I guess it's a win for Google in that they managed to narrow the scope of this to the 6P, but I have a 5X with the bootloop issue sitting on my bedside table waiting for me to find time to do something to do with it. My current phone is my dad's old 5X, which in turn was a replacement phone he managed to get under warranty for his first one - which had the bootloop issue.
Hopefully this triggers another class action for 5X owners. I don't even care about the money - I bought mine for a bargain price when it was close to end of life. But I do care that Google apparently keeps putting their name to just crappy phones.
The Pixel line does not appear immune to weird problems. My partner bought a brand new Pixel 2 XL a few months ago. The microphone didn't work in regular cell phone calls at all, so it was replaced with a 2nd unit.
The Pixel 3 - at least here in Australia - seems to have a similar problem, with many reports from users of call problems where the call quality is too low to be usable, there is silence for the first 10 seconds of the call before the mike works, etc.
I know they're complicated devices so some problems are expected. But the way they're built obviously makes maintenance and fixing problems next to impossible. Can't they make a nice simple design with easily accessible, easily maintainable parts - a design that they can iterate on over the years to gradually improve as they discover bits that aren't great?
I listened to a great podcast from NPR the other day called Tax Hero, about a Stanford professor who created a system in California called ReadyReturn to basically do this with the state taxes.
It is a fascinating podcast so if you have the time it's worth a listen (I say this as an Australian that finds US taxes a byzantine mess), but the basic gist of it is this professor was all like, why the fuck doesn't our government do what every other government in the world does and take the pain out of taxes for our citizens?
So he banged out a system to do it in California and after a successful trial tried to roll it out further. Then he discovered Intuit and the tax lobby and Grover Norquist and that mob and was basically stonewalled by (you guessed it) Republicans.
He spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money on a lobbyist and made a ton of progress but ended up losing out on getting into the legislation, or whatever (I can't remember the gritty political details) by a single vote.
There's some commentary from Norquist and the other side is well represented in the discussion, IMO - I have a better understanding as to why people are against it. I just think it's not at all worth it at all and the massive amount of pain, stress and financial burden could be better spent literally anywhere else.
I'm still using the same version of SecureCRT for Windows - that I bought in 2003.
Until very recently, it worked totally perfectly on all my Linux systems. It's just started failing because it doesn't support some of the latest ciphers that are on by default in sshd.
I can fix this but haven't had the time to look to see if they're disabled because they're insecure, or just because there's some new hotness - so in the meantime, I'm using putty.
I'd be interested to know how much Linux software is out there, simply copied from directory over the years, that would still be cheerfully plugging away after all this time. Worked perfectly across every version of Windows (currently on Win8.1) I've ever used it on.
It's not clear from the original source (this BBC article, but it's certainly seems possible he's actually saying this is something that parents should do -/not/ something that governments should do.
The only quote bit I can find is "That game shouldn't be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household?". There's not a lot of other context. By 'your household' I'd argue he's talking to parents and householder owners.
i.e., on the surface this seems like a yet another massive non-story hugely blown out of proportion by the (especially gaming) media.
A service called OnLive first launched this model at GDC in 2009, after several years stealth development. I happened to be there at the time and got to try it out there and was vaguely impressed but coming from Australia I knew it would be a bit of a long shot for it to work here with our crappy Internet.
It didn't go anywhere; Sony ended up buying all their patents. Not sure if there is a competing product now. NVIDIA also had a product in this space.
My reservations are still the same - as you note, network latency is the big factor.
True story from just last night: I was playing a game of Dota 2 with a couple mates. My partner returned home mid-game and I immediately started lagging hard, resulting in one of my teammates getting killed when I made some bad moves.
The reason? My partner's phone re-connected to the wifi once she was in range and started syncing with Google Photos (a bunch of photos and videos). This floods my upstream connection (a cool 1Mbit) and kills performance until uploads are complete.
So for me, I'm worried Stadia would be this experience - but also in my single player games.
I only had a quick glance through the paper so not sure if it's addressed, but: what is the normal everyday rate of human drivers hitting people with darker skin? How does that compare to self-driving cars?
I nearly hit a dark-skinned cyclist just a couple days ago, about 3 seconds after he was nearly hit by another car. Wearing almost all black and riding at night with no lights. He was nearly completely invisible and it was obvious the other car only saw him at the last second, just like I did - in fact one of the only reasons I saw him at all was I saw the other car stop weirdly suddenly and then reverse.
If your self-driving car relies on the same stuff as humans then it seems obvious they're going to have similar problems, right? I learned as a kid not to wear dark colours at night if I was going to be near roads.
It'd be nice if self-driving cars were better than humans in every single case but it's not necessary - as long as they're not worse, but generally better, they'll be worth it, I reckon.
Out of interest, do you have an indoor carpark for the car? I spent a couple years in the midwest and (having come from Australia) was surprised by how much a big deal parking indoors was for things like avoiding having to scrape ice off your windscreen in the morning.
We had several friends that had (lightly) heated garages - I can't quite remember why, maybe to stop things like wiper fluid freezing? - but I imagine that would help with the cold starts at least at one end of the commute?
Huh. This post kind of explains why Microsoft opted for Chrome for their next browser engine instead of Firefox. They're actually probably better off with a Chrome-lead monoculture for this reason.
The more resources they can starve from Mozilla, the more powerful a position they will be in in terms of being able to dictate the terms of the browser-based advertising market.
You can't point at the cleanup costs, any more than you can point out how cheap it is for a dude to dig coal out of the ground and burn it or someone who just randomly put a wind turbine on his house and now claims to get free electricity.
The best method we have is levelised cost of energy. I don't know if LCOE for nuclear includes cleanup costs - I would guess not as it's rare that they need to deal with it, but as you note it might not be that much anyway.
The most interesting thing though is the LCOE of renewables continues to fall, while nuclear seems to be pretty steady in terms of cost.
Note: I'm not super opposed to nuclear. But I prefer the idea of small, more decentralised power generation + smart grid. Ultimately though most of what I read in LCOE terms seems to indicate that nuclear is just more expensive. (You can make the argument that nuclear is expensive because of regulatory pain, which is fair - but doesn't really help much. Expensive is expensive! )
They're document checks, nothing more. The statistics on this are pretty clear.
I think it must depend on where you live and the precise laws about them. In Australia random breath tests (RBTs) have been hugely successful (in fact I think we invented the concept, back in '68? you're welcome:) - reducing alcohol-related deaths from 40% to 20% in most states.
It's still a big sad problem but I think the practice has been very effective - it has a really strong stigma associated it with and most people are pretty brutally careful about it (at least in cities where there are plenty of alternatives; rural places have less luck).
I'd note though that - at least in my state, Qld - they're definitely not treated as 'document checks'. The process seems strictly regulated to just pulling you over, blowing in the machine, and then moving you on (or taking you aside for more testing if you blow over 0.05 BAC). I have been RBT'ed at least 10 times in my driving history and never once have even been asked for my license.
I suspect if you had an obvious vehicle defect you might get pinged but generally I think the scope of these checks is limited. I don't know anyone in Australia that objects to RBTs.
I spent two years in the midwest (Ohio) and was surprised to discover that RBTs require advance notice (otherwise it's a 4A violation?). I never once saw an RBT setup in the wild (though occasionally saw the Columbus police post upcoming locations on Facebook) and was amazed at the tolerance of locals for drink driving. A data centre vendor took me out for beers one night; we both had a bunch of strong double IPAs - I was wrecked and when he went to drive home I was like "what are you doing?!?!" and he just cheerfully told me he was fine (admittedly he probably had 20kg on me).
Speaking to locals they basically just never ever see RBTs; it all comes down to whether or not you get pinged driving erratically and then it's usually a field sobriety test. The 'random' factor of the RBT doesn't come into play enough like it does here. I imagine it differs a bit from state to state though, although I guess 4A applies country-wide.
That said, I've been back in Australia for a year and haven't seen one yet though, which has surprised me.
My Nexus 5X recently died - just rebooted in the middle of using it and it didn't come back up, just got stuck in a boot loop. My dad had the exact same thing happen to his phone (also a 5X) a couple months back; I went through the usual process to try to fix it and discovered that there's a fix that basically involved an unofficial ROM, along with an effort to try to get fix legitimised by Google by signing the relevant files.
It seems that the 5X is just busted by design as many many users had this problem. I haven't been able to get mine to boot far enough to try the fix (seems it's better as a immunisation method).
I was a bit nervous about putting random software I downloaded from the Internet on at such a low level, although it's all open source and seems to be highly recommended by XDA at least.
But when this sort of customisation is the only way to keep your phone alive when it dies hard after only two years - you'd better believe they're still a thing. Here's to the hacker types that keep our devices alive.
If you paid for the license, you could stream it from any of them (who supported Ultraviolet).
From a very quick read of the shutdown announcement that sounds it sounds like they're trying to offer some continuitiy like that: "... in the majority of cases, your movies and TV shows will remain accessible at previously-linked retailers."
Of course that doesn't help you if the retailer decides to pull the plug (which seems like the inevitable fate of all such services).
While calling it "insecure by design" is arguably true, I think it's worth noting that it's not (really) through ignorance or apathy or anything - WP has made a conscious design decision to trade off security for usability.
I am assuming you're referring to WP's (soft[1]) requirement for the website to be writeable by the web user. For the uninitiated with WordPress, this leads to a lot of problems when (usually) third party plugins/themes are exploited and people can write their own code to the disk, leading to sites being compromised with malware of all sorts, or simply filling them with spam, or any number of other malicious things.
They've made this trade off because it greatly simplifies the use of WordPress as a tool by the non-technical, in no small part due to its popularity. Arguably this is a Bad Thing because it encourages users to install their own themes/plugins/code without vetting it carefully, leading to more exploits, etc - but when used carefully and deployed with some small amount of training, it allows many users to quickly and easily deploy and manage websites.
One interesting thing though is that it also allows them to remotely and automatically update WordPress installs. I haven't seen hard data on this but I would say purely anecdotally this has cut down on the number of exploited sites.
I can't comment on the terribleness of the rest of the code; I tinker with it a bit and generally find it fairly easy to figure out what is going on. I would love to see the writing-to-disk requirement removed but it would change the whole thing in major ways. I have a few WordPress sites that I run with no disk writing permissions; I have a separate httpd running on a different port as a user with write permissions, so that I can maintain it easily via the website but public access all happens on an account with no write access. I lose automatic updates but I feel safer:)
[1] I say 'soft' because you can run a WordPress site quite happily with no disk writing access; you just need to manually perform any actions that require disk access (updating core, installing themes/plugins, modifying.htaccess if on Apache, etc). This limits the impact of many exploits.
Australian milk generally does not have vitamin D added, as far as I know. At least the usual one I get does not.
You can buy milk with added vitamin D, but I believe it's usually sold with higher calcium milk to aid absorption.
I'm not sure about other foods. I remember being surprised when I lived in the USA a couple years ago that all the milk had vitamin D. (I was diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency after being there for a few months of Midwest winter!)
In my city (Brisbane, Australia), you're allowed to use a motorised vehicle on the sidewalk; it's the same rules as for a bike - you have to keep left and give way to pedestrians.
We've only just gotten the Lime scooters here; so far people seem to be respecting the rules. It certainly seems like only a matter of time before a pedestrian is collected by a scooter though.
I was in Oakland a couple months ago which was the first city I've seen with these scooters and they were kinda strewn all over the place, many of them lying on their side right in the middle of walkways, which really put me off them coming to my city, which they did a few months later. One thing that has surprised me here in Brisbane though - people are generally really good at keeping scooters off footpaths in an out-of-the-way and nice manner, so it hasn't bugged me as much as I expected.
My family bought my mum an Apple Watch for Christmas. Unfortunately I didn't check the label and it wasn't suitable for her phone - she had an iPhone 5S, and the new Watch requires an iPhone 6. Something we only found out on Christmas day.
So we arranged to get her a phone upgrade. It was complicated - I'm an Android user and while I keep half an ear out about Apple stuff, I kind of assumed there was just the iPhone X and a couple of variants.
But it turns out you can buy everything from an iPhone 7 up! There's the 7, 7+, 8, 8+, XR, XS, and XS Max. And of course for each model there are the different size variants. And colour variants.
So we had massive choice paralysis. Which of these is the best thing to get? What is the best long term investment? It seems like if I buy a 7, it is going to be "obsolete" the soonest. But the X series start at AUD$1000 and that seems like a ludicrous amount for a non-power-user who is actually perfectly happy with her iPhone 5S.
If the Watch hadn't been a consideration, I probably also would have thrown some Android options into the mix - if you already have to factor in a bunch of things, why not a couple more?!?
I'm sure Apple have a bunch of genius-level people that decide on their product line-up that know way more than me. But just from my experience, going through the process once it seems like a risky play to have so many choices beyond how many gigs and what colour the device should be. Making the response to "I need a new iPhone" really simple for everyone seems as important to me as making them all "Just Work".
This is great. Wish I had mod points. People like to frame things as us vs them when the reality is often that they're only a tiny little bit apart on their perspectives.
Front page news on Boxing Day here in Australia at the moment is this story about a drone interrupting waterbombing attempts of a bushfire in Tasmania. So we need this system here too.
I don't know enough about drones but I assume the ones that have any reasonable range use radio for communicating from the remote. How hard is it to use direction finding techniques to find the source of the transmitter controlling the drone?
Here's the article that describes the original 'trial' that they did at Holburn station in London.
Having caught the tube there many times I find it pretty easy to believe that making them standing only would save some time for some people - what you refer to as 'exceptional demand' is pretty much normal there in peak hour where the wait on entry is a problem.
It would however make it worse for/me/ because I'm one of the few people that actually does walk up that long steep escalator!
Which is not possible. Muskâ(TM)s tunnel cost $40 million per mile. The last company useing the literally the exact same machine bored a tunnel for $38 million per mile.
Interesting.
At the price of tunnel digging it just seems like madness to do it and then not try to maximise the throughput of it with mass transit.
My city has built several big cross-city tunnels in the last decade and they seem great now, but in a couple years the traffic in them will be bad - one of them has been bottlenecked in peakhour because one end simply doesn't have the capacity to redistribute the traffic.
A rail engineer made a few interesting comments comparing this tunnel (which I guess admittedly is more of a proof of concept?) to an actual train. A few numbers extrapolated out of the press release; it doesn't really compare favourably:
To put it another way, Musk's shoddily-built tunnel will have to carry over EIGHT VEHICLES PER SECOND to match the capacity of an underground railway. No chance.
Google could possibly still win the messaging wars by bringing back Google Talk. This was the perfect messaging application - for users. It was simple, lightweight, native clients, supported simple chat, voice, etc (even video but maybe with a plugin?). Almost everyone I knew used it, even my low-tech family members, because it was simple and everyone had it.
Hangouts started the exodus; I found it annoying, confusing and bloated and I assume all my family and friends did too, because they dropped it almost immediately. We moved to Whatsapp which is nice and simple and really awesome to use, if you can get past the Facebook connection - which is hard:(
I think Google can still win here by at least/trying/ to not lose, which is the opposite of what they're doing at the moment. Hangouts, Allo, etc - they've just made a huge mess of everything. Even if they can't figure out how to monetise a nice, simple, E2E-encrypted messaging application with ads, they can claw back important marketshare from competition. But I can't see it happening.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it's a win for Google in that they managed to narrow the scope of this to the 6P, but I have a 5X with the bootloop issue sitting on my bedside table waiting for me to find time to do something to do with it. My current phone is my dad's old 5X, which in turn was a replacement phone he managed to get under warranty for his first one - which had the bootloop issue.
Hopefully this triggers another class action for 5X owners. I don't even care about the money - I bought mine for a bargain price when it was close to end of life. But I do care that Google apparently keeps putting their name to just crappy phones.
The Pixel line does not appear immune to weird problems. My partner bought a brand new Pixel 2 XL a few months ago. The microphone didn't work in regular cell phone calls at all, so it was replaced with a 2nd unit.
The Pixel 3 - at least here in Australia - seems to have a similar problem, with many reports from users of call problems where the call quality is too low to be usable, there is silence for the first 10 seconds of the call before the mike works, etc.
I know they're complicated devices so some problems are expected. But the way they're built obviously makes maintenance and fixing problems next to impossible. Can't they make a nice simple design with easily accessible, easily maintainable parts - a design that they can iterate on over the years to gradually improve as they discover bits that aren't great?
I listened to a great podcast from NPR the other day called Tax Hero, about a Stanford professor who created a system in California called ReadyReturn to basically do this with the state taxes.
It is a fascinating podcast so if you have the time it's worth a listen (I say this as an Australian that finds US taxes a byzantine mess), but the basic gist of it is this professor was all like, why the fuck doesn't our government do what every other government in the world does and take the pain out of taxes for our citizens?
So he banged out a system to do it in California and after a successful trial tried to roll it out further. Then he discovered Intuit and the tax lobby and Grover Norquist and that mob and was basically stonewalled by (you guessed it) Republicans.
He spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money on a lobbyist and made a ton of progress but ended up losing out on getting into the legislation, or whatever (I can't remember the gritty political details) by a single vote.
There's some commentary from Norquist and the other side is well represented in the discussion, IMO - I have a better understanding as to why people are against it. I just think it's not at all worth it at all and the massive amount of pain, stress and financial burden could be better spent literally anywhere else.
I'm still using the same version of SecureCRT for Windows - that I bought in 2003.
Until very recently, it worked totally perfectly on all my Linux systems. It's just started failing because it doesn't support some of the latest ciphers that are on by default in sshd.
I can fix this but haven't had the time to look to see if they're disabled because they're insecure, or just because there's some new hotness - so in the meantime, I'm using putty.
I'd be interested to know how much Linux software is out there, simply copied from directory over the years, that would still be cheerfully plugging away after all this time. Worked perfectly across every version of Windows (currently on Win8.1) I've ever used it on.
It's not clear from the original source (this BBC article, but it's certainly seems possible he's actually saying this is something that parents should do - /not/ something that governments should do.
The only quote bit I can find is "That game shouldn't be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household?". There's not a lot of other context. By 'your household' I'd argue he's talking to parents and householder owners.
i.e., on the surface this seems like a yet another massive non-story hugely blown out of proportion by the (especially gaming) media.
A service called OnLive first launched this model at GDC in 2009, after several years stealth development. I happened to be there at the time and got to try it out there and was vaguely impressed but coming from Australia I knew it would be a bit of a long shot for it to work here with our crappy Internet.
It didn't go anywhere; Sony ended up buying all their patents. Not sure if there is a competing product now. NVIDIA also had a product in this space.
My reservations are still the same - as you note, network latency is the big factor.
True story from just last night: I was playing a game of Dota 2 with a couple mates. My partner returned home mid-game and I immediately started lagging hard, resulting in one of my teammates getting killed when I made some bad moves.
The reason? My partner's phone re-connected to the wifi once she was in range and started syncing with Google Photos (a bunch of photos and videos). This floods my upstream connection (a cool 1Mbit) and kills performance until uploads are complete.
So for me, I'm worried Stadia would be this experience - but also in my single player games.
I only had a quick glance through the paper so not sure if it's addressed, but: what is the normal everyday rate of human drivers hitting people with darker skin? How does that compare to self-driving cars?
I nearly hit a dark-skinned cyclist just a couple days ago, about 3 seconds after he was nearly hit by another car. Wearing almost all black and riding at night with no lights. He was nearly completely invisible and it was obvious the other car only saw him at the last second, just like I did - in fact one of the only reasons I saw him at all was I saw the other car stop weirdly suddenly and then reverse.
If your self-driving car relies on the same stuff as humans then it seems obvious they're going to have similar problems, right? I learned as a kid not to wear dark colours at night if I was going to be near roads.
It'd be nice if self-driving cars were better than humans in every single case but it's not necessary - as long as they're not worse, but generally better, they'll be worth it, I reckon.
Out of interest, do you have an indoor carpark for the car? I spent a couple years in the midwest and (having come from Australia) was surprised by how much a big deal parking indoors was for things like avoiding having to scrape ice off your windscreen in the morning.
We had several friends that had (lightly) heated garages - I can't quite remember why, maybe to stop things like wiper fluid freezing? - but I imagine that would help with the cold starts at least at one end of the commute?
Huh. This post kind of explains why Microsoft opted for Chrome for their next browser engine instead of Firefox. They're actually probably better off with a Chrome-lead monoculture for this reason.
The more resources they can starve from Mozilla, the more powerful a position they will be in in terms of being able to dictate the terms of the browser-based advertising market.
You can't point at the cleanup costs, any more than you can point out how cheap it is for a dude to dig coal out of the ground and burn it or someone who just randomly put a wind turbine on his house and now claims to get free electricity.
The best method we have is levelised cost of energy. I don't know if LCOE for nuclear includes cleanup costs - I would guess not as it's rare that they need to deal with it, but as you note it might not be that much anyway.
The most interesting thing though is the LCOE of renewables continues to fall, while nuclear seems to be pretty steady in terms of cost.
Note: I'm not super opposed to nuclear. But I prefer the idea of small, more decentralised power generation + smart grid. Ultimately though most of what I read in LCOE terms seems to indicate that nuclear is just more expensive. (You can make the argument that nuclear is expensive because of regulatory pain, which is fair - but doesn't really help much. Expensive is expensive! )
They're document checks, nothing more. The statistics on this are pretty clear.
I think it must depend on where you live and the precise laws about them. In Australia random breath tests (RBTs) have been hugely successful (in fact I think we invented the concept, back in '68? you're welcome :) - reducing alcohol-related deaths from 40% to 20% in most states.
It's still a big sad problem but I think the practice has been very effective - it has a really strong stigma associated it with and most people are pretty brutally careful about it (at least in cities where there are plenty of alternatives; rural places have less luck).
I'd note though that - at least in my state, Qld - they're definitely not treated as 'document checks'. The process seems strictly regulated to just pulling you over, blowing in the machine, and then moving you on (or taking you aside for more testing if you blow over 0.05 BAC). I have been RBT'ed at least 10 times in my driving history and never once have even been asked for my license.
I suspect if you had an obvious vehicle defect you might get pinged but generally I think the scope of these checks is limited. I don't know anyone in Australia that objects to RBTs.
I spent two years in the midwest (Ohio) and was surprised to discover that RBTs require advance notice (otherwise it's a 4A violation?). I never once saw an RBT setup in the wild (though occasionally saw the Columbus police post upcoming locations on Facebook) and was amazed at the tolerance of locals for drink driving. A data centre vendor took me out for beers one night; we both had a bunch of strong double IPAs - I was wrecked and when he went to drive home I was like "what are you doing?!?!" and he just cheerfully told me he was fine (admittedly he probably had 20kg on me).
Speaking to locals they basically just never ever see RBTs; it all comes down to whether or not you get pinged driving erratically and then it's usually a field sobriety test. The 'random' factor of the RBT doesn't come into play enough like it does here. I imagine it differs a bit from state to state though, although I guess 4A applies country-wide.
That said, I've been back in Australia for a year and haven't seen one yet though, which has surprised me.
My Nexus 5X recently died - just rebooted in the middle of using it and it didn't come back up, just got stuck in a boot loop. My dad had the exact same thing happen to his phone (also a 5X) a couple months back; I went through the usual process to try to fix it and discovered that there's a fix that basically involved an unofficial ROM, along with an effort to try to get fix legitimised by Google by signing the relevant files.
It seems that the 5X is just busted by design as many many users had this problem. I haven't been able to get mine to boot far enough to try the fix (seems it's better as a immunisation method).
I was a bit nervous about putting random software I downloaded from the Internet on at such a low level, although it's all open source and seems to be highly recommended by XDA at least.
But when this sort of customisation is the only way to keep your phone alive when it dies hard after only two years - you'd better believe they're still a thing. Here's to the hacker types that keep our devices alive.
If you paid for the license, you could stream it from any of them (who supported Ultraviolet).
From a very quick read of the shutdown announcement that sounds it sounds like they're trying to offer some continuitiy like that: "... in the majority of cases, your movies and TV shows will remain accessible at previously-linked retailers."
Of course that doesn't help you if the retailer decides to pull the plug (which seems like the inevitable fate of all such services).
This update broke my tabs-on-bottom userChrome.css settings.
What was only about 6 lines of code now seems to require a lot more effort - see this github for example code.
While calling it "insecure by design" is arguably true, I think it's worth noting that it's not (really) through ignorance or apathy or anything - WP has made a conscious design decision to trade off security for usability.
I am assuming you're referring to WP's (soft[1]) requirement for the website to be writeable by the web user. For the uninitiated with WordPress, this leads to a lot of problems when (usually) third party plugins/themes are exploited and people can write their own code to the disk, leading to sites being compromised with malware of all sorts, or simply filling them with spam, or any number of other malicious things.
They've made this trade off because it greatly simplifies the use of WordPress as a tool by the non-technical, in no small part due to its popularity. Arguably this is a Bad Thing because it encourages users to install their own themes/plugins/code without vetting it carefully, leading to more exploits, etc - but when used carefully and deployed with some small amount of training, it allows many users to quickly and easily deploy and manage websites.
One interesting thing though is that it also allows them to remotely and automatically update WordPress installs. I haven't seen hard data on this but I would say purely anecdotally this has cut down on the number of exploited sites.
I can't comment on the terribleness of the rest of the code; I tinker with it a bit and generally find it fairly easy to figure out what is going on. I would love to see the writing-to-disk requirement removed but it would change the whole thing in major ways. I have a few WordPress sites that I run with no disk writing permissions; I have a separate httpd running on a different port as a user with write permissions, so that I can maintain it easily via the website but public access all happens on an account with no write access. I lose automatic updates but I feel safer :)
[1] I say 'soft' because you can run a WordPress site quite happily with no disk writing access; you just need to manually perform any actions that require disk access (updating core, installing themes/plugins, modifying .htaccess if on Apache, etc). This limits the impact of many exploits.
Australian milk generally does not have vitamin D added, as far as I know. At least the usual one I get does not.
You can buy milk with added vitamin D, but I believe it's usually sold with higher calcium milk to aid absorption.
I'm not sure about other foods. I remember being surprised when I lived in the USA a couple years ago that all the milk had vitamin D. (I was diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency after being there for a few months of Midwest winter!)
In my city (Brisbane, Australia), you're allowed to use a motorised vehicle on the sidewalk; it's the same rules as for a bike - you have to keep left and give way to pedestrians.
We've only just gotten the Lime scooters here; so far people seem to be respecting the rules. It certainly seems like only a matter of time before a pedestrian is collected by a scooter though.
I was in Oakland a couple months ago which was the first city I've seen with these scooters and they were kinda strewn all over the place, many of them lying on their side right in the middle of walkways, which really put me off them coming to my city, which they did a few months later. One thing that has surprised me here in Brisbane though - people are generally really good at keeping scooters off footpaths in an out-of-the-way and nice manner, so it hasn't bugged me as much as I expected.
They seem to be a big hit here.
My family bought my mum an Apple Watch for Christmas. Unfortunately I didn't check the label and it wasn't suitable for her phone - she had an iPhone 5S, and the new Watch requires an iPhone 6. Something we only found out on Christmas day.
So we arranged to get her a phone upgrade. It was complicated - I'm an Android user and while I keep half an ear out about Apple stuff, I kind of assumed there was just the iPhone X and a couple of variants.
But it turns out you can buy everything from an iPhone 7 up! There's the 7, 7+, 8, 8+, XR, XS, and XS Max. And of course for each model there are the different size variants. And colour variants.
So we had massive choice paralysis. Which of these is the best thing to get? What is the best long term investment? It seems like if I buy a 7, it is going to be "obsolete" the soonest. But the X series start at AUD$1000 and that seems like a ludicrous amount for a non-power-user who is actually perfectly happy with her iPhone 5S.
If the Watch hadn't been a consideration, I probably also would have thrown some Android options into the mix - if you already have to factor in a bunch of things, why not a couple more?!?
I'm sure Apple have a bunch of genius-level people that decide on their product line-up that know way more than me. But just from my experience, going through the process once it seems like a risky play to have so many choices beyond how many gigs and what colour the device should be. Making the response to "I need a new iPhone" really simple for everyone seems as important to me as making them all "Just Work".
Based on your sig, it seems kinda obvious why you've 'seen it more'. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug!
This tree burial pod is kinda cool.
This is great. Wish I had mod points. People like to frame things as us vs them when the reality is often that they're only a tiny little bit apart on their perspectives.
Front page news on Boxing Day here in Australia at the moment is this story about a drone interrupting waterbombing attempts of a bushfire in Tasmania. So we need this system here too.
I don't know enough about drones but I assume the ones that have any reasonable range use radio for communicating from the remote. How hard is it to use direction finding techniques to find the source of the transmitter controlling the drone?
Here's the article that describes the original 'trial' that they did at Holburn station in London.
Having caught the tube there many times I find it pretty easy to believe that making them standing only would save some time for some people - what you refer to as 'exceptional demand' is pretty much normal there in peak hour where the wait on entry is a problem.
It would however make it worse for /me/ because I'm one of the few people that actually does walk up that long steep escalator!
Which is not possible. Muskâ(TM)s tunnel cost $40 million per mile. The last company useing the literally the exact same machine bored a tunnel for $38 million per mile.
Interesting.
At the price of tunnel digging it just seems like madness to do it and then not try to maximise the throughput of it with mass transit.
My city has built several big cross-city tunnels in the last decade and they seem great now, but in a couple years the traffic in them will be bad - one of them has been bottlenecked in peakhour because one end simply doesn't have the capacity to redistribute the traffic.
A rail engineer made a few interesting comments comparing this tunnel (which I guess admittedly is more of a proof of concept?) to an actual train. A few numbers extrapolated out of the press release; it doesn't really compare favourably:
To put it another way, Musk's shoddily-built tunnel will have to carry over EIGHT VEHICLES PER SECOND to match the capacity of an underground railway. No chance.
Just build some fucking trains, America!
Google could possibly still win the messaging wars by bringing back Google Talk. This was the perfect messaging application - for users. It was simple, lightweight, native clients, supported simple chat, voice, etc (even video but maybe with a plugin?). Almost everyone I knew used it, even my low-tech family members, because it was simple and everyone had it.
Hangouts started the exodus; I found it annoying, confusing and bloated and I assume all my family and friends did too, because they dropped it almost immediately. We moved to Whatsapp which is nice and simple and really awesome to use, if you can get past the Facebook connection - which is hard :(
I think Google can still win here by at least /trying/ to not lose, which is the opposite of what they're doing at the moment. Hangouts, Allo, etc - they've just made a huge mess of everything. Even if they can't figure out how to monetise a nice, simple, E2E-encrypted messaging application with ads, they can claw back important marketshare from competition. But I can't see it happening.