I love the concern trolling that comes out with every piece of Firefox news. Mozilla has obviously lost the mainstream browser war but a lot of that is due to the fact that Google has deeper pockets and chose a base (WebKit) that was in better shape than the older Gecko was.
And who has been the stewards of Gecko since 2003? The Mozilla foundation. They've had 14 years to fix it instead of pissing away resources on operating systems, programming languages, LBGT-bullshit (not the cause but making a software company into a social program), rebranding (moz://a, only 20 years after/.), piling up a dragon's hoard and so on. They thought ding-dong, the wicked witch (IE6) is dead now we can let our flagship product rot.
People still rage about Australis but then go on and say they switched to Chrome over it, while simultaneously complaining that Australis was a Chrome clone. Now, people will leave Firefox due to WebExtensions, which is... what Chrome uses.
Well yes, if you take a pick-up truck and dress it up like a sports car I'd rather have an actual sports car, since neither is a good pick-up truck anymore.
The extensions API was going to break anyway as soon as multi-process was fully implemented.
They could have made it a lot more backwards compatible easier by pretending each extension was in a one-window browser and said here's a new API for cross-tab communication for those who need it. Many extensions don't really need to know any other tab exists. It's only a full rewrite because Mozilla wants it to be.
You make it sound like this is something that had to happen, that market forces bigger than Mozilla forced their hand. This is bullshit, they had lots of choices to take a different path and ignored all of them. In their latest public fiscal year (2015) they spent $214 million of $417 million in royalties on software development. They don't say how many employees that translates into but certainly that's >1000 FTEs and they have $323 million in assets, essentially all profit that's funneled into stocks and property. They have tons of money and resources they could use to make exactly the browser they want.
Take Force Awakens, which has a very high 8.1 rating. However if you go into the User Review section, majority of reviews are very very scathing. And having watched the film, I agree that the movie was terrible. So why the disconnect between user review and user ratings?
14yo kid: It has laser guns and lightsabers -> high rating Anal retentive SF-nerd with "Han shot first" issues -> bad review
Seriously, some people take light entertainment waaaaaaaaaaay too seriously. Star Wars, obviously. All the superhero movies Marvel makes, they're comic books in movie form. Even LotR had their naysayers because Tom Bombadil was missing and Arwen's love story was a side show from the appendix and... whatever. Consider it a bit like the biggest hits on the music charts, they're not the deepest and most "meaningful" songs. They're what most people want to hear, just like McDonald's isn't going out of business no matter how many food experts shit on them.
The kind we're not building (walking bomb) is not particularly susceptible to jamming; if you jam it, it just blows up. Once it's safely away from the operator, you can arm that functionality.
Until IS tricks you into sending it into a building full of civilians, that would be a PR nightmare. Basically it would be a very slow and impractical delivery mechanism after you've decided it's safe to blow it up. It's different when you don't give a shit about accidental or collateral damage, then you can just strap a stick of C4 to a RC toy and wire the detonator like a dead man's switch to make it a walking bomb. When you lose signal or turn it off it's going to blow up something.
We must actually be pretty close to being able to deploy remotely controlled ground infantry
I doubt it, I don't think we have anything that comes close to passing a military obstacle course. If you think of say an urban area and the task of the robot(s) is to secure a building it has to execute so many practical little details, just using a door handle is challenging outside the lab. The other big deal is stealth, if you look at the robots today most of them are quite loud with hydraulics and such so they couldn't sneak up on anyone. There's a reason all soldiers do hand signals and all that shit, if they just trampled in they'd be easy targets. Also jamming would be a big issue, it's not that hard to create a big noise generator that could be triggered by a trip wire or such. Outdoors a jamming device trying to bring down a drone makes you a big target to shoot at but in the basement of a building your robo-soldiers would be cut off without any easy means to restore contact. For sure robots could do more but I think we're dependent on humans in close proximity for quite some time to come.
When people are worried about changes in "many layers of the stack", it's usually a good time to re-architect the system and build microservices. Basically, you get the entire stack in every microservice and you stop worrying about ripple effects; you upgrade or troubleshoot things at a much smaller scale.
Isn't this one of the problems caused by modularization, not solved by it? Basically if everything was in the same VCS it'd be a huge change set doing some database changes, some business rule changes, some desktop GUI changes, some Android GUI changes, some iPhone GUI changes etc. but the moment you start breaking it up you have to start tracking that this change of functionality requires changes in five different projects and unless everything makes it into the next release it won't work. The more you've divided into microservices, the more places you need to change. Each service will be less complex but the interaction between the services would get more complex because you need to pass things around from service to service.
In my experience what makes developers unhappy is having to write documentation, perform testing and fixing bugs. Of course, that might simply define the habits of the "under-performing colleague" that then drags down the happiness of other, more diligent and professional, developers.
Depends on whether you think "make working code" should be on a list of developers' priorities or not. In a bad workplace what you list are code words for "explain the code so I don't need to make any effort to understand" and "please clean up my hacky semi-functional spaghetti code mess". Here's usually how my day goes, I got my things to do and my deadlines to keep. Then someone requests a change, said developer assigned essentially says "I got no clue on how do to this so I'm estimating a week or two" and the reporter goes "so long? I was hoping it was a day's work and I need it in three", we have a chat with my manager and I do a stunt implementing the essentials before lunch. It'll still need documentation, testing and bug fixing but it'll be mostly there and that's really all the time I have to spare.
Same often goes for bug fixing, unless it's important I've often found that the time I need to spend unraveling is better spent on creating the code I'm supposed to create. Rather than finding the one flaw in the old code, big chunks are rewritten often finding and closing undiscovered bugs in the process while enabling a cleaner structure for the future. That is, I certainly own my own messes and test/clean up my own code. But I'd rather ditch certain bug fixes on someone that I know will use 3x as long as me rather than write new code I know they'll use 10x as long to achieve with poorer results. Yeah I'm not stellar on the points above, but I don't think anyone feels I'm underperforming. At least my boss and colleagues seem to miss me when I'm not available and they're on their own.
The north is highly unlikely to ever strike first, because there is no way they would ever be able to hit hard enough that there wouldn't be a severe response. They might be able to blow up a few cities, but then they would have america attacking them back in full force.
On a day that NK is rational, of course they make their best impression of being irrational. A rational explanation is that NK wants to give the impression they'll fight to the last man and make any invasion a bloody carnage even if they'll be on the losing end of the mess, whether or not that's actually true it's better than giving the appearance that they'll fold to superior forces. The counter-argument is that they might really be irrational and replaced so much fact with ideology, honest men with yes-men and drunk so much of their own kool-aid they'll attack in a genuine but foolish belief they'll win.
The question is how often has that really happened, that a vastly inferior army has gone on the attack? Even if you look at the wars that were genuinely lost like Hitler's invasion of Russia, the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, the arab build-up to the Six Day War, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and so on they had a lot more genuine power to think they could win or wouldn't incur the wrath of major allies. North Korea has half the population and 1/50th the GDP of South Korea and the US is a close ally that has repeated made it clear they'll back SK in case of a war.
It seems to me most dictators are quite happy ruling their own fiefdom, I doubt your world gets any shinier if you rule 10 million people or 20 million people. At least now in the modern day of long range weapons where you can't just send out your armies to die for you while you're king of the castle. Or at the very least commanding well behind enemy lines. Despite all the heroic tales of kings leading their men into battle I doubt they were at the front of the charge...
You spoiled brats with your C64s with floppy drives and your VIC-20s... you had it too easy. The original Commodore PET had 8K of RAM, a 40x25 character display, and storage on a cassette tape.
The C64 also had cassette storage, it was a looong time before I got a floppy drive. My buddy still has one for nostalgia, it's amazing how much patience we had as kids... press play on tape, wait 5-10 minutes? Totally okay. Several minutes of waiting between events in sports games? No problem. These days, if it's not on SSD and ready to use in <5 seconds I'm like "zzz.... come on". Not everything was better in the "good old days".
If the internet suffers an extended outage, there would be massive numbers of deaths. During the first few days, there would be thousands of deaths. During the first few weeks there would be millions of deaths. During the first few months, there would be billions of deaths.
So... two-three months without the Internet and billions will die. The hyperbole is strong in this one. So much of what we do these days is not about survival. In a true life-or-death emergency we'd make different priorities, in the absence of information we'd restart the push economy. People would start stockpiling pasta, rice, flour, biscuits, canned food, bottled water and everything else that could be preserved. We'd limit consumption to war rationing standards, everything on a need-to-have basis. The transition would be painful and some would die but I think there's a lot of production capacity that isn't utilized today because it's not economically efficient, but if there's a shortage it could be used. Slaughter the cattle, ship the beef and the grain you saved for example.
Of course it would depend on whether or not we could keep society together. If it first started to disintegrate with looting and riots with gangs raiding supplies so trade and industrial production comes to a halt then yeah things could fall apart. I don't think locusts like that could last though, they'd just plunder their way but as there's less and less to plunder they'd just fizzle. And eventually we'd have to rebuild in a more sustainable way, like redoing the last 200 years or so. I think we'd lose the modern tech that requires a civilization-level effort like computers and such, but I think Amish-level societies would be reasonably self-sufficient enough to survive.
Incidentally, said "great" model is currently completely out of reach, even for relatively simple things like driving a car (which almost all humans can learn to do, i.e. it does not require much).
We have taught the car how to drive. On the race track self-driving cars are going toe-to-toe with human experts, there's no shortage of driving skills. On a desert run I'd go with the computer just for consistency and reaction time. The challenge is that it's not a closed environment and we don't really know what other general improvisation or problem avoidance / solving skills might come in handy, what the computer lack isn't on any driving test. At least I don't remember anything said about what I should do if there's a sign missing or obscured nor any process to determine whether I might have missed one or the signs are erroneous or sabotaged except maybe some hand-wavy cliches about driving defensively.
Maybe we can't ever build a computer that'll genuinely solve entirely new problems. But I think we'll be pretty happy with one that accumulates all the solutions we've come up with, because I know my driver's education was nowhere near the sum of all driving experience we have. Even now with 20 years of experience there's a lot that millions of other drivers have experienced and I haven't. At some point I expect the vast reference material will outweigh my improvisation skills, most the time. And the chance that you have that expert in that particular car who needs it who can pull it out of thin air in a split second will be slim to none. Simulations can test many outcomes, before the fact and after the fact. I'd rather put our expert on the review board.
First the AI needs to recognize it made a mistake. Humans can't recognize they made a mistake unless another human tells them or there is a failure they are already trained to recognize. How does an AI driven car recognize it just blew through a stop sign unless a human on board tells them or some other indication, like crashing into another car?
Well, at least here in Norway it'd probably run a constant comparison to NVDB - the national road registry. It's among other things the working tool for route planners but it actually contains every traffic light, sign, restriction in height, weight, direction of traffic, curvature, altitude, number of lanes and other road-related elements. At least for self driving classes 3/4 I expect it'll just bail on you and say there's an inconsistency between the stored info and the observed info, you work it out. If it doesn't exist in other countries in a usable form today someone will probably compile it and sell the service.
The data you're looking for probably exists in some form in a planning office, but worse cast Google could use Google Maps and start mapping out the signs themselves. Add a bit of crowdsourcing by having self driving cars upload video for review and I think you're good. The only time it would be a problem was if there was no stop signs before, there are stop signs now and the car didn't register any signs. But I imagine pretty quick they'd get some agreement to get road sign changes reported in,
I know even planned road work and detours goes into our database. It's only accidents and other emergency issues that cause signs to just appear. But to solve that you have to solve the "waving police officer problem" first. If you can detect that, you can hopefully detect ad hoc signs as well. Worst case make some kind of "wave to alert autonomous cars to go manual" sign and fine abusers, the point is to make it work most the time not all the time. At least for now, level 5 is so far out there it's mostly fantasy.
As a parent if I think the child has had too much 'device time' I will take it away. If they want it back they have to have their chores done. It works pretty well. (...) Additionally, don't fight the desire your child has, it may be the passion that fuels his income when they are adults.
That's just ordinary parenting, teaching kids they can't do just the things they want to do. An addiction is a passion that's gone beyond something you want to do into something you feel you need to do like an obsession or compulsion and the rest of your life starts to revolve around getting back there. Like if you're a WoW addict life is about getting rid of all the "distractions" like school, friends, family, events and activities so you can spend more time in Azeroth. Some are functional addicts in that they do the things that absolutely must be done, others start becoming dysfunctional like lying and cheating and skipping school. People have flunked out, lost their jobs, wife and kids for virtual trinkets.
Yes, most kids' passions aren't allowed to involve into addictions because parents effectively shut them down, you don't get ice cream for dinner every day and if you don't do your homework and chores your Internet privileges are revoked. But when they're teens they must also start to get some freedom to make their own choices. Not everyone will cope well with that responsibility, but you can't babysit them forever. If you have some form of troubled teen you probably have a better chance of getting them back on the right track with professional help when they're 15 and living at home than when they're 18 and free to self destruct. Assuming they have real problems, but I know at least a few who did.
Media companies are making bigger profits than ever, with no signs of it slowing down. Why are they so concerned about the tiny amount of piracy taking place?
Because they're trying to sell us on the idea that IP is property. They don't want you to think about it like a free seat at the cinema, they want you to think of every pirated copy as money stolen from them. If they want you to believe it, they have to act like it whether or not they actually think they could have made a sale or not. Even among the people who use subscription services for convenience they are struggling to convince people that sharing is wrong.
The people who argue for net neutrality are clearly the ones who benefit financially from it: geeks who use more bandwidth than average and upload a lot
Nobody has asked that any one bit be treated differently than any other bit, if you spend a lot you pay a lot. When you completely fail to grasp the nature of net neutrality you're either a troll or a shill.
Its not the cost, its the control. Blu rays come with unskippable ads, they cant be easily backed up, and the physical disc is larger than the computer i store thousands of movies on.
I really doubt you got a computer smaller than a BluRay disc. Granted a 200-disc spindle would be bigger than a 10TB HDD or you could use a USB stick if you want to win in two dimensions, but pressed discs are quite compact and durable if treated nicely. WIthout the DRM, I don't really mind the form factor at all. YMMV.
Good shill. How much are they paying you? Whenever there's a product or service, there's those who make it, those who consume it and middlemen. Getting rid of most the middlemen has been the greatest boon of the Internet. Middlemen love to gauge, don't you think the post office would love to gauge how much they charge to deliver this particular package from this sender? The phone company to connect this particular call? That's what you want the ISP to do, sit in the middle and shake down any website you want to visit. You sound way too smart to be this dumb, so I guess the question is: Comcast, Charter, AT&T or Verizon?
While agree with most of your post, the "when do we generate revenue" line is probably the most optional. There are a lot of start ups that grow customer base at a loss, expecting to eventually sell to someone that can keep absorbing teh losses until they monetize. E.g. Google.
Well you're right, I probably didn't mean the company as such but your finances... how and when do you plan to transition from using savings and free labor to live off something else, it doesn't have to be profit it could be investor money. Because unless you have a successful start-up behind you it's unlikely you can bankroll it yourself and if it suffocates before you can secure another source of funding it's over.
1) Does anyone have strong statistical evidence that the problem is Islam, and not a different common feature?
The percentage of terrorists shouting "Allahu akbar". To be more serious though, in unruly areas the border between terrorism, civil war, insurrection, sectarian fighting, war crimes, genocide and general lawlessness is quite blurry so it's hard to give a number everyone will agree on. But in Europe islamic terrorism has been the leading cause of terror in the 21st century. And unlike much of the terror of the past, it seems designed to create mass carnage and maximize civilian casualties. Same with the US even if you exclude 9/11 with Ford Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando leading the pack. Boston was pretty much a flop as deaths go, even if it swamped the news.
In other parts of the world it depends on how you count Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Boko Haram, Al-Nusra, Daesh etc. as opposed to all the other shit that goes down. The Arab Spring for example is a giant cluster fuck. Same with Eastern Ukraine, conflicts in CAR and Somalia in Africa etc. and if you go strictly by number of deaths it's nothing like the killing fields in an actual war. The Stockholm attack is roughly one bad bus accident. In Syria ~1000 civilians die every month. Even if you put Madrid, London 2005, Nice, Berlin, London 2017, Stockholm etc. together for more than a decade of terror you don't come close to a single month. The goal is more to say nobody's safe.
The question is more whether there's underlying tensions building up that will lead to something much, much bigger. After all, if you look in isolation it looks like the years between WWI and WWII were pretty peaceful. Then boom the casualties fly off the map. I'm not really optimistic by the results of "integration" so far, they might live here but many don't adjust much in terms of values or way of life, not even in the next generation. It took us centuries to go from the Dark Ages through enlightenment and women's suffrage to modern life, now we're starting over again for no sane reason I can think of. I guess we have a glutton for punishment.
The current party is the one that put the breaks on letting refugees in and making the asylum process stricter.
Bullshit. All the other parties including the one in government right now have worked together to exclude the one anti-immigration party (Sverigedemokraterna, 12.86% of the vote) from gaining any political power. The only reason they slowed down a little was because the system was about to collapse under the immigration pressure. Essentially, as long as SD have <50% they'll pretend it's not there and vote the way that would have a majority without them. Right now they're polling at ~18%, with attacks like these they'll probably get even bigger.
Do care more for this guy than the others because he worked for a tech company? The other three had hobbies, relationships, careers (except the eleven year-old).
As far as I know the other three haven't been publicly identified so it's less personal for us with nameless, faceless victims and a whole lot less to say. Not that it really matters who in that it's not a targeted attack like Charlie Hebdo, the victims are just random people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that's the problem, so many apologists are still looking for a way we've wronged these people that caused them to become terrorists. But we haven't, we are simply kafir and our disbelief in Allah is our crime.
There was a documentary here in Norway published quite recently called "The Norwegian Islamist", the main character was just convicted to 9 years in prison for terror recruitment. He had agree to the documentary to show "true Islam" and really gave a good look into his world view, it was simple yet terrifying. The world was divided in two, Muslims and non-Muslims. Nations matters not. Laws matters not. As long as he follows Islam, all is justified. Every other word out of his mouth was inshallah, if Allah wills it.
The Islamic State is the one place on Earth where muslims can live by Allah's laws. Those who oppose the Islamic State oppose Allah, those who oppose Allah must die. He'd publicly applaud terrorists and terrorism, stopping just short of encouraging it in a way that'd be illegal. Basically he'd say something like "praise the brave martyrs in Paris, may Allah open the gates to paradise for you" or something like that. He was sending converts to Iraq/Syria to do "humanitarian aid" and you could just feel the quote marks hanging in the air like a big in-joke.
I really didn't want to Godwin this post but if you ever wondered how the Nazis managed to justify sending women and children to the gas chambers simply for being Jews then that's exactly how he feels about non-Muslims. It's total war in its purest form, everyone is a legitimate target. And the same goes the other way around, as long as they're martyrs to the cause they're not atrocities. They're not terrorists. They're holy warriors fighting a holy war for Allah and the only thing that matters is to crush your enemies for the glory of Allah. The ultimate in "the ends justify the means".
If you want to join a startup, go to these incubators and ask them to give you their elevator pitch. If the basic concept sounds okay, ask if they need more staff, what they'd show a potential investor and what skills they're looking for then negotiate a deal. Remember start-ups usually don't have a lot of cash so your income will probably depend on the company's future, joining a poor start-up doesn't do you any good. Make sure you don't end up in a position where you accept crap pay but they'll run away with all the profit if it succeeds.
If you're looking to actually start a software company, how do you know if you have a viable market if you don't have any "business experience"? The most important part of a software company isn't the code, it's the business plan. Essential points:
Who are you planning to sell to? What will be the key selling features? Why hasn't anyone else done it? How will it reach the market? When do we expect product revenue?
If you think I'll just create the product and they'll come, stop. Nobody knows you exist, nobody understands your product/solution and nobody cares. If you haven't got a grip on those, that's okay but then don't quit your day job. Start creating it, try selling it and get some actual experience. That way it'll only cost you time and you'll probably learn that selling it was much harder than you thought. At least that was my limited experience running a start-up, even if we thought we had the product they needed the customer was rarely more than lukewarm.
You might call them "perfectionists" because they will never finish anything (...) Although they are enthusiastic, their failure mode is that they never produce an end product and their office, lab or home is full of half-completed projects.
I think those two are different archetypes. What you describe is a type of "abandonist" that runs into trouble/uncertainty but rather than work through it procrastinates by starting to work on something else, however since almost every project has some hardship they leave a trail of half-finished things in their wake. I know a person who is like that with home renovation, rather than do one thing in one room and finish he'll start on twenty things in five rooms and never finish. He is roughly as far from a perfectionist as I can think of. Perfectionists are people who refuse to deliver anything until they've tweaked it to some arbitrary standard of perfection that solves every corner case with every nice-to-have feature. They just don't know when to stop and deliver.
I think I'll also add a third archetype, the reinventer. This is the kind of person who - without any real effort or review - can tell you that everything you have is crap and should be rewritten from scratch, probably using Ruby on Rails and NoSQL or whatever is the buzzword of the day. They're the tech version of the trade magazine CEO who'll jump on any buzzword thinking this will solve our problems. And if you're foolish enough to listen he'll soon be exploring the next new fad saying RoR is so yesterday and we should rewrite everything in Node.js instead. Right now the magic buzzword is SQL Server Master Data Services, that'll solve our master data problems. Not.
Not to mention the fact that co-working, the latest buzzword for "not valued enough to have an office", is basically the most miserable work environment I can think of. You only need one loud overtalker and productivity effectively drops to zero.
I think it's one of those "when it works it's amazing, so let's try to make everything and everyone like that". The best scrum team I've met was super chatty, they were constantly bouncing ideas and questions around and even though I'd take on any one of them in a one-on-one coding competition as a team they'd teach the Borg a thing or two about a hive mind. It was like looking at a professional sports team at play, sure every player has their role but if you didn't have any coordination the team that plays well together would overrun a team of highly talented individuals.
The problem is, not everybody works like that. Some talk way too much, some really ought to say something but doesn't. Putting great players and poor players together or lack of coordination can lead to a lot of frustration as some people do excellent work only to see it go to waste. I know I failed at that one at work recently, to me it was obvious since I've lived and breathed the solution I'm working on for some years but to a new person it wasn't obvious at all, so I completely failed to point him to the existing solution so he started looking at a new one. And I've written a lot of code that was for naught.
They are in it just for the monies. It does make me seriously sad, and one of the main reasons I am quitting my job. But I kindof believe that a lot of workpaces are like that.
I think that's pretty close to the definition of work, something somebody else wants me to do for money. I think the number of people who are "living the dream" is <0.01% or less. And if I had a billion in the bank it would be a lot more "when I want it, how I want it, the days I feel like it". Like today I'd just like to be a beach bum. Or just soothe a hangover. Or sit inside and play WoW. I'm not complaining about work, as work goes it's very nice. But if money really was no subject at all... nah, I'd quit and do something else. Like, not "nothing" but nothing resembling any paid position. Also if anyone would like to give me a billion dollars to test that theory, I volunteer.
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I love the concern trolling that comes out with every piece of Firefox news. Mozilla has obviously lost the mainstream browser war but a lot of that is due to the fact that Google has deeper pockets and chose a base (WebKit) that was in better shape than the older Gecko was.
And who has been the stewards of Gecko since 2003? The Mozilla foundation. They've had 14 years to fix it instead of pissing away resources on operating systems, programming languages, LBGT-bullshit (not the cause but making a software company into a social program), rebranding (moz://a, only 20 years after /.), piling up a dragon's hoard and so on. They thought ding-dong, the wicked witch (IE6) is dead now we can let our flagship product rot.
People still rage about Australis but then go on and say they switched to Chrome over it, while simultaneously complaining that Australis was a Chrome clone. Now, people will leave Firefox due to WebExtensions, which is... what Chrome uses.
Well yes, if you take a pick-up truck and dress it up like a sports car I'd rather have an actual sports car, since neither is a good pick-up truck anymore.
The extensions API was going to break anyway as soon as multi-process was fully implemented.
They could have made it a lot more backwards compatible easier by pretending each extension was in a one-window browser and said here's a new API for cross-tab communication for those who need it. Many extensions don't really need to know any other tab exists. It's only a full rewrite because Mozilla wants it to be.
You make it sound like this is something that had to happen, that market forces bigger than Mozilla forced their hand. This is bullshit, they had lots of choices to take a different path and ignored all of them. In their latest public fiscal year (2015) they spent $214 million of $417 million in royalties on software development. They don't say how many employees that translates into but certainly that's >1000 FTEs and they have $323 million in assets, essentially all profit that's funneled into stocks and property. They have tons of money and resources they could use to make exactly the browser they want.
Take Force Awakens, which has a very high 8.1 rating. However if you go into the User Review section, majority of reviews are very very scathing. And having watched the film, I agree that the movie was terrible. So why the disconnect between user review and user ratings?
14yo kid: It has laser guns and lightsabers -> high rating
Anal retentive SF-nerd with "Han shot first" issues -> bad review
Seriously, some people take light entertainment waaaaaaaaaaay too seriously. Star Wars, obviously. All the superhero movies Marvel makes, they're comic books in movie form. Even LotR had their naysayers because Tom Bombadil was missing and Arwen's love story was a side show from the appendix and... whatever. Consider it a bit like the biggest hits on the music charts, they're not the deepest and most "meaningful" songs. They're what most people want to hear, just like McDonald's isn't going out of business no matter how many food experts shit on them.
The kind we're not building (walking bomb) is not particularly susceptible to jamming; if you jam it, it just blows up. Once it's safely away from the operator, you can arm that functionality.
Until IS tricks you into sending it into a building full of civilians, that would be a PR nightmare. Basically it would be a very slow and impractical delivery mechanism after you've decided it's safe to blow it up. It's different when you don't give a shit about accidental or collateral damage, then you can just strap a stick of C4 to a RC toy and wire the detonator like a dead man's switch to make it a walking bomb. When you lose signal or turn it off it's going to blow up something.
We must actually be pretty close to being able to deploy remotely controlled ground infantry
I doubt it, I don't think we have anything that comes close to passing a military obstacle course. If you think of say an urban area and the task of the robot(s) is to secure a building it has to execute so many practical little details, just using a door handle is challenging outside the lab. The other big deal is stealth, if you look at the robots today most of them are quite loud with hydraulics and such so they couldn't sneak up on anyone. There's a reason all soldiers do hand signals and all that shit, if they just trampled in they'd be easy targets. Also jamming would be a big issue, it's not that hard to create a big noise generator that could be triggered by a trip wire or such. Outdoors a jamming device trying to bring down a drone makes you a big target to shoot at but in the basement of a building your robo-soldiers would be cut off without any easy means to restore contact. For sure robots could do more but I think we're dependent on humans in close proximity for quite some time to come.
When people are worried about changes in "many layers of the stack", it's usually a good time to re-architect the system and build microservices. Basically, you get the entire stack in every microservice and you stop worrying about ripple effects; you upgrade or troubleshoot things at a much smaller scale.
Isn't this one of the problems caused by modularization, not solved by it? Basically if everything was in the same VCS it'd be a huge change set doing some database changes, some business rule changes, some desktop GUI changes, some Android GUI changes, some iPhone GUI changes etc. but the moment you start breaking it up you have to start tracking that this change of functionality requires changes in five different projects and unless everything makes it into the next release it won't work. The more you've divided into microservices, the more places you need to change. Each service will be less complex but the interaction between the services would get more complex because you need to pass things around from service to service.
In my experience what makes developers unhappy is having to write documentation, perform testing and fixing bugs. Of course, that might simply define the habits of the "under-performing colleague" that then drags down the happiness of other, more diligent and professional, developers.
Depends on whether you think "make working code" should be on a list of developers' priorities or not. In a bad workplace what you list are code words for "explain the code so I don't need to make any effort to understand" and "please clean up my hacky semi-functional spaghetti code mess". Here's usually how my day goes, I got my things to do and my deadlines to keep. Then someone requests a change, said developer assigned essentially says "I got no clue on how do to this so I'm estimating a week or two" and the reporter goes "so long? I was hoping it was a day's work and I need it in three", we have a chat with my manager and I do a stunt implementing the essentials before lunch. It'll still need documentation, testing and bug fixing but it'll be mostly there and that's really all the time I have to spare.
Same often goes for bug fixing, unless it's important I've often found that the time I need to spend unraveling is better spent on creating the code I'm supposed to create. Rather than finding the one flaw in the old code, big chunks are rewritten often finding and closing undiscovered bugs in the process while enabling a cleaner structure for the future. That is, I certainly own my own messes and test/clean up my own code. But I'd rather ditch certain bug fixes on someone that I know will use 3x as long as me rather than write new code I know they'll use 10x as long to achieve with poorer results. Yeah I'm not stellar on the points above, but I don't think anyone feels I'm underperforming. At least my boss and colleagues seem to miss me when I'm not available and they're on their own.
The north is highly unlikely to ever strike first, because there is no way they would ever be able to hit hard enough that there wouldn't be a severe response. They might be able to blow up a few cities, but then they would have america attacking them back in full force.
On a day that NK is rational, of course they make their best impression of being irrational. A rational explanation is that NK wants to give the impression they'll fight to the last man and make any invasion a bloody carnage even if they'll be on the losing end of the mess, whether or not that's actually true it's better than giving the appearance that they'll fold to superior forces. The counter-argument is that they might really be irrational and replaced so much fact with ideology, honest men with yes-men and drunk so much of their own kool-aid they'll attack in a genuine but foolish belief they'll win.
The question is how often has that really happened, that a vastly inferior army has gone on the attack? Even if you look at the wars that were genuinely lost like Hitler's invasion of Russia, the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, the arab build-up to the Six Day War, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and so on they had a lot more genuine power to think they could win or wouldn't incur the wrath of major allies. North Korea has half the population and 1/50th the GDP of South Korea and the US is a close ally that has repeated made it clear they'll back SK in case of a war.
It seems to me most dictators are quite happy ruling their own fiefdom, I doubt your world gets any shinier if you rule 10 million people or 20 million people. At least now in the modern day of long range weapons where you can't just send out your armies to die for you while you're king of the castle. Or at the very least commanding well behind enemy lines. Despite all the heroic tales of kings leading their men into battle I doubt they were at the front of the charge...
You spoiled brats with your C64s with floppy drives and your VIC-20s... you had it too easy. The original Commodore PET had 8K of RAM, a 40x25 character display, and storage on a cassette tape.
The C64 also had cassette storage, it was a looong time before I got a floppy drive. My buddy still has one for nostalgia, it's amazing how much patience we had as kids... press play on tape, wait 5-10 minutes? Totally okay. Several minutes of waiting between events in sports games? No problem. These days, if it's not on SSD and ready to use in <5 seconds I'm like "zzz.... come on". Not everything was better in the "good old days".
If the internet suffers an extended outage, there would be massive numbers of deaths. During the first few days, there would be thousands of deaths. During the first few weeks there would be millions of deaths. During the first few months, there would be billions of deaths.
So... two-three months without the Internet and billions will die. The hyperbole is strong in this one. So much of what we do these days is not about survival. In a true life-or-death emergency we'd make different priorities, in the absence of information we'd restart the push economy. People would start stockpiling pasta, rice, flour, biscuits, canned food, bottled water and everything else that could be preserved. We'd limit consumption to war rationing standards, everything on a need-to-have basis. The transition would be painful and some would die but I think there's a lot of production capacity that isn't utilized today because it's not economically efficient, but if there's a shortage it could be used. Slaughter the cattle, ship the beef and the grain you saved for example.
Of course it would depend on whether or not we could keep society together. If it first started to disintegrate with looting and riots with gangs raiding supplies so trade and industrial production comes to a halt then yeah things could fall apart. I don't think locusts like that could last though, they'd just plunder their way but as there's less and less to plunder they'd just fizzle. And eventually we'd have to rebuild in a more sustainable way, like redoing the last 200 years or so. I think we'd lose the modern tech that requires a civilization-level effort like computers and such, but I think Amish-level societies would be reasonably self-sufficient enough to survive.
Incidentally, said "great" model is currently completely out of reach, even for relatively simple things like driving a car (which almost all humans can learn to do, i.e. it does not require much).
We have taught the car how to drive. On the race track self-driving cars are going toe-to-toe with human experts, there's no shortage of driving skills. On a desert run I'd go with the computer just for consistency and reaction time. The challenge is that it's not a closed environment and we don't really know what other general improvisation or problem avoidance / solving skills might come in handy, what the computer lack isn't on any driving test. At least I don't remember anything said about what I should do if there's a sign missing or obscured nor any process to determine whether I might have missed one or the signs are erroneous or sabotaged except maybe some hand-wavy cliches about driving defensively.
Maybe we can't ever build a computer that'll genuinely solve entirely new problems. But I think we'll be pretty happy with one that accumulates all the solutions we've come up with, because I know my driver's education was nowhere near the sum of all driving experience we have. Even now with 20 years of experience there's a lot that millions of other drivers have experienced and I haven't. At some point I expect the vast reference material will outweigh my improvisation skills, most the time. And the chance that you have that expert in that particular car who needs it who can pull it out of thin air in a split second will be slim to none. Simulations can test many outcomes, before the fact and after the fact. I'd rather put our expert on the review board.
First the AI needs to recognize it made a mistake. Humans can't recognize they made a mistake unless another human tells them or there is a failure they are already trained to recognize. How does an AI driven car recognize it just blew through a stop sign unless a human on board tells them or some other indication, like crashing into another car?
Well, at least here in Norway it'd probably run a constant comparison to NVDB - the national road registry. It's among other things the working tool for route planners but it actually contains every traffic light, sign, restriction in height, weight, direction of traffic, curvature, altitude, number of lanes and other road-related elements. At least for self driving classes 3/4 I expect it'll just bail on you and say there's an inconsistency between the stored info and the observed info, you work it out. If it doesn't exist in other countries in a usable form today someone will probably compile it and sell the service.
The data you're looking for probably exists in some form in a planning office, but worse cast Google could use Google Maps and start mapping out the signs themselves. Add a bit of crowdsourcing by having self driving cars upload video for review and I think you're good. The only time it would be a problem was if there was no stop signs before, there are stop signs now and the car didn't register any signs. But I imagine pretty quick they'd get some agreement to get road sign changes reported in,
I know even planned road work and detours goes into our database. It's only accidents and other emergency issues that cause signs to just appear. But to solve that you have to solve the "waving police officer problem" first. If you can detect that, you can hopefully detect ad hoc signs as well. Worst case make some kind of "wave to alert autonomous cars to go manual" sign and fine abusers, the point is to make it work most the time not all the time. At least for now, level 5 is so far out there it's mostly fantasy.
As a parent if I think the child has had too much 'device time' I will take it away. If they want it back they have to have their chores done. It works pretty well. (...) Additionally, don't fight the desire your child has, it may be the passion that fuels his income when they are adults.
That's just ordinary parenting, teaching kids they can't do just the things they want to do. An addiction is a passion that's gone beyond something you want to do into something you feel you need to do like an obsession or compulsion and the rest of your life starts to revolve around getting back there. Like if you're a WoW addict life is about getting rid of all the "distractions" like school, friends, family, events and activities so you can spend more time in Azeroth. Some are functional addicts in that they do the things that absolutely must be done, others start becoming dysfunctional like lying and cheating and skipping school. People have flunked out, lost their jobs, wife and kids for virtual trinkets.
Yes, most kids' passions aren't allowed to involve into addictions because parents effectively shut them down, you don't get ice cream for dinner every day and if you don't do your homework and chores your Internet privileges are revoked. But when they're teens they must also start to get some freedom to make their own choices. Not everyone will cope well with that responsibility, but you can't babysit them forever. If you have some form of troubled teen you probably have a better chance of getting them back on the right track with professional help when they're 15 and living at home than when they're 18 and free to self destruct. Assuming they have real problems, but I know at least a few who did.
Media companies are making bigger profits than ever, with no signs of it slowing down. Why are they so concerned about the tiny amount of piracy taking place?
Because they're trying to sell us on the idea that IP is property. They don't want you to think about it like a free seat at the cinema, they want you to think of every pirated copy as money stolen from them. If they want you to believe it, they have to act like it whether or not they actually think they could have made a sale or not. Even among the people who use subscription services for convenience they are struggling to convince people that sharing is wrong.
The people who argue for net neutrality are clearly the ones who benefit financially from it: geeks who use more bandwidth than average and upload a lot
Nobody has asked that any one bit be treated differently than any other bit, if you spend a lot you pay a lot. When you completely fail to grasp the nature of net neutrality you're either a troll or a shill.
Its not the cost, its the control. Blu rays come with unskippable ads, they cant be easily backed up, and the physical disc is larger than the computer i store thousands of movies on.
I really doubt you got a computer smaller than a BluRay disc. Granted a 200-disc spindle would be bigger than a 10TB HDD or you could use a USB stick if you want to win in two dimensions, but pressed discs are quite compact and durable if treated nicely. WIthout the DRM, I don't really mind the form factor at all. YMMV.
Good shill. How much are they paying you? Whenever there's a product or service, there's those who make it, those who consume it and middlemen. Getting rid of most the middlemen has been the greatest boon of the Internet. Middlemen love to gauge, don't you think the post office would love to gauge how much they charge to deliver this particular package from this sender? The phone company to connect this particular call? That's what you want the ISP to do, sit in the middle and shake down any website you want to visit. You sound way too smart to be this dumb, so I guess the question is: Comcast, Charter, AT&T or Verizon?
While agree with most of your post, the "when do we generate revenue" line is probably the most optional. There are a lot of start ups that grow customer base at a loss, expecting to eventually sell to someone that can keep absorbing teh losses until they monetize. E.g. Google.
Well you're right, I probably didn't mean the company as such but your finances... how and when do you plan to transition from using savings and free labor to live off something else, it doesn't have to be profit it could be investor money. Because unless you have a successful start-up behind you it's unlikely you can bankroll it yourself and if it suffocates before you can secure another source of funding it's over.
1) Does anyone have strong statistical evidence that the problem is Islam, and not a different common feature?
The percentage of terrorists shouting "Allahu akbar". To be more serious though, in unruly areas the border between terrorism, civil war, insurrection, sectarian fighting, war crimes, genocide and general lawlessness is quite blurry so it's hard to give a number everyone will agree on. But in Europe islamic terrorism has been the leading cause of terror in the 21st century. And unlike much of the terror of the past, it seems designed to create mass carnage and maximize civilian casualties. Same with the US even if you exclude 9/11 with Ford Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando leading the pack. Boston was pretty much a flop as deaths go, even if it swamped the news.
In other parts of the world it depends on how you count Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Boko Haram, Al-Nusra, Daesh etc. as opposed to all the other shit that goes down. The Arab Spring for example is a giant cluster fuck. Same with Eastern Ukraine, conflicts in CAR and Somalia in Africa etc. and if you go strictly by number of deaths it's nothing like the killing fields in an actual war. The Stockholm attack is roughly one bad bus accident. In Syria ~1000 civilians die every month. Even if you put Madrid, London 2005, Nice, Berlin, London 2017, Stockholm etc. together for more than a decade of terror you don't come close to a single month. The goal is more to say nobody's safe.
The question is more whether there's underlying tensions building up that will lead to something much, much bigger. After all, if you look in isolation it looks like the years between WWI and WWII were pretty peaceful. Then boom the casualties fly off the map. I'm not really optimistic by the results of "integration" so far, they might live here but many don't adjust much in terms of values or way of life, not even in the next generation. It took us centuries to go from the Dark Ages through enlightenment and women's suffrage to modern life, now we're starting over again for no sane reason I can think of. I guess we have a glutton for punishment.
The current party is the one that put the breaks on letting refugees in and making the asylum process stricter.
Bullshit. All the other parties including the one in government right now have worked together to exclude the one anti-immigration party (Sverigedemokraterna, 12.86% of the vote) from gaining any political power. The only reason they slowed down a little was because the system was about to collapse under the immigration pressure. Essentially, as long as SD have <50% they'll pretend it's not there and vote the way that would have a majority without them. Right now they're polling at ~18%, with attacks like these they'll probably get even bigger.
Do care more for this guy than the others because he worked for a tech company? The other three had hobbies, relationships, careers (except the eleven year-old).
As far as I know the other three haven't been publicly identified so it's less personal for us with nameless, faceless victims and a whole lot less to say. Not that it really matters who in that it's not a targeted attack like Charlie Hebdo, the victims are just random people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that's the problem, so many apologists are still looking for a way we've wronged these people that caused them to become terrorists. But we haven't, we are simply kafir and our disbelief in Allah is our crime.
There was a documentary here in Norway published quite recently called "The Norwegian Islamist", the main character was just convicted to 9 years in prison for terror recruitment. He had agree to the documentary to show "true Islam" and really gave a good look into his world view, it was simple yet terrifying. The world was divided in two, Muslims and non-Muslims. Nations matters not. Laws matters not. As long as he follows Islam, all is justified. Every other word out of his mouth was inshallah, if Allah wills it.
The Islamic State is the one place on Earth where muslims can live by Allah's laws. Those who oppose the Islamic State oppose Allah, those who oppose Allah must die. He'd publicly applaud terrorists and terrorism, stopping just short of encouraging it in a way that'd be illegal. Basically he'd say something like "praise the brave martyrs in Paris, may Allah open the gates to paradise for you" or something like that. He was sending converts to Iraq/Syria to do "humanitarian aid" and you could just feel the quote marks hanging in the air like a big in-joke.
I really didn't want to Godwin this post but if you ever wondered how the Nazis managed to justify sending women and children to the gas chambers simply for being Jews then that's exactly how he feels about non-Muslims. It's total war in its purest form, everyone is a legitimate target. And the same goes the other way around, as long as they're martyrs to the cause they're not atrocities. They're not terrorists. They're holy warriors fighting a holy war for Allah and the only thing that matters is to crush your enemies for the glory of Allah. The ultimate in "the ends justify the means".
We're covered in all sorts of dusts.
Angel dust would explain a thing or two...
If you want to join a startup, go to these incubators and ask them to give you their elevator pitch. If the basic concept sounds okay, ask if they need more staff, what they'd show a potential investor and what skills they're looking for then negotiate a deal. Remember start-ups usually don't have a lot of cash so your income will probably depend on the company's future, joining a poor start-up doesn't do you any good. Make sure you don't end up in a position where you accept crap pay but they'll run away with all the profit if it succeeds.
If you're looking to actually start a software company, how do you know if you have a viable market if you don't have any "business experience"? The most important part of a software company isn't the code, it's the business plan. Essential points:
Who are you planning to sell to?
What will be the key selling features?
Why hasn't anyone else done it?
How will it reach the market?
When do we expect product revenue?
If you think I'll just create the product and they'll come, stop. Nobody knows you exist, nobody understands your product/solution and nobody cares. If you haven't got a grip on those, that's okay but then don't quit your day job. Start creating it, try selling it and get some actual experience. That way it'll only cost you time and you'll probably learn that selling it was much harder than you thought. At least that was my limited experience running a start-up, even if we thought we had the product they needed the customer was rarely more than lukewarm.
You might call them "perfectionists" because they will never finish anything (...) Although they are enthusiastic, their failure mode is that they never produce an end product and their office, lab or home is full of half-completed projects.
I think those two are different archetypes. What you describe is a type of "abandonist" that runs into trouble/uncertainty but rather than work through it procrastinates by starting to work on something else, however since almost every project has some hardship they leave a trail of half-finished things in their wake. I know a person who is like that with home renovation, rather than do one thing in one room and finish he'll start on twenty things in five rooms and never finish. He is roughly as far from a perfectionist as I can think of. Perfectionists are people who refuse to deliver anything until they've tweaked it to some arbitrary standard of perfection that solves every corner case with every nice-to-have feature. They just don't know when to stop and deliver.
I think I'll also add a third archetype, the reinventer. This is the kind of person who - without any real effort or review - can tell you that everything you have is crap and should be rewritten from scratch, probably using Ruby on Rails and NoSQL or whatever is the buzzword of the day. They're the tech version of the trade magazine CEO who'll jump on any buzzword thinking this will solve our problems. And if you're foolish enough to listen he'll soon be exploring the next new fad saying RoR is so yesterday and we should rewrite everything in Node.js instead. Right now the magic buzzword is SQL Server Master Data Services, that'll solve our master data problems. Not.
Not to mention the fact that co-working, the latest buzzword for "not valued enough to have an office", is basically the most miserable work environment I can think of. You only need one loud overtalker and productivity effectively drops to zero.
I think it's one of those "when it works it's amazing, so let's try to make everything and everyone like that". The best scrum team I've met was super chatty, they were constantly bouncing ideas and questions around and even though I'd take on any one of them in a one-on-one coding competition as a team they'd teach the Borg a thing or two about a hive mind. It was like looking at a professional sports team at play, sure every player has their role but if you didn't have any coordination the team that plays well together would overrun a team of highly talented individuals.
The problem is, not everybody works like that. Some talk way too much, some really ought to say something but doesn't. Putting great players and poor players together or lack of coordination can lead to a lot of frustration as some people do excellent work only to see it go to waste. I know I failed at that one at work recently, to me it was obvious since I've lived and breathed the solution I'm working on for some years but to a new person it wasn't obvious at all, so I completely failed to point him to the existing solution so he started looking at a new one. And I've written a lot of code that was for naught.
They are in it just for the monies. It does make me seriously sad, and one of the main reasons I am quitting my job. But I kindof believe that a lot of workpaces are like that.
I think that's pretty close to the definition of work, something somebody else wants me to do for money. I think the number of people who are "living the dream" is <0.01% or less. And if I had a billion in the bank it would be a lot more "when I want it, how I want it, the days I feel like it". Like today I'd just like to be a beach bum. Or just soothe a hangover. Or sit inside and play WoW. I'm not complaining about work, as work goes it's very nice. But if money really was no subject at all... nah, I'd quit and do something else. Like, not "nothing" but nothing resembling any paid position. Also if anyone would like to give me a billion dollars to test that theory, I volunteer.