The problem with an arbitrary 1-10 or 5-star/point rating system is that every person defines their rating in a slightly different way. For instance, I've seen people knock a star off a rating for a game or movie because "nothing is perfect", meaning that apparently they'll *never* give 5/5 stars. On the other hand, many people seem to operation in a binary mode, rating 5/5 for anything moderately good, while anything they don't care for is 1/5. Some people define 5/10 as "average", while others imply that's 7/10 or 8/10 is "average", probably due to the influence of academic grading systems.
I often think surveys or ratings would be better suited with simple binary choices, eliminating all that variability. Each question can be answered with a simple yes or no. With enough people, you still get a sense for the overall quality, and doesn't require as much thought from the customer. If they had a bad experience, you can be certain they'll be checking "no", at which point it's fair to follow up and find out what when wrong.
Did we provide you with excellent service? yes/no Were our employees courteous, friendly, and helpful? yes/no Would you recommend our company to your friends and family? yes/no
I just don't see anything more complicated than that being reliable. And if you're trying to rate employees with these metrics by distinguishing between 9/10 satisfaction or 10/10 satisfaction, you're probably using your metrics wrong.
From documentaries I've seen, it seems that retaining flexibility at the joints when pressurized is one of the trickier challenges. Based on the images, it's hard to determine how they address this, but there's probably more going on than shows beneath the outer layers.
Also, I'm pretty sure the orange color was a safety feature of previous suits, not a fashion statement. "Boeing Blue?" Marketing is a hell of a reason to pick a suit color.
As a child, I was forced to engage in a legacy of genocide by cleaning the bathroom every weekend. The guilt of a billion billion silenced innocents is my cross to bear. At times, the pain is almost too much, but my own death would be a coward's escape. The nightmares are almost a relief, a small atonement for those who were never even allowed to dream. Never again... never forget.
Meanwhile conservatives still think Carter was "history's greatest monster"
Are you kidding me? Jimmy Carter has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to global peace and charitable works, even if I personally disagreed with some of his post-Presidential actions and statements. Every conservative/Republican I know of, myself among them, thinks Carter is good person, but made a lousy President.
He's kind of the opposite of Bill Clinton, I suppose.
Wait a minute. Speaking of "alternative facts", I'd like a source for the claim that the improvement to employment during Reagan was some slight of hand with numbers, rather than actual gains. And unemployment peaked at nearly 11% using the official government numbers (U3 calculations), not 15%. The link provided doesn't support what the summary implies.
When President Reagan took office, the headline unemployment rate was 7.5 percent. Unemployment crept as high as 10.8 percent in December and January of his second year as president, but fell to 5.4 percent by the time he left.
In fact, a change to the government employment reporting came under Obama in 2010, as we're now using a different definition to calculate the "labor force", excluding people who have given up on finding work entirely, if I remember correctly. That changed the way we'd been measuring unemployment for the past thirty years.
Some types of transportation are going to stay dependent on fossil fuels for the time being, because there's no good alternative. You're not going to power commercial or military aircraft with batteries or solar panels. Maybe someday ships can be powered by giant batteries, but I'm not so sure that's a great idea for marine vehicles, given their aquatic environment. And obviously, we're not going back to wind-power.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to start with the low-hanging fruit, which is converting to electric cars for our shorter-range commuter vehicles, and at the same time working towards more sustainable power generation for the electric grid. After that, we can start focusing on more efficient ways of creating synthetic hydrocarbon fuels in ways that are carbon neutral. After all, there's nothing wrong with using hydrocarbon fuels if those are synthesized in a carbon-neutral manner, such as creating it from biomass grown for that purpose.
It's also an economic thing. Increased gas prices directly correlate with an increase in the price of food and other goods. Also, daily commutes are not exactly something most people can opt out of. And not everyone is fortunate enough to make six-figure-plus salaries that can largely ignore those "minor" cost-of-living increases.
I can never figure out why people don't understand that different applications have different requirements, and as such, there will NEVER be a single "best" language. Even in the videogame industry, C# and other managed or scripted languages are often used for tool development, while C++ is nearly always used for engine and game code.
No one with any sense expects it to be the most *popular* language. But there are literally billions of lines of working C++ code out there. At this point, C++ is ubiquitous enough that it will never really die. Or at least, certainly not before I do.
That's actually a really good point. I've watched some conference talks in recent years that explained how C++ is actually two languages... one designed for library writers (where a lot of the most hard-core features are aimed, such as move-semantics or template-related features), and a simpler subset for library-users, who often just call the code that the library writers write. The real world is not quite as clean-cut as that exactly, but I think it's true to some degree, certainly.
All this makes for libraries which are incredibly easy-to-use while at the same time are both safe and efficient. In many cases, the user doesn't even have to know about all the optimizations that have been made. They can simply take advantage of the new language features like shared_ptr without having to worry about all the language features and work that went into making sure it works as naturally as though it were a built in language feature and not a library class. It's hard to describe how transformative the C++ 11/14 standard was for C++ as a language to people who still view it through the lens of what it was a like a decade or two ago. I often remark that C++ actually feels a lot like a managed language like C# now, only with much uglier syntax.
What's remarkable to me is that this was done without breaking existing code out in the wild. I joke about the ugly syntax, but a lot of that comes from the reluctance to introduce new operators and keywords, which would invariably break existing code. Many of the complaints about C++'s "bloated" nature also comes from features left in place for backwards compatibility. If I had to offer a fourth quality to C++, it would be "stability", for which we can thank the C++ design community, who (along with various working groups) have been doing an amazing job this past decade. You can see modern examples of how traumatic it is for a language-using community when backwards compatibility breaks, something that many more modern language designers don't seem to feel as reluctant to do as I think they should.
Hell, C++ 17 is only now removing support for trigraphs, for goodness' sake, an artifact of ancient keyboards that didn't support all the characters required to program C/C++. Hilariously, IBM is opposing its removal (it's already been delayed since C++ 11, largely thanks to them), which tells you that there's some rather ancient C/C++ actually living out there in the wild, as well as indicating how conservative the C++ community is in this regard.
Well, part of being a professional programmer, at least IMO, is not going batshit-insane with fancy language features when they're not needed. C++ is a language in which you can write some really, really horrible code if you're determined to do so. And I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe it as a language that's easy to master. But for highly experienced C++ programmers like myself, it's an incredibly powerful language, and that's what's important, at least when I use it professionally.
It's pretty easy to list off a litany of problems with C++. It's bloated, it's ugly, it's hard to learn, full of strange idioms and tricky rules. But it has three characteristics that make it indespensible for certain industries and applications:
* It's ubiquitous. Nearly every platform has a C++ compiler, and there's a lot of sample C or C++ code available to use. It also makes hiring and training easier. * It's efficient. You don't pay for features you don't use, and it compiles down to fast, efficient, native code. * It's got reasonably good abstraction features that don't require paying a heavy price for that safety, enabling large, complex programs to be written more easily.
There are a lot of great new languages coming out, but nearly all of those fail on the first point. Unfortunately, that's a deal breaker for many projects.
And conveniently, you don't have to change anything about what you're doing at all, or learn anything, or even try. Just put the work on billions of other people. Must be a coincidence.
It's very convenient for us English speakers, but it also happens to be true. English is fast becoming the world's "common" tongue, especially in areas of technology. If one knows their native language plus English, they'll have the vast majority of the world's knowledge at their fingertips. Some languages are not well suited for general-purpose computing, like the 50K+ logosyllabic Chinese characters. English, with its simple alphabet, most certainly is.
Learning English, especially if you want to code, work in a technical field, or communicate with others online, is very important. Japan has known this for decades, as their schools teach mandatory English from early on. Slightly over half of Europeans speak English as well. It makes no sense to move against the natural flow and promote a more neutral or even an invented language, because then you just inconvenience everyone equally. Perhaps more fair, but infinitely less practical. Besides which, I'd argue English-only speakers are the poorer for not knowing a second or third language.
That being said, I'm certainly not opposed to native-language resources being made available to people, of course. If the tools are made available, I think that will tend to happen organically over time as demand grows.
Caveat: It's okay to make mistakes as long as no one was hurt or killed by easily preventable errors. Obviously, that doesn't apply here, so I definitely agree. Sharing your experience and turning it into a teachable moment ensures others learn from it as well.
It would have been less embarrassing for them to just make up some excuse about a temporary outage, or blame a DDOS attack, or Russian hackers. It's good to remember that when lambasting them about what idiots they are for not noticing this before their DB puked on them. It's tempting to do, but really does nothing but stroke your own ego while at the same time encouraging people to try to hide their mistakes to avoid this sort of public shaming.
So, yeah, kudos for them for owning up to their own mistake.
Hey, are you trying to kill Mozilla's efforts to refresh their brand experience? You're aware they have a new logo now, right? What's with the logo-shaming? I thought Slashdot was better than this. Disappointed.
And you'd be yelling obscenities at someone who probably agrees with you in most aspects on this topic. All I'm saying is that comparing Tesla's 'autopilot' it to it's original moniker isn't a very compelling argument - nothing more, nothing less.
Contrary to what you and saloomy probably believe (based on the vociferous rebuttals) I don't actually believe that Tesla needs to change it's 'autopilot' name. Even if they called it "minor driver assist but please still pay attention to the road", stupid people are stupid, and will do stupid things regardless, while most people will use it responsibly after learning how it works. Of all the people driving Teslas, how many people were honestly confused by the name? I'm guessing not a lot, if any. So, the entire argument seems sort of silly to me.
See, that's why it's not a bad thing to remain civil.
Wyoming is the least populous state (50/50) with an entire population less than Oklahoma City.
Good point. Apparently, over half a million people live in Wyoming, meaning 1.3 percent of the population work in coal-related industries. If you extrapolate that out to families and dependents, as well as supporting industries, it could very well be as much as 5 percent of the state's population relies on the coal-mining industry.
It's kind of a shame, because apparently the wind conditions are quite ideal for power generation, but are obviously being blocked for political reasons. Still, I guess Wyoming has the right to choose the power they want, just like other states. It sure seems like they'd be a bit interested in diversifying, though, given the trends that are pretty obvious to most of us.
Ah, I see. Re-reading again, the last sentence makes that more obvious.
I'm wondering now if the negative tone was actually intentional or not, because TFA sounds a bit more neutral. I think much of it comes from the word "pressured" in the headline (which the article doesn't use). It makes it sound as though Google is sending goons to app developers' homes to... "encourage" them to upgrade their libraries.
"That's a lovely app you have there. It would be a real shame if something were to happen to it."
Apparently, 6,673 people. Add another 1,110 at coal-fired plants, as that's sort of related to the issue.
It's telling that I had to get these numbers from sourcewatch (a progressive / left-leaning group), because I first looked at industry websites and couldn't find employment numbers. Given these numbers, I can see why they don't exactly trumpet them. Coal is not actually a huge employer these days. It's more likely that they have a disproportional lobbying influence, especially since their industry is more or less under attack by environmental concerns, and has historically been an economic driver for Wyoming.
People keep making this argument about the analogy between Tesla's feature and the autopilot feature of airplanes, but how many normal people know an airplane's autopilot works? It's a pointless comparison unless it's a widely known fact among the general public, which I'd argue it is not. I'll bet most people have the same mis-impression of an airline's autopilot feature.
Even so, I think we're just in a collective learning curve regarding semi-autonomous vehicles. Eventually, the cars will become fully autonomous anyhow, so I'm not terrible concerned. The fact that collisions are down by 40% validates what many of us long believed, which is that computers are going to be much safer drivers than humans. And this is just a very early and flawed first iteration of the technology to come.
The only "bad thing" here is that some developer can't even be bothered to patch known security issues out of their code. It seems unlikely Google would have started to impose deadlines if a significant number of developers weren't simply ignoring those security alerts. The program was originally started with no action required on the part of developers. Obviously, that didn't work out so well.
I see nothing wrong with Google requiring a minimal effort to maintain security if developers wish to be listed in Google's app store.
Well, don't sweat it too much. Every once in a while I get modded down by some special snowflake who somehow construes a reasonable difference in opinion as a personal insult. I see you also got a more typical "Overrated" on another post, which I translate as "I disagree with you and want to shut you up".
So anyhow, no, you shouldn't have been marked as a troll, even if you're completely and utterly wrong.;-)
As a videogame programmer, a significant amount of what I do is working with user-defined types like geometric vectors, matrices, quaternions, etc, all of which have well-defined operations that use mathematical notation, and it makes a big difference when I can write code in a natural and intuitive style. Just because someone could theoretically abuse a feature doesn't mean it's still not a useful feature. You could completely misname a function that adds two values to "multiply_two_values()", but why on earth would you do that? Are functions with arbitrary names a terrible idea then? It makes no more sense to blame operator overloading for similar imagined "shortcomings".
Even the whole "hidden" factor is less an issue than you'd imagine it to be. In most typical use cases I've seen, operators are overloaded on custom classes designed to work like native types. You're typically aware of when you're using these types, and so you're also aware that you're using overloaded operators. Let's also not forget that operator overloading makes things like C++ smart pointers look and work like native raw pointers, or allows us to use an index operator on a collection, or create a custom variant type which you can use just like native types without having to look up arbitrary method names.
More to the point, in two decades of professional C++ programming, do you know how many times this has actually been a problem for me in the real world? Zero. I've never seen an example of someone abusing operators in a ridiculous way like this in code I've actually used or worked on, but I've seen plenty of examples of when it made for much more intuitive and readable code. I see this brought up as an argument all the time, but I think the concern about this is vastly overblown based on my own personal experience.
If your calculation is correct, it would mean a solid ball with a radius of 159km, which is quite larger than the 100km radius of the actual asteroid.
Good catch. Based on that, it sounds like I'm off by a significant factor. I was extrapolating based on the given monetary value alone, and there were quite a few zeroes in those numbers. I may have misplaced one or two of them. It's still fun even if we can only build ten Death Stars.
I heard the accompanying video's talking head saying "...an asteroid with so much money, it could easily solve the worlds..." and then I shut it off.
I'd much rather know what the volume of iron is, because that's actually interesting and practical. Let's do the math. Feel free to double-check me as well, as I'm just going to rush through this.
Iron costs about 80 dollars per metric tonne, according to Google. So, $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 converts to 125,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of iron. Cast iron weighs 7.3 tonnes per cubic meter, so that's ~17,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters of iron. That number is a bit high to visualize, so let's turn that into cubic kilometers by removing nine zeros. We're looking at 17 million cubic kilometers of iron.
Holy crap. How many Death Stars could we make out of that? According to someone on the internet, a Death Star requires 1,080,000,000,000,000 tonnes of steel. Divide our original tonnage by that and... Hell yeah, we could build a fleet of 115 Death Stars with that asteroid.
See? Now that's way more interesting and easier to visualize at the same time, right?
I suspect that Microsoft no longer considers normal people as their primary customers, at least as far as Windows goes. The only ones who fit that description are corporate clients, who can nearly always turn all this sort of nonsense off. For instance, we use Windows 10 + Chrome at my current employer, and I never see stuff like this. Apparently, everyone else is just an opportunity to be "monetized", or to act as corporate beta testers for the latest breaking Windows updates.
As sad as all this is, there's absolutely no way I can ever leave Windows completely. As a videogame developer, for starters, Windows is my primary market. Also as important, there's a lot of critical development software I use for which there's simply no equivalent on MacOS or Linux. In theory, some of it may run on Wine, but that's punishing myself more than running Windows for a second-class experience at best. At the very least, for my part, I'm going to make damn sure that any games I release also run on Mac and Linux. From what I can see, this is becoming more common in the game industry, which is encouraging, since that's what seems to be holding a lot of customers on Windows.
Also, thank goodness I use Firefox, as apparently MS doesn't consider it enough of a market threat to bombard me with popups. Maybe they feel sorry for Mozilla?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with an arbitrary 1-10 or 5-star/point rating system is that every person defines their rating in a slightly different way. For instance, I've seen people knock a star off a rating for a game or movie because "nothing is perfect", meaning that apparently they'll *never* give 5/5 stars. On the other hand, many people seem to operation in a binary mode, rating 5/5 for anything moderately good, while anything they don't care for is 1/5. Some people define 5/10 as "average", while others imply that's 7/10 or 8/10 is "average", probably due to the influence of academic grading systems.
I often think surveys or ratings would be better suited with simple binary choices, eliminating all that variability. Each question can be answered with a simple yes or no. With enough people, you still get a sense for the overall quality, and doesn't require as much thought from the customer. If they had a bad experience, you can be certain they'll be checking "no", at which point it's fair to follow up and find out what when wrong.
Did we provide you with excellent service? yes/no
Were our employees courteous, friendly, and helpful? yes/no
Would you recommend our company to your friends and family? yes/no
I just don't see anything more complicated than that being reliable. And if you're trying to rate employees with these metrics by distinguishing between 9/10 satisfaction or 10/10 satisfaction, you're probably using your metrics wrong.
From documentaries I've seen, it seems that retaining flexibility at the joints when pressurized is one of the trickier challenges. Based on the images, it's hard to determine how they address this, but there's probably more going on than shows beneath the outer layers.
Also, I'm pretty sure the orange color was a safety feature of previous suits, not a fashion statement. "Boeing Blue?" Marketing is a hell of a reason to pick a suit color.
Murder no more... bacteria ...
As a child, I was forced to engage in a legacy of genocide by cleaning the bathroom every weekend. The guilt of a billion billion silenced innocents is my cross to bear. At times, the pain is almost too much, but my own death would be a coward's escape. The nightmares are almost a relief, a small atonement for those who were never even allowed to dream. Never again... never forget.
Meanwhile conservatives still think Carter was "history's greatest monster"
Are you kidding me? Jimmy Carter has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to global peace and charitable works, even if I personally disagreed with some of his post-Presidential actions and statements. Every conservative/Republican I know of, myself among them, thinks Carter is good person, but made a lousy President.
He's kind of the opposite of Bill Clinton, I suppose.
Wait a minute. Speaking of "alternative facts", I'd like a source for the claim that the improvement to employment during Reagan was some slight of hand with numbers, rather than actual gains. And unemployment peaked at nearly 11% using the official government numbers (U3 calculations), not 15%. The link provided doesn't support what the summary implies.
When President Reagan took office, the headline unemployment rate was 7.5 percent. Unemployment crept as high as 10.8 percent in December and January of his second year as president, but fell to 5.4 percent by the time he left.
In fact, a change to the government employment reporting came under Obama in 2010, as we're now using a different definition to calculate the "labor force", excluding people who have given up on finding work entirely, if I remember correctly. That changed the way we'd been measuring unemployment for the past thirty years.
Some types of transportation are going to stay dependent on fossil fuels for the time being, because there's no good alternative. You're not going to power commercial or military aircraft with batteries or solar panels. Maybe someday ships can be powered by giant batteries, but I'm not so sure that's a great idea for marine vehicles, given their aquatic environment. And obviously, we're not going back to wind-power.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to start with the low-hanging fruit, which is converting to electric cars for our shorter-range commuter vehicles, and at the same time working towards more sustainable power generation for the electric grid. After that, we can start focusing on more efficient ways of creating synthetic hydrocarbon fuels in ways that are carbon neutral. After all, there's nothing wrong with using hydrocarbon fuels if those are synthesized in a carbon-neutral manner, such as creating it from biomass grown for that purpose.
It's also an economic thing. Increased gas prices directly correlate with an increase in the price of food and other goods. Also, daily commutes are not exactly something most people can opt out of. And not everyone is fortunate enough to make six-figure-plus salaries that can largely ignore those "minor" cost-of-living increases.
I can never figure out why people don't understand that different applications have different requirements, and as such, there will NEVER be a single "best" language. Even in the videogame industry, C# and other managed or scripted languages are often used for tool development, while C++ is nearly always used for engine and game code.
No one with any sense expects it to be the most *popular* language. But there are literally billions of lines of working C++ code out there. At this point, C++ is ubiquitous enough that it will never really die. Or at least, certainly not before I do.
That's actually a really good point. I've watched some conference talks in recent years that explained how C++ is actually two languages... one designed for library writers (where a lot of the most hard-core features are aimed, such as move-semantics or template-related features), and a simpler subset for library-users, who often just call the code that the library writers write. The real world is not quite as clean-cut as that exactly, but I think it's true to some degree, certainly.
All this makes for libraries which are incredibly easy-to-use while at the same time are both safe and efficient. In many cases, the user doesn't even have to know about all the optimizations that have been made. They can simply take advantage of the new language features like shared_ptr without having to worry about all the language features and work that went into making sure it works as naturally as though it were a built in language feature and not a library class. It's hard to describe how transformative the C++ 11/14 standard was for C++ as a language to people who still view it through the lens of what it was a like a decade or two ago. I often remark that C++ actually feels a lot like a managed language like C# now, only with much uglier syntax.
What's remarkable to me is that this was done without breaking existing code out in the wild. I joke about the ugly syntax, but a lot of that comes from the reluctance to introduce new operators and keywords, which would invariably break existing code. Many of the complaints about C++'s "bloated" nature also comes from features left in place for backwards compatibility. If I had to offer a fourth quality to C++, it would be "stability", for which we can thank the C++ design community, who (along with various working groups) have been doing an amazing job this past decade. You can see modern examples of how traumatic it is for a language-using community when backwards compatibility breaks, something that many more modern language designers don't seem to feel as reluctant to do as I think they should.
Hell, C++ 17 is only now removing support for trigraphs, for goodness' sake, an artifact of ancient keyboards that didn't support all the characters required to program C/C++. Hilariously, IBM is opposing its removal (it's already been delayed since C++ 11, largely thanks to them), which tells you that there's some rather ancient C/C++ actually living out there in the wild, as well as indicating how conservative the C++ community is in this regard.
Well, part of being a professional programmer, at least IMO, is not going batshit-insane with fancy language features when they're not needed. C++ is a language in which you can write some really, really horrible code if you're determined to do so. And I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe it as a language that's easy to master. But for highly experienced C++ programmers like myself, it's an incredibly powerful language, and that's what's important, at least when I use it professionally.
It's pretty easy to list off a litany of problems with C++. It's bloated, it's ugly, it's hard to learn, full of strange idioms and tricky rules. But it has three characteristics that make it indespensible for certain industries and applications:
* It's ubiquitous. Nearly every platform has a C++ compiler, and there's a lot of sample C or C++ code available to use. It also makes hiring and training easier.
* It's efficient. You don't pay for features you don't use, and it compiles down to fast, efficient, native code.
* It's got reasonably good abstraction features that don't require paying a heavy price for that safety, enabling large, complex programs to be written more easily.
There are a lot of great new languages coming out, but nearly all of those fail on the first point. Unfortunately, that's a deal breaker for many projects.
Do you know what I never hear a carpenter saying? "Geez, look at all these tools. I wish I had fewer tools in my toolbox."
C++ is a language toolbox. You can use the parts of it useful to you, and largely ignore the rest if you don't happen to need it at the moment.
And conveniently, you don't have to change anything about what you're doing at all, or learn anything, or even try. Just put the work on billions of other people. Must be a coincidence.
It's very convenient for us English speakers, but it also happens to be true. English is fast becoming the world's "common" tongue, especially in areas of technology. If one knows their native language plus English, they'll have the vast majority of the world's knowledge at their fingertips. Some languages are not well suited for general-purpose computing, like the 50K+ logosyllabic Chinese characters. English, with its simple alphabet, most certainly is.
Learning English, especially if you want to code, work in a technical field, or communicate with others online, is very important. Japan has known this for decades, as their schools teach mandatory English from early on. Slightly over half of Europeans speak English as well. It makes no sense to move against the natural flow and promote a more neutral or even an invented language, because then you just inconvenience everyone equally. Perhaps more fair, but infinitely less practical. Besides which, I'd argue English-only speakers are the poorer for not knowing a second or third language.
That being said, I'm certainly not opposed to native-language resources being made available to people, of course. If the tools are made available, I think that will tend to happen organically over time as demand grows.
Caveat: It's okay to make mistakes as long as no one was hurt or killed by easily preventable errors. Obviously, that doesn't apply here, so I definitely agree. Sharing your experience and turning it into a teachable moment ensures others learn from it as well.
It would have been less embarrassing for them to just make up some excuse about a temporary outage, or blame a DDOS attack, or Russian hackers. It's good to remember that when lambasting them about what idiots they are for not noticing this before their DB puked on them. It's tempting to do, but really does nothing but stroke your own ego while at the same time encouraging people to try to hide their mistakes to avoid this sort of public shaming.
So, yeah, kudos for them for owning up to their own mistake.
Hey, are you trying to kill Mozilla's efforts to refresh their brand experience? You're aware they have a new logo now, right? What's with the logo-shaming? I thought Slashdot was better than this. Disappointed.
And you'd be yelling obscenities at someone who probably agrees with you in most aspects on this topic. All I'm saying is that comparing Tesla's 'autopilot' it to it's original moniker isn't a very compelling argument - nothing more, nothing less.
Contrary to what you and saloomy probably believe (based on the vociferous rebuttals) I don't actually believe that Tesla needs to change it's 'autopilot' name. Even if they called it "minor driver assist but please still pay attention to the road", stupid people are stupid, and will do stupid things regardless, while most people will use it responsibly after learning how it works. Of all the people driving Teslas, how many people were honestly confused by the name? I'm guessing not a lot, if any. So, the entire argument seems sort of silly to me.
See, that's why it's not a bad thing to remain civil.
Wyoming is the least populous state (50/50) with an entire population less than Oklahoma City.
Good point. Apparently, over half a million people live in Wyoming, meaning 1.3 percent of the population work in coal-related industries. If you extrapolate that out to families and dependents, as well as supporting industries, it could very well be as much as 5 percent of the state's population relies on the coal-mining industry.
Anyhow, apparently, this is not exactly a new thing: http://wyomingpublicmedia.org/...
It's kind of a shame, because apparently the wind conditions are quite ideal for power generation, but are obviously being blocked for political reasons. Still, I guess Wyoming has the right to choose the power they want, just like other states. It sure seems like they'd be a bit interested in diversifying, though, given the trends that are pretty obvious to most of us.
Ah, I see. Re-reading again, the last sentence makes that more obvious.
I'm wondering now if the negative tone was actually intentional or not, because TFA sounds a bit more neutral. I think much of it comes from the word "pressured" in the headline (which the article doesn't use). It makes it sound as though Google is sending goons to app developers' homes to... "encourage" them to upgrade their libraries.
"That's a lovely app you have there. It would be a real shame if something were to happen to it."
how many humans are actually working there?
Apparently, 6,673 people. Add another 1,110 at coal-fired plants, as that's sort of related to the issue.
It's telling that I had to get these numbers from sourcewatch (a progressive / left-leaning group), because I first looked at industry websites and couldn't find employment numbers. Given these numbers, I can see why they don't exactly trumpet them. Coal is not actually a huge employer these days. It's more likely that they have a disproportional lobbying influence, especially since their industry is more or less under attack by environmental concerns, and has historically been an economic driver for Wyoming.
People keep making this argument about the analogy between Tesla's feature and the autopilot feature of airplanes, but how many normal people know an airplane's autopilot works? It's a pointless comparison unless it's a widely known fact among the general public, which I'd argue it is not. I'll bet most people have the same mis-impression of an airline's autopilot feature.
Even so, I think we're just in a collective learning curve regarding semi-autonomous vehicles. Eventually, the cars will become fully autonomous anyhow, so I'm not terrible concerned. The fact that collisions are down by 40% validates what many of us long believed, which is that computers are going to be much safer drivers than humans. And this is just a very early and flawed first iteration of the technology to come.
The only "bad thing" here is that some developer can't even be bothered to patch known security issues out of their code. It seems unlikely Google would have started to impose deadlines if a significant number of developers weren't simply ignoring those security alerts. The program was originally started with no action required on the part of developers. Obviously, that didn't work out so well.
I see nothing wrong with Google requiring a minimal effort to maintain security if developers wish to be listed in Google's app store.
Well, don't sweat it too much. Every once in a while I get modded down by some special snowflake who somehow construes a reasonable difference in opinion as a personal insult. I see you also got a more typical "Overrated" on another post, which I translate as "I disagree with you and want to shut you up".
So anyhow, no, you shouldn't have been marked as a troll, even if you're completely and utterly wrong. ;-)
Sorry, I can't disagree with you more about this.
As a videogame programmer, a significant amount of what I do is working with user-defined types like geometric vectors, matrices, quaternions, etc, all of which have well-defined operations that use mathematical notation, and it makes a big difference when I can write code in a natural and intuitive style. Just because someone could theoretically abuse a feature doesn't mean it's still not a useful feature. You could completely misname a function that adds two values to "multiply_two_values()", but why on earth would you do that? Are functions with arbitrary names a terrible idea then? It makes no more sense to blame operator overloading for similar imagined "shortcomings".
Even the whole "hidden" factor is less an issue than you'd imagine it to be. In most typical use cases I've seen, operators are overloaded on custom classes designed to work like native types. You're typically aware of when you're using these types, and so you're also aware that you're using overloaded operators. Let's also not forget that operator overloading makes things like C++ smart pointers look and work like native raw pointers, or allows us to use an index operator on a collection, or create a custom variant type which you can use just like native types without having to look up arbitrary method names.
More to the point, in two decades of professional C++ programming, do you know how many times this has actually been a problem for me in the real world? Zero. I've never seen an example of someone abusing operators in a ridiculous way like this in code I've actually used or worked on, but I've seen plenty of examples of when it made for much more intuitive and readable code. I see this brought up as an argument all the time, but I think the concern about this is vastly overblown based on my own personal experience.
If your calculation is correct, it would mean a solid ball with a radius of 159km, which is quite larger than the 100km radius of the actual asteroid.
Good catch. Based on that, it sounds like I'm off by a significant factor. I was extrapolating based on the given monetary value alone, and there were quite a few zeroes in those numbers. I may have misplaced one or two of them. It's still fun even if we can only build ten Death Stars.
I heard the accompanying video's talking head saying "...an asteroid with so much money, it could easily solve the worlds..." and then I shut it off.
I'd much rather know what the volume of iron is, because that's actually interesting and practical. Let's do the math. Feel free to double-check me as well, as I'm just going to rush through this.
Iron costs about 80 dollars per metric tonne, according to Google. So, $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 converts to 125,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of iron. Cast iron weighs 7.3 tonnes per cubic meter, so that's ~17,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters of iron. That number is a bit high to visualize, so let's turn that into cubic kilometers by removing nine zeros. We're looking at 17 million cubic kilometers of iron.
Holy crap. How many Death Stars could we make out of that? According to someone on the internet, a Death Star requires 1,080,000,000,000,000 tonnes of steel. Divide our original tonnage by that and... Hell yeah, we could build a fleet of 115 Death Stars with that asteroid.
See? Now that's way more interesting and easier to visualize at the same time, right?
I suspect that Microsoft no longer considers normal people as their primary customers, at least as far as Windows goes. The only ones who fit that description are corporate clients, who can nearly always turn all this sort of nonsense off. For instance, we use Windows 10 + Chrome at my current employer, and I never see stuff like this. Apparently, everyone else is just an opportunity to be "monetized", or to act as corporate beta testers for the latest breaking Windows updates.
As sad as all this is, there's absolutely no way I can ever leave Windows completely. As a videogame developer, for starters, Windows is my primary market. Also as important, there's a lot of critical development software I use for which there's simply no equivalent on MacOS or Linux. In theory, some of it may run on Wine, but that's punishing myself more than running Windows for a second-class experience at best. At the very least, for my part, I'm going to make damn sure that any games I release also run on Mac and Linux. From what I can see, this is becoming more common in the game industry, which is encouraging, since that's what seems to be holding a lot of customers on Windows.
Also, thank goodness I use Firefox, as apparently MS doesn't consider it enough of a market threat to bombard me with popups. Maybe they feel sorry for Mozilla?