, is an interoperable standard with many players in the game. Enabling them to lock each other out means taking a "universal" connection and splitting it into a multitude of incompatible connections. As you said, it's just a matter of time before we see "certified" USB-C cables that don't working with USB-C ports because they weren't certified for that port. That's a world I do not want to see.
(Aside: It's also worth pointing out that Apple hasn't been waiting on this to transition from Lightning to USB-C. The 2018 iPad Pro already had a USB-C port instead of a Lightning port, and the MacBook lines began switching to USB-C charging years ago. As such, any Apple fans thinking they're shielded from these issues are living in a bubble that's about to pop. Likewise, any Apple fans who think that Lightning works fine so USB-C will too need to realize that the two are very different.)
1Password doesn't require a subscription or an account. While the company is definitely pushing customers that direction, they haven't stopped selling one-off licenses for the latest versions of their apps. About the only major features that non-subscribers are missing are the ability to sync via 1Password's cloud service and the ability to manage vaults for teams/families. They still have locally-stored vaults with the option to manually sync via Wi-Fi or automatically sync via Dropbox/iCloud.
I agree that the embargo makes absolutely no sense, but we're missing the point if we allow this to become a conversation about whether China has an incentive to develop AI. As you said, they unequivocally do. What this is actually about is whether or not other countries will be incentivized to work with China rather than the US.
I've never worked there, but I think it's safe to say that Silicon Valley (or, more broadly, the US as a whole) is more or less at the center of the current technological revolution. Because of that, the US (all of it: government, companies, and citizens) has been able to enjoy a number of knock-on benefits. For instance, Silicon Valley draws talent at an international level, giving the US a leg up at maintaining its technological lead. Being at the forefront gives American companies a first-mover advantage in their markets, providing a head start over international competition. Being first also means that you get to define how things work as you go along, meaning that many of the technologies developed in Silicon Valley have become the de facto standards in their respective markets. Supporting the de facto standard from day one (because you invented it) also saves American companies time and effort, since they don't need to retool later to support someone else's way of doing things. And because the US is already doing all of this and is willing to share much of it, the international community (both individuals and countries) have decided to invest in Silicon Valley's efforts by using its services, adopting its technology, and sinking their own time and money into furthering Silicon Valley's R&D efforts even faster. Those investments help propel new development at a faster rate while either growing revenues or reducing the amount of US money that needs to be spent on R&D by American companies, either of which benefits the US.
TL;DR, it's a virtuous cycle: being at the front draws talent and investment, which drives down costs and speeds development, which helps the US stay at the front.
If the US makes itself less appealing by establishing an embargo, it'll keep developing these technologies just as China will, sure, but the virtuous cycle may be broken. If that cycle breaks, China may be the one that gets to enjoy the knock-on benefits, which may help place it at the front of the next wave of technological development. That's what the conversation needs to be about.
The problem with Facebook isn't its value proposition. Clearly people (though perhaps not many of us) find value in using it. The problem with Facebook is the lack of informed consent.
I have no problem with people pissing away their privacy for some additional, marginal utility. That's their prerogative. But that person has a right to understand what it means when they do so: to understand what they're giving up in exchange for what they're receiving. That's a foundational principle on which transactions are built in functioning societies.
When I pay for goods in a store, the terms of the transaction make it clear what each party is giving up: I pay $X and in exchange I receive Y item. One or both of us may not properly value what it is that we're giving up (e.g. an eBay seller listing an item far under what it's worth), but there's never a question about what's being exchanged. But when comparable transactions occur between Facebook and its users, most users aren't even aware that those transactions have occurred, let alone what they've lost in the process. That's the problem.
If people want to throw away their privacy, that's their call, but force those capitalizing on it to make it clear what that means.
Judges are going to say that there is no debt involved
Not if they want to remain a judge they won’t. This isn’t just “theory” I’m tossing around. This is centuries-old case law and precedent that is currently being practiced by the courts. The courts have already been compelling shops to accept cash if they allow debts to first be incurred, but these cases go back far further. Factories, mills, and mines used to issue their own currencies in the old days. The federal government established the current rules specifically to ensure that people weren’t locked into using some form of Monopoly money after a debt had already been incurred. Without that protection, it becomes easy to trick people into something that’s effectivly indentured servitude.
Exactly this. Already got a hairdo? Already had your salad dressed? Already drank two beers? You’re in their debt and they are legally required to accept cash as payment for that debt.
The only way to go cashless is by charging up front, before any goods or services are rendered. I.e. They can refuse the business of anyone who will pay with cash, but they can’t refuse to accept cash for any business already done. That’s why a place like Starbucks can legally go cashless, and also why a typical sit-down restaurant can’t or won’t.
Just guessing here, but I’d imagine the reason you would want to strip away those benefits for employers is because employers enjoy group bargaining power. The reason employees let their employers cover insurance is because the company can negotiate a significantly better group rate than the individual can negotiate for and by themselves.
By taking away a primary incentive for companies to cover insurance, you eliminate much of the group bargaining in the system, which should put individuals on a much more even playing field. Or, as an alternative interpretation, by taking away that incentive, you force everyone over to individual coverage, which should put individuals in a much worse bargaining position against the insurance companies.
Here’s the thing: “Christmas” is a setting, not a genre. A rock is always a rock, regardless of intent (though it may not be a seat). A Christmas film is always a Christmas film, regardless of intent (though it may not be a comedy).
There are Christmas horror movies (e.g. Gremlins, Krampus), Christmas kids’ films (e.g. Jingle All the Way, The Santa Clause), Christmas dramas (e.g. It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street), Christmas romantic films, Christmas musicals (e.g. White Christmas), Christmas action films (e.g. Iron Man 3), and many, many more. We can debate until the cows come home what genre a film belongs to, but “Christmas” movies are defined by their setting, not their tone, intent, or thematic content. The fact that each of these films firmly established that Christmas was their setting was sufficient to definitively prove that they’re each Christmas films.
So, is Die Hard set during the Christmas season? Yes? Christmas movie. Simple as that. It’s only when you misidentify Christmas as a genre that you run into subjective territory.
Exactly. You teach concepts and techniques for learning new concepts. For the most part, you only teach tools and current methods inasmuch as they're necessary for teaching the things that actually matter.
None of what's being talked about here is actually new. Between my internships, hobby projects, and professional career, I've likely put dozens of programming, scripting, markup, and query languages into use at various points, not to mention countless frameworks and stacks, a huge percentage of which didn't exist when I graduated. My university's program did a good job of preparing me for all of that by exposing me to plenty of different paradigms while ensuring that I understood the benefits and drawbacks to each of them. It would have been a waste of time to make learning the languages or frameworks the point of the class, since languages and frameworks come and go, but their concepts continue to live on. Of course, it also means that the onus was on me to pick up those languages and frameworks once I got out of school.
That's why a lot of students feel like they learn more in their first six months on the job than they ever did in four years at a university: that's how it's supposed to work. Their university education has given them the frames of reference and context they need to quickly absorb that new information and put it to quick use. You don't need a university education to do so, of course, and I think most of us know people who made it in STEM careers without a four-year degree. That said, we tend to be biased by hearing about the rare success stories while never really hearing about the multitude of people who didn't make it. The ones who did make it have always been the exception, not the rule, and that's only becoming more true with time. As these industries mature, the door that used to let people in without a degree has been closing more and more.
Browsing is generally fairly bad at achieving anything close to line speed because there are so many round trips and connections to different domains.
I think you've misidentified the cause of the problem you're seeing, not to mention the benefit you'll get from 5G.
As things stand now, your mobile browser will establish concurrent connections to each domain as soon as it becomes aware that it needs a resource from them. Those connections operate in parallel with each other, so instead of waiting on a series of "many round trips" to different domains (as was the case up until the late-90s), these days you're simply waiting on the single, slowest round trip from that entire set of connections. With the sequential round trips of yesteryear, lowering the latency had a significant impact, since you'd benefit by performance improvement * number of connections, but with parallel connections, lowering the latency only nets you a benefit of performance improvement. As such, 5G won't actually provide you with much benefit at all.
If you're seeing slow page load times, the likely culprit is that the page is using an ad network that's running on-the-fly auctions for the banner/tower ad you'll be seeing. The winners of those auctions will then sometimes run a secondary auction for that spot, and so on and so on. Those interactions happen in sequence, rather than parallel, but they're happening between entities outside of your control, with your browser simply having to wait on them to figure out whose resource you should view. At the risk of summoning APK, the proper fix for your situation is almost certainly to use a resource blocker, that way you don't even ask for that resource in the first place. I'm a big fan of uMatrix (or uBlock Origin) in my browsers, as well as pi-hole on my home network.
So, in looking into it more, it sounds like I've simply been fortunate. At least across the US, the exempt vs. non-exempt classification is handled via federal regulations set by the Department of Labor, so it should be common across most states (though individual states are permitted to have stronger protections for employees). It specifically says that computer programmers (as determined by what we're primarily doing, not our job titles) are exempt, provided we meet a certain minimum salary threshold ($455/wk or $27.36/hr).
That said, and this is kinda where I was coming from in my previous post, there's nothing saying that an employer is required to classify employees as exempt, even if they qualify. Quite the opposite, in fact: employers are welcome to classify any employee as non-exempt, but if they choose to classify an employee as exempt and a dispute later arises about that classification, the legal onus is on the employer to defend that choice.
That an employer can classify us as exempt doesn't mean they should be doing so. Employers aren't doing it for our wellbeing. They're doing it for their own.
Try being a programmer. You're exempt [...]
Whoa whoa whoa. Who says you're exempt? I'm a full-time software developer and I'm not exempt. I've never been exempt. I get paid time-and-a-half for every minute over 40 hours and always have.
If your employer has you categorized as exempt and is abusing it in the ways you're suggesting, you're at a bad company, plain and simple. The only valid reason I can think of to classify a programmer as exempt is if there's an expectation that they be on call, and if that's the case, there should already be additional compensation established. Anything less and you're working at a bad place. Leave.
I hear you, and I agree that such a response would have been warranted, but at least for me my go-to response is to lean into it further when there's stuff like this. You saw me trip and fall? Watch as I get up, take an elaborate bow, and pause for your applause. Now we both have a funny story to tell and we can all laugh as the awkwardness evaporates. I have to wear a silly hat at the corporate birthday party? Watch me pick the silliest hat and proudly rock it. Feel free to tell whatever stories you want about my wearing of said silly hat. I'm fine with you sharing them and I want you to know it. To me, there's no more reason to feel shame or embarrassment over situations like these than there is reason to cry over spilt milk. My pride isn't wounded when I trip and fall or wear a silly hat, and for anyone else with their priorities in the right order, I'd expect that the same would be true.
The only difference with this variety of troll is that they're trying to introduce shame into a situation where it doesn't exist. Leaning into it just makes it obvious how dumb that notion is without stooping to their level. Trying to make me feel awkward for bringing up my wife? Let me talk about how awesome she is, because that's just about my favorite thing to do and I'm incredibly proud of her. Anyone who thinks I'd be shamed by the suggestion that I mention my wife too much clearly doesn't know me.
Most trolls are ill-suited to handle forthright responses from people with nothing to hide, particularly when those answers point back towards something lacking in the life of the troll (going back to your point regarding jealousy). They almost invariably fall apart once you put them off-balance just a bit.
Besides which, as a general rule I prefer to elevate the level of conversation, especially when someone says something that's plain dumb. I'm not perfect, so I routinely fail to do so (as recently as yesterday, in fact), but I do try. And if I can't be bothered to try, I generally just ignore them. "Don't feed the trolls" seems to work most of the time, in my experience.
Thanks! I'd have counted myself fortunate to simply meet someone of such outstanding character, beauty, integrity, humor, and intellect as my wife. Instead, however, I got to marry her. Not only that, but she's from a wonderful family. How many people actually get to say that they have great relationships with their in-laws and look forward to when they visit? Not many, from my experience, yet I'm able to do so. I'm an incredibly fortunate man.
I don't drop "my wife and I" into every post, like you're suggesting, but I do drop it into the posts where it adds something or acknowledges her role in something, just as I would with "a coworker and I" or "a friend and I". For instance, the fact that my wife and I both enjoyed videos from this YouTuber would suggest that they have a broad appeal, given that she's a "normal", not a nerd. Alternatively, if I didn't do something by myself, it only makes sense that I acknowledge the role that others played in doing that thing, rather than trying to suggest that I was capable of doing or thought to do it by myself.
Fixer Upper has done a lot for the PR of Waco, but yeah, that whole situation really tarnished the city's reputation.
My company is in the general area (a couple hours away), so I've gone to the Baylor career fair a few times. It's actually a nice enough city. It's got a good mid-sized town vibe where you feel like you could know the place inside and out without feeling like it's restrictively small. It's a shame I oftentimes still internally think of it as "Wacko" because of the Branch Davidians.
I actually just deployed pi-hole this last week for the first time (rather than buying new hardware to run it, I'm using it via Docker on the Windows box we use as our Plex server), and while the answer seems to be that it used to block those YouTube ads, right now it doesn't. At least not out of the box. There are various block lists that people have compiled that you can add to your pi-hole deployment, but blocking YouTube ads via pi-hole is a moving target, since YouTube is serving the ads up from the same servers that serve the videos, meaning that pi-hole can't easily distinguish between them.
It's still worth it, since even with content blockers (uBlock and/or uMatrix, depending on user) in all of our desktop OS browsers, we're still seeing nearly 10% of network requests getting blackholed by pi-hole. I imagine most of those are ads in mobile apps and mobile browsers.
I have to admit, when I see a “YouTube star” claiming to be a “former NASA engineer”, my first assumption is he actually shlepped technical drawings around between departments - or was in charge of keeping their monitors clean.
His Wikipedia page suggests he's a proper engineer: he has a Mechanical Engineering degree and a Masters (presumably in a related field), and he worked at JPL for 9 years, 7 of which were spent working on Curiosity.
Prior to this video, my wife and I had stumbled on a handful of his videos over the years. He's clearly a smart guy who is interested in making science and technology more fun and accessible to a wide audience. The sort of person who is capable of inspiring kids to pursue STEM. While we don't subscribe to his channel or seek his videos out, we've enjoyed the videos of his that have popped up as recommendations.