I have no problem with a code of conduct that states: "Be courteous and professional". In fact, why the hell does a code of conduct need paragraphs of rule lawyering? What bad behavior is not covered by "Be courteous and professional"? Trying to drill down into specifics just ends up looking ridiculous. Let's examine a few:
"Microaggressions" are imaginary insults by supremely overly-sensitive people. If someone is being a jerk, they're not committing "microaggressions", they're being a jerk. You can inform a person that perhaps a particular phrase isn't appropriate, etc.
"Don't just aim to be technically unimpeachable, aim to be your best self." Sorry, this has no business being in a code of conduct. It's essentially preaching at this point. Laudable goal or not, a code of conduct shouldn't be this overly broad. If I'm fine with slacking off for a day and being a bit lazy, I'm apparently breaking the code of conduct. Anyone see how ridiculous that is?
"Romantic or sexual commentary, remarks, or questions." Right... sexual harassment is out of course, but shall we now pretend that we're not romantic or sexual creatures by nature? Just confine it to a ban on sexual harassment or unwanted advances. I think this was what was being attempted, but again, was overly broad.
"Derailing (try to stay on topic; if you want to talk about something else, start a new conversation)" Wow, they're banning going off topic? And this is listed under "destructive behavior"? This is getting a bit over the top.
And I have no problem with the community stating that they reserve the right to remove poisonous elements. You remove bad apples from the barrel to prevent the whole bunch from spoiling. There's got to be some good sense applied here. Obviously, if someone is banned for life for a minor perceived insult, the community is in trouble. We occasionally see such power plays and community drama, but then again, such actions would go against the code of conduct itself, as that's not very professional.
This is what happens when someone tries to create an overly-default a set of programmer-like (or maybe "lawyer-like") rules for "playing nice".
Yep, there's something to be said about that. I've been on the opposite end, though. You see, devs have to run the game in debug mode. If you don't have cutting edge machines, you can barely play the game and debug it at the same time. I've worked at a studio where we had very middle of the road machines, and the problem is that for a large portion of the dev schedule, the game is slow even in release mode. It's inefficient to optimize code while it's still being changed on a daily basis. You have to do that closer to the end of the production cycle. So, yes, the game we released was very well optimized, but it came at the cost of a lot of dev pain and frustration. I think the proper solution is, as you indicated, is to have shared min-spec test machines for the team.
Of course, the real trick is that optimization is not just a function of code alone, something many people don't consider. It's a function of code + geometry + texture sizes + shader complexity, and depending on the PC specs, any or all of those could be causing a bottleneck. So, you need to make sure the artists don't go overboard with poly, texture, and shader counts. But there's no "magic limits" you can really tell them... you can just try to set some rough guidelines, but those are only estimates, because the environments and characters are built many months before the engine is in decent shape (assuming you're building your own, or heavily modifying one). If your estimate is off in the final months, it's a mad scramble to try to cull assets or simplify shaders, assuming you can't get more perf from code optimization.
I'm not trying to excuse the devs. There's no excuse for a buggy, poor performing game. And the management has to take a hit for knowingly releasing the game well before it was ready. I'm just saying game optimization / performance targets is a very complicated issue from the dev side.
Yeah, I'm also I'm sort of curious what the submitter thinks a technical solution would do that an ink stamp doesn't? What exactly is he trying to accomplish? I'm assuming it's just to identify his books, right? In that case, you really need a human-readable label of some sort. An RFID doesn't remind the person looking at it who the book belongs to. I suppose you could go to your friend's house and scan his bookshelves, looking for your property, but...?
You can buy a self-inking custom-made stamp for less than $30. Choose a size/shape, upload a design, and there you go. Problem solved.
Car crashes kill millions of people a year. Airlines full of passengers go down in horrible, flaming wrecks. It will make news, but I think you understimate how many people are willing to use an extremely useful technology even if there's a slight risk of death. Look at what happens when a serious car defect is found, like shrapnel in airbags, or brakes that don't work... a big fuss is made, sure, but no one stops driving their cars, perhaps except for people with the specific models affected.
Keep in mind that the initial market will be very small. The first deaths inevitability will happen when very few people have these types of cars, and as such, isn't going to have as large an emotional impact is you're imagining. More than that, within a *very* short time, I'd imagine you're going to see a very dramatic differentiation in overall safety between those who own autonomous cars and those who don't. The first death in an autonomous car will be a sad milestone (we recently had the first death in a Tesla), but I'd be willing to bet it's going to be because some idiot smashed into them.
Yes, but a good system would understand the *intent* of the question. A lot of our language revolves around subtle context that we has humans understand well, but computers simply don't. That's partly why AI is such a hard problem - computers just don't understand the larger context of the world like we do.
In the end, tactics like this will only backfire. You want your customers to love your products, and Apple generally does a pretty good job of this. This seems unexpectedly petty of them, especially considering they're such a profitable company. Or maybe I just don't know them well enough? My only Apple product is an iMac mini, used for porting my software.
Microsoft got sued by contract temp workers, who called themselves "permatemps", mostly positions like entry-level QA and so forth. Some of these people were contracted for years at a time, but because they were contracted, didn't get benefits, of course. So, after the lawsuit was settled (which was lauded as a huge victory for those workers), to stay within the letter of the law, Microsoft simply laid off all temp workers for a minimum of three months after a year of employment, or else those people wouldn't qualify as "temp" anymore. Recently, the rules were changed to 18-months on / 6-months off.
Sometimes you need to be careful what you ask for. Or at least, *how* you ask for it. Low-skilled workers don't exactly have a lot of collective bargaining power. They may end up with a worse deal than when they started.
C has a lot going for it. It's simple, portable, ubiquitous. The language lets you do whatever you want with minimal fuss or overhead. Its generated assembly code is fast and efficient. Because it's the system language of choice for operating systems, nearly every other language can interop with C to some degree. C++ is largely backwards compatible with it. If you want a library to be portable with just about everything else, you write it in C. Great.. awesome so far.
That being said, C requires that the programmer write code perfectly, or else you've got a potential security disaster. It's not theoretically impossible, but as we've seen from history, in a large body of complex code, it's nearly impossible. There are virtually no built-in mechanisms for the compiler to help the programmer catch obvious programming errors. As such, it seems like a rather terrible language to use for any sort of internet-facing API, where the code will be subjected to intense attacks. And that pretty much describes most of Google, doesn't it? So it's not too surprising Google would be looking for a safer C-like alternative.
C is a fine language for what it is, but I don't understand people that seem to pick a single language, then infer that it's the end-all and be-all for every programming task on the planet. You CAN write secure, threaded code in C. Then again, you CAN build an entire house with nothing but hand tools. No carpenter doesn't have a basic hammer in their toolbox, but I'd imagine very few would purposefully eschew the use of a nail gun when appropriate.
I'm not so sure. Isn't the concern more about the total amount of bacteria, not the fact that it was present at all? The point isn't to turn it into a clean room - that's a fruitless exercise with humans living there. After all, humans are pretty good at dealing with residual bacteria in our environment, so long as it's in reasonably small doses. The idea is just to reduce the airborne concentration a bit down to "normal" levels, not to sterilize the station.
Doesn't intense UV light kill those sorts of bacteria? Generally speaking, I understand that the effectiveness of UV filtration of air is reduced with moving air flow (since effectiveness is a function of time and UV intensity), but on a space station, the same air is going to be re-circulated many thousands of times, so you have the advantage of repeated passes.
Would that not be effective, or was NASA simply under the impression that a HEPA filter would be adequate for the job?
The pundits are morons. There's simply no polite way to say it, and they've been wrong so many times about the "death" of various markets, it's ridiculous. How many failed predictions of doomed platforms do I have to recount? Let's reminisce...
I'm sure we can all remember the "PC gaming is dying" hype of the last... what... several decade now? It's about as much as a meme as "Year of Linux on the Desktop". Does anyone also remember in the middle of the last console generation how some pundits thought that console gaming was also dying? There were serious predictions that the next generation of consoles (meaning the current gen at this point) would be the last *ever*. Remember the panic about how social and casual games were going to eclipse the world of PC gaming? And then... smartphone games were the new thing, right? Those smartphone apps were taking over the world, and no one would buy a console or PC game, let alone a game for a dedicated handheld device. Yet, here they still are, each with their own piece of the ever-growing videogame market.
So, yes, no big surprise here for me. The PC flourishes in part because of the things the PC is good at. It's obvious that the PC is the technically superior gaming platform in most measurable metrics - power, controls, flexibility, connectivity and customization. Still, the console is going to stay with us, because it's convenient, comfortable, social, and immersive. Handhelds consoles have an advantage in form factor, while table and smartphone games have an advantage in accessibility. To me, arguing which is the "superior" platform is like arguing which is the best utensil: fork, knife, or spoon. It's entirely dependent on what you want to use it for, or perhaps *where* you want to use it.
Not too long ago, I needed an small monitor for work, so I went to my local office supply store, and picked up a small, cheapo monitor. It wasn't until I got it home and tried to plug it in that I realized it was VGA-ONLY. Yeah, a brand-new Dell monitor. WTF, are you kidding me? I mean, my fault for not checking the specs first (I assumed any new monitor would have DVI ports at minimum), but seriously? VGA monitors are apparently not dead yet - they're still selling them as we speak. Lame.
Naturally it's not a perfect solution, but let's please not let perfect be the enemy of good. We all know a patched system is far less likely to be compromised. And let's be honest here... hardware-manufacturing companies don't go out of business all that often, and when they do, they're often acquired by another company for their IP and assets. This should also include their liabilities, which is to provide continued support for sold devices.
Sure, at some point, a device will be at the end of it's service life. I don't expect a for-profit company to patch its devices forever. We're still a lot safer with the device getting patched for as long as possible.
I'm not sure I buy that argument, especially when dealing with consumer hardware. As one example, how would a typical consumer possibly know that their router has been compromised? How would they even know it's "unpatched" in the first place? And what happens if you're completely patched up and you still get a bot on your system? While zero-day exploits are less common, they're do happen on a pretty regular basis.
Nowadays, no consumer device should access or especially be accessed by the internet unless it's set up by default to auto-patch itself. This needs to be the new normal for hardware, because the reality is that security issues WILL be found, and that a typical consumer will NEVER patch things themselves. I used to have to update my Synology NAS box myself, checking when updates were available. After a well-publicized attack on their boxes, Synology wisely decided to allow their boxes to auto-patch themselves. We're starting to see this with some routers, and a lot of our critical software (OS, browsers) are now auto-patching as well. And we damn well need to make sure people making IoT devices get this right the first time.
At this point, it's not just a matter of protection for the consumer that purchased the hardware. It's protection for the rest of the internet as well. We can't afford to leave old crap connected to the internet in perpetuity. As sad as that is, it's just proven to be too dangerous for the ecosystem as a whole.
As for commercial-grade stuff... well, that's probably another discussion.
That's what they currently do. Japanese and Koreans just use a special font which renders the characters the way their language draws the glyphs. But that's ultimately a rather poor solution - essentially no better than what we used to have to do with code pages, where the text needed language metadata to render properly.
Let's take your example of the letter "A". What would happen if both the Latin A and Greek Alpha mapped to the same code point? Would you consider those equivalent? They have similar historical roots, right (I think)? The upper cases look identical, but the lower case glyph isn't exactly the same. Now, anytime you want to combine English (or any Latin-based alphabet) with Greek within the same text document, you simply can't, because there's no indication of which language you're typing in, since the code points are shared. At least, you can't do it in a simple text file without some other metadata to switch fonts in mid-stream.
How often does this happen? How often might a Japanese article reference someone's name in China, or vice versa? Historical documents are also a problem, because scholars might wish to differentiate based on the appearance of the character, which is much more significant in Asian logographic writing systems.
Does that help to explain the issue a bit? It's sort of confusing, I know.
I never said they weren't. But the ones that aren't can cause problems, not just in theory, but in everyday life. You counter with "but you wouldn't want to do that anyways", which is a pretty lousy way to defend a broken system. It's particularly problematic when trying to preserve the characteristics of writing in historic or scholarly works.
Again, bullshit. Western language render foreign names using different characters far more frequently than Japanese/Chinese.
No, you misunderstand. I'm saying western scripts don't have a *problem* when trying to do so, unlike in Japanese scripts with embedded Chinese names. You can easily embed a French or Russian phrase in English without fear of it being rendered incorrectly. However, you can't seamlessly intermix Japanese and Chinese without providing context for which language is being rendered. More critically, Japanese and Korean are among the few languages that *require* language-specific context simply to render correctly. That's simply broken.
Yet more bullshit. Han unification happened with the agreement of the Japanese and Chinese.
No, that's not true either. The original committee had no Asian companies or interests represented - they were all North American companies, most from Silicon Valley. Later they did have representation, but the damage was already done. Note that Chinese are inconvenienced by the unification far less often, as Simplified Chinese wasn't unified.
Stop making excuses for what was a terrible design decision that is still creating significant problems for entire language groups. Still, thank God the Unicode Consortium got to work getting those emoji properly encoded though, eh?
See: Han Unification, and all the problems it's caused. Because of this, the Japanese need to jump through hoops if they wish to write a Chinese name in an otherwise Japanese section of text. Since few other western languages have this problem, many Japanese were rather upset at this decision of the Unicode consortium.
Unless we know the final cost of the 20 MW plant vs the 110 MW plant, I'm not sure how you can come to that conclusion. The source of funding has nothing to do with the economy of scale, as much as I'd also prefer things like this to be privately funded. Operational costs vs power output, and the longevity of the plant will also play a significant role.
We shouldn't have too long to wait to see if this is a great idea or a boondoggle. I'm not pretending to know enough either way to make a prediction.
It depends on the department, I suppose. In my middle-class and rather quiet neighborhood, the police actually tracked down and caught a kid who ran into my lawn with this car, damaging some shrubbery, then fled the scene. They then stopped by and asked if I would like to press charged, and I got the officer's advice on whether or not I should do so. All very polite, professional, and efficient.
I think what's really different in today's society is that *everyone* has a camera now, and we all have access to worldwide media, both as a consumer and as a publisher, via the internet. Any story can become a national story this way, and as such, it feels like we're seeing a lot more bad things happen, when in reality, those same things probably just never made the news before for lack of evidence or, more realistically, no one to tell the story to in the media.
Nowadays, you really can't expect any event to occur in public and *not* have it filmed and "published", where the entire world can see it uncensored. The police should simply embrace this reality and record everything themselves. This will help to protect both themselves and civilians, as well as provide important evidence (either way) in the case of wrongdoing.
In TFA they mention that there's a smaller-scale demonstration plant operational right now, so it's not like they're building this plant with no working experience. One would hope that the demonstration plant is operating well enough to have justified the construction of the larger one. In projects like this, scale often works to your economic advantage, so it makes sense to start building these things bigger.
To be honest, I suspect it was more along the lines of "we copied this boilerplate combination NDA/noncompete agreement from somewhere else" sort of deal, rather than any sort of purposeful intent by the company. In case you're wondering, I'm a videogame programmer. There are generally no critical trade secrets for me to protect, other than what a normal NDA would typically cover.
In your case, it sounded like a non-compete made sense. For typically employees like me at the time, they generally don't.
I was also required to sign a non-compete clause as part of the employment paperwork when I joined a new company. When I read it, I asked the HR person about it, and the response was "Oh, that's just legal boilerplate stuff. We would never enforce that clause." Foolishly, I signed it anyhow, and fortunately, nothing came of it of course. I was younger and less experienced, plus unemployed and nearly out of money. It's harder to protest in that situation, but as I'm a bit older and hopefully a bit wiser, I'll never sign another agreement like that.
A co-worker of mine did the smart thing and wouldn't sign the paperwork unless he was allowed to mark out that section of the contract.
I certainly agree that brick and mortar will likely always have a place. My last visit to a Walmart was when I was traveling in another state as well.
Grocery shopping is something I don't mind doing in person. I'll often get dinner ideas when I spot a cut of meat, a particular sauce, or some fruits or veggies. Drug stores are handy when I need some toiletries, and they're really handy when I'm sick and need some medicine now, and not three days from now. I'd imagine a lot of people (other than me) enjoy shopping for clothes, and I'd bet a big part of that is browsing the selection and trying things on with your friends. Hardware stores are convenient when you need to ask some questions about a project. And who would want to buy a couch without sitting in it first, or a bed without lying on it?
Honestly, I'm not even sure there's a reason Walmart really needs to compete in the online space. They probably just hate the thought of giving up *any* retail marketshare without a fight.
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I have no problem with a code of conduct that states: "Be courteous and professional". In fact, why the hell does a code of conduct need paragraphs of rule lawyering? What bad behavior is not covered by "Be courteous and professional"? Trying to drill down into specifics just ends up looking ridiculous. Let's examine a few:
"Microaggressions" are imaginary insults by supremely overly-sensitive people. If someone is being a jerk, they're not committing "microaggressions", they're being a jerk. You can inform a person that perhaps a particular phrase isn't appropriate, etc.
"Don't just aim to be technically unimpeachable, aim to be your best self." Sorry, this has no business being in a code of conduct. It's essentially preaching at this point. Laudable goal or not, a code of conduct shouldn't be this overly broad. If I'm fine with slacking off for a day and being a bit lazy, I'm apparently breaking the code of conduct. Anyone see how ridiculous that is?
"Romantic or sexual commentary, remarks, or questions." Right... sexual harassment is out of course, but shall we now pretend that we're not romantic or sexual creatures by nature? Just confine it to a ban on sexual harassment or unwanted advances. I think this was what was being attempted, but again, was overly broad.
"Derailing (try to stay on topic; if you want to talk about something else, start a new conversation)" Wow, they're banning going off topic? And this is listed under "destructive behavior"? This is getting a bit over the top.
And I have no problem with the community stating that they reserve the right to remove poisonous elements. You remove bad apples from the barrel to prevent the whole bunch from spoiling. There's got to be some good sense applied here. Obviously, if someone is banned for life for a minor perceived insult, the community is in trouble. We occasionally see such power plays and community drama, but then again, such actions would go against the code of conduct itself, as that's not very professional.
This is what happens when someone tries to create an overly-default a set of programmer-like (or maybe "lawyer-like") rules for "playing nice".
Yep, there's something to be said about that. I've been on the opposite end, though. You see, devs have to run the game in debug mode. If you don't have cutting edge machines, you can barely play the game and debug it at the same time. I've worked at a studio where we had very middle of the road machines, and the problem is that for a large portion of the dev schedule, the game is slow even in release mode. It's inefficient to optimize code while it's still being changed on a daily basis. You have to do that closer to the end of the production cycle. So, yes, the game we released was very well optimized, but it came at the cost of a lot of dev pain and frustration. I think the proper solution is, as you indicated, is to have shared min-spec test machines for the team.
Of course, the real trick is that optimization is not just a function of code alone, something many people don't consider. It's a function of code + geometry + texture sizes + shader complexity, and depending on the PC specs, any or all of those could be causing a bottleneck. So, you need to make sure the artists don't go overboard with poly, texture, and shader counts. But there's no "magic limits" you can really tell them... you can just try to set some rough guidelines, but those are only estimates, because the environments and characters are built many months before the engine is in decent shape (assuming you're building your own, or heavily modifying one). If your estimate is off in the final months, it's a mad scramble to try to cull assets or simplify shaders, assuming you can't get more perf from code optimization.
I'm not trying to excuse the devs. There's no excuse for a buggy, poor performing game. And the management has to take a hit for knowingly releasing the game well before it was ready. I'm just saying game optimization / performance targets is a very complicated issue from the dev side.
Yeah, I'm also I'm sort of curious what the submitter thinks a technical solution would do that an ink stamp doesn't? What exactly is he trying to accomplish? I'm assuming it's just to identify his books, right? In that case, you really need a human-readable label of some sort. An RFID doesn't remind the person looking at it who the book belongs to. I suppose you could go to your friend's house and scan his bookshelves, looking for your property, but...?
You can buy a self-inking custom-made stamp for less than $30. Choose a size/shape, upload a design, and there you go. Problem solved.
Car crashes kill millions of people a year. Airlines full of passengers go down in horrible, flaming wrecks. It will make news, but I think you understimate how many people are willing to use an extremely useful technology even if there's a slight risk of death. Look at what happens when a serious car defect is found, like shrapnel in airbags, or brakes that don't work... a big fuss is made, sure, but no one stops driving their cars, perhaps except for people with the specific models affected.
Keep in mind that the initial market will be very small. The first deaths inevitability will happen when very few people have these types of cars, and as such, isn't going to have as large an emotional impact is you're imagining. More than that, within a *very* short time, I'd imagine you're going to see a very dramatic differentiation in overall safety between those who own autonomous cars and those who don't. The first death in an autonomous car will be a sad milestone (we recently had the first death in a Tesla), but I'd be willing to bet it's going to be because some idiot smashed into them.
Yes, but a good system would understand the *intent* of the question. A lot of our language revolves around subtle context that we has humans understand well, but computers simply don't. That's partly why AI is such a hard problem - computers just don't understand the larger context of the world like we do.
In the end, tactics like this will only backfire. You want your customers to love your products, and Apple generally does a pretty good job of this. This seems unexpectedly petty of them, especially considering they're such a profitable company. Or maybe I just don't know them well enough? My only Apple product is an iMac mini, used for porting my software.
Bleh. Wasn't the first time enough?
Microsoft got sued by contract temp workers, who called themselves "permatemps", mostly positions like entry-level QA and so forth. Some of these people were contracted for years at a time, but because they were contracted, didn't get benefits, of course. So, after the lawsuit was settled (which was lauded as a huge victory for those workers), to stay within the letter of the law, Microsoft simply laid off all temp workers for a minimum of three months after a year of employment, or else those people wouldn't qualify as "temp" anymore. Recently, the rules were changed to 18-months on / 6-months off.
Sometimes you need to be careful what you ask for. Or at least, *how* you ask for it. Low-skilled workers don't exactly have a lot of collective bargaining power. They may end up with a worse deal than when they started.
C has a lot going for it. It's simple, portable, ubiquitous. The language lets you do whatever you want with minimal fuss or overhead. Its generated assembly code is fast and efficient. Because it's the system language of choice for operating systems, nearly every other language can interop with C to some degree. C++ is largely backwards compatible with it. If you want a library to be portable with just about everything else, you write it in C. Great.. awesome so far.
That being said, C requires that the programmer write code perfectly, or else you've got a potential security disaster. It's not theoretically impossible, but as we've seen from history, in a large body of complex code, it's nearly impossible. There are virtually no built-in mechanisms for the compiler to help the programmer catch obvious programming errors. As such, it seems like a rather terrible language to use for any sort of internet-facing API, where the code will be subjected to intense attacks. And that pretty much describes most of Google, doesn't it? So it's not too surprising Google would be looking for a safer C-like alternative.
C is a fine language for what it is, but I don't understand people that seem to pick a single language, then infer that it's the end-all and be-all for every programming task on the planet. You CAN write secure, threaded code in C. Then again, you CAN build an entire house with nothing but hand tools. No carpenter doesn't have a basic hammer in their toolbox, but I'd imagine very few would purposefully eschew the use of a nail gun when appropriate.
I'm not so sure. Isn't the concern more about the total amount of bacteria, not the fact that it was present at all? The point isn't to turn it into a clean room - that's a fruitless exercise with humans living there. After all, humans are pretty good at dealing with residual bacteria in our environment, so long as it's in reasonably small doses. The idea is just to reduce the airborne concentration a bit down to "normal" levels, not to sterilize the station.
Doesn't intense UV light kill those sorts of bacteria? Generally speaking, I understand that the effectiveness of UV filtration of air is reduced with moving air flow (since effectiveness is a function of time and UV intensity), but on a space station, the same air is going to be re-circulated many thousands of times, so you have the advantage of repeated passes.
Would that not be effective, or was NASA simply under the impression that a HEPA filter would be adequate for the job?
The pundits are morons. There's simply no polite way to say it, and they've been wrong so many times about the "death" of various markets, it's ridiculous. How many failed predictions of doomed platforms do I have to recount? Let's reminisce...
I'm sure we can all remember the "PC gaming is dying" hype of the last... what... several decade now? It's about as much as a meme as "Year of Linux on the Desktop". Does anyone also remember in the middle of the last console generation how some pundits thought that console gaming was also dying? There were serious predictions that the next generation of consoles (meaning the current gen at this point) would be the last *ever*. Remember the panic about how social and casual games were going to eclipse the world of PC gaming? And then... smartphone games were the new thing, right? Those smartphone apps were taking over the world, and no one would buy a console or PC game, let alone a game for a dedicated handheld device. Yet, here they still are, each with their own piece of the ever-growing videogame market.
So, yes, no big surprise here for me. The PC flourishes in part because of the things the PC is good at. It's obvious that the PC is the technically superior gaming platform in most measurable metrics - power, controls, flexibility, connectivity and customization. Still, the console is going to stay with us, because it's convenient, comfortable, social, and immersive. Handhelds consoles have an advantage in form factor, while table and smartphone games have an advantage in accessibility. To me, arguing which is the "superior" platform is like arguing which is the best utensil: fork, knife, or spoon. It's entirely dependent on what you want to use it for, or perhaps *where* you want to use it.
Not too long ago, I needed an small monitor for work, so I went to my local office supply store, and picked up a small, cheapo monitor. It wasn't until I got it home and tried to plug it in that I realized it was VGA-ONLY. Yeah, a brand-new Dell monitor. WTF, are you kidding me? I mean, my fault for not checking the specs first (I assumed any new monitor would have DVI ports at minimum), but seriously? VGA monitors are apparently not dead yet - they're still selling them as we speak. Lame.
Naturally it's not a perfect solution, but let's please not let perfect be the enemy of good. We all know a patched system is far less likely to be compromised. And let's be honest here... hardware-manufacturing companies don't go out of business all that often, and when they do, they're often acquired by another company for their IP and assets. This should also include their liabilities, which is to provide continued support for sold devices.
Sure, at some point, a device will be at the end of it's service life. I don't expect a for-profit company to patch its devices forever. We're still a lot safer with the device getting patched for as long as possible.
And the thermostats need to be online because....?
Because otherwise they'd have to sell you the devices rather than renting them to you.
I'm not sure I buy that argument, especially when dealing with consumer hardware. As one example, how would a typical consumer possibly know that their router has been compromised? How would they even know it's "unpatched" in the first place? And what happens if you're completely patched up and you still get a bot on your system? While zero-day exploits are less common, they're do happen on a pretty regular basis.
Nowadays, no consumer device should access or especially be accessed by the internet unless it's set up by default to auto-patch itself. This needs to be the new normal for hardware, because the reality is that security issues WILL be found, and that a typical consumer will NEVER patch things themselves. I used to have to update my Synology NAS box myself, checking when updates were available. After a well-publicized attack on their boxes, Synology wisely decided to allow their boxes to auto-patch themselves. We're starting to see this with some routers, and a lot of our critical software (OS, browsers) are now auto-patching as well. And we damn well need to make sure people making IoT devices get this right the first time.
At this point, it's not just a matter of protection for the consumer that purchased the hardware. It's protection for the rest of the internet as well. We can't afford to leave old crap connected to the internet in perpetuity. As sad as that is, it's just proven to be too dangerous for the ecosystem as a whole.
As for commercial-grade stuff... well, that's probably another discussion.
That's what they currently do. Japanese and Koreans just use a special font which renders the characters the way their language draws the glyphs. But that's ultimately a rather poor solution - essentially no better than what we used to have to do with code pages, where the text needed language metadata to render properly.
Let's take your example of the letter "A". What would happen if both the Latin A and Greek Alpha mapped to the same code point? Would you consider those equivalent? They have similar historical roots, right (I think)? The upper cases look identical, but the lower case glyph isn't exactly the same. Now, anytime you want to combine English (or any Latin-based alphabet) with Greek within the same text document, you simply can't, because there's no indication of which language you're typing in, since the code points are shared. At least, you can't do it in a simple text file without some other metadata to switch fonts in mid-stream.
How often does this happen? How often might a Japanese article reference someone's name in China, or vice versa? Historical documents are also a problem, because scholars might wish to differentiate based on the appearance of the character, which is much more significant in Asian logographic writing systems.
Does that help to explain the issue a bit? It's sort of confusing, I know.
...technology evolves by jerks...
Steve Jobs... Bill Gates... Jeff Bezos... yeah, it's sort of hard to argue the point.
Bullshit. Most character are nearly identical.
I never said they weren't. But the ones that aren't can cause problems, not just in theory, but in everyday life. You counter with "but you wouldn't want to do that anyways", which is a pretty lousy way to defend a broken system. It's particularly problematic when trying to preserve the characteristics of writing in historic or scholarly works.
Again, bullshit. Western language render foreign names using different characters far more frequently than Japanese/Chinese.
No, you misunderstand. I'm saying western scripts don't have a *problem* when trying to do so, unlike in Japanese scripts with embedded Chinese names. You can easily embed a French or Russian phrase in English without fear of it being rendered incorrectly. However, you can't seamlessly intermix Japanese and Chinese without providing context for which language is being rendered. More critically, Japanese and Korean are among the few languages that *require* language-specific context simply to render correctly. That's simply broken.
Yet more bullshit. Han unification happened with the agreement of the Japanese and Chinese.
No, that's not true either. The original committee had no Asian companies or interests represented - they were all North American companies, most from Silicon Valley. Later they did have representation, but the damage was already done. Note that Chinese are inconvenienced by the unification far less often, as Simplified Chinese wasn't unified.
Stop making excuses for what was a terrible design decision that is still creating significant problems for entire language groups. Still, thank God the Unicode Consortium got to work getting those emoji properly encoded though, eh?
See: Han Unification, and all the problems it's caused. Because of this, the Japanese need to jump through hoops if they wish to write a Chinese name in an otherwise Japanese section of text. Since few other western languages have this problem, many Japanese were rather upset at this decision of the Unicode consortium.
TL;DR: Semantics matter.
Unless we know the final cost of the 20 MW plant vs the 110 MW plant, I'm not sure how you can come to that conclusion. The source of funding has nothing to do with the economy of scale, as much as I'd also prefer things like this to be privately funded. Operational costs vs power output, and the longevity of the plant will also play a significant role.
We shouldn't have too long to wait to see if this is a great idea or a boondoggle. I'm not pretending to know enough either way to make a prediction.
It depends on the department, I suppose. In my middle-class and rather quiet neighborhood, the police actually tracked down and caught a kid who ran into my lawn with this car, damaging some shrubbery, then fled the scene. They then stopped by and asked if I would like to press charged, and I got the officer's advice on whether or not I should do so. All very polite, professional, and efficient.
I think what's really different in today's society is that *everyone* has a camera now, and we all have access to worldwide media, both as a consumer and as a publisher, via the internet. Any story can become a national story this way, and as such, it feels like we're seeing a lot more bad things happen, when in reality, those same things probably just never made the news before for lack of evidence or, more realistically, no one to tell the story to in the media.
Nowadays, you really can't expect any event to occur in public and *not* have it filmed and "published", where the entire world can see it uncensored. The police should simply embrace this reality and record everything themselves. This will help to protect both themselves and civilians, as well as provide important evidence (either way) in the case of wrongdoing.
In TFA they mention that there's a smaller-scale demonstration plant operational right now, so it's not like they're building this plant with no working experience. One would hope that the demonstration plant is operating well enough to have justified the construction of the larger one. In projects like this, scale often works to your economic advantage, so it makes sense to start building these things bigger.
To be honest, I suspect it was more along the lines of "we copied this boilerplate combination NDA/noncompete agreement from somewhere else" sort of deal, rather than any sort of purposeful intent by the company. In case you're wondering, I'm a videogame programmer. There are generally no critical trade secrets for me to protect, other than what a normal NDA would typically cover.
In your case, it sounded like a non-compete made sense. For typically employees like me at the time, they generally don't.
I was also required to sign a non-compete clause as part of the employment paperwork when I joined a new company. When I read it, I asked the HR person about it, and the response was "Oh, that's just legal boilerplate stuff. We would never enforce that clause." Foolishly, I signed it anyhow, and fortunately, nothing came of it of course. I was younger and less experienced, plus unemployed and nearly out of money. It's harder to protest in that situation, but as I'm a bit older and hopefully a bit wiser, I'll never sign another agreement like that.
A co-worker of mine did the smart thing and wouldn't sign the paperwork unless he was allowed to mark out that section of the contract.
I certainly agree that brick and mortar will likely always have a place. My last visit to a Walmart was when I was traveling in another state as well.
Grocery shopping is something I don't mind doing in person. I'll often get dinner ideas when I spot a cut of meat, a particular sauce, or some fruits or veggies. Drug stores are handy when I need some toiletries, and they're really handy when I'm sick and need some medicine now, and not three days from now. I'd imagine a lot of people (other than me) enjoy shopping for clothes, and I'd bet a big part of that is browsing the selection and trying things on with your friends. Hardware stores are convenient when you need to ask some questions about a project. And who would want to buy a couch without sitting in it first, or a bed without lying on it?
Honestly, I'm not even sure there's a reason Walmart really needs to compete in the online space. They probably just hate the thought of giving up *any* retail marketshare without a fight.