I've known people who have been pretty savagely hooked on WoW or other MMOs, but I strongly suspect video game addiction isnt a disease, its a symptom of something deeper like social anxieties (Easier to grind dungeons than make IRL friends), poor executive cognitive function (Ie being garbage at making life priorities and staying on task) or depression.
Well if you draw a parallel to alcoholism then escapism, depression, anxiety etc. are common causes to start drinking too much, but once you have problems to stop I'd say that's its own condition not merely a symptom.
But a stand-alone mental disorder? How do you even define that, whats the cut off point and why. Seems spurious to me.
Not any harder than any other addiction, looking for an exact cut-off point is like trying to find the one beer that makes you an alcoholic. The TL;DR version is "Are you throwing away your life to satisfy an addiction?"
The question is more whether this is a unique form of addiction and has some meaningful difference in the mechanisms and treatments than other forms. A drug addiction has an obvious physical component. A gambling addiction has an economic component. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is kinda an addiction to do the same thing over and over again. I suppose the main difference with a gaming addiction is that you receive constant validation and encouragement to game more and you're rewarded for it both by the game and your gaming peers. Out there friends, family, work, school etc. is going to shit but in here you're important and successful. I think the closest parallel - and the biggest reason it probably won't become a disorder - is to joining a cult. Because doing pretty much the same to join some wacky religious fanatic is not a mental disorder...
I don`t trust Unicode to run natively on any systems that I manage. Of course, those systems support Unicode at the application level if needed although.
Uh, what? Unicode is a data format, it's not something you can run. Because it tries to be everything for everyone it's unfortunately a very big and complex standard, but it essentially boils down to:
1. Graphic characters (136,537) 2. Format characters (153) 3. Control characters (65) 4. Private use areas
The graphic characters are basically a very big version of your ABC's. Yes, it's all languages living and dead and symbols and emojis and whatever but the worst you can do with those are create better ASCII art or rather non-ASCII art. Format and control characters are the only ones you need to really care about and honestly all you need is a simple filter to strip all except those you want. For example if you strip all of them you can't do line breaks, that one is nice to have in the comment box but maybe not in the subject. This is also where you have the infamous right-to-left indicators and everything else "dangerous".
And strip everything else that's private or unassigned, obviously. Seriously, the way/. fumbled the ball on this many, many years was a rookie mistake in input validation and it was like once bitten, twice shy ever since. Sure, that could invite more trash posts but that's more the job of the lameness filter & moderation. And then maybe/. could move out of the 90s and we could actually write delta-v with an actual delta. Or abbreviate micrometers. Or paste a quote with a long dash or those curly quotes and not have them show up as trash. Seriously, the code is a relic.
Yes, if an account consistently downvotes far more than upvotes they should receive even less mod points. We need to mod up what is good or important, not downvote what we don't like. This promotes more discussion instead of burying comments.
I almost exclusively vote down. That's because I generally want to get back to posting while moderating I feel is more janitor duty, your time to take out the trash. It's quick and easy to pick a discussion you want to sit out, find a bunch of shit posts that undoubtedly belong at -1 and mod them to oblivion. It's a valid use of mod points and you'd definitely notice if we stopped doing it. I might mod up some good posts in the process, but that's more incidental. I don't want to mod things as insightful, informative or interesting just because they're not a GNAA troll or goatse link. I think it's more important that you can read posts at +2/+1/0 without a steaming pile of garbage than whether it's at +3 or +5 or at least that modding up and down is complementary.
I've tried it at a friend's house and I think the biggest problem is what you'd do as a player. I mean realistically you're trapped in a very small box so it's either some variation of DDR where you do things on the spot which gets tiresome really fast or it's a simulator where you're in the driver/pilot's seat. And for the latter curved wide screens would get me most of the way there. I mean the cool thing is the motion tracking but it's mostly limited to duck and cover and peeking around corners. You can't run around like it's some paintball match, 99.9% of us just don't have the space. I still haven't seen any VR concept I'd consider playing for more than like 10-15 minutes.
Middle America (working class) has been screwed over by globalisation. It was not intentional, but that's what happened. This is why you have a Trump in the White House. And don't think it can't get a lot worse. At least right now people do still have jobs. Shitty casual jobs.
Well, globalization meant a bunch of dirt cheap labor came on the market. But it's not so dirt cheap anymore. Just look at this graph, average wage in China: 29229 CNY/year -> 67569 CNY/year from 2008 to 2016. I found one recent forecast that says it's roughly 76300 now. If you look at the same figures for the US though these are hourly not yearly it's about $17.8 -> $22.3 from 2008 to 2018. You also need to pair this up with some inflation numbers but long story short "third world manufacturing" is closing the cost gap pretty quick. 76300 CNY = $12k USD, pretty soon you're approaching US minimum wage levels.
Adobe screwed it up big time. They should've FOSSed it when the touch-mobile revolution started - that was their last chance. Flash is dead and Adobe alone is to blame.
Yeah.. on the other hand, Adobe didn't really have a business model to go with it. It's a bit like Java, you can say that OpenJDK is what makes Java still relevant but Sun is dead. When it comes down to it most companies aren't that concerned with the greater good and leaving a legacy if they won't be around to benefit from it. Not making any moral judgement but economically they seem to be quite profitable with their proprietary cloud-ware, so I don't think Adobe regrets the horse they bet on.
While I agree the cost of an ambulance ride is ridiculous, the amount that's charged is actually in line with what it costs to operate one. Ambulances cost about a quarter million dollars to purchase and outfit. So right off the bat you're at 10x the cost of a private car used for taxi services. Then you have to pay for the labor costs of two, sometimes three EMTs aboard instead of a single driver. And you're amortizing all this over a lot fewer rides per day than a taxi service. So it actually makes sense that they cost several tens of times more than a taxi service.
Agreed, here in Norway we have socialized healthcare so calling an ambulance is free, but even over public budgets it costs 10x of a taxi. Unless you're in need of urgent medical treatment, supervision or has to lay flat they ask you to take a taxi. If you're well enough to sit up, that's generally enough. I just checked here in Norway, last year ambulances did 1.064 million hours on assignment in a population of 5.26 million so that's 12 minutes/person. And that's including assignments that fizzle into not actually needing an ambulance and the transport assignments that often eat up the hours, they divide the number of assignments in three (emergency/urgent/normal) but not the hours.
Charging for an ambulance is a bit like billing a boxing match by the hour and then have a KO in round one. It's like the faster and shorter the better the service is but as a billable rate you have a ton of very expensive equipment and highly trained staff to give tiny, tiny bursts of medical expertise. I live in an urban area, 74% of the time there's an ambulance here within 12 minutes of calling for it. That's an especially equipped car with trained staff, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It's not the pizza delivery guy who'll be here within one hour during opening hours, staffed with any teen with a driver's license using any car. It's a bit like asking why the difference between 99% and 99,99999% uptime is so much... it's only 1% right?
Just update the EULA with a fine print that nobody can read to say, "uber is not an ambulance service. Please do use uber instead of ambulance". You get to keep all the cool cash. But no liability! Hey, it worked with "uber is not a taxi company" schtick, why not now?
Many countries including the US have Good Samaritan laws that compel bystanders to help in a medical emergency, it's got nothing specifically to do with being an Uber driver so you can't dismiss that responsibility through terms and conditions. That said I don't think there's any legal risk to Uber drivers, lots of people go to the hospital for various non-critical conditions and if a critical condition should occur you dial 911. I mean it could just as well be a random passenger on a random trip having a heart attack, granted a person in poor health going to the hospital to get checked out is a higher risk passenger, but in principle it's no different. It's just a risk of driving a taxi, like a drunk person barfing full the back seat.
Thanks! I looked at their website and noticed that the "supported engines" list included CryEngines, UX3D, Unity, Unreal, and Source. Does this mean these engines already use Vulkan instead of OpenGL, or that they can be configured to do so by the developer?
Configured to do so, game engines generally try to abstract away the underlying graphics system for game developers. In fact you might say the rise of a few dominant game engines is the main reason why we now make drivers with low-level access. To attempt to very briefly recap history:
1. All graphics card did their own thing 2. Some standards emerged, primarily OpenGL and DirectX. 3. Game developers built directly on OpenGL/DirectX 4. OpenGL had an early lead but Microsoft made DirectX dominant 5. Game engines increase in complexity, do much more than graphics 6. Most game developers develop on top of a game engine 7. Game engine developers want more direct access to hardware 8. DirectX12/Vulkan/Metal (and also Mantle, now dead) offer lower level access
You could say the market flipped, through most of the 90s and 00s game developers definitively wanted the OS to do more so they could do less and develop games faster. But as the market matured they didn't want just a graphics stack, they wanted a whole game engine they could fill with content. And the abstractions the OS makers had made became more of a hindrance than an aid to game engine developers, they wanted to do their own low level code and create abstractions that integrated better with their engine.
Another way of putting is also that on the CPU side you have assembler. Granted there's a few flavors like x86, ARM and PowerPC but they all have very basic operations like 2+2. Graphics never had a really low level language like that, they implemented higher level constructs all their own way. Much of that is because a lot of early graphics card was fixed function, it's only in modern times they have become programmable mini-processors. And this is kinda their assembler-level language.
When you have a scale of well... "ideal" to "non-ideal" means of transport where say the least ideal is single person in a big gas guzzling SUV and the most ideal is someone walking/cycling everywhere they go that ideal is too impractical for most. So you start having HOV lanes and EV credits and bus/tram/train lines and taxis and every time you add something "in between" there's the risk that more people choose to slide down the scale than up the scale. And then there's the question of how much hassle it is the times you do have requirements out of the ordinary.
So yes, people pick an Uber instead of taking the bus. But if there was never an Uber, would they just say fuck it and buy a private car and use that instead? I remember quite a few years back around here they were trying hard to traffic shape public transport, cutting lines with few people. Which lead to two problems, one was irregular hours the other was that if you missed that bus it'd be forever to the next one. They were losing customers left and right and everybody was unhappy. Eventually they got a management with a clue that figured this out.
They started having like minimum frequencies, like this is a 15 minute line and this is a 30 minute line and from like "opening hours" in the morning to "closing hours" at night it'd run, even though many trips had few passengers. What happened? Lots of customers returned because they didn't have to plan so much and it worked even if they needed to odd routes at odd times and they could rely on never waiting *that* long. I'm kinda thinking the same here, is Uber the problem or Uber what makes the rest work. You need some grease in the system even if it's not the "ideal" solution.
I don't think you can teach then to write "better" code, like the actual ability to break an task into programmatic steps. While you could learn some useful algorithms and patterns that's a long topic and more something you get with experience. What I would focus on is a self-taught programmer has probably mostly worked alone, written all the code themselves and done relatively small projects with a limited lifespan and a lot of greenfield projects where you deliver version 1.0 in the end. This may not be true like if they've been part of a big OSS project, but in general think it's true.
So the first thing I'd take a round on is developing software as a team, both in terms of process and in terms of code. These days I'd probably just skip the check out/check in and go straight to branch/merge and how to develop in your sandbox, when you got something working you make a pull request or push it to the master branch. The code part would be about interfaces and "edge" documentation, that some might study your implementation but most simply want to call your code and know what to expect.
As part of this you should also talk about clear and meaningful naming, how your code should not have unexpected side effects and that your code should not expect everyone to understand how to use it correctly. That it's your job to make sure bad input is rejected properly and doesn't crash the whole system, as that's generally not acceptable in a multi-user system or as a small function in a big program. That goes for other developers calling it wrong, bad data from users, other services or hackers and includes writing test cases with both "normal" input, edge cases and bad input.
Finally you should talk about long term maintenance and running production systems. It goes back to documentation, you got handed down code from your predecessor and you'll be handing down to your successor. Don't expect people will be there to answer questions or explain indefinitely, it can even be you coming back to the same code years later. Requirements change and expand, you need test cases to make sure you didn't break things that used to work. You need to know what code branches are in production and how to patch those in parallel with developing new code.
I think those are the essentials, there's still the issue if the actual code is good or not but it's like trying to lecture someone on how to be a chef. It needs the right amount of cooking and the right amount of seasoning, sometimes you're plain doing it wrong other times you're just overdoing it. Lectures may expand the toolbox but it takes experience to apply the right tool the right way in a given situation. And there's usually more than one solution, some more elegant than others.
You don't sign for things up here unless there's a widespread terminal failure and the company still has an old fashioned carbon-copy style credit device available.
You only need a carbon-copy device if the power is out or all your terminals are broken and if the power is out there's no lights so most likely the store will close. It's far more common that the Internet connection is down, then it goes into offline mode where instead of the regular receipt it spits out a bill that I sign on, at least that's the way it works here in Norway. I'm not sure if they send it electronically later when it reconnects and the signatures are just for disputes or if the store needs to deliver the paper bills to the bank, but cards eventually get charged and usually everybody is happy.
When that happens the store is on the hook for fraud as you could potentially use a debit card with no money or a credit card in excess of the limit. I'm not sure if they have offline blacklists for blocked cards, so potentially stolen cards too. But unless you're running around with wire cutters that's not something a fraudster can plan for and it's up to the store to get it fixed in a timely manner or invest in redundant connections or simply refuse large/all transactions. Tough in practice I've never been refused in ages, except when the office cafeteria's single terminal was broken. But they took IOUs on a piece of paper...
That "-1, Overrated" mod really should be replaced with "-1, I disagree but I got no arguments or facts to contradict you with so I'll just try to silence you". Ah well...
And yet mortgages, which are, as far as I can see, also contracts, are bought and sold routinely. My mortgage for example was sold twice, and I was never consulted at my end of the agreement. There are whole industries built around the buying and selling of contracts - futures, insurance, student loans, mortgages.
If you can get the other party to agree to it, sure. If you got the market power to put in your boilerplate agreement that you can transfer the loan then you can. That is if it's actually sold and not pass-through, like I can quasi-sell that debt for $x now and agree to forward all future payments to you. As long as you remain a legal entity in the middle you don't need permission for that.
The whole point is that corporations are trying to take away the ability of letting consumers decide.
Well, in the past you were mostly concerned with the quality of the repair and we've had that whole run with third party parts and uncertified labor. Unfortunately with a lot of modern gadgets it's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's also a Trojan horse. Like, whatever the customer wanted fixed is fixed, but it'll also steal all your private data or contain a backdoor to be controlled like a puppet. With digital signing it can empty your bank accounts and do serious damage. It's not just because they want to secure their own monopoly profits that they want to ensure the integrity of the system.
A license is not a piece of property, it's a contract or in even more layman terms an agreement. And no, you can't just sell your end of an agreement. If you buy that disc, use the download code and the license agreement doesn't let you transfer it to anybody else you're stuck with it forever. You can sell the disc as you own that, but Disney don't have to offer the service to anyone else. I think that part is quite well settled, try selling your Steam account and you'll find it banned real quick. And I don't think anyone has won in court because you don't own the games so there's no right of first sale.
That said, I don't think Redbox is breaking any laws, these codes are not licenses and they've not agreed to any terms yet as that would be when you use the download code. The copyright is exhausted when they sell the discs, unbundling and selling the parts is in general legal. It's possible that the buyers are violating the terms for using the download code if they say it's only valid if you're also the legal owner of the disc, but that's not Redbox's problem. I'm not sure how the theory of copyright abuse comes in, maybe it's that your rights to the download service terminates when you sell the disc which is using the license to restraint statutory rights. That should be illegal.
Language is communication so everybody got a vote. But briefly speaking there's no reason to have two words if they mean exactly the same in all contexts and all meanings. There's usually some nuance between them which makes one preferable over the other. Either that or it's just a loaner from a different language and it's a battle between the "native" and "foreign" word like "taxi" and "cab". In this case they're both quite well settled English words though.
Exactly, boarding from front to back, as they do it now, is actually the worst way to do it. It causes blockages. The back should board first and the front should exit first. That's the most logical approach. Of course they don't want their precious first class people waiting longer though so they board first despite that being the slowest, most inconvenient way to board.
Well I can't speak for first class but I can speak for the business class... if you're doing 100+ flights a year as I did at least one year you got everything worked out in fine detail. It's within size and weight regulations because you don't want the hassle. You keep your liquids and laptop near the zipper to easily extract and return it and they're within limits too. You know every metal object you're carrying and if the scanner beeps it for a random check. You place your hand luggage in the overhead compartment and step aside. Approximately every major delay I've seen has been a.. (thinking of a polite term) less than experienced traveler who's clearly on his once-a-year vacation trip or with rugrats that can't behave.
It even went so far that I had a security guard comment out loud "Perfect technique" and while a bit flummoxed I did manage to answer "Practice makes perfect". But of course I did look as I've done this a thousand times the last decade and... it was probably close. While the "perks" of early entry and early exit are quite questionable, trust me we're not the enemy. We just don't want to get stuck behind the 1% of the "regular" passengers who don't have any social antennas and realize (s)he's blocking a plane full of people. And well, if you're going on your once-a-year vacation you can afford to be there two hours early. Me, I've spent enough time in the airport lounge that felt like a chore. It's not a perk, it's a poor substitute for being home.
Not true on that. A lazy slacker might only work 60 hours/week when harvest/etc came up. Generally that minimal subsistence living most people worked 20-30hrs/week or less as there were other things that were required. Even people who were in highly skilled jobs could work less then 10hrs/week.
It assumes all their work was recorded, paid for work. I suspect that for example when it comes to artisans what you've really got is much closer to the "billable hours". That you only count the time the fisherman is out fishing and not the maintenance and repair of boat and nets or that they had smaller side-jobs for off-season nobody bothered to record. If you took an ax and made firewood and traded with your neighbor for a chicken I doubt that would be recorded anywhere. But maybe most importantly, their wages were shit so most worked to support themselves. So you had a town baker, but if you could make a decent bread yourself... I think the threshold to spend money was a lot higher.
Factories and the growth of cities kinda took that away, you had to buy most things which meant you had to work more for money to pay with money. That people at some point only worked down to 10 hours/week I think is a naive fantasy. If they did I suspect it was because that paid enough money for the things they needed money for, while they got better "paid" supporting themselves some other way the rest of the time. It's not like today where you hire a carpenter, plumber, carpenter, mechanic etc. or buy whatever you need in the store or online at the slightest hint of trouble. This was more "build your own homestead" times.
.. we either we end up automate everything and become the ultimate slackers
Except that we do lots of things we don't get paid to do and take on responsibilities we don't need to have. You could have a perfectly active and meaningful life without work, for example are all retirees you know "total slackers"? Yeah some would probably zone out and become almost vegetative but that'd be by choice. Heck with office work we already have morbidly obese people who can barely walk yet pull off a meaningful job. If on top of that you work from home you can pretty much survive if you can get out of bed in the morning and answer the pizza delivery guy. Ultimate slacking is more or less already here for those who want it.
I used both to mean greater than 50% chance of happening. That is exactly what I also mean when I use either in everyday conversation.
Well, I would say "likely" has a more subjective and causal tone to it than probably which is more objective and numeric. As in "The reduced crop is likely due to cold and wet weather" vs "If we run we can probably catch the bus". If you swap words the meaning is the same, but it sounds less natural to me. That likely/unlikely is tighter connected to plausible/implausible than probable/improbable. Like you can say that according to the standard model the Higgs boson is likely to be so-and-such while CERN proved its existance with 99.99995% probability. That theories are likelyhoods and experiments are probabilities, I don't think there's a formally recognized scientific difference or consistent use though.
It didn't attack the human in any way, it just continued to try and go through the door
Well for a sci-fi movie that's enough, robot is trying to get through door to do bad things(TM). Humans try to stop it, the harder they try the harder the robot resists. If the door is not opening, I'll improve my stance and pull harder. If you're trying to drag me backwards, I'll dig in and try to drag you forwards? What if this thing was bigger and strong, enough to pull the human off his feet instead. What if it had two arms, one fending off the hockey stick while the other opened the door? That it's not attacking the human would only enhance the creepiness, like I'm here on a mission and I'm going to complete it and you're just a nuisance in my way. Something like the Terminator going after John Connor and quasi-ignoring everyone else unless they get in the way. Okay, not quite there yet... but unrelenting persistence gets you part of the way.
I'm going to stop you right there because your assumption is completely and totally incorrect. So-called 'AI' as it currently exists, and for the forseeable future, is not in any way, shape, or form equivalent to a human being. We have NO IDEA how human brains are self-aware, capable of actual 'thought', capable of having a 'personality', etcetera, and so-called 'artificial intelligence' is not capable of these things;
Well how many jobs want that in an employee? Most jobs just want you to be a cog in the machinery, do whatever you were trained to do. You may not realize it if you work in a creative industry, but there's no progress to being a taxi driver you just drive people around. McD served Big Macs last year and will serve Big Macs next year. A lot of manufacturing, maintenance, retail, shipping, construction, processing, support etc. have people doing the same tasks over and over. Even education, if you consider that every year teachers start with a new class that doesn't know anything they taught last year.
We've already automated away a ton of routine jobs, the kind you can solve with trivial scripting and simple machinery. Now we're going for the more fuzzy, semi-routine jobs but they rarely take any real innovation. Take Waymo's 2017 disengagement figures for California that was recently released, on 352,545 miles driven they had 63 disengagements so once every 5600 miles. Near as I can tell humans make police-reported crashes once every 500k miles (3,131 billion miles / 6.3 million crashes), Waymo has driven 4 million miles now without any serious crashes. It's happening all without "real" AI.
Easiest diet is this: expend more than you take in. I lost 30lbs over 3 months my senior year of college eating mostly 2 things that most diets tell you to stay away from: meat and rice. But I kept what I consumed to a minimum and worked out regularly.
Everybody can lose weight working out. But I've found that to exercise enough to offset a constant calorie surplus is almost impossible unless you're an athlete or something. When I was fairly fit I could burn 1000 calories in a 1.5 hour workout. One Big Mac with medium fries and non-diet Coke and it's all a waste (997 kcal says the calculator here in Norway). One 0.5 liter beer = 200 kcal, 100 grams of potato chips = 500 kcal so binge at one party and spend forever paying it off. Sure you don't do that every day but you probably don't work out every day either.
Realistically I'd do maybe do 2-3 workouts of 6-700 kcal a week so 1500/week average. It's still a rounding error compared to the 2500*7 = 17500 kcal they calculate for a regular diet. It's not even 10%. And you need room in the budget for some luxuries too or the boredom will kill you, which means that most days you need a light deficit. That said, I have a pretty clear minimum threshold before hunger drives me crazy. If I want to lose more than that, I need to exercise. And there's other reasons to exercise too, fat to muscle ratio for one. And muscle is far more compact, you look better.
I found losing weight to be relatively easy, it's a "project" where you eat healthy and exercise with no stupid calories. Sustaining a weight though, in a lifestyle you can imagine doing for years that's the hard part. I'd exhaust my motivation, snap and gain back a lot of weight pretty quickly. Same with exercise - I once ran a half marathon on too thin a foundation, threw my running shoes in the closet and found them six months later with the tag still attached. So I've worked a lot on how I can trim the corners without feeling like I'm dieting. Because even 300 g/week is 15 kg in a year, if you can't keep it steady there's no point.
I think my biggest victory is that I've found the willpower to wait for the "second hunger", you know how you get tired, overtired, then *really* tired? I've found it's the same for hunger, if you make it past that first "hey, you got some snack for me I could store as fat for the winter" hunger the body will kinda shut up about it for a while until the warning lights come on to say "hey, this body could really use some energy right now because we're running on fumes". I guess it's the old hunter-gatherer instincts kicking in, no reason for your body to wail about food if there's none to be had right now. They didn't have well stocked fridges 24x7x365.
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I've known people who have been pretty savagely hooked on WoW or other MMOs, but I strongly suspect video game addiction isnt a disease, its a symptom of something deeper like social anxieties (Easier to grind dungeons than make IRL friends), poor executive cognitive function (Ie being garbage at making life priorities and staying on task) or depression.
Well if you draw a parallel to alcoholism then escapism, depression, anxiety etc. are common causes to start drinking too much, but once you have problems to stop I'd say that's its own condition not merely a symptom.
But a stand-alone mental disorder? How do you even define that, whats the cut off point and why. Seems spurious to me.
Not any harder than any other addiction, looking for an exact cut-off point is like trying to find the one beer that makes you an alcoholic. The TL;DR version is "Are you throwing away your life to satisfy an addiction?"
The question is more whether this is a unique form of addiction and has some meaningful difference in the mechanisms and treatments than other forms. A drug addiction has an obvious physical component. A gambling addiction has an economic component. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is kinda an addiction to do the same thing over and over again. I suppose the main difference with a gaming addiction is that you receive constant validation and encouragement to game more and you're rewarded for it both by the game and your gaming peers. Out there friends, family, work, school etc. is going to shit but in here you're important and successful. I think the closest parallel - and the biggest reason it probably won't become a disorder - is to joining a cult. Because doing pretty much the same to join some wacky religious fanatic is not a mental disorder...
I don`t trust Unicode to run natively on any systems that I manage. Of course, those systems support Unicode at the application level if needed although.
Uh, what? Unicode is a data format, it's not something you can run. Because it tries to be everything for everyone it's unfortunately a very big and complex standard, but it essentially boils down to:
1. Variable-length encoding (most commonly utf-8)
2. Fixed-length encoding (most commonly ucs-2)
The characters break down into:
1. Graphic characters (136,537)
2. Format characters (153)
3. Control characters (65)
4. Private use areas
The graphic characters are basically a very big version of your ABC's. Yes, it's all languages living and dead and symbols and emojis and whatever but the worst you can do with those are create better ASCII art or rather non-ASCII art. Format and control characters are the only ones you need to really care about and honestly all you need is a simple filter to strip all except those you want. For example if you strip all of them you can't do line breaks, that one is nice to have in the comment box but maybe not in the subject. This is also where you have the infamous right-to-left indicators and everything else "dangerous".
And strip everything else that's private or unassigned, obviously. Seriously, the way /. fumbled the ball on this many, many years was a rookie mistake in input validation and it was like once bitten, twice shy ever since. Sure, that could invite more trash posts but that's more the job of the lameness filter & moderation. And then maybe /. could move out of the 90s and we could actually write delta-v with an actual delta. Or abbreviate micrometers. Or paste a quote with a long dash or those curly quotes and not have them show up as trash. Seriously, the code is a relic.
Yes, if an account consistently downvotes far more than upvotes they should receive even less mod points. We need to mod up what is good or important, not downvote what we don't like. This promotes more discussion instead of burying comments.
I almost exclusively vote down. That's because I generally want to get back to posting while moderating I feel is more janitor duty, your time to take out the trash. It's quick and easy to pick a discussion you want to sit out, find a bunch of shit posts that undoubtedly belong at -1 and mod them to oblivion. It's a valid use of mod points and you'd definitely notice if we stopped doing it. I might mod up some good posts in the process, but that's more incidental. I don't want to mod things as insightful, informative or interesting just because they're not a GNAA troll or goatse link. I think it's more important that you can read posts at +2/+1/0 without a steaming pile of garbage than whether it's at +3 or +5 or at least that modding up and down is complementary.
I've tried it at a friend's house and I think the biggest problem is what you'd do as a player. I mean realistically you're trapped in a very small box so it's either some variation of DDR where you do things on the spot which gets tiresome really fast or it's a simulator where you're in the driver/pilot's seat. And for the latter curved wide screens would get me most of the way there. I mean the cool thing is the motion tracking but it's mostly limited to duck and cover and peeking around corners. You can't run around like it's some paintball match, 99.9% of us just don't have the space. I still haven't seen any VR concept I'd consider playing for more than like 10-15 minutes.
Middle America (working class) has been screwed over by globalisation. It was not intentional, but that's what happened. This is why you have a Trump in the White House. And don't think it can't get a lot worse. At least right now people do still have jobs. Shitty casual jobs.
Well, globalization meant a bunch of dirt cheap labor came on the market. But it's not so dirt cheap anymore. Just look at this graph, average wage in China: 29229 CNY/year -> 67569 CNY/year from 2008 to 2016. I found one recent forecast that says it's roughly 76300 now. If you look at the same figures for the US though these are hourly not yearly it's about $17.8 -> $22.3 from 2008 to 2018. You also need to pair this up with some inflation numbers but long story short "third world manufacturing" is closing the cost gap pretty quick. 76300 CNY = $12k USD, pretty soon you're approaching US minimum wage levels.
Adobe screwed it up big time. They should've FOSSed it when the touch-mobile revolution started - that was their last chance. Flash is dead and Adobe alone is to blame.
Yeah.. on the other hand, Adobe didn't really have a business model to go with it. It's a bit like Java, you can say that OpenJDK is what makes Java still relevant but Sun is dead. When it comes down to it most companies aren't that concerned with the greater good and leaving a legacy if they won't be around to benefit from it. Not making any moral judgement but economically they seem to be quite profitable with their proprietary cloud-ware, so I don't think Adobe regrets the horse they bet on.
While I agree the cost of an ambulance ride is ridiculous, the amount that's charged is actually in line with what it costs to operate one. Ambulances cost about a quarter million dollars to purchase and outfit. So right off the bat you're at 10x the cost of a private car used for taxi services. Then you have to pay for the labor costs of two, sometimes three EMTs aboard instead of a single driver. And you're amortizing all this over a lot fewer rides per day than a taxi service. So it actually makes sense that they cost several tens of times more than a taxi service.
Agreed, here in Norway we have socialized healthcare so calling an ambulance is free, but even over public budgets it costs 10x of a taxi. Unless you're in need of urgent medical treatment, supervision or has to lay flat they ask you to take a taxi. If you're well enough to sit up, that's generally enough. I just checked here in Norway, last year ambulances did 1.064 million hours on assignment in a population of 5.26 million so that's 12 minutes/person. And that's including assignments that fizzle into not actually needing an ambulance and the transport assignments that often eat up the hours, they divide the number of assignments in three (emergency/urgent/normal) but not the hours.
Charging for an ambulance is a bit like billing a boxing match by the hour and then have a KO in round one. It's like the faster and shorter the better the service is but as a billable rate you have a ton of very expensive equipment and highly trained staff to give tiny, tiny bursts of medical expertise. I live in an urban area, 74% of the time there's an ambulance here within 12 minutes of calling for it. That's an especially equipped car with trained staff, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It's not the pizza delivery guy who'll be here within one hour during opening hours, staffed with any teen with a driver's license using any car. It's a bit like asking why the difference between 99% and 99,99999% uptime is so much... it's only 1% right?
Just update the EULA with a fine print that nobody can read to say, "uber is not an ambulance service. Please do use uber instead of ambulance". You get to keep all the cool cash. But no liability! Hey, it worked with "uber is not a taxi company" schtick, why not now?
Many countries including the US have Good Samaritan laws that compel bystanders to help in a medical emergency, it's got nothing specifically to do with being an Uber driver so you can't dismiss that responsibility through terms and conditions. That said I don't think there's any legal risk to Uber drivers, lots of people go to the hospital for various non-critical conditions and if a critical condition should occur you dial 911. I mean it could just as well be a random passenger on a random trip having a heart attack, granted a person in poor health going to the hospital to get checked out is a higher risk passenger, but in principle it's no different. It's just a risk of driving a taxi, like a drunk person barfing full the back seat.
Thanks! I looked at their website and noticed that the "supported engines" list included CryEngines, UX3D, Unity, Unreal, and Source. Does this mean these engines already use Vulkan instead of OpenGL, or that they can be configured to do so by the developer?
Configured to do so, game engines generally try to abstract away the underlying graphics system for game developers. In fact you might say the rise of a few dominant game engines is the main reason why we now make drivers with low-level access. To attempt to very briefly recap history:
1. All graphics card did their own thing
2. Some standards emerged, primarily OpenGL and DirectX.
3. Game developers built directly on OpenGL/DirectX
4. OpenGL had an early lead but Microsoft made DirectX dominant
5. Game engines increase in complexity, do much more than graphics
6. Most game developers develop on top of a game engine
7. Game engine developers want more direct access to hardware
8. DirectX12/Vulkan/Metal (and also Mantle, now dead) offer lower level access
You could say the market flipped, through most of the 90s and 00s game developers definitively wanted the OS to do more so they could do less and develop games faster. But as the market matured they didn't want just a graphics stack, they wanted a whole game engine they could fill with content. And the abstractions the OS makers had made became more of a hindrance than an aid to game engine developers, they wanted to do their own low level code and create abstractions that integrated better with their engine.
Another way of putting is also that on the CPU side you have assembler. Granted there's a few flavors like x86, ARM and PowerPC but they all have very basic operations like 2+2. Graphics never had a really low level language like that, they implemented higher level constructs all their own way. Much of that is because a lot of early graphics card was fixed function, it's only in modern times they have become programmable mini-processors. And this is kinda their assembler-level language.
When you have a scale of well... "ideal" to "non-ideal" means of transport where say the least ideal is single person in a big gas guzzling SUV and the most ideal is someone walking/cycling everywhere they go that ideal is too impractical for most. So you start having HOV lanes and EV credits and bus/tram/train lines and taxis and every time you add something "in between" there's the risk that more people choose to slide down the scale than up the scale. And then there's the question of how much hassle it is the times you do have requirements out of the ordinary.
So yes, people pick an Uber instead of taking the bus. But if there was never an Uber, would they just say fuck it and buy a private car and use that instead? I remember quite a few years back around here they were trying hard to traffic shape public transport, cutting lines with few people. Which lead to two problems, one was irregular hours the other was that if you missed that bus it'd be forever to the next one. They were losing customers left and right and everybody was unhappy. Eventually they got a management with a clue that figured this out.
They started having like minimum frequencies, like this is a 15 minute line and this is a 30 minute line and from like "opening hours" in the morning to "closing hours" at night it'd run, even though many trips had few passengers. What happened? Lots of customers returned because they didn't have to plan so much and it worked even if they needed to odd routes at odd times and they could rely on never waiting *that* long. I'm kinda thinking the same here, is Uber the problem or Uber what makes the rest work. You need some grease in the system even if it's not the "ideal" solution.
I don't think you can teach then to write "better" code, like the actual ability to break an task into programmatic steps. While you could learn some useful algorithms and patterns that's a long topic and more something you get with experience. What I would focus on is a self-taught programmer has probably mostly worked alone, written all the code themselves and done relatively small projects with a limited lifespan and a lot of greenfield projects where you deliver version 1.0 in the end. This may not be true like if they've been part of a big OSS project, but in general think it's true.
So the first thing I'd take a round on is developing software as a team, both in terms of process and in terms of code. These days I'd probably just skip the check out/check in and go straight to branch/merge and how to develop in your sandbox, when you got something working you make a pull request or push it to the master branch. The code part would be about interfaces and "edge" documentation, that some might study your implementation but most simply want to call your code and know what to expect.
As part of this you should also talk about clear and meaningful naming, how your code should not have unexpected side effects and that your code should not expect everyone to understand how to use it correctly. That it's your job to make sure bad input is rejected properly and doesn't crash the whole system, as that's generally not acceptable in a multi-user system or as a small function in a big program. That goes for other developers calling it wrong, bad data from users, other services or hackers and includes writing test cases with both "normal" input, edge cases and bad input.
Finally you should talk about long term maintenance and running production systems. It goes back to documentation, you got handed down code from your predecessor and you'll be handing down to your successor. Don't expect people will be there to answer questions or explain indefinitely, it can even be you coming back to the same code years later. Requirements change and expand, you need test cases to make sure you didn't break things that used to work. You need to know what code branches are in production and how to patch those in parallel with developing new code.
I think those are the essentials, there's still the issue if the actual code is good or not but it's like trying to lecture someone on how to be a chef. It needs the right amount of cooking and the right amount of seasoning, sometimes you're plain doing it wrong other times you're just overdoing it. Lectures may expand the toolbox but it takes experience to apply the right tool the right way in a given situation. And there's usually more than one solution, some more elegant than others.
You don't sign for things up here unless there's a widespread terminal failure and the company still has an old fashioned carbon-copy style credit device available.
You only need a carbon-copy device if the power is out or all your terminals are broken and if the power is out there's no lights so most likely the store will close. It's far more common that the Internet connection is down, then it goes into offline mode where instead of the regular receipt it spits out a bill that I sign on, at least that's the way it works here in Norway. I'm not sure if they send it electronically later when it reconnects and the signatures are just for disputes or if the store needs to deliver the paper bills to the bank, but cards eventually get charged and usually everybody is happy.
When that happens the store is on the hook for fraud as you could potentially use a debit card with no money or a credit card in excess of the limit. I'm not sure if they have offline blacklists for blocked cards, so potentially stolen cards too. But unless you're running around with wire cutters that's not something a fraudster can plan for and it's up to the store to get it fixed in a timely manner or invest in redundant connections or simply refuse large/all transactions. Tough in practice I've never been refused in ages, except when the office cafeteria's single terminal was broken. But they took IOUs on a piece of paper...
That "-1, Overrated" mod really should be replaced with "-1, I disagree but I got no arguments or facts to contradict you with so I'll just try to silence you". Ah well...
And yet mortgages, which are, as far as I can see, also contracts, are bought and sold routinely. My mortgage for example was sold twice, and I was never consulted at my end of the agreement. There are whole industries built around the buying and selling of contracts - futures, insurance, student loans, mortgages.
If you can get the other party to agree to it, sure. If you got the market power to put in your boilerplate agreement that you can transfer the loan then you can. That is if it's actually sold and not pass-through, like I can quasi-sell that debt for $x now and agree to forward all future payments to you. As long as you remain a legal entity in the middle you don't need permission for that.
The whole point is that corporations are trying to take away the ability of letting consumers decide.
Well, in the past you were mostly concerned with the quality of the repair and we've had that whole run with third party parts and uncertified labor. Unfortunately with a lot of modern gadgets it's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's also a Trojan horse. Like, whatever the customer wanted fixed is fixed, but it'll also steal all your private data or contain a backdoor to be controlled like a puppet. With digital signing it can empty your bank accounts and do serious damage. It's not just because they want to secure their own monopoly profits that they want to ensure the integrity of the system.
If Disney sells me a license
A license is not a piece of property, it's a contract or in even more layman terms an agreement. And no, you can't just sell your end of an agreement. If you buy that disc, use the download code and the license agreement doesn't let you transfer it to anybody else you're stuck with it forever. You can sell the disc as you own that, but Disney don't have to offer the service to anyone else. I think that part is quite well settled, try selling your Steam account and you'll find it banned real quick. And I don't think anyone has won in court because you don't own the games so there's no right of first sale.
That said, I don't think Redbox is breaking any laws, these codes are not licenses and they've not agreed to any terms yet as that would be when you use the download code. The copyright is exhausted when they sell the discs, unbundling and selling the parts is in general legal. It's possible that the buyers are violating the terms for using the download code if they say it's only valid if you're also the legal owner of the disc, but that's not Redbox's problem. I'm not sure how the theory of copyright abuse comes in, maybe it's that your rights to the download service terminates when you sell the disc which is using the license to restraint statutory rights. That should be illegal.
step 6: realize this is about as productive as feeding a toddler into a wood chipper
*turns on recording device*
Tell me, what experience do you have that makes you say that?
Oh, "you would say". Well, then, case closed. /s
Language is communication so everybody got a vote. But briefly speaking there's no reason to have two words if they mean exactly the same in all contexts and all meanings. There's usually some nuance between them which makes one preferable over the other. Either that or it's just a loaner from a different language and it's a battle between the "native" and "foreign" word like "taxi" and "cab". In this case they're both quite well settled English words though.
Exactly, boarding from front to back, as they do it now, is actually the worst way to do it. It causes blockages. The back should board first and the front should exit first. That's the most logical approach. Of course they don't want their precious first class people waiting longer though so they board first despite that being the slowest, most inconvenient way to board.
Well I can't speak for first class but I can speak for the business class... if you're doing 100+ flights a year as I did at least one year you got everything worked out in fine detail. It's within size and weight regulations because you don't want the hassle. You keep your liquids and laptop near the zipper to easily extract and return it and they're within limits too. You know every metal object you're carrying and if the scanner beeps it for a random check. You place your hand luggage in the overhead compartment and step aside. Approximately every major delay I've seen has been a.. (thinking of a polite term) less than experienced traveler who's clearly on his once-a-year vacation trip or with rugrats that can't behave.
It even went so far that I had a security guard comment out loud "Perfect technique" and while a bit flummoxed I did manage to answer "Practice makes perfect". But of course I did look as I've done this a thousand times the last decade and... it was probably close. While the "perks" of early entry and early exit are quite questionable, trust me we're not the enemy. We just don't want to get stuck behind the 1% of the "regular" passengers who don't have any social antennas and realize (s)he's blocking a plane full of people. And well, if you're going on your once-a-year vacation you can afford to be there two hours early. Me, I've spent enough time in the airport lounge that felt like a chore. It's not a perk, it's a poor substitute for being home.
Not true on that. A lazy slacker might only work 60 hours/week when harvest/etc came up. Generally that minimal subsistence living most people worked 20-30hrs/week or less as there were other things that were required. Even people who were in highly skilled jobs could work less then 10hrs/week.
It assumes all their work was recorded, paid for work. I suspect that for example when it comes to artisans what you've really got is much closer to the "billable hours". That you only count the time the fisherman is out fishing and not the maintenance and repair of boat and nets or that they had smaller side-jobs for off-season nobody bothered to record. If you took an ax and made firewood and traded with your neighbor for a chicken I doubt that would be recorded anywhere. But maybe most importantly, their wages were shit so most worked to support themselves. So you had a town baker, but if you could make a decent bread yourself... I think the threshold to spend money was a lot higher.
Factories and the growth of cities kinda took that away, you had to buy most things which meant you had to work more for money to pay with money. That people at some point only worked down to 10 hours/week I think is a naive fantasy. If they did I suspect it was because that paid enough money for the things they needed money for, while they got better "paid" supporting themselves some other way the rest of the time. It's not like today where you hire a carpenter, plumber, carpenter, mechanic etc. or buy whatever you need in the store or online at the slightest hint of trouble. This was more "build your own homestead" times.
.. we either we end up automate everything and become the ultimate slackers
Except that we do lots of things we don't get paid to do and take on responsibilities we don't need to have. You could have a perfectly active and meaningful life without work, for example are all retirees you know "total slackers"? Yeah some would probably zone out and become almost vegetative but that'd be by choice. Heck with office work we already have morbidly obese people who can barely walk yet pull off a meaningful job. If on top of that you work from home you can pretty much survive if you can get out of bed in the morning and answer the pizza delivery guy. Ultimate slacking is more or less already here for those who want it.
I used both to mean greater than 50% chance of happening. That is exactly what I also mean when I use either in everyday conversation.
Well, I would say "likely" has a more subjective and causal tone to it than probably which is more objective and numeric. As in "The reduced crop is likely due to cold and wet weather" vs "If we run we can probably catch the bus". If you swap words the meaning is the same, but it sounds less natural to me. That likely/unlikely is tighter connected to plausible/implausible than probable/improbable. Like you can say that according to the standard model the Higgs boson is likely to be so-and-such while CERN proved its existance with 99.99995% probability. That theories are likelyhoods and experiments are probabilities, I don't think there's a formally recognized scientific difference or consistent use though.
It didn't attack the human in any way, it just continued to try and go through the door
Well for a sci-fi movie that's enough, robot is trying to get through door to do bad things(TM). Humans try to stop it, the harder they try the harder the robot resists. If the door is not opening, I'll improve my stance and pull harder. If you're trying to drag me backwards, I'll dig in and try to drag you forwards? What if this thing was bigger and strong, enough to pull the human off his feet instead. What if it had two arms, one fending off the hockey stick while the other opened the door? That it's not attacking the human would only enhance the creepiness, like I'm here on a mission and I'm going to complete it and you're just a nuisance in my way. Something like the Terminator going after John Connor and quasi-ignoring everyone else unless they get in the way. Okay, not quite there yet... but unrelenting persistence gets you part of the way.
I'm going to stop you right there because your assumption is completely and totally incorrect. So-called 'AI' as it currently exists, and for the forseeable future, is not in any way, shape, or form equivalent to a human being. We have NO IDEA how human brains are self-aware, capable of actual 'thought', capable of having a 'personality', etcetera, and so-called 'artificial intelligence' is not capable of these things;
Well how many jobs want that in an employee? Most jobs just want you to be a cog in the machinery, do whatever you were trained to do. You may not realize it if you work in a creative industry, but there's no progress to being a taxi driver you just drive people around. McD served Big Macs last year and will serve Big Macs next year. A lot of manufacturing, maintenance, retail, shipping, construction, processing, support etc. have people doing the same tasks over and over. Even education, if you consider that every year teachers start with a new class that doesn't know anything they taught last year.
We've already automated away a ton of routine jobs, the kind you can solve with trivial scripting and simple machinery. Now we're going for the more fuzzy, semi-routine jobs but they rarely take any real innovation. Take Waymo's 2017 disengagement figures for California that was recently released, on 352,545 miles driven they had 63 disengagements so once every 5600 miles. Near as I can tell humans make police-reported crashes once every 500k miles (3,131 billion miles / 6.3 million crashes), Waymo has driven 4 million miles now without any serious crashes. It's happening all without "real" AI.
Easiest diet is this: expend more than you take in. I lost 30lbs over 3 months my senior year of college eating mostly 2 things that most diets tell you to stay away from: meat and rice. But I kept what I consumed to a minimum and worked out regularly.
Everybody can lose weight working out. But I've found that to exercise enough to offset a constant calorie surplus is almost impossible unless you're an athlete or something. When I was fairly fit I could burn 1000 calories in a 1.5 hour workout. One Big Mac with medium fries and non-diet Coke and it's all a waste (997 kcal says the calculator here in Norway). One 0.5 liter beer = 200 kcal, 100 grams of potato chips = 500 kcal so binge at one party and spend forever paying it off. Sure you don't do that every day but you probably don't work out every day either.
Realistically I'd do maybe do 2-3 workouts of 6-700 kcal a week so 1500/week average. It's still a rounding error compared to the 2500*7 = 17500 kcal they calculate for a regular diet. It's not even 10%. And you need room in the budget for some luxuries too or the boredom will kill you, which means that most days you need a light deficit. That said, I have a pretty clear minimum threshold before hunger drives me crazy. If I want to lose more than that, I need to exercise. And there's other reasons to exercise too, fat to muscle ratio for one. And muscle is far more compact, you look better.
I found losing weight to be relatively easy, it's a "project" where you eat healthy and exercise with no stupid calories. Sustaining a weight though, in a lifestyle you can imagine doing for years that's the hard part. I'd exhaust my motivation, snap and gain back a lot of weight pretty quickly. Same with exercise - I once ran a half marathon on too thin a foundation, threw my running shoes in the closet and found them six months later with the tag still attached. So I've worked a lot on how I can trim the corners without feeling like I'm dieting. Because even 300 g/week is 15 kg in a year, if you can't keep it steady there's no point.
I think my biggest victory is that I've found the willpower to wait for the "second hunger", you know how you get tired, overtired, then *really* tired? I've found it's the same for hunger, if you make it past that first "hey, you got some snack for me I could store as fat for the winter" hunger the body will kinda shut up about it for a while until the warning lights come on to say "hey, this body could really use some energy right now because we're running on fumes". I guess it's the old hunter-gatherer instincts kicking in, no reason for your body to wail about food if there's none to be had right now. They didn't have well stocked fridges 24x7x365.