From another recent post: "Social credit offenses range from not paying individual taxes or fines to spreading false information..." [emphasis added]. That would make for very swift "justice" indeed. Make a wonky claim in a "private" chat group while you're on the bus, and get thrown off immediately. No soup for you.
Maybe, just maybe, Google Books is a poor choice for a tool. As big as it is, it's going to be spotty, and weighted toward more recent, digital, texts, and ones that are sufficiently available for scanning.
Better to use something that represents actual research. If English is your focus, which it seems to be given your current line of attack, it might be better to look in the full Oxford English Dictionary, readily available in and through your local library, even digitally.
My father, who was a research chemist, once told me that the old, thick, returnable Coke bottles actually made good reaction vessels (think beakers), precisely because they were strong and could take the abuse of regular use.
For me, it's like pundits' and SiFi writers' predictions: some big hits, some big misses. For example, I'd have thought that fusion generation would long since have been solved, and I'd be paying a utility to power my house with it (which I'd say qualifies as consumer-purchasable technology). And yet solar energy is now just about off-the-shelf price competitive most places.
What I've noticed over time is that the things we do have now are difficult (in time and effort) and even if they just seem to pop up or have become so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine not having had them anymore, these "simple" things have required many, many advances by large numbers of people incrementally over a long time, and then yet more time for us to figure out how to best use them. It's just hard to see that unless you look explicitly or are in it.
It's just as easy to grossly underestimate the time a prediction might take as it is to miss a blindside breakthrough.
In addition to the post's reported issue (which is hardly news, BTW; it's been a thing for a good while), another reason I rejected this feature for our most recent car is that I often like to verify that the car's door is locked, and without that annoying beep if I (re)lock with the fob. With an auto-open feature (pun quite intended), a test of the door handle as I'm leaving the car always leaves it open. Maybe it automatically re-locks after some time, but even that might be longer than I want.
And if auto-open fobs weren't enough, another option was to be able to start the car remotely from a smartphone app. Warms it up and such. Just what I need, filling the garage with CO. I skipped that "feature" too.
So did I (the Jupiter version, 640x480 display), and I thought it was almost ideal for taking to meetings, if not for full desktop work. Just the basics, near instant wake-up, and an almost real keyboard (tab and ~/` misplaced). It's too bad that prohibitive licensing schemes and internal fighting pretty much killed WinCE. Looks like we're about to repeat the cycle.
At what point does this simply start to make the film grains bigger? I suppose that may still be a benefit, making a digital transfer look even more like projected film and less like pixels. A Cinerama-sized, highly curved screen (as I saw it originally) is far too big for my house, though; probably needs to be VR to get a theater experience in a home.
Yes, this whole Mozilla effort, as useful and important as it could have been, falls completely flat for me. The parent's observation makes this site a prime example of mystery meat; and webpagesthatsuck.com has been documenting such bad web design for many years. One of the responses suggests trying to click on the product photos; that's just yet more click-bait design. The best I could do was to enable "display URL on hover" in my favorite browser, and hope that the URLs were at least somewhat self-identifying. Given the site's target audience, that's not helpful.
And now about the reviews themselves. Mozilla's "minimum security standards" bar seems pretty darned low. Just look at all of their "thumbs-up" products that on further inspection say "Yes" to the all-important factor "Shares your information with 3rd parties for unexpected reasons". In fact many "thumbs-up" reviews have 2 out of 3 sad faces in the "What does it know about me" category. How is the target audience supposed to have any confidence in these reviews?
And though there are some tablets in the list, where are the smartphones?
Until removal, all products were top-sellers, with thousands of positive reviews that averaged their ratings between 4.6 and 4.9.
This is why so many product reviews by both users and well-published reviewers are essentially worthless. They might be decent UI and basic functionality reviews, but practically no reviewing source includes a security review. At least Consumer Reports claims they are going to start, though it's long since time that they or others should have started doing so.
One interpretation is that this is posterior covering: a first, subtle step toward moving this issue onto the government's shoulders, and thus off of theirs. As in many such cases, it could be another case of "be careful what you ask for; you might get it". Meaning politics and the government moving more directly into their business. They might have been better off actually doing something about their admitted failures and demonstrating progress rather than lip service.
The new legislation is designed to give officials enough information to catch Airbnb hosts who operate outside of strict home-sharing laws.
This sounds like governmental fishing when a court-issued warrant backed by actual probable cause is the correct way to go about this. It would expose anyone who is not operating "outside of strict home-sharing laws" to an unnecessary search.
Yes, elementary function libraries are normally highly table driven and may only need a single linear interpolation at the cost of bigger tables, all for speed. The slickest method I've worked with was the accurate tables method, which gets better-than-expected accuracy by pre-computing the table values, not at a fixed interval, but at nearby points that just happen to have better accuracy than the type's precision (because the values are chosen such that, if they're represented in extended precision, they have extra binary zeros). They're expensive to find and compute, but you do that once per function to build the table that's then built into the library.
But to my original point, it's the specialists who do these today, not essentially every engineer using a printed table.
And I remember learning about the more accurate manual interpolation methods too, such as taking several table values and doing a curve fit. Ugh!
Slide rules, log tables, trig tables, knowledge on how to interpolate for intermediate values in those tables. In fact, much of the non-pictorial content in the math version of the CRC. Then graphing calculators killed off that part too. All that, and the monumental amount of work that it once took to compute those tables by hand, with occasional errors, before computing devices did them. One thing I don't lament is that those tables typically listed function values to a set number of decimal places, not significant figures. Or hauling around those big books.
I remember needing a coin cell battery for something some years ago, so I made my usual pilgrimage to Fry's. As it happened, they were in a small area that was suffering a power outage. And yet they were still open. Employees with flashlights led us in individually to pick up what we wanted. At the checkout counters, no power meant that the cash registers didn't work either, and they had no process for creating cash receipts. Instead, they only accepted credit cards, and only the old fashioned way (even for the time): swiping our cards through the little manual impression machines to make multi-layered paper carbon copies of receipts (with the full credit card number recorded). It was probably the smallest credit card purchase I've ever made.
And the point: with an even longer history of computerized cash registers now, that may even immediately track inventory to a back-end server, what significantly sized store is even capable of handling the paper receipts for cash in a power outage? What stores even have the old manual card impression machines? I think it may be a poor assumption that cash is a useful alternative to credit cards / electronic payment in a power failure, in many cases.
Nope, simply reflective; the regular contemporary plate wasn't reflective. It was the 1982 plate here; a reflective paint didn't become standard (no extra fee) there until 5 years later. The other draw, apparently, was the graphic design.
IIRC, this isn't the first time that California has had an option for an expensive, unnecessary upgrade for license plates (other than vanity ones). I believe they used to offer a license plate with reflective material embedded in the paint that made them more visible in the dark. While potentially safer (those behind could potentially see you sooner with their headlight reflection), they did cost extra, and the regular license plates met all of the legal visibility requirements anyway.
Second point: Since when did the logo for the now-absorbed company Digital Equipment Corporation become/.'s icon for generic digital things? That just seems wrong.
One of the major complaints about the head tax, beyond simply driving business away, is that it demonstrates the mayor's and city council's "Red Queen thinking": "Funding first, plan afterward!", and "Off with their heads!" if others don't agree. As this local editorial points out (quote below), the city has not been able to show that they are able to reduce homelessness with the resources they've applied so far, partly due to inept management. So they're demanding more money with no evidence that they are capable of using it effectively.
From the editorial:
... Seattle is just starting reforms based on a 2016 study that found its homeless programs suffer more from weak management and lax contracts than funding shortfalls. Now, before showing any reduction in homelessness, the council is more than doubling funding over 2016 levels by adding the head tax.
Slashdot Mirror
From another recent post: "Social credit offenses range from not paying individual taxes or fines to spreading false information..." [emphasis added]. That would make for very swift "justice" indeed. Make a wonky claim in a "private" chat group while you're on the bus, and get thrown off immediately. No soup for you.
Maybe, just maybe, Google Books is a poor choice for a tool. As big as it is, it's going to be spotty, and weighted toward more recent, digital, texts, and ones that are sufficiently available for scanning.
Better to use something that represents actual research. If English is your focus, which it seems to be given your current line of attack, it might be better to look in the full Oxford English Dictionary, readily available in and through your local library, even digitally.
My father, who was a research chemist, once told me that the old, thick, returnable Coke bottles actually made good reaction vessels (think beakers), precisely because they were strong and could take the abuse of regular use.
WSJ reports, referring to Energywire, that it was Duke Energy.
For me, it's like pundits' and SiFi writers' predictions: some big hits, some big misses. For example, I'd have thought that fusion generation would long since have been solved, and I'd be paying a utility to power my house with it (which I'd say qualifies as consumer-purchasable technology). And yet solar energy is now just about off-the-shelf price competitive most places.
What I've noticed over time is that the things we do have now are difficult (in time and effort) and even if they just seem to pop up or have become so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine not having had them anymore, these "simple" things have required many, many advances by large numbers of people incrementally over a long time, and then yet more time for us to figure out how to best use them. It's just hard to see that unless you look explicitly or are in it.
It's just as easy to grossly underestimate the time a prediction might take as it is to miss a blindside breakthrough.
So, how long will the various municipalities' automatic red light ticketing cameras last with this?
In addition to the post's reported issue (which is hardly news, BTW; it's been a thing for a good while), another reason I rejected this feature for our most recent car is that I often like to verify that the car's door is locked, and without that annoying beep if I (re)lock with the fob. With an auto-open feature (pun quite intended), a test of the door handle as I'm leaving the car always leaves it open. Maybe it automatically re-locks after some time, but even that might be longer than I want.
And if auto-open fobs weren't enough, another option was to be able to start the car remotely from a smartphone app. Warms it up and such. Just what I need, filling the garage with CO. I skipped that "feature" too.
So did I (the Jupiter version, 640x480 display), and I thought it was almost ideal for taking to meetings, if not for full desktop work. Just the basics, near instant wake-up, and an almost real keyboard (tab and ~/` misplaced). It's too bad that prohibitive licensing schemes and internal fighting pretty much killed WinCE. Looks like we're about to repeat the cycle.
At what point does this simply start to make the film grains bigger? I suppose that may still be a benefit, making a digital transfer look even more like projected film and less like pixels. A Cinerama-sized, highly curved screen (as I saw it originally) is far too big for my house, though; probably needs to be VR to get a theater experience in a home.
It was the Valley of Heart's Delight. Lots of orchards.
No worries. I'm a happy long-time Firefox and Thunderbird user. My post was strictly about gift report.
Yes, this whole Mozilla effort, as useful and important as it could have been, falls completely flat for me. The parent's observation makes this site a prime example of mystery meat; and webpagesthatsuck.com has been documenting such bad web design for many years. One of the responses suggests trying to click on the product photos; that's just yet more click-bait design. The best I could do was to enable "display URL on hover" in my favorite browser, and hope that the URLs were at least somewhat self-identifying. Given the site's target audience, that's not helpful.
And now about the reviews themselves. Mozilla's "minimum security standards" bar seems pretty darned low. Just look at all of their "thumbs-up" products that on further inspection say "Yes" to the all-important factor "Shares your information with 3rd parties for unexpected reasons". In fact many "thumbs-up" reviews have 2 out of 3 sad faces in the "What does it know about me" category. How is the target audience supposed to have any confidence in these reviews?
And though there are some tablets in the list, where are the smartphones?
This goes back to at least Eliza program, which drew in a surprising number of folks, and was hardly AI.
Until removal, all products were top-sellers, with thousands of positive reviews that averaged their ratings between 4.6 and 4.9.
This is why so many product reviews by both users and well-published reviewers are essentially worthless. They might be decent UI and basic functionality reviews, but practically no reviewing source includes a security review. At least Consumer Reports claims they are going to start, though it's long since time that they or others should have started doing so.
One interpretation is that this is posterior covering: a first, subtle step toward moving this issue onto the government's shoulders, and thus off of theirs. As in many such cases, it could be another case of "be careful what you ask for; you might get it". Meaning politics and the government moving more directly into their business. They might have been better off actually doing something about their admitted failures and demonstrating progress rather than lip service.
The new legislation is designed to give officials enough information to catch Airbnb hosts who operate outside of strict home-sharing laws.
This sounds like governmental fishing when a court-issued warrant backed by actual probable cause is the correct way to go about this. It would expose anyone who is not operating "outside of strict home-sharing laws" to an unnecessary search.
Yes, elementary function libraries are normally highly table driven and may only need a single linear interpolation at the cost of bigger tables, all for speed. The slickest method I've worked with was the accurate tables method, which gets better-than-expected accuracy by pre-computing the table values, not at a fixed interval, but at nearby points that just happen to have better accuracy than the type's precision (because the values are chosen such that, if they're represented in extended precision, they have extra binary zeros). They're expensive to find and compute, but you do that once per function to build the table that's then built into the library.
But to my original point, it's the specialists who do these today, not essentially every engineer using a printed table.
And I remember learning about the more accurate manual interpolation methods too, such as taking several table values and doing a curve fit. Ugh!
Today, those dollars are inflated. So the cost is in fact lower in terms of earnings.
Slide rules, log tables, trig tables, knowledge on how to interpolate for intermediate values in those tables. In fact, much of the non-pictorial content in the math version of the CRC. Then graphing calculators killed off that part too. All that, and the monumental amount of work that it once took to compute those tables by hand, with occasional errors, before computing devices did them. One thing I don't lament is that those tables typically listed function values to a set number of decimal places, not significant figures. Or hauling around those big books.
"nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment"
How does this follow when humans are training the crows to clean up the human mess?
I remember needing a coin cell battery for something some years ago, so I made my usual pilgrimage to Fry's. As it happened, they were in a small area that was suffering a power outage. And yet they were still open. Employees with flashlights led us in individually to pick up what we wanted. At the checkout counters, no power meant that the cash registers didn't work either, and they had no process for creating cash receipts. Instead, they only accepted credit cards, and only the old fashioned way (even for the time): swiping our cards through the little manual impression machines to make multi-layered paper carbon copies of receipts (with the full credit card number recorded). It was probably the smallest credit card purchase I've ever made.
And the point: with an even longer history of computerized cash registers now, that may even immediately track inventory to a back-end server, what significantly sized store is even capable of handling the paper receipts for cash in a power outage? What stores even have the old manual card impression machines? I think it may be a poor assumption that cash is a useful alternative to credit cards / electronic payment in a power failure, in many cases.
Nope, simply reflective; the regular contemporary plate wasn't reflective. It was the 1982 plate here; a reflective paint didn't become standard (no extra fee) there until 5 years later. The other draw, apparently, was the graphic design.
Are these PDP-11s or VAXen or what? And what type?
In any case, they're certainly trailing edge...
IIRC, this isn't the first time that California has had an option for an expensive, unnecessary upgrade for license plates (other than vanity ones). I believe they used to offer a license plate with reflective material embedded in the paint that made them more visible in the dark. While potentially safer (those behind could potentially see you sooner with their headlight reflection), they did cost extra, and the regular license plates met all of the legal visibility requirements anyway.
Second point: Since when did the logo for the now-absorbed company Digital Equipment Corporation become /.'s icon for generic digital things? That just seems wrong.
One of the major complaints about the head tax, beyond simply driving business away, is that it demonstrates the mayor's and city council's "Red Queen thinking": "Funding first, plan afterward!", and "Off with their heads!" if others don't agree. As this local editorial points out (quote below), the city has not been able to show that they are able to reduce homelessness with the resources they've applied so far, partly due to inept management. So they're demanding more money with no evidence that they are capable of using it effectively.
From the editorial:
... Seattle is just starting reforms based on a 2016 study that found its homeless programs suffer more from weak management and lax contracts than funding shortfalls. Now, before showing any reduction in homelessness, the council is more than doubling funding over 2016 levels by adding the head tax.