>It seems uncharitable to put the fault for the "controversy" on the people who believed Larson's misandrist statements rather than on Larson for making the misandrist statements.
Sure, Larson touched off the storm. But it would have been just another celebrity saying something stupid if not for the boatloads of internet types, etc., that all decided the movie had to be garbage, even though they hadn't seen it yet, based on the sayso boatloads of others, who also hadn't seen the movie yet. Lather, rinse, repeat, in a giant circle-jerk.
Is that uncharitable? Yes. And they deserve it.
Does that make me an asshole? Probably. And I'm fine with that.
The movie is passable as an origin story. As far as I can tell, mostly the only people that are finding egregious SJW agenda driven pandering in it are people who either a) haven't seen it yet, b) decided they were going to hate it and looked for every little flaw to back their preconceived notion (confirmation bias), or c) are doubling down so they don't have to admit they might have been wrong. Sure, some people just don't like the movie. And that's fine. I thought it was okay. And that's fine too. Yet others absolutely love it. And that is also fine.
Is Captain Marvel the best movie of all time? No. It has issues. Some of those issues are precisely because it *is* an origin story. Keep in mind that it has to lay the character groundwork for *people who know nothing about the comics*. If you already know much of what is going to happen ahead of time, of course it's going to seem slow or boring. But you'll find that *most* of the cinema-goers *gasp* don't read the comics. Some of the issues are maybe due to direction or scripts. I rather suspect a nontrivial number of them are due to editing decisions. But overall, the movie was entertaining and I don't feel like my admission price was wasted.
I think the biggest problem with Captain Marvel is simply that the marketing was badly flawed and agenda driven. And even then, it didn't really blow up until Larson opened her yap and said something less than brilliant at which point agenda driven shills, etc., ran with it.
"The smartphone symbols won't be included in rego numbers and are simply decorative." At least some sanity is currently prevailing, there. Though it's mostly likely due to IT systems that can almost handle ASCII correctly without exploding rather than any intelligence anywhere.
Even better is when they quote the entire email chain that has all five previous answers to the question when they ask it for a sixth time. At that point, even if it's a "valued customer", I reply back with "You quoted the answer five times in your query. Please read your your email." Sometimes I'll be more diplomatic, but there really isn't a diplomatic way to say "stop wasting my time and just read the answer already". Depending on the specific circumstances, it will be accompanied by a "this falls outside of standard support and, thus, future queries for the same information will be billed at a our consulting rate at a minimum time increment of 1 hour." Most of the time, it does cause the repetetive questions to stop. Much of the time, I get back some comment or other along the lines of "it's easier to just ask you" as if I'm their PA or something and when I do, they definitely get back a fee schedule. Occasionally, it triggers a shitstorm with managers involved, but it usually calms down when I turn the tables on the managers. "What's your email? I'll copy you on *every* query and reply from now on and you can see for your self."
"For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term." Right. That's bafflegab for "we couldn't get enough handouts and special concessions". Which they shouldn't be getting anyway.
Not all of Ontario. A very large chunk of northern Ontario (everything west of Thunder Bay, roughly) is on Central Time. (Actually, the time zone split should go through the middle of Thunder Bay but it was shifted west one railroad stop for practical reasons.)
I'll be willing to come on board on the paper straws side of things when they come up with cost effective straws that don't disintegrate in the drinks and don't screw with the flavour of the drink. (And, yes, they do screw with the flavour, or, at least the ones the local greasy spoon uses do.) Of course, I have a solution to that problem: just don't use a straw.
I've started noticing lately that many things with any amount of motion tend to stutter randomly. This is especially bad in high motion shots or in long panning shots. For the panning shots, you might think it's actually judder from telecining, but this happens on everthing no matter the frame rate or broadcast source. I'm sure some of it is due to overcompression, but when compression fails due to lack of bits, you get pixelation effects and other fun artifacts. The picture doesn't just stall or look like it dropped back to half or less of the usual frame rate.
Anyway, this being enabled by default reminds me of the whole reason televisions are usually configured by default to *distort* 4:3 content on 16:9 displays. You see, these frame interpolation and motion smoothing things work great on scrolling news marquees, talking heads, and the like. So just like removing the "black bars" that "waste" part of the TV screen (distorting 4:3 pictures), the whole reason interpolation is enabled is to make things look "better" on the show room floor.
This sounds like the representative you were talking to scammed you into agreeing to a contract extension with a 6 month promotional bonus. You may not have signed anything, but they almost certainly entered it into the system as if you did.
As far as I can tell, they can't legally prevent you from cancelling service. They can charge cancellation fees based on whatever contract is in force at the time, but preventing cancellation is not allowed. That doesn't prevent them from using underhanded and even illegal tactics for customer retention, though.
Advice to others: refuse to talk to the "loyalty" department. Just adamantly demand that you are cancelling your service, even if they do insist on putting you through to their "loyalty" department. Make sure you know exactly what your contract says if there is one that hasn't expired. If there is no contract in force, make sure you know what the terms of service say about cancellation. Also make sure you know what the relevant laws in your jurisdiction say since that trumps the contents of the contract if it differs. And most important of all, don't get frustrated and just agree to something to get off the phone with them. That's what they're trying to get you to do.
Remember. Those calls that are recorded for "quality assurance purposes" can be used to prove you agreed to something in a dispute. (You might consider recording your conversation as well. They can hardly object if they are going to record the call on their side.)
That turns out not to be true. Numerous scams have been traced to Indian sources. CBC Marketplace actually traced one group of scammers right to the actual physical call centre address. The relevant Indian police politely told them to piss off even though they had actual evidence.
I suspect the actual reason action happened in this case is that Microsoft provided sufficient "consideration" which exceeded similar "consideration" from the scammers.
So researchers have discovered that short term gains can come at the expense of long term success? *gasp* Say it isn't so!
Actually, that's been a known problem for a long time.You end up at a local maximum on the "score" function and now you have no possible way to improve so re-enforcement learning just keeps you there even though you might do substantially better if you actually took a decrease in the "score" and ended up on the path to some other maximum on the function.
Yeah, I don't get what legal theory the union thinks they can use to prevent the plant closure. Nothing in Canadian law requires a company to continue unprofitable operations. And even if it did, it's still not going to happen unless someone pays for it.
Quite frankly, the union can STFU. They should be talking to GM about what happens to their members, not the media. And the various levels of government shouldn't be doing anything about this either beyond the already existing social programs available to everyone.
0. Overbooking or overselling shall not be permitted and there must be automatic and non-optional compensation paid to the passenger that must be at least as much as the total amount paid for the ticket including all fees, surcharges, taxes,etc. plus a meaningful punitive amount.
The reasoning here is that if you have collected a fare for that seat, then you are not *by definition* losing money on that seat, even if it is empty due to a no-show. If you can't make ends meet without overbooking, the, you aren't charging enough for your services or your overheads are too high. Neither of these is the passenger's problem. Also, isn't selling the same physical thing to two different people fraudulent by definition? (And physical space for over a duration *is* a physical thing.)
They did demonstrate that it isn't particularly hard to fool simple fingerprint scanners. I mean, they used a simple photocopy of a fingerprint. Granted, those were fairly simple scanners, but it isn't too hard to imagine similar techniques working with more advanced scanners. I've also seen some presentations by physical penetration testers that were able to lift fingerprints and fool fingerprint locks, though they often simply bypassed the reader altogether.
For most of us outside the US, we can't even subscribe to most of the services, evev if we want to. Or, if we can, the vast majority of the stuff that would motivate us to subscribe is unavailable due to assinine geolocking of content.
Will they deny him entry into Commonwealth entities? That might be inconvenient, but that would be all.
Contrary to what many people think, the Commonwealth member nations are actually independent, or at the very least, self-governing. The UK cannot dictate to the rest of the Commonwealth to ban or otherwise sanction any individual. In other words, even that minor inconvenience isn't even on the table. (And, no, Elizabeth II cannot try throwing her weight as Queen around, even in nations where her power is more than ceremonial, without potentially triggering a wave of monachy abolition movements.)
Obviously, the Commonwealth nations could agree to take some action, but that is unlikely on anything but the least controversial issues. Everyone has a dozen mutually incompatible agendas of their own, never mind trying to figure out something they all agree on with others.
No. Their action of stepping off the curb in front of you dooms them, not your reaction time. We need to start holding pedestrians accountable for their own safety rather than automatically assuming that the automobile is at fault. The whole notion of "pedestrian has the right of way no matter what" is ludicrous when analyzed objectively. The idea that just because the pedestrian stepped onto the road in a crosswalk means that all traffic must stop instantly and in contravention of the laws of physics and/or reaction time of the operators is just bleeping stupid. (That's actually the rule in my neck of the woods. As though you're somehow supposed to read the mind of a pedestrian that you often cannot see due to obstructions (parked cars usually) is just dumb.) I'm not arguing that the pedestrian should always be considered at fault, either. Only that the pedestrian should have at least some responsibility for their own safety.
There is a *lot* of code out there that does questionable stuff in PHP. Stuff that approximately works in PHP 5.6 but fails hard in PHP 7. A large amount of it is relying on things that were deprecated way before PHP 5.6 was even considered as a possibility. A lot of that code is non-trivial so it isn't a quick fix to update it, or worse, is orphaned and there is nobody to update it.
Even worse, a large fraction of it is on sites who don't have a programmer. It exists in unmaintained modules or add-ons to some framework or other that is, itself, often never upgraded. At $dayjob, I've lost count of the number of web sites that get defaced because someone bought a web site from $random_web_developer who used $framework and then never did any maintenance. I mean, people still expect a web site to be "fire and forget", especially if it's a simple brochure style site, and don't understand why they should have to put resources into maintaining it. And they're not wrong, either. These are the vast majority of the sites I can't force-upgrade to PHP 7 without having the customers simply cancel their accounts and not pay their outstanding bills. (Eventually I'll have to, but not today.)
On the other hand, I had almost no issues running PHP code I wrote on PHP 7. But that's probably because I don't overcomplicated the code with eleventy thousand classes, namespaces, autoloading classes, "Composer", or any other fancy gimmick that is all the rage today. The issues I did have tended to be due to code that really shouldn't have worked in the first place, or actually wasn't working properly even on PHP 5.6.
Basically, the overall resistance to replacing QWERTY is down to whether there is a tangible benefit to be had to compensate for the pain of transition. And transition to anything different *will* be painful because it necessarily requires everyone to retrain on the new layout. It's not clear that any previous alternative (including Dvorak) actually provides such a benefit. Even if there is a measurable improvement with a new layout or new input device, it would have to be such that it makes life noticeably easier for a large cross section of users. Nothing seems to have met that bar.
The original Dvorak study was flawed (no proper control and was not conducted by an impartial party) and further studies have suggested that additional training on QWERTY leads to (on average) similar gains to those shown in Dvorak's study (where the participants were trained on the Dvorak layout). Thus, it's not clear that there is any real benefit there so it's not surprising that it hasn't taken over the world.
Basically, since existing QWERTY keyboards generally do reasonably well for most people who do use some method of touch typing, it seems unlikely anything that isn't substantially better on multiple fronts will likey take over. Also, for the fair number of people who don't touch type, keyboard layout makes no real difference so that group of people won't benefit at all from a change.
I know that I, personally, find the QWERTY keyboard adequate for my needs. It's not clear to me that a different layout would necessarily be substantially better so I have no incentive to put the time into learning something else. Perhaps something will come along some day that is substantially better, but I'm skeptical.
Flying cars are not ever going to be mainstream. The problem isn't who operates them (humans or machines), even, though human drivers can't even handle two dimensional operations reliably so I would be terrified of the average driver today having to deal with three dimensions. No, the problem is the energy cost of getting a car in the air in the first place. I don't see a reasonable solution to that problem coming any time soon unless we discover some heretofore unknown magical method of doing antigravity or something like that. In general, it's far more economical to keep general transportation using traditional ground transport simply because you necessarily remove the cost of lifting and then lowering again the cargo and vehicle.
That's not to say that rich people won't have flying cars. I mean, they may be a bit more practical and helicpoters assuming they ever work. That's assuming they aren't already helicopters....
Or the police could actually respond with someone who actually, I don't know, investigates the report *before* sending in a paramilitary force? I mean, it seems like getting some Mark I eyeballs on a scene first would prevent pretty much every case of SWATing. That doesn't mean that the SWAT people don't go out to the location. Only that they do not deploy as the *first* option before there are any eyeballs on the scene.
School starting at 7:15 is ludicrous. Especially for older children for whom getting up early is counter-indicated by biology. (There are studies but I can't be bothered looking up references for a/. comment.) And wouldn't that mean school is then getting out for the day at 1:30 or so? Or do school days run longer in the US than I'm familiar with from when I went to school. Where and when I went to school, it ran from roughly 8:45 or 9:00 to about 3:15 or so, which meant I could get up at 7:00, do the necessary morning stuff, and *walk* to school and be there with a substantial margin before school started. Said schools provided zero bus service within towns. Maybe it's time we start allowing children to walk to school and stop bubble wrapping them? Especially the older ones, but even at age 6, I was walking to school and crossing a *highway* to do so.
The only people that *actually* benefit from credit bureaus are the banks and other lenders that use them. Consumers don't actually benefit at all. Contrary to the popular narrative, there is no need for credit bureaus in order for lenders to make decisions about extending credit. They did just fine making those decisions before the credit bureaus existed. It just meant they had to actually do the leg work to verify information on credit applications. You know, by making a few phone calls or checking their own records.
Since credit bureaus really only facilitate lenders' laziness, regularly have inaccurate information, and, as Equifax has so effectively demonstrated, are not secure repositories of information, the entire credit bureau system should be abolished and made illegal.
For anyone that argues that this will make borrowing harder, I say, "Good!" If borrowing money was harder, a lot fewer people would be massively over extended which would be an immense improvement for the future economic outlook.
Slashdot Mirror
>It seems uncharitable to put the fault for the "controversy" on the people who believed Larson's misandrist statements rather than on Larson for making the misandrist statements.
Sure, Larson touched off the storm. But it would have been just another celebrity saying something stupid if not for the boatloads of internet types, etc., that all decided the movie had to be garbage, even though they hadn't seen it yet, based on the sayso boatloads of others, who also hadn't seen the movie yet. Lather, rinse, repeat, in a giant circle-jerk.
Is that uncharitable? Yes. And they deserve it.
Does that make me an asshole? Probably. And I'm fine with that.
The movie is passable as an origin story. As far as I can tell, mostly the only people that are finding egregious SJW agenda driven pandering in it are people who either a) haven't seen it yet, b) decided they were going to hate it and looked for every little flaw to back their preconceived notion (confirmation bias), or c) are doubling down so they don't have to admit they might have been wrong. Sure, some people just don't like the movie. And that's fine. I thought it was okay. And that's fine too. Yet others absolutely love it. And that is also fine.
Is Captain Marvel the best movie of all time? No. It has issues. Some of those issues are precisely because it *is* an origin story. Keep in mind that it has to lay the character groundwork for *people who know nothing about the comics*. If you already know much of what is going to happen ahead of time, of course it's going to seem slow or boring. But you'll find that *most* of the cinema-goers *gasp* don't read the comics. Some of the issues are maybe due to direction or scripts. I rather suspect a nontrivial number of them are due to editing decisions. But overall, the movie was entertaining and I don't feel like my admission price was wasted.
I think the biggest problem with Captain Marvel is simply that the marketing was badly flawed and agenda driven. And even then, it didn't really blow up until Larson opened her yap and said something less than brilliant at which point agenda driven shills, etc., ran with it.
"The smartphone symbols won't be included in rego numbers and are simply decorative." At least some sanity is currently prevailing, there. Though it's mostly likely due to IT systems that can almost handle ASCII correctly without exploding rather than any intelligence anywhere.
Even better is when they quote the entire email chain that has all five previous answers to the question when they ask it for a sixth time. At that point, even if it's a "valued customer", I reply back with "You quoted the answer five times in your query. Please read your your email." Sometimes I'll be more diplomatic, but there really isn't a diplomatic way to say "stop wasting my time and just read the answer already". Depending on the specific circumstances, it will be accompanied by a "this falls outside of standard support and, thus, future queries for the same information will be billed at a our consulting rate at a minimum time increment of 1 hour." Most of the time, it does cause the repetetive questions to stop. Much of the time, I get back some comment or other along the lines of "it's easier to just ask you" as if I'm their PA or something and when I do, they definitely get back a fee schedule. Occasionally, it triggers a shitstorm with managers involved, but it usually calms down when I turn the tables on the managers. "What's your email? I'll copy you on *every* query and reply from now on and you can see for your self."
"For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term." Right. That's bafflegab for "we couldn't get enough handouts and special concessions". Which they shouldn't be getting anyway.
Not all of Ontario. A very large chunk of northern Ontario (everything west of Thunder Bay, roughly) is on Central Time. (Actually, the time zone split should go through the middle of Thunder Bay but it was shifted west one railroad stop for practical reasons.)
I'll be willing to come on board on the paper straws side of things when they come up with cost effective straws that don't disintegrate in the drinks and don't screw with the flavour of the drink. (And, yes, they do screw with the flavour, or, at least the ones the local greasy spoon uses do.) Of course, I have a solution to that problem: just don't use a straw.
I've started noticing lately that many things with any amount of motion tend to stutter randomly. This is especially bad in high motion shots or in long panning shots. For the panning shots, you might think it's actually judder from telecining, but this happens on everthing no matter the frame rate or broadcast source. I'm sure some of it is due to overcompression, but when compression fails due to lack of bits, you get pixelation effects and other fun artifacts. The picture doesn't just stall or look like it dropped back to half or less of the usual frame rate.
Anyway, this being enabled by default reminds me of the whole reason televisions are usually configured by default to *distort* 4:3 content on 16:9 displays. You see, these frame interpolation and motion smoothing things work great on scrolling news marquees, talking heads, and the like. So just like removing the "black bars" that "waste" part of the TV screen (distorting 4:3 pictures), the whole reason interpolation is enabled is to make things look "better" on the show room floor.
This sounds like the representative you were talking to scammed you into agreeing to a contract extension with a 6 month promotional bonus. You may not have signed anything, but they almost certainly entered it into the system as if you did.
As far as I can tell, they can't legally prevent you from cancelling service. They can charge cancellation fees based on whatever contract is in force at the time, but preventing cancellation is not allowed. That doesn't prevent them from using underhanded and even illegal tactics for customer retention, though.
Advice to others: refuse to talk to the "loyalty" department. Just adamantly demand that you are cancelling your service, even if they do insist on putting you through to their "loyalty" department. Make sure you know exactly what your contract says if there is one that hasn't expired. If there is no contract in force, make sure you know what the terms of service say about cancellation. Also make sure you know what the relevant laws in your jurisdiction say since that trumps the contents of the contract if it differs. And most important of all, don't get frustrated and just agree to something to get off the phone with them. That's what they're trying to get you to do.
Remember. Those calls that are recorded for "quality assurance purposes" can be used to prove you agreed to something in a dispute. (You might consider recording your conversation as well. They can hardly object if they are going to record the call on their side.)
That turns out not to be true. Numerous scams have been traced to Indian sources. CBC Marketplace actually traced one group of scammers right to the actual physical call centre address. The relevant Indian police politely told them to piss off even though they had actual evidence.
I suspect the actual reason action happened in this case is that Microsoft provided sufficient "consideration" which exceeded similar "consideration" from the scammers.
So researchers have discovered that short term gains can come at the expense of long term success? *gasp* Say it isn't so!
Actually, that's been a known problem for a long time.You end up at a local maximum on the "score" function and now you have no possible way to improve so re-enforcement learning just keeps you there even though you might do substantially better if you actually took a decrease in the "score" and ended up on the path to some other maximum on the function.
(Oh, and "Fr1st ps0t!", especially if it isn't.)
Yeah, I don't get what legal theory the union thinks they can use to prevent the plant closure. Nothing in Canadian law requires a company to continue unprofitable operations. And even if it did, it's still not going to happen unless someone pays for it.
Quite frankly, the union can STFU. They should be talking to GM about what happens to their members, not the media. And the various levels of government shouldn't be doing anything about this either beyond the already existing social programs available to everyone.
You forgot this one:
0. Overbooking or overselling shall not be permitted and there must be automatic and non-optional compensation paid to the passenger that must be at least as much as the total amount paid for the ticket including all fees, surcharges, taxes ,etc. plus a meaningful punitive amount.
The reasoning here is that if you have collected a fare for that seat, then you are not *by definition* losing money on that seat, even if it is empty due to a no-show. If you can't make ends meet without overbooking, the, you aren't charging enough for your services or your overheads are too high. Neither of these is the passenger's problem. Also, isn't selling the same physical thing to two different people fraudulent by definition? (And physical space for over a duration *is* a physical thing.)
They did demonstrate that it isn't particularly hard to fool simple fingerprint scanners. I mean, they used a simple photocopy of a fingerprint. Granted, those were fairly simple scanners, but it isn't too hard to imagine similar techniques working with more advanced scanners. I've also seen some presentations by physical penetration testers that were able to lift fingerprints and fool fingerprint locks, though they often simply bypassed the reader altogether.
For most of us outside the US, we can't even subscribe to most of the services, evev if we want to. Or, if we can, the vast majority of the stuff that would motivate us to subscribe is unavailable due to assinine geolocking of content.
You expressed it more clearly, but I think that was actually my point with the throwing weight around thing.
Will they deny him entry into Commonwealth entities? That might be inconvenient, but that would be all.
Contrary to what many people think, the Commonwealth member nations are actually independent, or at the very least, self-governing. The UK cannot dictate to the rest of the Commonwealth to ban or otherwise sanction any individual. In other words, even that minor inconvenience isn't even on the table. (And, no, Elizabeth II cannot try throwing her weight as Queen around, even in nations where her power is more than ceremonial, without potentially triggering a wave of monachy abolition movements.)
Obviously, the Commonwealth nations could agree to take some action, but that is unlikely on anything but the least controversial issues. Everyone has a dozen mutually incompatible agendas of their own, never mind trying to figure out something they all agree on with others.
No. Their action of stepping off the curb in front of you dooms them, not your reaction time. We need to start holding pedestrians accountable for their own safety rather than automatically assuming that the automobile is at fault. The whole notion of "pedestrian has the right of way no matter what" is ludicrous when analyzed objectively. The idea that just because the pedestrian stepped onto the road in a crosswalk means that all traffic must stop instantly and in contravention of the laws of physics and/or reaction time of the operators is just bleeping stupid. (That's actually the rule in my neck of the woods. As though you're somehow supposed to read the mind of a pedestrian that you often cannot see due to obstructions (parked cars usually) is just dumb.) I'm not arguing that the pedestrian should always be considered at fault, either. Only that the pedestrian should have at least some responsibility for their own safety.
True, that. But maybe, just maybe, this can be the camel's nose.
There is a *lot* of code out there that does questionable stuff in PHP. Stuff that approximately works in PHP 5.6 but fails hard in PHP 7. A large amount of it is relying on things that were deprecated way before PHP 5.6 was even considered as a possibility. A lot of that code is non-trivial so it isn't a quick fix to update it, or worse, is orphaned and there is nobody to update it.
Even worse, a large fraction of it is on sites who don't have a programmer. It exists in unmaintained modules or add-ons to some framework or other that is, itself, often never upgraded. At $dayjob, I've lost count of the number of web sites that get defaced because someone bought a web site from $random_web_developer who used $framework and then never did any maintenance. I mean, people still expect a web site to be "fire and forget", especially if it's a simple brochure style site, and don't understand why they should have to put resources into maintaining it. And they're not wrong, either. These are the vast majority of the sites I can't force-upgrade to PHP 7 without having the customers simply cancel their accounts and not pay their outstanding bills. (Eventually I'll have to, but not today.)
On the other hand, I had almost no issues running PHP code I wrote on PHP 7. But that's probably because I don't overcomplicated the code with eleventy thousand classes, namespaces, autoloading classes, "Composer", or any other fancy gimmick that is all the rage today. The issues I did have tended to be due to code that really shouldn't have worked in the first place, or actually wasn't working properly even on PHP 5.6.
Basically, the overall resistance to replacing QWERTY is down to whether there is a tangible benefit to be had to compensate for the pain of transition. And transition to anything different *will* be painful because it necessarily requires everyone to retrain on the new layout. It's not clear that any previous alternative (including Dvorak) actually provides such a benefit. Even if there is a measurable improvement with a new layout or new input device, it would have to be such that it makes life noticeably easier for a large cross section of users. Nothing seems to have met that bar.
The original Dvorak study was flawed (no proper control and was not conducted by an impartial party) and further studies have suggested that additional training on QWERTY leads to (on average) similar gains to those shown in Dvorak's study (where the participants were trained on the Dvorak layout). Thus, it's not clear that there is any real benefit there so it's not surprising that it hasn't taken over the world.
Basically, since existing QWERTY keyboards generally do reasonably well for most people who do use some method of touch typing, it seems unlikely anything that isn't substantially better on multiple fronts will likey take over. Also, for the fair number of people who don't touch type, keyboard layout makes no real difference so that group of people won't benefit at all from a change.
I know that I, personally, find the QWERTY keyboard adequate for my needs. It's not clear to me that a different layout would necessarily be substantially better so I have no incentive to put the time into learning something else. Perhaps something will come along some day that is substantially better, but I'm skeptical.
Flying cars are not ever going to be mainstream. The problem isn't who operates them (humans or machines), even, though human drivers can't even handle two dimensional operations reliably so I would be terrified of the average driver today having to deal with three dimensions. No, the problem is the energy cost of getting a car in the air in the first place. I don't see a reasonable solution to that problem coming any time soon unless we discover some heretofore unknown magical method of doing antigravity or something like that. In general, it's far more economical to keep general transportation using traditional ground transport simply because you necessarily remove the cost of lifting and then lowering again the cargo and vehicle.
That's not to say that rich people won't have flying cars. I mean, they may be a bit more practical and helicpoters assuming they ever work. That's assuming they aren't already helicopters....
Or the police could actually respond with someone who actually, I don't know, investigates the report *before* sending in a paramilitary force? I mean, it seems like getting some Mark I eyeballs on a scene first would prevent pretty much every case of SWATing. That doesn't mean that the SWAT people don't go out to the location. Only that they do not deploy as the *first* option before there are any eyeballs on the scene.
School starting at 7:15 is ludicrous. Especially for older children for whom getting up early is counter-indicated by biology. (There are studies but I can't be bothered looking up references for a /. comment.) And wouldn't that mean school is then getting out for the day at 1:30 or so? Or do school days run longer in the US than I'm familiar with from when I went to school. Where and when I went to school, it ran from roughly 8:45 or 9:00 to about 3:15 or so, which meant I could get up at 7:00, do the necessary morning stuff, and *walk* to school and be there with a substantial margin before school started. Said schools provided zero bus service within towns. Maybe it's time we start allowing children to walk to school and stop bubble wrapping them? Especially the older ones, but even at age 6, I was walking to school and crossing a *highway* to do so.
The only people that *actually* benefit from credit bureaus are the banks and other lenders that use them. Consumers don't actually benefit at all. Contrary to the popular narrative, there is no need for credit bureaus in order for lenders to make decisions about extending credit. They did just fine making those decisions before the credit bureaus existed. It just meant they had to actually do the leg work to verify information on credit applications. You know, by making a few phone calls or checking their own records.
Since credit bureaus really only facilitate lenders' laziness, regularly have inaccurate information, and, as Equifax has so effectively demonstrated, are not secure repositories of information, the entire credit bureau system should be abolished and made illegal.
For anyone that argues that this will make borrowing harder, I say, "Good!" If borrowing money was harder, a lot fewer people would be massively over extended which would be an immense improvement for the future economic outlook.