I find all natural gemstones silly at this point. You can buy flawless man-made versions of most of them for a fraction of the price of even quite included mined stones. Even when their values are similar, I'd still rather use the man-made ones as they are more energy-efficient.
I'm married, so I've bought a lot of jewelry, and she insisted on diamonds in her engagement ring (I tried to talk her out of it, but the marketing is strong and she wouldn't accept all the reasonable arguments against them). The jeweler insisted natural maintained more value and that man-made ones were close to natural in price. Ultimately, I took their advice on the diamonds, but with the exception of purple & lavender sapphires (which are always natural because nobody make them), all our colored stones are lab grown and I'm happiest with the lab grown stones for everything from quality to price to feeling better about their source...
Considering the evil of De Beers, I hope the company goes under due to their price fixing and that enough of us can prove to others that there's nothing special about a tiny chunk of naturally-occurring carbon.
On the other hand, I was obsessive about using all the recycled (because you have to mine it, might as well reuse what is already available) platinum I realistically could in them, along with having them fabricated by respected artisans, since all the value in jewelry is in the metal and workmanship.
The problem is that it needs to be told what it's supposed to track and it homes for where it launched. Following someone walking is very different from following someone when they're moving quickly. None of their video showed the latter, which tells me that they couldn't show it (after all, it'd be impressive).
Don't get me wrong, it looks like it'd be handy for a lot of purposes and they're moving in the right direction, but the pet analogy is really what I want to see for action shots. If I am bothering to charge and carry it, it needs to be able to do them with little-to-no planning or configuration. We're talking push of a single button simple. In a way, the best solution would probably be the simplest one: Have the smartphone stream GPS coordinates to the drone while tracking... It'd beat object recognition and keep it close the whole time.
As I think about it more, I can see some great uses for it. It's very cost effective for the capabilities and the size would make it very practical to carry around. I do think the size is great and the way it folds up really small is the best part of it. If I was a travel blogger that wanted to add video of my adventures, this would be an obvious choice.
How do these groups justify their existence over 40 years after the junk science of "race" was completely debunked? There is clearly a lot of money to be made by perpetuating junk science and peddling that garbage to the uneducated masses.
The AC is right. That you can intentionally select for traits is irrelevant. Race is a social construct. If you don't believe me, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics
We're all Homo sapiens sapiens. A tiny handful of genes that affect outward appearance are irrelevant. The fact people cling to such outdated garbage is depressing.
That was my first thought as well. All the best developers I've ever worked with were quite socially awkward, most probably somewhere on the spectrum. The best I ever hired was absolutely awful in the interview and nobody else could see what I saw in him.
High-functioning autistics succeeding in tech careers have resulted in what some have described as an "epidemic" of ASDs among children in Silicon Valley. One of the problems is that high-functioning autistics still seldom move up into management (even if they want to), which keeps companies from hiring lower-functioning people with strong skills.
At the very least, it's good to see some companies looking at working on diversity on this front. Too bad it will probably take decades to catch on in smaller companies where they'd likely be far more comfortable.
I hate that 80 character limit so much. It's probably my biggest beef with PEP8, right before the four-space indentation rule (2 spaces are so much better).
Number designations are good, provided they include information. None of the modern car manufacturers (except, possibly, M-B) have numeric designations that actually mean anything. Pulling a number and adding a letter or three to it is not clever, it's a reflection of a complete lack of intelligence and/or creativity.
Names are even less meaningful, unless they last a long time. GM is the grand master of random names on random cars. They have done it so much that I often learn of some flop they built under a name I never heard of that was only available in X markets. Toyota is close to them, with their wide array of almost indistinguishable cars (take a look at their economy car line and tell me how these are clearly differentiated...I dare you).
In my opinion, companies should use a size/class name or letter identifier, then a series of completely standardized numbers/characters to define the body style & propulsion, then a unique trim name/identifier. Tesla does about the best I've seen in recent years - "Model S P90D" = Model S, Performance configuration (P), 90kWh battery pack (90), and AWD (D). Maybe this is why they appeal to tech people so much, aside from the fact they're electric.
When I need data unrecoverable, I use dd. You don't really need anything else./dev/zero and/dev/zero | tr '\000' '\377', do until you get bored or start getting errors...
Of course, if I only ran Windows, I guess I wouldn't have many choices.
I don't trust the cloud providers, either. If I host something with one, I always assume it will need to be possible to completely load/restore it somewhere else. Tapes are the only remaining magnetic media that I still believe have a legitimate use case. Hard disks are still far too expensive to fit between tapes and solid state storage.
I have been actively avoiding optical since the late 1990s and haven't put an optical drive in a computer I have built for myself since 2002. In fact, I haven't put one in any desktop I have built since 2010. Optical media is terrible for data storage, even tape makes more sense...
For that matter, I've been phasing out spinning hard disks for years. Sometime in 2009 is the last time I begrudgingly put a hard disk in a desktop. last time I ordered any was when I bought some enterprise-grade ones in 2013 for a file server. All my servers since then have exclusively used SSDs.
Not only is optical basically dead to me in regard to computers (very few drives exist anywhere in my company; I pull my old USB one out and hand it to someone about 2-3 times a year), but it is almost entirely dead for all entertainment media (I download or stream just about everything I watch these days). The blu-ray player isn't even connected to the TV anymore, it just sits in a cupboard collecting dust.
Solid state media is the future. Everything else is either for special use cases (tape - slow archival) or completely obsolete. Give it a couple more years and even cheap laptops will probably have SSDs, at which point HDDs will be forever dead.
The Los Angeles style is better with lower overhead than other forms. It flows in communication and doesn't add excessive irrelevant information. Considering they operate primarily in their metro area, it works very well. Nobody cares what type of road it is because it is irrelevant. If you want a truly bad system, drop "the" entirely. That's how they do it in San Francisco and a number of areas they have influenced. The negative effects are severe.
I have to disagree on "orient", as it overloads a word that is used as a noun or adjective. "Orientate" is a verb. All words based on it are as well. I believe people on this site primarily speak AmE and the term comes from BrE, which is probably why you are so confused by and resistant to it.
But that would be wrong. There is a location and they're as close to it as they can be. It is somewhere in the lower-48 US, so they return a rough centre and a radius that encompasses the region the address is in.
There are a lot of these that go to a geographic centre of a city or state as well, as that is the best accuracy they can provide.
All legitimate uses of their data (I have used it on a few projects.) would not be negatively affected by this lack of exact precision. The people at fault are those that used this database improperly, not those that created it.
I read that and thought, "Next, we'll hear of some hapless rural officer dying in a lake.". At the very least, I could see the local law enforcement suing for all the times it went out on that lake in a boat to get to that spot or all the calls flooding in from other LE groups to go there. They can't win.
Seriously. My record would be muddier than the Mississippi River after a major flood of the surrounding area. I have people that use my loyalty cards and I use theirs (family, close friends, girlfriend, her family, etc). Hell, so does my GF. We buy things for ourselves and others. Her dad was flagged for marketing for products he was helping me research.
Going even further, there is tons that makes me even harder to track - numerous VMs, years in other countries, and the lack of concentration of information (except with Google - it's hard to get away from them).
I'd love to know what most of these companies know about me, though...
Humans place a thin veneer of "society", "civilization", and/or "intelligence" over most of these traits, but to claim that humans are somehow not subject to the same is ignoring that most of us are only a handful of generations separated from people that were constantly at risk of death or displacement due to famine or warfare. Crime and population statistics seem to closely reflect the results of this study, as violence is increasingly concentrated among the global poor and the global rich are having fewer children.
Areas with jobs available to young people are far more expensive than that. A $150k house should be occupied by a household making at least $50k/year, which isn't easy to find in places where those jobs are readily available.
Where I live, 100k is the new 40k, but inhabitable house prices start around 500k (especially if you factor in things like HOA fees). Houses that were purchased by people with average incomes 20-30 years ago now go for well over 1M. No, I don't live in California or New York...
Except that stat is also subject to dropping people out of the pool. If you're unemployed more than some amount of time, they consider you no longer part of the labor pool.
The numbers shouldn't be cooked. A raw percentage of working-age adults (perhaps with a breakdown by age group) that are employed and their full/part-time status would be far more useful than the numbers we get.
H-1Bs are supposed to be the cream of the crop, not entry level people. Local recent grads in the US often find it hard to get their foot in the door in the job market because there are no entry level jobs left.
On the other hand, the program has always needed an extremely high minimum wage limit because 60k isn't even a realistic starting salary straight out of school these days. Here in Seattle, 125k is what a fresh-out-of-school CS grad can expect to make in their first programming job. I know a community college dropout that just turned 21 that is making over 6 figures. These numbers are much lower than those seen in SV/SF.
Comparing a 90s Caprice to a modern car is pretty silly. They haven't made one in 20 years. The Crown Vics had gone through many upgrades over the years and were/are exceptionally durable, plus the parts are dirt cheap. This economy of scale has not been reached with any other vehicle used in modern fleets as nothing has become essentially a standard across the board like the Crown Vic was.
But there is still a legitimate argument against CAFE. You're forcing the manufacturers to produce a car with better CAFE ratings every year, but that won't always result in better ratings on newer cycles or in real world use. My new car is rated 23/32, but actually sees about 26 with my driving. Most owners can't even break 23. When driven to get top marks on a CAFE test (which I have only done once in my car on a long drive), it netted slightly over 40.
Wouldn't it be better if they focused on real-world results instead? Take existing cars, run a newer test, then use that as a new benchmark.
But I have done it. Once. At Overstock.com. Their CEO and his close circle are the worst people I've ever done work for. Would never wish that on anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I find all natural gemstones silly at this point. You can buy flawless man-made versions of most of them for a fraction of the price of even quite included mined stones. Even when their values are similar, I'd still rather use the man-made ones as they are more energy-efficient.
I'm married, so I've bought a lot of jewelry, and she insisted on diamonds in her engagement ring (I tried to talk her out of it, but the marketing is strong and she wouldn't accept all the reasonable arguments against them). The jeweler insisted natural maintained more value and that man-made ones were close to natural in price. Ultimately, I took their advice on the diamonds, but with the exception of purple & lavender sapphires (which are always natural because nobody make them), all our colored stones are lab grown and I'm happiest with the lab grown stones for everything from quality to price to feeling better about their source...
Considering the evil of De Beers, I hope the company goes under due to their price fixing and that enough of us can prove to others that there's nothing special about a tiny chunk of naturally-occurring carbon.
On the other hand, I was obsessive about using all the recycled (because you have to mine it, might as well reuse what is already available) platinum I realistically could in them, along with having them fabricated by respected artisans, since all the value in jewelry is in the metal and workmanship.
The problem is that it needs to be told what it's supposed to track and it homes for where it launched. Following someone walking is very different from following someone when they're moving quickly. None of their video showed the latter, which tells me that they couldn't show it (after all, it'd be impressive).
Don't get me wrong, it looks like it'd be handy for a lot of purposes and they're moving in the right direction, but the pet analogy is really what I want to see for action shots. If I am bothering to charge and carry it, it needs to be able to do them with little-to-no planning or configuration. We're talking push of a single button simple. In a way, the best solution would probably be the simplest one: Have the smartphone stream GPS coordinates to the drone while tracking... It'd beat object recognition and keep it close the whole time.
As I think about it more, I can see some great uses for it. It's very cost effective for the capabilities and the size would make it very practical to carry around. I do think the size is great and the way it folds up really small is the best part of it. If I was a travel blogger that wanted to add video of my adventures, this would be an obvious choice.
It'll impress me when it can follow me like a pet in WoW. Until then, I'd still need a friend to fly it for a third-person aerial view...
How do these groups justify their existence over 40 years after the junk science of "race" was completely debunked? There is clearly a lot of money to be made by perpetuating junk science and peddling that garbage to the uneducated masses.
The AC is right. That you can intentionally select for traits is irrelevant. Race is a social construct. If you don't believe me, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics
We're all Homo sapiens sapiens. A tiny handful of genes that affect outward appearance are irrelevant. The fact people cling to such outdated garbage is depressing.
That was my first thought as well. All the best developers I've ever worked with were quite socially awkward, most probably somewhere on the spectrum. The best I ever hired was absolutely awful in the interview and nobody else could see what I saw in him.
High-functioning autistics succeeding in tech careers have resulted in what some have described as an "epidemic" of ASDs among children in Silicon Valley. One of the problems is that high-functioning autistics still seldom move up into management (even if they want to), which keeps companies from hiring lower-functioning people with strong skills.
At the very least, it's good to see some companies looking at working on diversity on this front. Too bad it will probably take decades to catch on in smaller companies where they'd likely be far more comfortable.
I hate that 80 character limit so much. It's probably my biggest beef with PEP8, right before the four-space indentation rule (2 spaces are so much better).
Number designations are good, provided they include information. None of the modern car manufacturers (except, possibly, M-B) have numeric designations that actually mean anything. Pulling a number and adding a letter or three to it is not clever, it's a reflection of a complete lack of intelligence and/or creativity.
Names are even less meaningful, unless they last a long time. GM is the grand master of random names on random cars. They have done it so much that I often learn of some flop they built under a name I never heard of that was only available in X markets. Toyota is close to them, with their wide array of almost indistinguishable cars (take a look at their economy car line and tell me how these are clearly differentiated...I dare you).
In my opinion, companies should use a size/class name or letter identifier, then a series of completely standardized numbers/characters to define the body style & propulsion, then a unique trim name/identifier. Tesla does about the best I've seen in recent years - "Model S P90D" = Model S, Performance configuration (P), 90kWh battery pack (90), and AWD (D). Maybe this is why they appeal to tech people so much, aside from the fact they're electric.
When I need data unrecoverable, I use dd. You don't really need anything else. /dev/zero and /dev/zero | tr '\000' '\377', do until you get bored or start getting errors...
Of course, if I only ran Windows, I guess I wouldn't have many choices.
dd?
I don't trust the cloud providers, either. If I host something with one, I always assume it will need to be possible to completely load/restore it somewhere else. Tapes are the only remaining magnetic media that I still believe have a legitimate use case. Hard disks are still far too expensive to fit between tapes and solid state storage.
I have been actively avoiding optical since the late 1990s and haven't put an optical drive in a computer I have built for myself since 2002. In fact, I haven't put one in any desktop I have built since 2010. Optical media is terrible for data storage, even tape makes more sense...
For that matter, I've been phasing out spinning hard disks for years. Sometime in 2009 is the last time I begrudgingly put a hard disk in a desktop. last time I ordered any was when I bought some enterprise-grade ones in 2013 for a file server. All my servers since then have exclusively used SSDs.
Not only is optical basically dead to me in regard to computers (very few drives exist anywhere in my company; I pull my old USB one out and hand it to someone about 2-3 times a year), but it is almost entirely dead for all entertainment media (I download or stream just about everything I watch these days). The blu-ray player isn't even connected to the TV anymore, it just sits in a cupboard collecting dust.
Solid state media is the future. Everything else is either for special use cases (tape - slow archival) or completely obsolete. Give it a couple more years and even cheap laptops will probably have SSDs, at which point HDDs will be forever dead.
The Los Angeles style is better with lower overhead than other forms. It flows in communication and doesn't add excessive irrelevant information. Considering they operate primarily in their metro area, it works very well. Nobody cares what type of road it is because it is irrelevant. If you want a truly bad system, drop "the" entirely. That's how they do it in San Francisco and a number of areas they have influenced. The negative effects are severe.
I have to disagree on "orient", as it overloads a word that is used as a noun or adjective. "Orientate" is a verb. All words based on it are as well. I believe people on this site primarily speak AmE and the term comes from BrE, which is probably why you are so confused by and resistant to it.
But that would be wrong. There is a location and they're as close to it as they can be. It is somewhere in the lower-48 US, so they return a rough centre and a radius that encompasses the region the address is in.
There are a lot of these that go to a geographic centre of a city or state as well, as that is the best accuracy they can provide.
All legitimate uses of their data (I have used it on a few projects.) would not be negatively affected by this lack of exact precision. The people at fault are those that used this database improperly, not those that created it.
I read that and thought, "Next, we'll hear of some hapless rural officer dying in a lake.". At the very least, I could see the local law enforcement suing for all the times it went out on that lake in a boat to get to that spot or all the calls flooding in from other LE groups to go there. They can't win.
Seriously. My record would be muddier than the Mississippi River after a major flood of the surrounding area. I have people that use my loyalty cards and I use theirs (family, close friends, girlfriend, her family, etc). Hell, so does my GF. We buy things for ourselves and others. Her dad was flagged for marketing for products he was helping me research.
Going even further, there is tons that makes me even harder to track - numerous VMs, years in other countries, and the lack of concentration of information (except with Google - it's hard to get away from them).
I'd love to know what most of these companies know about me, though...
Humans place a thin veneer of "society", "civilization", and/or "intelligence" over most of these traits, but to claim that humans are somehow not subject to the same is ignoring that most of us are only a handful of generations separated from people that were constantly at risk of death or displacement due to famine or warfare. Crime and population statistics seem to closely reflect the results of this study, as violence is increasingly concentrated among the global poor and the global rich are having fewer children.
Avoiding meiosis also reduces the risk of unfavorable code persisting in the gene pool.
<luddite>The old ways were clearly superior, otherwise they would have been replaced long ago.</luddite>
Areas with jobs available to young people are far more expensive than that. A $150k house should be occupied by a household making at least $50k/year, which isn't easy to find in places where those jobs are readily available.
Where I live, 100k is the new 40k, but inhabitable house prices start around 500k (especially if you factor in things like HOA fees). Houses that were purchased by people with average incomes 20-30 years ago now go for well over 1M. No, I don't live in California or New York...
Except that stat is also subject to dropping people out of the pool. If you're unemployed more than some amount of time, they consider you no longer part of the labor pool.
The numbers shouldn't be cooked. A raw percentage of working-age adults (perhaps with a breakdown by age group) that are employed and their full/part-time status would be far more useful than the numbers we get.
H-1Bs are supposed to be the cream of the crop, not entry level people. Local recent grads in the US often find it hard to get their foot in the door in the job market because there are no entry level jobs left.
On the other hand, the program has always needed an extremely high minimum wage limit because 60k isn't even a realistic starting salary straight out of school these days. Here in Seattle, 125k is what a fresh-out-of-school CS grad can expect to make in their first programming job. I know a community college dropout that just turned 21 that is making over 6 figures. These numbers are much lower than those seen in SV/SF.
Comparing a 90s Caprice to a modern car is pretty silly. They haven't made one in 20 years. The Crown Vics had gone through many upgrades over the years and were/are exceptionally durable, plus the parts are dirt cheap. This economy of scale has not been reached with any other vehicle used in modern fleets as nothing has become essentially a standard across the board like the Crown Vic was.
But there is still a legitimate argument against CAFE. You're forcing the manufacturers to produce a car with better CAFE ratings every year, but that won't always result in better ratings on newer cycles or in real world use. My new car is rated 23/32, but actually sees about 26 with my driving. Most owners can't even break 23. When driven to get top marks on a CAFE test (which I have only done once in my car on a long drive), it netted slightly over 40.
Wouldn't it be better if they focused on real-world results instead? Take existing cars, run a newer test, then use that as a new benchmark.
But I have done it. Once. At Overstock.com. Their CEO and his close circle are the worst people I've ever done work for. Would never wish that on anyone.
Seriously. Walking is often a better option. We don't even have decent mass transit to make up for it.