Marxism is probably preferable to the feudal society these guys are promoting.
That's an interesting comparison. Ignoring the question of whether "these guys" are promoting feudalism, I find it interesting to think about which actually is better, Marxism or feudalism, as an economic system.
From an ideological perspective, Marxism is better, in theory at least, because placing all ownership of property in the hands of a few lords is blatantly unfair. From a practical perspective, though, I'm not sure there's a difference, because every attempt to implement Marxism on any scale larger than a small commune ends up putting control of all property in the hands of a few committee members. I don't think there is any real difference between ownership and control that looks just like ownership but isn't.
In both cases, what you have is central planning, normally organized on multiple tiers to address the fact that no one person or committee can understand and manage it all. However, feudal systems tend to create stronger demarcations between the tiers, and very strong separation of control between the fiefs. This allows for the development of a market economy between fiefs, plus whatever internal markets the feudal lords choose to allow. And those who allow greater economic freedom will find their fiefs generating greater wealth, and feudalism is, er, not much constrained by ideological considerations.
I suppose a Marxist nation that organized itself as a collection of small communes who engaged in market transactions between one another could do that as well, but I think the ideology tends to squash that idea, because if communal ownership works at the small scale, why not expand it?
All in all, though neither is a very effective economic structure, I suspect that feudalism would be better than Marxism given comparable levels of technology and education. Marx obviously thought his system would be an improvement, since his whole focus was transitioning from feudalism to the "improved" world of communal ownership. But I think history has proved that he was simply wrong.
I know that someone was beheaded. It is clear that this is an horrible and cruel act, that nobody and nobody's family should experience. What information does it add to watch the video? You can convey the relevant information in text.
No, you can't. The fact you think so is the entire problem.
I think so, too, and I don't think it's a problem. Rather than just telling people they're talking out of their ass, why don't you explain what value is gained by watching it? Obviously there's no factual information in the video that can't be expressed in a few sentences of text, so the only think I can suppose is that you're of the opinion that the greater emotional impact of seeing it has value.
What, precisely, is that value? For me, personally, I can't imagine what it would be. I don't think anything could make me more strongly opposed to the act of beheading an innocent journalist. Seeing it would make that opposition more visceral -- perhaps in an almost literal sense -- but it wouldn't increase my opposition. It wouldn't lower my opinion of the terrorists, either, since it's not possible to hold a lower opinion of them than I do.
While it would be entertaining, I don't think that's a very useful method for evaluating the performance of self-driving cars, unless you're trying to design a car for demolition derby competitions. I understand that your'e trying to design an extreme environment on the theory that if the car can perform well there, it'll definitely do fine on real roads, but I don't think that theory is valid. In real life, the vehicles on the road try not to hit one another, and the method they use (in most countries, at least) isn't hyper-alertness and evasion skills, but rather cooperative rule-following.
We avoid accidents by collaborating on a set of rules, some written and enforced by police officers, most not, that tell us all how the other drivers are going to behave in a given situation. That is the context in which self-driving vehicles need to operate, at least until we eliminate the human drivers from the road -- at that point self-driving vehicles can use their high-speed wireless communication channels to collaborate more directly. Of course, while human drivers are on the road, we (human and machines alike) have to be wary of drivers who don't behave in the expected way, so there is some value in being able to avoid bad or aggressive behavior. But I don't think optimizing for that is likely to be the most effective solution.
The Google team recognizes this and is optimizing for proper cooperative behavior, and even behavior that optimizes for the comfort of passengers, as in the example in the summary.
The problem with simulator testing is that you can't test scenarios that you didn't think of. This is particularly important to find problems arising from multiple simultaneous situations. For example, you might test the scenarios "front camera obscured by rain", "car ahead of you performs emergency stop", and "dog runs into street", but that doesn't necessarily tell you how the car will respond to a combination of the three.
Real life is far more creative than any scenario designer.
Which is why you should do both. A simulation can test millions of permutations -- including arbitrary combinations of events, and in far more variety than could be tested in a reasonable amount of time on real roads -- and can verify that software changes don't introduce regressions. Real-world testing introduces an element of randomness which provides additional insights for the simulation test cases.
Ultimately, governments should probably develop their own simulators which run the autonomous car through a large battery of scenarios, including scenarios which include disabling some of the car's sensors. Then autonomous vehicles from different manufacturers could be validated on a standard test suite before being allowed on the roads, and when real-world incidents occur in which an automated car makes a bad decision, those incidents can and should be replicated in the simulator and all certified vehicles tested. They should also do real-world testing, but I suspect that in the long run simulations will provide much greater confidence.
Embrace mediocrity and find another outlet for your creativity.
This is among the worst advice for programmers I've ever read. And it's pointless advice because it's where the majority of programmers already are.
Oh, I certainly agree that clever code is a bad idea, but you should never stop thinking creatively about how to make your code better. Focus it on finding ways to structure your code that are elegantly simple and obvious, on finding the perfect name for that variable, function or class, one that precisely captures the meaning and intent -- and if there is no such perfect name, focus it on finding ways to refactor your code so that there is a perfect name. Programming -- done right -- is an inherently creative task, and the scope for beneficial creativity is vast.
This even applies at the micro level. It's almost always the case that any handful of lines of code that contains branching logic can be structured in several different ways. Take the time and try each of them! See which is most concise, which is most readable, which highlights one aspect of the logic flow or another... and then spend some time deciding which aspect will be most important for the next programmer to read it. Think about how you can write code a little bit differently to eliminate -- and visibly eliminate -- important classes of functional or security bugs.
One of the more important insights I received, after nearly 20 years as a professional programmer, was that comments are evil. Comments are a hack to work around the failure to write code which is sufficiently clear and expressive (note that I'm talking about inline comments, not comments used to generate documentation). When I find myself typing a comment, I step back and look for ways to improve naming, or refactor, until the comment is no longer necessary.
Those are just a few examples, there are many more. Programming, like any art, is a never-ending opportunity for learning and improvement, because perfection is unachievable. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try, though. I can already hear the complaints "But I don't have time for that crap, I have deadlines, and..." that's just another set of constraints to be optimized. When time is tight, I focus on simplifying and making absolutely sure that my code is bug-free and has thorough automated tests, because there isn't any time for extended debugging.
Never, ever settle for mediocrity. One of my proudest days was when another programmer whose skills and code I highly respect called my code the cleanest and clearest he's ever read. I strive to impress my colleagues (and I work with some of the best) with clarity, simplicity and elegance. Sometimes I succeed, mostly I fail... but I always learn in the process. After 25 years, I think I'm learning more every day now than I did when I started. The lessons are more subtle and far less obvious, but I think they're more valuable.
Detroit got fat and lazy, and as a result foreign automakers ate their lunch. Japan in particular had cheaper, harder-working workers, coupled with more focus on efficiency and -- eventually, after they built enough capital and experience building cheap crap cars -- design and build quality. Detroit didn't believe they could lose, either the management, or the unions. In order to stay competitive, both would have had to make serious changes... almost certainly including some reductions in labor costs and some labor re-training.
Yep. And, frankly, it was and is obvious that it would be. I've been saying for years that globalism was ultimately a good thing, though in the short term it was going to be painful for the wealthy countries, as standards of living equalize. If this article is correct, the pain may be much less, and much shorter, than I'd expected. Not that there isn't still pain ahead, but if we're already getting to the point where overseas labor costs have risen enough to be offset by domestic education and infrastructure, then the future looks pretty good.
At the end of the day, though, I'm no more entitled to my job than some programmer in China. If he can do the job as well and will do it for less money, then he should have it. Cost of living differences make this painful in the short term, but if we just keep competition open, the field will level -- some of that leveling may come from decreases in my standard of living but most of it will come from increases in his. That's too bad for me, but great for him, and it's fair because he's no less a human being than I am.
Interesting. What do you mean by "operate the engine in private"? Who would use it? And given that information derived from what you search for is the primary source of information for ad targeting, and given that the search engine is the primary place the ads are displayed, how would that work?
You missed the point. You can make such a license if you like, indeed many people have made them. But it is a popularity contest in that unless a significant number of people agree with your priorities and therefore choose to adopt your license, you won't have accomplished anything.
And, of course, the GP disagrees with your priorities and wouldn't use your license. I see both sides, but I think I'd probably shy away from a license with such vague and potentially far-reaching restrictions.
Maybe that's the problem? Can't we have the power of the sharp kitchen knife without the four years of training from Tibetan monks?
Sure. What we can't have is the power of the sharp kitchen knife, plus the compatibility with existing code and libraries without the four years of training.
I can teach a novice to use a nice, pleasant, safe and very powerful subset of modern C++ in a fairly short period of time... as long as the novice is only working on code written in that subset. If the novice starts looking at and modifying other code, though, all bets are off until he's done his years on the mountain top.
The way I see it, C++14 is a very nice language with a bunch of baggage you should just ignore... except when you have to use because you're working with code that already does. This means given a clean, modern codebase you should be able to hire a bunch of smart novices and get them productive fairly quickly. Just keep an old salt around who can answer their questions when they step outside of the nice subset.
Non-sequiteur. X has nothing to do with the GUI, at least not any part of the GUI users care about. X is merely the tool used to draw stuff on the screen; it says nothing about what gets drawn. Everything users care about, including what windows, buttons, fonts, etc., look like, how applications interact with one another, and whether or not all of the above is nicely integrated and looks like it belongs together has nothing to do with X.
US courts have ruled that linking to infringing content constitutes contributory infringement. I'm not sure how "direct" the link has to be. Google search links to torrent sites which contain pointers to infringing content, for example, so that's apparently okay.
The DMCA doesn'y say anything at all about search results. It's about hosting allegedly infringing material.
Courts in the US have held that linking directly to infringing content constitutes contributory infringement. Linking to another site isn't infringement just because the other site doesn't want you to link and benefit from their material (Tickemaster v Tickets.com established that), but linking to infringing material on another site does.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer nor am I a Google spokesperson.)
While that may be true, the shareholders would riot in a damned hurry if the stock price were to tank because Google becomes less relevant.
Which would be relevant only if Larry, Sergey and Eric decided to allow it to be. As long as the three of them stay united, they outvote the rest of the shareholders combined.
These monopolies have billions in cash reserves to run them profitless for a very long time. Like decades.
Aside from the rather questionable assertion that Google is a monopoly, the company's cash reserves are nowhere near that large, or, rather, the company's expenses are much larger than you believe. Last I heard, Google has cash reserves of ~$60B (which, note, aren't actually cash; you don't leave that much capital sitting idle), and annual operational costs of about $40B. How long Google could continue to operate with hugely decreased revenues depends on just how far the revenues declined, and how much economizing the company could do, but I strongly doubt that it would be "decades". If all advertising revenue derived from the search engine disappeared and Google didn't economize at all, it would be bankrupt in maybe three years.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. Everything in this post is derived from public information.)
Yes. Traffic jams happen because interchanges/intersections get saturated.
Actually, the study in question was on freeways, and it didn't necessarily have anything to do with interchanges, which are all rate-controlled in the area. One spot they found regularly jammed was just a rise in the road. The partially obstructed vision was enough to cause a few drivers to slow just a bit, which snowballed and then created a jam which moved backwards from the rise at a fairly constant rate of precession, two or three mph, IIRC. So after the jam moved away from the rise, there was *no* cause for it. It just self-sustained as drivers bunched up when approaching the jam.
I don't have a link handy, but a group (from Stanford, IIRC) did it as a study, rather than to make a point. They found that by driving slow (perhaps even below the speed limit) in a line, they could fix traffic jams. Not because of anything to do with speed limits, but rather just the dynamics of heavy traffic which can cause self-perpetuating jams, even though there is actually plenty of road capacity, no obstructions, etc. By creating a moving roadblock for a few miles and creating a gap that allowed the jam to unjam, they could quickly get traffic flowing smoothly.
Maybe because places that don't have a problem with crime in the first place don't care about making laws to restrict access to weapons?
Perhaps. Assuming you're right, it leaves open the question of whether the restrictions actually affect the level of violence and in what direction. The assumption of the cities with high violence and tight restrictions is that the restrictions reduce violence. Though that assumption seems logical, history calls it into question. For example, both DC and Chicago saw massive increases in violence after they enacted their draconian restrictions. The rest of the country also saw rising violence at the same time, but nowhere near in the same degree. So perhaps the city leaders were prescient, saw the coming wave of violence and acted to mitigate it, or perhaps their action actually exacerbated it. Or maybe the restrictions made no difference at all.
My money is on restrictions increasing the violence, mainly because the restrictions only affect the law-abiding, which gives criminals an advantage, and eliminates their single biggest worry (per FBI studies, in which violent criminals overwhelmingly report that their biggest fear when committing a crime is that the target might be armed). We'll get a chance to see over the next few years, since DC and Chicago have been forced by the courts to loosen their restrictions dramatically.
The misogyny arises from the implied assumption that the woman is just the object of men's desire, that she has no will of her own or ability to act, except to comply with the wishes of whichever man reaches her. The story doesn't actually say any of that, but it is pretty strongly implied. There's also the implication that the physicist and engineer are male, but that's the lesser issue.
It's interesting to note that merely reversing the gender roles in the story causes the perceived problem to disappear, but doesn't address the real issue. This is because it's not the story itself that implies the misogyny, but the cultural subtext, and since that subtext assumes that men are actors and initiators that the man has decided to go along with the game. You can truly eliminate the problem by modifying the story to make the woman the organizer of the little game, which puts all three on equal footing. She's acting by setting the scenario up, the men are acting by deciding whether or not they wish to participate and if so, how.
The difference is subtle, but such subtle, unconscious biases in many different areas can and do often combine into significant -- though often completely unintentional -- bias against women.
As an aside, when we speak of the "objectification" of women, the original use of that word in that context means not object as in "thing", but object as in "direct object", from grammatical structure. The objectified person is one who is always acted upon rather than acting upon others. This story clearly indicates both meanings of the word: The woman in the story is an object of desire, in this case sexual. That's actually perfectly fine. Men and women both can be objects of sexual desire, and as long as the desire doesn't translate into unwelcome advances or into other negative effects, everyone appreciates being thought desirable. But the woman is also and object upon which the physicist or engineer will get to enact their will, and her will isn't relevant. That is the way in which objectification is negative.
Revising the story to make the woman the initiator of the game, while not removing the ability of the physicist and engineer to choose, makes all of the participants actors and none of them pure objects.
My experience was that disk-borne viruses were just about as common on Mac OS as they were on DOS, on a per system basis. There were many more DOS viruses in absolute terms, of course.
Which will last exactly as long as it isn't profitable to make a virus for it.
If everyone swapped to a certain distro of Linux, I'd be willing to bet you'd have major problems within a week.
Actually, compromised Linux systems are in high demand because they make great botnet command and control servers. They're far more valuable than a compromised Windows box.
Also, the assumption behind your assertion is easily demonstrated to be untrue. MacOS had major virus problems, in spite of being much less popular than Windows. OS X has almost no viruses, in spite of being much more popular than MacOS. Android is a great case study: The dominant Android versions, using the Google Play store only, have no significant virus problems, while the much, much less popular Chinese devices have lots. iOS, of course, has basically none, and it's a far more attractive and profitable target than Chinese Android devices. It's less popular than mainstream Android, but given the demographics of the platforms is probably more attractive.
Market share has basically nothing to do with vulnerability to malware.
Of the top ten States in terms of strictest gun laws, 7 have the lowest number of gun deaths.
You know when gun deaths were really low? Before guns were invented. The homicide rate, however, was about an order of magnitude higher than it is now.
Your statement is true, but utterly irrelevant to the question of where the safest places to live are. Does it matter what weapon is used to kill you? Or rob you or, rape you, or... Of course it doesn't. You have fallen victim to (or else are disingenuously pushing, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're foolish, not malicious) to a very clever stratagem pushed by advocates of gun control: Focusing only on gun crime and ignoring other crime.
The statistic that matters isn't the number of gun deaths, it's the number of homicides, assaults, rapes, robberies, etc., total. And on any one of those scales, those states with strict gun laws don't do particularly well. To make them look good you have to do exactly what you did: arbitrarily exclude much of the violence.
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Marxism is probably preferable to the feudal society these guys are promoting.
That's an interesting comparison. Ignoring the question of whether "these guys" are promoting feudalism, I find it interesting to think about which actually is better, Marxism or feudalism, as an economic system.
From an ideological perspective, Marxism is better, in theory at least, because placing all ownership of property in the hands of a few lords is blatantly unfair. From a practical perspective, though, I'm not sure there's a difference, because every attempt to implement Marxism on any scale larger than a small commune ends up putting control of all property in the hands of a few committee members. I don't think there is any real difference between ownership and control that looks just like ownership but isn't.
In both cases, what you have is central planning, normally organized on multiple tiers to address the fact that no one person or committee can understand and manage it all. However, feudal systems tend to create stronger demarcations between the tiers, and very strong separation of control between the fiefs. This allows for the development of a market economy between fiefs, plus whatever internal markets the feudal lords choose to allow. And those who allow greater economic freedom will find their fiefs generating greater wealth, and feudalism is, er, not much constrained by ideological considerations.
I suppose a Marxist nation that organized itself as a collection of small communes who engaged in market transactions between one another could do that as well, but I think the ideology tends to squash that idea, because if communal ownership works at the small scale, why not expand it?
All in all, though neither is a very effective economic structure, I suspect that feudalism would be better than Marxism given comparable levels of technology and education. Marx obviously thought his system would be an improvement, since his whole focus was transitioning from feudalism to the "improved" world of communal ownership. But I think history has proved that he was simply wrong.
I know that someone was beheaded. It is clear that this is an horrible and cruel act, that nobody and nobody's family should experience. What information does it add to watch the video? You can convey the relevant information in text.
No, you can't. The fact you think so is the entire problem.
I think so, too, and I don't think it's a problem. Rather than just telling people they're talking out of their ass, why don't you explain what value is gained by watching it? Obviously there's no factual information in the video that can't be expressed in a few sentences of text, so the only think I can suppose is that you're of the opinion that the greater emotional impact of seeing it has value.
What, precisely, is that value? For me, personally, I can't imagine what it would be. I don't think anything could make me more strongly opposed to the act of beheading an innocent journalist. Seeing it would make that opposition more visceral -- perhaps in an almost literal sense -- but it wouldn't increase my opposition. It wouldn't lower my opinion of the terrorists, either, since it's not possible to hold a lower opinion of them than I do.
So what is the value of seeing it?
While it would be entertaining, I don't think that's a very useful method for evaluating the performance of self-driving cars, unless you're trying to design a car for demolition derby competitions. I understand that your'e trying to design an extreme environment on the theory that if the car can perform well there, it'll definitely do fine on real roads, but I don't think that theory is valid. In real life, the vehicles on the road try not to hit one another, and the method they use (in most countries, at least) isn't hyper-alertness and evasion skills, but rather cooperative rule-following.
We avoid accidents by collaborating on a set of rules, some written and enforced by police officers, most not, that tell us all how the other drivers are going to behave in a given situation. That is the context in which self-driving vehicles need to operate, at least until we eliminate the human drivers from the road -- at that point self-driving vehicles can use their high-speed wireless communication channels to collaborate more directly. Of course, while human drivers are on the road, we (human and machines alike) have to be wary of drivers who don't behave in the expected way, so there is some value in being able to avoid bad or aggressive behavior. But I don't think optimizing for that is likely to be the most effective solution.
The Google team recognizes this and is optimizing for proper cooperative behavior, and even behavior that optimizes for the comfort of passengers, as in the example in the summary.
The problem with simulator testing is that you can't test scenarios that you didn't think of. This is particularly important to find problems arising from multiple simultaneous situations. For example, you might test the scenarios "front camera obscured by rain", "car ahead of you performs emergency stop", and "dog runs into street", but that doesn't necessarily tell you how the car will respond to a combination of the three.
Real life is far more creative than any scenario designer.
Which is why you should do both. A simulation can test millions of permutations -- including arbitrary combinations of events, and in far more variety than could be tested in a reasonable amount of time on real roads -- and can verify that software changes don't introduce regressions. Real-world testing introduces an element of randomness which provides additional insights for the simulation test cases.
Ultimately, governments should probably develop their own simulators which run the autonomous car through a large battery of scenarios, including scenarios which include disabling some of the car's sensors. Then autonomous vehicles from different manufacturers could be validated on a standard test suite before being allowed on the roads, and when real-world incidents occur in which an automated car makes a bad decision, those incidents can and should be replicated in the simulator and all certified vehicles tested. They should also do real-world testing, but I suspect that in the long run simulations will provide much greater confidence.
Embrace mediocrity and find another outlet for your creativity.
This is among the worst advice for programmers I've ever read. And it's pointless advice because it's where the majority of programmers already are.
Oh, I certainly agree that clever code is a bad idea, but you should never stop thinking creatively about how to make your code better. Focus it on finding ways to structure your code that are elegantly simple and obvious, on finding the perfect name for that variable, function or class, one that precisely captures the meaning and intent -- and if there is no such perfect name, focus it on finding ways to refactor your code so that there is a perfect name. Programming -- done right -- is an inherently creative task, and the scope for beneficial creativity is vast.
This even applies at the micro level. It's almost always the case that any handful of lines of code that contains branching logic can be structured in several different ways. Take the time and try each of them! See which is most concise, which is most readable, which highlights one aspect of the logic flow or another... and then spend some time deciding which aspect will be most important for the next programmer to read it. Think about how you can write code a little bit differently to eliminate -- and visibly eliminate -- important classes of functional or security bugs.
One of the more important insights I received, after nearly 20 years as a professional programmer, was that comments are evil. Comments are a hack to work around the failure to write code which is sufficiently clear and expressive (note that I'm talking about inline comments, not comments used to generate documentation). When I find myself typing a comment, I step back and look for ways to improve naming, or refactor, until the comment is no longer necessary.
Those are just a few examples, there are many more. Programming, like any art, is a never-ending opportunity for learning and improvement, because perfection is unachievable. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try, though. I can already hear the complaints "But I don't have time for that crap, I have deadlines, and..." that's just another set of constraints to be optimized. When time is tight, I focus on simplifying and making absolutely sure that my code is bug-free and has thorough automated tests, because there isn't any time for extended debugging.
Never, ever settle for mediocrity. One of my proudest days was when another programmer whose skills and code I highly respect called my code the cleanest and clearest he's ever read. I strive to impress my colleagues (and I work with some of the best) with clarity, simplicity and elegance. Sometimes I succeed, mostly I fail... but I always learn in the process. After 25 years, I think I'm learning more every day now than I did when I started. The lessons are more subtle and far less obvious, but I think they're more valuable.
Detroit got fat and lazy, and as a result foreign automakers ate their lunch. Japan in particular had cheaper, harder-working workers, coupled with more focus on efficiency and -- eventually, after they built enough capital and experience building cheap crap cars -- design and build quality. Detroit didn't believe they could lose, either the management, or the unions. In order to stay competitive, both would have had to make serious changes... almost certainly including some reductions in labor costs and some labor re-training.
IMHO, it's both.
Yep. And, frankly, it was and is obvious that it would be. I've been saying for years that globalism was ultimately a good thing, though in the short term it was going to be painful for the wealthy countries, as standards of living equalize. If this article is correct, the pain may be much less, and much shorter, than I'd expected. Not that there isn't still pain ahead, but if we're already getting to the point where overseas labor costs have risen enough to be offset by domestic education and infrastructure, then the future looks pretty good.
At the end of the day, though, I'm no more entitled to my job than some programmer in China. If he can do the job as well and will do it for less money, then he should have it. Cost of living differences make this painful in the short term, but if we just keep competition open, the field will level -- some of that leveling may come from decreases in my standard of living but most of it will come from increases in his. That's too bad for me, but great for him, and it's fair because he's no less a human being than I am.
Interesting. What do you mean by "operate the engine in private"? Who would use it? And given that information derived from what you search for is the primary source of information for ad targeting, and given that the search engine is the primary place the ads are displayed, how would that work?
It's not a popularity contest.
You missed the point. You can make such a license if you like, indeed many people have made them. But it is a popularity contest in that unless a significant number of people agree with your priorities and therefore choose to adopt your license, you won't have accomplished anything.
And, of course, the GP disagrees with your priorities and wouldn't use your license. I see both sides, but I think I'd probably shy away from a license with such vague and potentially far-reaching restrictions.
Maybe that's the problem? Can't we have the power of the sharp kitchen knife without the four years of training from Tibetan monks?
Sure. What we can't have is the power of the sharp kitchen knife, plus the compatibility with existing code and libraries without the four years of training.
I can teach a novice to use a nice, pleasant, safe and very powerful subset of modern C++ in a fairly short period of time... as long as the novice is only working on code written in that subset. If the novice starts looking at and modifying other code, though, all bets are off until he's done his years on the mountain top.
The way I see it, C++14 is a very nice language with a bunch of baggage you should just ignore... except when you have to use because you're working with code that already does. This means given a clean, modern codebase you should be able to hire a bunch of smart novices and get them productive fairly quickly. Just keep an old salt around who can answer their questions when they step outside of the nice subset.
The problem is the GUI. People don't like X
Non-sequiteur. X has nothing to do with the GUI, at least not any part of the GUI users care about. X is merely the tool used to draw stuff on the screen; it says nothing about what gets drawn. Everything users care about, including what windows, buttons, fonts, etc., look like, how applications interact with one another, and whether or not all of the above is nicely integrated and looks like it belongs together has nothing to do with X.
count me out... this sort of stuff just makes me want to live on a remote tropical island and spend my days fishing.
Do you also insist on owning your own elevator?
I insist on living and working in locations where I don't need an elevator... a remote tropical island would work well for this.
US courts have ruled that linking to infringing content constitutes contributory infringement. I'm not sure how "direct" the link has to be. Google search links to torrent sites which contain pointers to infringing content, for example, so that's apparently okay.
The DMCA doesn'y say anything at all about search results. It's about hosting allegedly infringing material.
Courts in the US have held that linking directly to infringing content constitutes contributory infringement. Linking to another site isn't infringement just because the other site doesn't want you to link and benefit from their material (Tickemaster v Tickets.com established that), but linking to infringing material on another site does.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer nor am I a Google spokesperson.)
While that may be true, the shareholders would riot in a damned hurry if the stock price were to tank because Google becomes less relevant.
Which would be relevant only if Larry, Sergey and Eric decided to allow it to be. As long as the three of them stay united, they outvote the rest of the shareholders combined.
These monopolies have billions in cash reserves to run them profitless for a very long time. Like decades.
Aside from the rather questionable assertion that Google is a monopoly, the company's cash reserves are nowhere near that large, or, rather, the company's expenses are much larger than you believe. Last I heard, Google has cash reserves of ~$60B (which, note, aren't actually cash; you don't leave that much capital sitting idle), and annual operational costs of about $40B. How long Google could continue to operate with hugely decreased revenues depends on just how far the revenues declined, and how much economizing the company could do, but I strongly doubt that it would be "decades". If all advertising revenue derived from the search engine disappeared and Google didn't economize at all, it would be bankrupt in maybe three years.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. Everything in this post is derived from public information.)
Yes. Traffic jams happen because interchanges/intersections get saturated.
Actually, the study in question was on freeways, and it didn't necessarily have anything to do with interchanges, which are all rate-controlled in the area. One spot they found regularly jammed was just a rise in the road. The partially obstructed vision was enough to cause a few drivers to slow just a bit, which snowballed and then created a jam which moved backwards from the rise at a fairly constant rate of precession, two or three mph, IIRC. So after the jam moved away from the rise, there was *no* cause for it. It just self-sustained as drivers bunched up when approaching the jam.
There was a /. article on it. It was fascinating.
I don't have a link handy, but a group (from Stanford, IIRC) did it as a study, rather than to make a point. They found that by driving slow (perhaps even below the speed limit) in a line, they could fix traffic jams. Not because of anything to do with speed limits, but rather just the dynamics of heavy traffic which can cause self-perpetuating jams, even though there is actually plenty of road capacity, no obstructions, etc. By creating a moving roadblock for a few miles and creating a gap that allowed the jam to unjam, they could quickly get traffic flowing smoothly.
Maybe because places that don't have a problem with crime in the first place don't care about making laws to restrict access to weapons?
Perhaps. Assuming you're right, it leaves open the question of whether the restrictions actually affect the level of violence and in what direction. The assumption of the cities with high violence and tight restrictions is that the restrictions reduce violence. Though that assumption seems logical, history calls it into question. For example, both DC and Chicago saw massive increases in violence after they enacted their draconian restrictions. The rest of the country also saw rising violence at the same time, but nowhere near in the same degree. So perhaps the city leaders were prescient, saw the coming wave of violence and acted to mitigate it, or perhaps their action actually exacerbated it. Or maybe the restrictions made no difference at all.
My money is on restrictions increasing the violence, mainly because the restrictions only affect the law-abiding, which gives criminals an advantage, and eliminates their single biggest worry (per FBI studies, in which violent criminals overwhelmingly report that their biggest fear when committing a crime is that the target might be armed). We'll get a chance to see over the next few years, since DC and Chicago have been forced by the courts to loosen their restrictions dramatically.
LOL. I don't think anyone who knows me would call me a feminist. I try to be nice to women, but I try to be nice to everyone.
The misogyny arises from the implied assumption that the woman is just the object of men's desire, that she has no will of her own or ability to act, except to comply with the wishes of whichever man reaches her. The story doesn't actually say any of that, but it is pretty strongly implied. There's also the implication that the physicist and engineer are male, but that's the lesser issue.
It's interesting to note that merely reversing the gender roles in the story causes the perceived problem to disappear, but doesn't address the real issue. This is because it's not the story itself that implies the misogyny, but the cultural subtext, and since that subtext assumes that men are actors and initiators that the man has decided to go along with the game. You can truly eliminate the problem by modifying the story to make the woman the organizer of the little game, which puts all three on equal footing. She's acting by setting the scenario up, the men are acting by deciding whether or not they wish to participate and if so, how.
The difference is subtle, but such subtle, unconscious biases in many different areas can and do often combine into significant -- though often completely unintentional -- bias against women.
As an aside, when we speak of the "objectification" of women, the original use of that word in that context means not object as in "thing", but object as in "direct object", from grammatical structure. The objectified person is one who is always acted upon rather than acting upon others. This story clearly indicates both meanings of the word: The woman in the story is an object of desire, in this case sexual. That's actually perfectly fine. Men and women both can be objects of sexual desire, and as long as the desire doesn't translate into unwelcome advances or into other negative effects, everyone appreciates being thought desirable. But the woman is also and object upon which the physicist or engineer will get to enact their will, and her will isn't relevant. That is the way in which objectification is negative.
Revising the story to make the woman the initiator of the game, while not removing the ability of the physicist and engineer to choose, makes all of the participants actors and none of them pure objects.
Everything I've read said it's very unlikely to hit Earth in 2880. One chance in three hundred does not "likely" make.
On the other hand, 1 in 300 is pretty close to the chance of a Straight coming up without a Draw....
If we can't figure out a way to reduce that probability to approximately zero sometime in the next 866 years, we deserve to get smashed.
My experience was that disk-borne viruses were just about as common on Mac OS as they were on DOS, on a per system basis. There were many more DOS viruses in absolute terms, of course.
Which will last exactly as long as it isn't profitable to make a virus for it. If everyone swapped to a certain distro of Linux, I'd be willing to bet you'd have major problems within a week.
Actually, compromised Linux systems are in high demand because they make great botnet command and control servers. They're far more valuable than a compromised Windows box.
Also, the assumption behind your assertion is easily demonstrated to be untrue. MacOS had major virus problems, in spite of being much less popular than Windows. OS X has almost no viruses, in spite of being much more popular than MacOS. Android is a great case study: The dominant Android versions, using the Google Play store only, have no significant virus problems, while the much, much less popular Chinese devices have lots. iOS, of course, has basically none, and it's a far more attractive and profitable target than Chinese Android devices. It's less popular than mainstream Android, but given the demographics of the platforms is probably more attractive.
Market share has basically nothing to do with vulnerability to malware.
Of the top ten States in terms of strictest gun laws, 7 have the lowest number of gun deaths.
You know when gun deaths were really low? Before guns were invented. The homicide rate, however, was about an order of magnitude higher than it is now.
Your statement is true, but utterly irrelevant to the question of where the safest places to live are. Does it matter what weapon is used to kill you? Or rob you or, rape you, or... Of course it doesn't. You have fallen victim to (or else are disingenuously pushing, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're foolish, not malicious) to a very clever stratagem pushed by advocates of gun control: Focusing only on gun crime and ignoring other crime.
The statistic that matters isn't the number of gun deaths, it's the number of homicides, assaults, rapes, robberies, etc., total. And on any one of those scales, those states with strict gun laws don't do particularly well. To make them look good you have to do exactly what you did: arbitrarily exclude much of the violence.