I mean, on those kinds of roads, what is driving? Continuous small steering inputs to keep the vehicle centered in the lane and continuous accelerator adjustment to keep the vehicle at the desired speed. Some modern cars will do the lane centering on their own and distance sensing cruise control can manage speed, up to and including coming to a complete stop. If the car can manage these, why isn't it self-driving?
I driven one of these cars and other than complaining if you take your hands completely off the wheel for too long, you literally don't have to "drive" on the highway.
I mostly think this is a semantics problem, and what we really need is a taxonomy of car autonomy.
Assisted driving: Car can maintain speed and respond to vehicles in front of it changing speed. Provides alerts for unexpected lane deviations, frontal collision avoidance.
Semi Self-driving: All of above, plus assisted lane deviation avoidance ("self nudging"), speed control can bring car to a complete stop.
Self-driving: Car can maintain speed and lane position and respond to vehicles in front of it changing speed or stopping without driver input. No course/route control and limited response to unexpected hazards (road surface problems, debris, etc) that require significant course alteration (swerving, lane changes). Some modern cars (mostly luxury) are at this point now.
Semi-autonomous: All of self-driving plus the ability to integrate GPS navigation and side view sensing to allow for lane changes and following on-highway route changes, including self-navigating most highway-highway ramps and connections. Driver input/control may be necessary for more complex situations (construction, blocked routes, etc). I'd also add in a failsafe "pullover" ability -- in the event of some issue, the car is able to pull off to the shoulder and stop.
Full autonomous: Car is capable of all driving and navigating tasks without any driver input.
When you combine distance sensing cruise control that can work in stop and go traffic and down to a complete stop and then combine it with automatic lane centering it seems pretty automatic.
I have a '19 Subaru that will lane-assist correct but not lane center, but the cruise control is literally useful in rush hour traffic and will full stop (but not re-start) the car. I'm told automatic lane centering will be a '20 or '21 feature. I think they could add it via software to my car, but they won't for sales reasons.
I agree that this isn't autonomous, but to most people it seems that way. To me autonomous is it drives itself and I can sit in the back seat.
I completely agree that too often management makes people use obsolete hardware needlessly.
I work for an IT consulting firm, maybe 50-some employees and they make people use some of the most ridiculously old laptops. I mean, we're an IT consulting firm, what does it look like when I show up with a shit-ass old computer? "Hi, please spend money on technology, we don't."
A lot of companies I work with literally have no end user computing life cycle plan. They push all the equipment way past it's useful lifetime, I'm talking 7-8 year old desktops sometimes. I've spent 2 hours "fixing" them because they're so slow, stuff that would be under 15 minutes if it was a modern system. And then they have a flurry of equipment replacement, and then wonder why they (again) have a giant bubble of obsolete machines that require a forklift upgrade.
I preach that they replace 20-25% of machines per year, regardless of whether "it still works". This makes the oldest tier 4-5 years at most, and they have a predictable pace and process from a cost and labor perspective, ideally distributed throughout the year.
First of all Junior, I'm 52, so I don't know what the fuck generation you're talking about.
I also challenge the entire narrative of "more theft" taking place. Random small quantities of office supplies have walked away for decades, mostly inadvertently. I mean what are you going to do, steal a box of copier paper and sell it on the corner?
I also don't believe people can just smash their iPhones on purpose and get new models. The last group of people any IT department wants to reward is the moron that conveniently breaks their device. An exec might get away with it, but that shit's expensive and it would call attention to whoever did it more than once. They'd get canned or be required to keep it in a giant Otterbox type case.
Whatever meaningful theft might be happening probably is an externality of 21st century capitalism. They shitcanned all the middle managers whose job it was, basically, to keep track of stuff. Just-in-time delivery means there's little planning and with the emphasis on rush shipping on everything, I'm sure the losses through outright mistakes in order fulfillment, delivery, etc are fairly high.
I think is two things, one, a chance for employers to bitch about employees depriving them of their right and true profits through waste and thievery. And two, a way for employers to shift the burden of bad management onto their employees. Fuck them. If they weren't so greedy and self-dealing, they could keep track of their resources better.
The primaries are manipulated contests that usually involve party insiders pushing other favored insiders.
And if you live in a one-party district like me, the "real" election is the primary because the other party candidate is usually some total freak who's only running because the other party will literally let anyone brave enough to run do so. But because of party manipulation and the "endorsed" label that gets handed out by the party's internal process, the primary isn't the real contest it should be.
The category of "unvaccinated people" includes people with unusual medical conditions who can't be vaccinated or can't be vaccinated on the usual vaccination schedules, and people who have literally been vaccinated but for whom the vaccine didn't work for whatever the reason.
Herd immunity is meant to protect them.
IMHO, most of the anti-vaxxers fall into the category of people who think they're gaining some advantage by not vaccinating while also simultaneously believing their risk is close to zero because everyone else got vaccinated and they can rely on herd immunity.
It's really the same mindset as people who cheat on their taxes. They want the benefits of what the taxes pay for, they just don't want to pay for them.
I'd wager that if there was some kind of disease that had a combination of infection vectors, both environmental and person-to-person, anti-vaxxers would be a lot less willing to rely on herd immunity since they would be at risk even with perfect herd immunity.
I worked for a big advertising agency 1993-2005 and at some point around 2001-2002 our prepress group was seriously considering a switch to Wintel platforms because of performance issues and the many headaches of OS 9 and the teething pains of OS X's early releases as well as much better network storage access.
They ultimately didn't switch for reasons that kind of boiled down to typeface management and some user resistance. We did do a pilot of one machine and the person that used it generally liked it.
The ranting and raving about Sun, DEC or other workstation CPU superiority is kind of meaningless in this comparison. The RISC/workstation CPUs were in bigger hardware and Intel based servers were just starting to get taken seriously as something beyond glorified desktops in the early 90s.
While I'm sure there's a lot of nits to pick, I sometimes wonder if the USB standards body is being bribed by somebody to hobble adoption of this standard.
USB 3.2, er, I mean USB 3.2 2x2, is pretty fast and theoretically could be used as an interconnect for devices that want SAS-3 now, at least on a bandwidth basis, and it's not far off SAS-4 in performance.
I can almost buy into a conspiracy where the USB standards people are getting bribed into idiotic branding and naming practices to keep the standard down and stop people from getting the idea that you don't need to spend thousands extra on expensive "enterprise" interfaces.
(OK, I know it's not *really* what some of the expensive enterprise interfaces really are, but it doesn't seem totally unrealistic that you could run a single LTO-7 tape drive connected via USB 3.2 2x2 vs. SAS-3).
It's all about profit for Google. They want the ad dollars of being a TV channel and none of the content creation or curation costs. There's almost nothing that comes from Google for free that's worth what you actually pay for it.
It's either meant to spy on you, will be abruptly ended as a platform, or is of low quality because it relies on "AI" that is neither intelligent nor advanced.
Chicken and egg, then? Odd that 90% of the desktop use cases didn't need 1 Gbps, either, but the economies of scale made sense to bake it into the chipsets anyway which drove down costs.
The parts costs for 10Gb must be high enough that razor-margin industries just don't feel pressed to step it up vs. paid-for commodity 1 Gbit parts.
The big problem with 10gbps is that it's too fast to handle with more than a few feet of copper, and fiber is a BITCH to terminate.
Maybe its misinformation? The spec lists it at 100 meters over Cat-6a and 50 meters over Cat-6. I've had zero problems with it using Cat-6 at ordinary data center lengths up to about 10 meters.
It's advantage in many environments isn't just the added speed -- it adds a ton of performance for even rotational media SAN, but the fact that its running on a 10x faster clock, cutting latency times as well, even for applications which aren't exceeding 1 Gbit throughput limitations. As for too slow, well, you can already run 1080p HDMI over Cat 6 and any other "video" you may want to run over network cable distances would be best handled as an ordinary network video stream using existing streaming media encoding. Anything else needing more speed already has datacenter speeds 25/40/100Gps over twinax or fiber.
Its marginally overkill at the desktop, but 10GBase-T has the advantage of being 10x faster, cheaper, simpler cabling than fiber or twinax, and backwards compatible with 1 Gbps.
I mean, what is has it been -- 5 years at least that 10GBase-T has been out, and it's still expensive?
Are network gear makers just charging a premium because there's still a lot of business/enterprise upgrading to be done or because they don't have anything else "premium" to offer once 1 Gbit becomes as obsolete as 100 Mbit?
Or is it just the industry not bothering to mass produce it because 1 Gbps is like 640k, it ought to be enough?
I would think science fiction would pose a greater risk unless you always had a strong and benevolent government that could stand in for the party. I'd think the censors would particularly object to stories set in the future in which there was no discernible institution like the party. I can see the first question the censor ask is why are you promoting a future without the party?
I would think that movies set in the distant past, before the party, would be easiest for censors, especially if they managed to portray the antagonists as enemies of the party. Probably followed by dramas set in any time frame where the dramatic themes have no political content and a driven by family dynamics, romance, etc. Although even then you probably have to mindful of the party's specific perspectives on things like sexual morality.
I'm not sure I like any of those ideas, but it did make me wonder...
Most theft laws increase the penalty/severity depending on the value of what was stolen.
I wonder if there should be a more sophisticated formula that depended on the value of what was stolen relative to the income of the individual it was stolen from, and the difference in income between the thief and their victim.
A poor persons stealing $100 from Bill Gates would get the equivalent of a parking ticket, but the same amount stolen from a $15/hr worker would be a serious felony.
An inverse theft (when a rich person steals from a poor person), would be extremely severe.
I'm sure with the specialist workload they get added budget dollars and probably added fees from cases filed in their district. I'm sure there are a lot of people living well because they are a paid consultant on something to this court.
I also don't doubt there is a lively social economy in orbit around the judges and influential staff people in this court and I'm sure if there was ever a strict audit, especially of spouses, children and extended family members there would be a lot of unusually large gifts and special favors. It's probably a hell of a place to own a Mercedes dealership.
I can definitely see that districts juries filled with people engaging in some populist fantasy about sticking it to an East/West coast greedy corporation trying to steal ideas from the little man.
Didn't they do something similar with ships in WW II? Paint them with funny patterns to confuse subs or enemies trying to target them?
I think something similar gets done when car companies test prototypes on the public streets, they give them these weird zigzag paint schemes which I think is meant to confuse the autofocus on cameras.
Britain is facing Brexit and a bunch of trade and economic issues. They'd rather stay in the good graces of the Chinese, the idea being they can replace stuff they would have bought from Europe with Chinese goods. And then there's the idea that if they don't get on board with 5G at a price point they can afford, their economic disadvantages will be worse yet.
The Germans probably figure they're just too smart to worry about hacked Chinese equipment, especially if they can isolate it with some good homegrown or European sourced technology. Plus they may well have come up with counter-espionage techniques that defeat Russian and American penetration that defeating the Chinese can't be any harder.
And in both cases, we can blame Trump's idiotic foreign policy for some of this. I'd wager if we had made Britain feel like they had a trade ally in Brexit and not shit all over German foreign policy, they might have gone along with us on Chinese telecom equipment.
When my mom was Stage 3-4+ with metatstatic breast cancer, she got a few blood transfusions. It was like the equivalent of a video game med pack. She had so much more energy and vitality, it was like a glimpse of her when she wasn't sick.
I think the last 2 we even requested within about 4-6 weeks of her death so she could attend a couple of last hurrahs with the extended family and not just be a total zombie.
I think this might have been whole blood and not just plasma, though.
Management is a highly conservative discipline and people have really weird ideas about work.
I really think it comes down to what management gets or think they get out of it.
I work for a small, owner-managed company who's the typical SMB entrepreneur who thinks that everybody loves the company and gets as much out it as he does. I think this is one part of the explanation.
Another is people in jobs where they're not specifically entrepreneurs, but where there is a real or perceived benefit from making their subordinates work harder. Bonus, promotion, prestige, fill in the blank.
After that are people that are just workaholics, who like whatever is they do enough that they can't understand people who don't want to work that hard.
I think you're right in many ways, but it's an unavoidable problem inherent to the nature of open source software.
Many of these things get written because the people involved want things working their way, not someone else's way and the subtle details matter. If they weren't persnickety about it, they'd be using what already existed that did the same job and would have never written the duplicated but slightly different software.
My guess is the real loss is in the realm of the desktop user interface. If somehow it had worked out there was only one open source desktop it would be much better quality and would likely wind up with more and better applications. It would look more like the Windows world, really, but open source.
It's funny, but nutrition and weight loss is one field where the "proven" theory of calories in/calories out has been shown to be at least less axiomatic than it's been thought to be if not less effective than ketogenic diets.
I think the definitions of under/over-policing are too dependent on the number of police available.
We call an area "over policed" if it seems like there are too many police patrols based on the amount of crime, when it seems to actually be driven by a sense that there are not enough police available in higher crime areas because they are misallocated to low crime areas.
I wonder if these terms would somewhat melt away if there were just more police overall? I would argue that the use of patrol cars and radios have created a false economy that suggests we can get away with too few police because they can be "efficiently" routed to places where crime has been reported. Generally low crime areas become effectively under-policed themselves and then become more susceptible to crimes of opportunity like burglary.
This is exactly what happens in my part of the city where I live, especially once warm weather hits. The crime rate is very low generally, but there's a huge uptick in burglary during spring and summer. Police and civic officials say there's nothing that can be done, mostly due to a lack of resources. The counter-argument is that more police patrols would increase criminal risk and reduce opportunity.
If you consider a thought experiment where the amount of police cars is held very low and most patrolling would need to be done in a non-motorized fashion, you would need more overall police since you couldn't just send patrol cars in response to criminal activity and zero police presence wouldn't be an option, either. Low crime areas would wind up with less criminal opportunity due to a more regular and permanent police presence.
The other dynamic that seems to drive low policing levels in generally low crime areas is the perception that since most of the crimes that do occur are property crimes, they are a low priority because the residents are generally affluent and have insurance which more or less eliminates the "victim".
If property insurance were much more expensive, say most people had a $10,000 deductible or higher and thus were self-insured for all amounts below that, I think property crime would get more police engagement. Victims would be more or less permanently victimized by material losses, since they would be very expensive to replace.
This was a problem for me at a major midwestern University in the mid-80s. I had a calculus TA who literally never spoke any intelligible English and generally communicated with grunts, pointing and occasionally a word or two written on the blackboard (either "QUIZ" or "QUESTION"). I actually tried asking questions once and he just did did some sample problem solving in front of me with no actual explanation in any spoken language. We had a professor who was a perfect English speaker the other 3 days a week, so I got some exposure to learning but the 2 days of TA time were a total joke and I barely managed a C in Calc II.
Surprisingly, it was a controversial subject to require English language skills of TAs even back then. I don't remember it being as manically ideological around race or culture in terms of the controversy, but there was always some inexplicable pushback from the University on this.
In retrosepct, I think the reason was that the math department had a total labor shortage of grad students for the number of needed TA positions. The IT division (which housed all the math/science/engineering departments) saw all these foreign students as a cash cow, since they paid full tuition. More English speaking TAs would have screwed up their finances and for-profit grad student recruitment.
Plus I've kind of always felt like most math teachers I've encountered have a binary view of mathematics -- there are two kinds of people, those with math skills and those without. Those with will "get" math with minimal instruction, those without are a lost cause. And I think this mindset was held by most other professors in science and engineering, who then used math as a bullshit filter for their programs, with the idea that if you're not a math whiz, you don't belong in any technology/engineering field. Maybe there's something to this, but the growth in the computer technology field and how little advanced math is required in a lot of practical applications would indicate that it's not that true.
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Really?
I mean, on those kinds of roads, what is driving? Continuous small steering inputs to keep the vehicle centered in the lane and continuous accelerator adjustment to keep the vehicle at the desired speed. Some modern cars will do the lane centering on their own and distance sensing cruise control can manage speed, up to and including coming to a complete stop. If the car can manage these, why isn't it self-driving?
I driven one of these cars and other than complaining if you take your hands completely off the wheel for too long, you literally don't have to "drive" on the highway.
I mostly think this is a semantics problem, and what we really need is a taxonomy of car autonomy.
Assisted driving: Car can maintain speed and respond to vehicles in front of it changing speed. Provides alerts for unexpected lane deviations, frontal collision avoidance.
Semi Self-driving: All of above, plus assisted lane deviation avoidance ("self nudging"), speed control can bring car to a complete stop.
Self-driving: Car can maintain speed and lane position and respond to vehicles in front of it changing speed or stopping without driver input. No course/route control and limited response to unexpected hazards (road surface problems, debris, etc) that require significant course alteration (swerving, lane changes). Some modern cars (mostly luxury) are at this point now.
Semi-autonomous: All of self-driving plus the ability to integrate GPS navigation and side view sensing to allow for lane changes and following on-highway route changes, including self-navigating most highway-highway ramps and connections. Driver input/control may be necessary for more complex situations (construction, blocked routes, etc). I'd also add in a failsafe "pullover" ability -- in the event of some issue, the car is able to pull off to the shoulder and stop.
Full autonomous: Car is capable of all driving and navigating tasks without any driver input.
When you combine distance sensing cruise control that can work in stop and go traffic and down to a complete stop and then combine it with automatic lane centering it seems pretty automatic.
I have a '19 Subaru that will lane-assist correct but not lane center, but the cruise control is literally useful in rush hour traffic and will full stop (but not re-start) the car. I'm told automatic lane centering will be a '20 or '21 feature. I think they could add it via software to my car, but they won't for sales reasons.
I agree that this isn't autonomous, but to most people it seems that way. To me autonomous is it drives itself and I can sit in the back seat.
I completely agree that too often management makes people use obsolete hardware needlessly.
I work for an IT consulting firm, maybe 50-some employees and they make people use some of the most ridiculously old laptops. I mean, we're an IT consulting firm, what does it look like when I show up with a shit-ass old computer? "Hi, please spend money on technology, we don't."
A lot of companies I work with literally have no end user computing life cycle plan. They push all the equipment way past it's useful lifetime, I'm talking 7-8 year old desktops sometimes. I've spent 2 hours "fixing" them because they're so slow, stuff that would be under 15 minutes if it was a modern system. And then they have a flurry of equipment replacement, and then wonder why they (again) have a giant bubble of obsolete machines that require a forklift upgrade.
I preach that they replace 20-25% of machines per year, regardless of whether "it still works". This makes the oldest tier 4-5 years at most, and they have a predictable pace and process from a cost and labor perspective, ideally distributed throughout the year.
First of all Junior, I'm 52, so I don't know what the fuck generation you're talking about.
I also challenge the entire narrative of "more theft" taking place. Random small quantities of office supplies have walked away for decades, mostly inadvertently. I mean what are you going to do, steal a box of copier paper and sell it on the corner?
I also don't believe people can just smash their iPhones on purpose and get new models. The last group of people any IT department wants to reward is the moron that conveniently breaks their device. An exec might get away with it, but that shit's expensive and it would call attention to whoever did it more than once. They'd get canned or be required to keep it in a giant Otterbox type case.
Whatever meaningful theft might be happening probably is an externality of 21st century capitalism. They shitcanned all the middle managers whose job it was, basically, to keep track of stuff. Just-in-time delivery means there's little planning and with the emphasis on rush shipping on everything, I'm sure the losses through outright mistakes in order fulfillment, delivery, etc are fairly high.
I think is two things, one, a chance for employers to bitch about employees depriving them of their right and true profits through waste and thievery. And two, a way for employers to shift the burden of bad management onto their employees. Fuck them. If they weren't so greedy and self-dealing, they could keep track of their resources better.
It's funny how they don't talk about the declines in wages as being a cause of this.
Asking a "loss prevention" consultant for their opinion? That's like asking Ebeneezer Scrooge why Bob Cratchit's family is going hungry.
What we need is ranked choice voting.
The primaries are manipulated contests that usually involve party insiders pushing other favored insiders.
And if you live in a one-party district like me, the "real" election is the primary because the other party candidate is usually some total freak who's only running because the other party will literally let anyone brave enough to run do so. But because of party manipulation and the "endorsed" label that gets handed out by the party's internal process, the primary isn't the real contest it should be.
The category of "unvaccinated people" includes people with unusual medical conditions who can't be vaccinated or can't be vaccinated on the usual vaccination schedules, and people who have literally been vaccinated but for whom the vaccine didn't work for whatever the reason.
Herd immunity is meant to protect them.
IMHO, most of the anti-vaxxers fall into the category of people who think they're gaining some advantage by not vaccinating while also simultaneously believing their risk is close to zero because everyone else got vaccinated and they can rely on herd immunity.
It's really the same mindset as people who cheat on their taxes. They want the benefits of what the taxes pay for, they just don't want to pay for them.
I'd wager that if there was some kind of disease that had a combination of infection vectors, both environmental and person-to-person, anti-vaxxers would be a lot less willing to rely on herd immunity since they would be at risk even with perfect herd immunity.
I worked for a big advertising agency 1993-2005 and at some point around 2001-2002 our prepress group was seriously considering a switch to Wintel platforms because of performance issues and the many headaches of OS 9 and the teething pains of OS X's early releases as well as much better network storage access.
They ultimately didn't switch for reasons that kind of boiled down to typeface management and some user resistance. We did do a pilot of one machine and the person that used it generally liked it.
The ranting and raving about Sun, DEC or other workstation CPU superiority is kind of meaningless in this comparison. The RISC/workstation CPUs were in bigger hardware and Intel based servers were just starting to get taken seriously as something beyond glorified desktops in the early 90s.
While I'm sure there's a lot of nits to pick, I sometimes wonder if the USB standards body is being bribed by somebody to hobble adoption of this standard.
USB 3.2, er, I mean USB 3.2 2x2, is pretty fast and theoretically could be used as an interconnect for devices that want SAS-3 now, at least on a bandwidth basis, and it's not far off SAS-4 in performance.
I can almost buy into a conspiracy where the USB standards people are getting bribed into idiotic branding and naming practices to keep the standard down and stop people from getting the idea that you don't need to spend thousands extra on expensive "enterprise" interfaces.
(OK, I know it's not *really* what some of the expensive enterprise interfaces really are, but it doesn't seem totally unrealistic that you could run a single LTO-7 tape drive connected via USB 3.2 2x2 vs. SAS-3).
It's all about profit for Google. They want the ad dollars of being a TV channel and none of the content creation or curation costs. There's almost nothing that comes from Google for free that's worth what you actually pay for it.
It's either meant to spy on you, will be abruptly ended as a platform, or is of low quality because it relies on "AI" that is neither intelligent nor advanced.
Chicken and egg, then? Odd that 90% of the desktop use cases didn't need 1 Gbps, either, but the economies of scale made sense to bake it into the chipsets anyway which drove down costs.
The parts costs for 10Gb must be high enough that razor-margin industries just don't feel pressed to step it up vs. paid-for commodity 1 Gbit parts.
The big problem with 10gbps is that it's too fast to handle with more than a few feet of copper, and fiber is a BITCH to terminate.
Maybe its misinformation? The spec lists it at 100 meters over Cat-6a and 50 meters over Cat-6. I've had zero problems with it using Cat-6 at ordinary data center lengths up to about 10 meters.
It's advantage in many environments isn't just the added speed -- it adds a ton of performance for even rotational media SAN, but the fact that its running on a 10x faster clock, cutting latency times as well, even for applications which aren't exceeding 1 Gbit throughput limitations. As for too slow, well, you can already run 1080p HDMI over Cat 6 and any other "video" you may want to run over network cable distances would be best handled as an ordinary network video stream using existing streaming media encoding. Anything else needing more speed already has datacenter speeds 25/40/100Gps over twinax or fiber.
Its marginally overkill at the desktop, but 10GBase-T has the advantage of being 10x faster, cheaper, simpler cabling than fiber or twinax, and backwards compatible with 1 Gbps.
I mean, what is has it been -- 5 years at least that 10GBase-T has been out, and it's still expensive?
Are network gear makers just charging a premium because there's still a lot of business/enterprise upgrading to be done or because they don't have anything else "premium" to offer once 1 Gbit becomes as obsolete as 100 Mbit?
Or is it just the industry not bothering to mass produce it because 1 Gbps is like 640k, it ought to be enough?
I would think science fiction would pose a greater risk unless you always had a strong and benevolent government that could stand in for the party. I'd think the censors would particularly object to stories set in the future in which there was no discernible institution like the party. I can see the first question the censor ask is why are you promoting a future without the party?
I would think that movies set in the distant past, before the party, would be easiest for censors, especially if they managed to portray the antagonists as enemies of the party. Probably followed by dramas set in any time frame where the dramatic themes have no political content and a driven by family dynamics, romance, etc. Although even then you probably have to mindful of the party's specific perspectives on things like sexual morality.
I'm not sure I like any of those ideas, but it did make me wonder...
Most theft laws increase the penalty/severity depending on the value of what was stolen.
I wonder if there should be a more sophisticated formula that depended on the value of what was stolen relative to the income of the individual it was stolen from, and the difference in income between the thief and their victim.
A poor persons stealing $100 from Bill Gates would get the equivalent of a parking ticket, but the same amount stolen from a $15/hr worker would be a serious felony.
An inverse theft (when a rich person steals from a poor person), would be extremely severe.
Empire building.
I'm sure with the specialist workload they get added budget dollars and probably added fees from cases filed in their district. I'm sure there are a lot of people living well because they are a paid consultant on something to this court.
I also don't doubt there is a lively social economy in orbit around the judges and influential staff people in this court and I'm sure if there was ever a strict audit, especially of spouses, children and extended family members there would be a lot of unusually large gifts and special favors. It's probably a hell of a place to own a Mercedes dealership.
I can definitely see that districts juries filled with people engaging in some populist fantasy about sticking it to an East/West coast greedy corporation trying to steal ideas from the little man.
Didn't they do something similar with ships in WW II? Paint them with funny patterns to confuse subs or enemies trying to target them?
I think something similar gets done when car companies test prototypes on the public streets, they give them these weird zigzag paint schemes which I think is meant to confuse the autofocus on cameras.
Britain is facing Brexit and a bunch of trade and economic issues. They'd rather stay in the good graces of the Chinese, the idea being they can replace stuff they would have bought from Europe with Chinese goods. And then there's the idea that if they don't get on board with 5G at a price point they can afford, their economic disadvantages will be worse yet.
The Germans probably figure they're just too smart to worry about hacked Chinese equipment, especially if they can isolate it with some good homegrown or European sourced technology. Plus they may well have come up with counter-espionage techniques that defeat Russian and American penetration that defeating the Chinese can't be any harder.
And in both cases, we can blame Trump's idiotic foreign policy for some of this. I'd wager if we had made Britain feel like they had a trade ally in Brexit and not shit all over German foreign policy, they might have gone along with us on Chinese telecom equipment.
When my mom was Stage 3-4+ with metatstatic breast cancer, she got a few blood transfusions. It was like the equivalent of a video game med pack. She had so much more energy and vitality, it was like a glimpse of her when she wasn't sick.
I think the last 2 we even requested within about 4-6 weeks of her death so she could attend a couple of last hurrahs with the extended family and not just be a total zombie.
I think this might have been whole blood and not just plasma, though.
Management is a highly conservative discipline and people have really weird ideas about work.
I really think it comes down to what management gets or think they get out of it.
I work for a small, owner-managed company who's the typical SMB entrepreneur who thinks that everybody loves the company and gets as much out it as he does. I think this is one part of the explanation.
Another is people in jobs where they're not specifically entrepreneurs, but where there is a real or perceived benefit from making their subordinates work harder. Bonus, promotion, prestige, fill in the blank.
After that are people that are just workaholics, who like whatever is they do enough that they can't understand people who don't want to work that hard.
I think you're right in many ways, but it's an unavoidable problem inherent to the nature of open source software.
Many of these things get written because the people involved want things working their way, not someone else's way and the subtle details matter. If they weren't persnickety about it, they'd be using what already existed that did the same job and would have never written the duplicated but slightly different software.
My guess is the real loss is in the realm of the desktop user interface. If somehow it had worked out there was only one open source desktop it would be much better quality and would likely wind up with more and better applications. It would look more like the Windows world, really, but open source.
It's funny, but nutrition and weight loss is one field where the "proven" theory of calories in/calories out has been shown to be at least less axiomatic than it's been thought to be if not less effective than ketogenic diets.
I think the definitions of under/over-policing are too dependent on the number of police available.
We call an area "over policed" if it seems like there are too many police patrols based on the amount of crime, when it seems to actually be driven by a sense that there are not enough police available in higher crime areas because they are misallocated to low crime areas.
I wonder if these terms would somewhat melt away if there were just more police overall? I would argue that the use of patrol cars and radios have created a false economy that suggests we can get away with too few police because they can be "efficiently" routed to places where crime has been reported. Generally low crime areas become effectively under-policed themselves and then become more susceptible to crimes of opportunity like burglary.
This is exactly what happens in my part of the city where I live, especially once warm weather hits. The crime rate is very low generally, but there's a huge uptick in burglary during spring and summer. Police and civic officials say there's nothing that can be done, mostly due to a lack of resources. The counter-argument is that more police patrols would increase criminal risk and reduce opportunity.
If you consider a thought experiment where the amount of police cars is held very low and most patrolling would need to be done in a non-motorized fashion, you would need more overall police since you couldn't just send patrol cars in response to criminal activity and zero police presence wouldn't be an option, either. Low crime areas would wind up with less criminal opportunity due to a more regular and permanent police presence.
The other dynamic that seems to drive low policing levels in generally low crime areas is the perception that since most of the crimes that do occur are property crimes, they are a low priority because the residents are generally affluent and have insurance which more or less eliminates the "victim".
If property insurance were much more expensive, say most people had a $10,000 deductible or higher and thus were self-insured for all amounts below that, I think property crime would get more police engagement. Victims would be more or less permanently victimized by material losses, since they would be very expensive to replace.
This was a problem for me at a major midwestern University in the mid-80s. I had a calculus TA who literally never spoke any intelligible English and generally communicated with grunts, pointing and occasionally a word or two written on the blackboard (either "QUIZ" or "QUESTION"). I actually tried asking questions once and he just did did some sample problem solving in front of me with no actual explanation in any spoken language. We had a professor who was a perfect English speaker the other 3 days a week, so I got some exposure to learning but the 2 days of TA time were a total joke and I barely managed a C in Calc II.
Surprisingly, it was a controversial subject to require English language skills of TAs even back then. I don't remember it being as manically ideological around race or culture in terms of the controversy, but there was always some inexplicable pushback from the University on this.
In retrosepct, I think the reason was that the math department had a total labor shortage of grad students for the number of needed TA positions. The IT division (which housed all the math/science/engineering departments) saw all these foreign students as a cash cow, since they paid full tuition. More English speaking TAs would have screwed up their finances and for-profit grad student recruitment.
Plus I've kind of always felt like most math teachers I've encountered have a binary view of mathematics -- there are two kinds of people, those with math skills and those without. Those with will "get" math with minimal instruction, those without are a lost cause. And I think this mindset was held by most other professors in science and engineering, who then used math as a bullshit filter for their programs, with the idea that if you're not a math whiz, you don't belong in any technology/engineering field. Maybe there's something to this, but the growth in the computer technology field and how little advanced math is required in a lot of practical applications would indicate that it's not that true.