Did you read what I wrote? The vast majority of the airspace of this country - including lots of airspace that drones have been using - is regulated by the FAA. Inasmuch as "a fraction" is "a very small fraction, like If you're a pilot, but not a crop duster, what are you doing flying at low altitudes when not around an airport?
What? That's the regulation and I'm allowed to be there whether I'm a crop duster or not. What is the drone doing there, is the question. In any case, the vast majority of this country has no altitude restriction since it counts as "sparsely populated areas". Otherwise it's 500 feet - hence the RC limit of 400 feet (since they generally fly in "other than congested" but not "sparsely populated" areas).
Flying drones in [in approach paths] is already against the law. So what's the problem?
Exactly. Like I said, the FAA came up with rules in 1981 to have planes and RCers get along. The AMA is pretty careful about this, actually, and it works well. But these drones don't require any skill or investment (and hence limited likelihood of interacting with the community), and the self-regulation isn't working any more. Do you expect the guy buying a Phantom on Amazon to be able to read a sectional and figure out where planes are likely to be? If they all did, we wouldn't be having this problem! So we need tighter regulation to make sure the drone guys follow the rules... unfortunately for everybody who was getting along just fine.
Not to mention that small GA planes aren't even rated for bird strikes. If I'm flying my Cessna 172 and I hit your drone and survive (which is pretty doubtful), I will be coming for you. Every pilot and person who "does" aviation feels the same way - and guess what/who the FAA is made of/for?
"A few feet" is probably "less than 50". But when even a boring plane like a Cessna 172 is going twice the speed of your car on the highway, and normally has nothing around it for miles, 50 feet is more than enough to make you change your pants. Hell, even 500 feet gets a pretty good pucker going.
And yes, generally pilots do report to the FAA (control towers) when they're near birds. It's a safety issue, and the tower will relay it to other pilots. You may recall a small issue with bird strikes a few years ago - it turned an Airbus with 150 people on it into a pretty lousy glider, so it's not something to mess with. The ATIS at my airport frequently says "birds on and in vicinity of the airport" as a warning, and it's also in the published airport information. Airports spend tremendous amounts of money on things like "population control" and more exotic measures like propane cannons to keep birds away.
Pilots report all kinds of things to the control tower, from birds to wind shear to problems with the runway lights. I definitely told tower when a drunk idiot on July 4th shot a bottle rocket into my wing on final approach...
"Navigable airspace" actually has a definition, you know.
"Navigable airspace" is airspace at or above the minimum altitudes of flight prescribed by the Code of Federal Regulations, and must include airspace needed to ensure safety in the takeoff and landing of aircraft. By policy, the term "airspace above minimum altitudes of flight" is interpreted to mean "airspace at or above minimum flight altitudes."
The referenced 14 CFR 91.119 defines minimum altitudes as altitudes allowing a safe emergency landing, and various other restrictions depending on whether you're over a "congested area", "other than congested area", or a "sparsely populated area".
So if you're over cornfields, the plains, a beach, or a lake (with no boats within 500 feet) it's perfectly legal to fly at 20 feet, and that counts as "navigable airspace". Hence the FAA purview. It's well established that the FAA has authority over all airspace in the country. The only rebuke the FAA has gotten in court has been "you have to go through rulemaking for this, you know" - which is precisely what they're doing.
Frankly, these drone idiots are ruining things for everybody. Model aircraft folks came to an understanding with the FAA something like 30 years ago, and the rules were quite sensible, and kept everybody safe and out of each other's way. But in comes Mr. Drone flying his just-bought Phantom out of sight at 1500 feet in an approach path, and now they have to regulate it.
I'm a pilot, and getting too close to birds gives me the willies. But birds don't have metal. If your toy puts a hole in my windshield with a closing speed of 230 MPH, it will probably kill me - what skin do you have in the game?
Citation really needed. I reject that integration is "promoting above everybody else". They're trying to provide the most relevant answers to their users, when they can. If you want to go off and do your own thing, the regular results aren't even below the fold! Try "sfo to jfk", which is clearly looking for specific flights - Google has a little box telling you the flights you can take, but immediately below that is a link to Kayak.com (for me). If you search the more generic "flights", there's a small widget indicating that you could've just searched the flight, but the first actual result is Kayak. I should note that the flight search stuff has a huge "Sponsored" text on it - if you don't want to use it, they could hardly make it easier to avoid especially since people are so hardwired to drill in on Google's real results. And if you do want to use it... well, what's the big deal? If somebody's literally just clicking on the first result anyway, and now they don't have to, that's a pretty mercurial and weak preference - would you say that a subtle algorithm change that happened to switch the first and second result was also worth breaking up the company? That's probably more damaging than Google launching its own thing. I imagine a lot of people skip right over the whole top block of "non-organic" results due to years of practice with the ads, but they still click the first organic result.
Let's use a less commercial example. Try searching for "triangle calculator" or "RFK mother" or "range of a cessna 172" or "how many bees are in a pound". They're obviously just trying to provide faster answers when they understand your query enough to do so. Do you really think they want to make money selling airline tickets? Or are they trying to put "ostermiller.org/calc/triangle.html" out of business as well?
Nope. First of all such a statement needs to be qualified - for instance, the 1.3+ billion people in China overwhelmingly prefer Baidu. It is clearly quite possible for people to avoid Google entirely, not just for search (which is, of course, even easier).
and are abusing it.
In what way? Because you don't think Google should use its other services to provide a more integrated experience? Without any sort of lock-in, don't pretend that's anything other than punishing success.
You're begging the question. If Google is a monopoly and they're integrating stuff, that's bad. And they must be a monopoly, because they're doing bad monopoly things like integrating stuff. But without being an actual monopoly with actual lock-in, there's no reason that integration is a problem at all - in fact it's quite the opposite, that's what they have to do to remain competitive. Changing search engines away from Google is as simple as typing a different URL or choosing something else from the drop-down, or even *not changing the default*. The idea that a high search marketshare can be anything other than direct user choice is ridiculous - and so what's the problem?
But this represents an existential threat - when viewed that way, it's a no-brainer to give up a market, even a huge market, if the price of admission is too high. Also, Google doesn't have to stop serving them, just stop doing business there.
Also, don't forget that Google pulled out of China, and China has a lot more population and will have the biggest GDP shortly. This is far more concerning than a little espionage.
Hi, I'm a white male. I believe strongly that women and men are capable of exactly the same amount of good and bad, and are equally responsible for their own decisions to do or not do things. I live my life like this - I'm a software engineer and I have an unusually high number of female coworkers, and they're as talented and respected as my male coworkers. We really don't think about gender at work - it's just not relevant.
Unfortunately, this is very much *not* feminism - at least any more. There is a certain kind of person who wants to control others, and modern ultrafeminism is overrun with them and their fans. I abhor the label "SJW" but... well, frankly, it does seem like a pretty apt description of some people. It's really sad for me, because there's probably going to be a big backlash soon - things like "shirtgate" really trouble people who haven't been tied into the echo chamber (they give you a blank look when you explain that people have a problem with it, and it changes to a horrified expression when you explain the scope and intensity).
But the only thin worse than a big backlash would be no backlash.
You know, when I was a kid, people like you kept telling me that I didn't understand stuff and wasn't responsible. That was a long time ago - you know what? Damnit, I *was* right! I was as savvy and responsible then as I am now. The only thing I've learned as an adult is that "is an adult" has a weight of exactly 0. I used to think the people in newspapers saying stuff had some authority, but really they're just "a dude said some stuff".
One of the great lies adults like to tell and believe is that there's some fundamental difference between adulthood and childhood. Here's the dirty little secret: nothing changes when you become an adult other than running out of milestones to point to and say "see? I'm not an adult yet!"
If you think you're wiser simply because you're older - well, you're not very wise at all. Wisdom comes from experience and intelligence - neither of which depend on age. Age is a free, lengthy way to get a limited amount of narrow experience - but reading and education gets you much more at a younger age.
Do you think your average 50 year old can say anything particularly wise? Really? People are basically idiots at every age.
Ah, OK. I wasn't sure which meaning you had in mind, but given the situation I thought "up the hierarchy" made more sense. Though I suppose death threats are the other sort of escalation...
But what do you think people should do instead of escalate? I think at this point it's pretty clear that there are fundamental (some might say philosophical) disagreements at play here that haven't been resolved yet - and may be unresolvable (people are talking seriously about forking Debian over this). Escalation seems like exactly the appropriate step. When I'm at work, if I don't agree with a decision I talk about it with my boss - but if we can't reach an agreement and I feel strongly that it's the wrong decision, I take it to his boss, and so on if necessary. I would be remiss if I didn't!
Honestly, many systemd proponents seem annoyed that people aren't accepting their decision without question, when what they propose is a pretty serious departure from a pretty fundamental system design philosophy. I don't know what to make of that.
I honestly don't really care about this whole init debate, from a technical standpoint. I don't see a compelling reason to prefer systemd, and given the fact that it's changing a system that's worked fine (with a few tweaks) for more than 30 years, I'd just as soon stay with the old style.
But there's a few extremely troubling things I see from the systemd side:
- A complete disregard for precedent. Yes, it's good to be open to rethinking how we do things, but the fact is that Unix has worked for a very, very long time. There's many reasons for this, but the "Unix philosophy" is undoubtedly one of them. systemd is by no means "Unixy". Reading a directory of symlinks and executing shell scripts is simple, and minimizes the logic built into init - which a lot of people believe is a good guiding principle for pretty much the entire OS. - An uncompelling value proposition. I don't much care about boot time (who reboots anymore, anyway?), and with Upstart my boot times were pretty quick anyway. If I'm running a server, I don't even care about boot time at all. What I do care about is simplicity of understanding and management. Systemd has failed to convince me that it does anything I want. Iin the absence of anything particularly valuable I'd just as soon stick with existing, robust, well-understood systems. I don't have my tonsils out for fun either - it's not change aversion to stick with things that worked fine in the absence of a compelling reason to change things. - Poor architecture. The init system should be as simple as possible. Let it start things like dbus if the system needs it, don't build them in. Discrete components that are loosely-coupled, please - tight coupling is a black mark against virtually any multi-binary software package, but especially in the boot process. Building things into the startup process just reduces the number of things you're able to remove from a system that doesn't need them. DBus is a great example of this. - Lack of concern for the server use case, and sysadmins in particular. People have raised concerns - many legitimate, some not - about systemd approaches, and the developers and (unusually rabid) community treat those concerns with indifference bordering on contempt. Here's a hint: when a group of competent professional acting in good faith doesn't understand why something is a good idea, it's your fault for having explained it poorly. Especially for an init system - the "average" user never did care about how his system booted! (Which, by the way, is something many systemd folk seem to disagree with - they say users are clamoring for it!) But the sysadmin does care, and has to manage it - best to treat him with respect, not contempt. - Tying perfectly-good cross platform programs to Linux. systemd is, unabashedly, a virus. Why my window manager or graphics program has to depend on init, I don't know. But as long as it does and that package is systemd, it kills cross-platform compatibility. Compatibility is what got Linux off the ground, and with the exception of systemd it's not too hard to keep it going. Don't throw this away! - Most importantly, the community is extremely toxic. What is Linux without community? Sure, there's bickering (since when is this bad, by the way?), but at the end of the day you have one of the most powerful and important pieces of software the world has ever seen. But the systemd mess feels like a Microsoft move, and the idea that there's a "Microsoft of Linux" able to move so unilaterally is extremely troubling. People voice concerns about systemd, and if they seem recycled it's because they haven't been well refuted! But the proponents are vicious, and vocal to an extent that makes one suspect astroturfing... which is even more troubling.
And the most troubling aspect of this toxic community are the attacks on opponents. The parent's comment is not the first, nor even the tenth, attack I've seen on a systemd opponent to claim that it's just someone afraid of losing their job and trying to set up some sort of
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This is just google voice search, right? Try asking the distance to the moon, then ask "what is that in miles/kilometers" (whichever it didn't give to start)
Not even jumping out of a plane - just flying one! I'm a private pilot and I'm SOL for life insurance unless I get one that specifically doesn't exclude it. Annoying because flying isn't particularly dangerous - about as dangerous as riding a motorcycle, and it's easy to reduce your risk below even that, but there's an actuarial stigma to it.
3 estimated guesses, actually, based on the flus most likely to be seen in North America. The flu is a rapidly-changing and complicated virus - all the more reason to reduce its chances of mutating back into something really dangerous, eh?
250,000-500,000 people a year die from the flu, more than 50,000 in the US (that's more than both traffic accidents and gun deaths combined). It's not something to fuck around with.
It's sweet that you think the people giving you a hard time about the flu shot care about you. Sorry to burst your bubble, but nobody cares about you. They care about your elderly neighbor or the kid a few seats away on the bus, or the coworker with the pregnant wife. And you can and will give it to them before you even know you have it, so it's not a question of "well *I'm* not the problem" - yes, everybody without a flu shot is potentially the problem, because they can get the flu and infect others before there's any hope of avoiding it. Before there was an effective vaccine that was cheap and easily available, the flu was just something that happened - but now that there's something to do about it, choosing not to do it is a pretty dickish move.
The flu is scary. Lots of people think Ebola is scary - sure, the flu has a lower case-mortality rate, but it's compensated for by how easy it is to spread, so overall even if we pretend this Ebola outbreak is typical, the flu is still like 100x more deadly worldwide, and something like 50,000x more deadly if we just look at the US. The 1918 flu killed 50-100 million people - that's 3-5% of humans who were alive at the time, disproportionately affecting healthy young and middle-aged adults. It killed 10x as many Americans as did World War 1. Sure, sanitation and treatment weren't what they are now, but if you get the flu, you can't do much more than supportive therapy. If that flu happened today, the death toll would undoubtedly be lower than it was, but most people would still know someone who'd been killed that year by the flu. That is, without a vaccine.
You hear horror stories about poor accusations of harassment. And then you hear things like this. That's disgusting and I hope you pressed charges. Nobody (men nor women) should stand for that shit.
It really sucks that men are expected to make the advances in this area. It just opens the door for a lot of misunderstanding, hurt feelings, and serious repercussions. It would be better for everybody if there was an equal chance of a woman asking a man out. But unfortunately, sitting and hoping isn't a viable strategy for men, so it creates a pretty fine line to walk. Obviously continuing in the face of a clear rejection is far, far over the line (and starting with overt sexual contact has left the line beyond the horizon) but there's a lot more grey area than is really comfortable for anybody. Men have been conditioned since childhood to pursue women despite initial rejection, by everything from Disney movies to award-winning sitcoms to classic novels, and women have been conditioned to wait and be pursued by those same influences. Obviously there's a right and wrong way to pursue, and once again your (and countless other) examples are beyond the pale, but I think women tend to underestimate how much power they wield here. It's even a trope, a woman who "can't find any good men" because only the jerks are brave enough (or don't care enough) to risk going over the line.
And - don't forget - people ripped her company a new asshole for daring to fire her, whereas the blowback to the company that fired the guy was negligible. Despite the fact that she was clearly, unambiguously, and disgustingly in the wrong. I'm sorry, but overhearing some private conversation does not give someone the right to chime in - or take a picture to shame publicly. And "sexual" is not "sexist", and she was so caught up in her own narrative that she misinterpreted innocent talk about wanting to "fork the repo" (that the on-stage developer was talking about) as something sexual. A dongle joke is vaguely distasteful, but it's hard to see how it affects anybody at all unless you consider the idea of sexuality to be violence against women. Yes I know some people actually think this, but then there is no conversation to have.
And yes, what the trolls did to Ms. Richards was despicable and completely out of line. Rape and death threats are never appropriate, but (on the internet) rarely threatening. There's no getting around the fact that had a man done this to a woman, there would be few rape threats - maybe some death threats. But the overall amount of, and substance of, the blowback would be far, far greater. Look at what they did to Larry Summers for stating a scientifically uncontroversial fact (men have a higher standard deviation of intelligence, which leads to more men at the highest and lowest ends of the spectrum despite average intelligence being the same). It cost him his job and a presidential appointment. And it's only gotten worse since then!
The lesson was: if you're a man, don't ever offend a woman or your life will be ruined at a distance. And you don't know what might offend a woman, and there is no recourse if you didn't mean to cause offense (or can't understand how something could cause offense) since it's in the eye of the beholder and (explicitly - it's offensive to suggest otherwise) not open for critique. Ms. Richards lost her job as well, but her job was as a "developer evangelist" and none of the (predominantly-male) developers would ever risk speaking to her after that incident, rather compromising her effectiveness.
I'm very much a feminist, but "feminism" is no longer about the simple idea that "women and men are equally capable of both good and bad". Hint: how often do you hear "feminists" say in the same breath that we need equality and more women in a field, because women are better? No, I don't mean "diversity of opinion" (which I completely agree with - we need more women, black people, older and younger people, etc to make sure we make the best decisions), I mean things like "sexism is bad and we should have a woman president, since there would be fewer wars". Even if it were true that women in power act differently than men, which it's not, the proponents obviously don't at all think women are equal.
If you think men are equally good at it, you've never seen teenage girls. Holy shit, the cruelest guys I ever met in high school (and we had a few beat-you-until-you're-bloody-and-leave-you-under-a-bridge class acts) weren't one tenth as cruel as *dozens* of the girls. They organized a campaign against this one girl so vicious and drawn-out that she tried to kill herself. Eventually her parents put her in a different school a half hour away, and this clique was thrilled that they'd "won". Even after she'd left, they had a great old time continuing to undermine her in her absence by spreading the rumor that she'd gotten pregnant and had to a special school. About a month later, they'd picked a new member of that clique to ostracize. I knew 17 year old girls who weren't talking to other 17 year old girls because of some insult that happened when they were 4 years old. The guys would have a fight and get it over with, or if it were more of a bully-type situation they'd set their terms and the target would abide by them and be left alone - but the girls actively tried to find their target to inflict more pain. I eventually ended up unpopular enough that nobody bothered me, and wise enough not to care, that I managed to make it through alright.
I'm just going by my experience here, but it's been corroborated by almost everyone I've ever asked, including other women (who had horror stories that were more private and went far, far beyond anything I'd ever seen).
Hear hear. I went to a school that had this mentality, that there are two sides to every fight by definition so it's easiest to just suspend both parties. My brother was assaulted by some bully and didn't even fight back, and was suspended since "they had a fight" - thankfully, my parents had enough sense to rip the administration a new asshole.
We have a real problem with this mentality in this country - the cable news outlets and others have decided that there are always two equally legitimate viewpoints (or sides to an argument) and present them equally in the interest of fairness. Unfortunately, this is unfair if the arguments are unequally valid, which is often the case.
Hang on a second. One of the smartest things I ever read on the topic had nothing to do with tech - it was a female psychologist who also happened to be a private pilot, and she was talking about getting more females interested in flying. (I don't think somebody could write such a candid article about tech, unfortunately.)
Her basic premise was that females need more encouragement from other women who've "been there" in order to feel comfortable taking that path. Basically, the "odd one out" thing you mention. But males are more apt to do something even in the face of active discouragement. I've certainly observed this in myself and other males, barely (if ever) observed it in females, and it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint as well (intuitively - I don't know if there are any studies that explicitly show this, but if risk-taking is on a bell-curve like most traits, in general the standard deviation in males is greater than in females). In professional flying, there's a lot of discouragement - it's hard, pretty thankless, the pay is crap for a long time despite needing a lot of expensive training just to start, and you're away a lot. Most pro pilots I know are in it for some version of prestige, which we know motivates women less than men.
In other words, to use your language, women are "herding creatures" to a greater extent then men (though I'd probably say "social creatures"). Men are more likely to find a niche in which they can excel, while women are more likely to stick to a "tried and tested" path. Note that I said "more likely", not "will always" - there are plenty of men who go into some boring average field, and plenty of women who don't, but on a societal level the averages and characteristics are important. And I don't think either of these characteristics are necessarily bad, or desirable to change. Both approaches to live have substantial downsides, and it's probably better to have a mix.
As a guy who actually drives an ambulance, please please *please* don't go through a red light. We have a siren that allows us to break traffic laws, and warns other vehicles that they need to do something unusual. In fact, there's a school of thought in emergency vehicle operation that says that you really shouldn't use the lights and siren at all, since some percentage of people will do something stupid in their presence and some percentage of those will get hurt or worse. And those few seconds just aren't that important - minutes, sure, but it's rare that the siren saves minutes. I try to do most of my driving without the siren, and only use it to make someone pull off to the side or break a traffic law (e.g., running a red light) that requires its use - but if traffic is moving, there's really no need (and using it is poor driving).
If some emergency vehicle is right behind you with the sirens blaring and you're at a red light, flip him off and stay put until the light changes. He can and should turn off the siren so as to not induce people to do something stupid. It would have been even better to have not gotten himself stuck in the first place, since he's allowed to go into opposing traffic so as to not require extraordinary measures of the other drivers.
In addition, Google Public DNS engineers have proposed a technical solution called EDNS Client Subnet. This proposal allows resolvers to pass in part of the client's IP address (the first 24/64 bits or less for IPv4/IPv6 respectively) as the source IP in the DNS message, so that nameservers can return optimized results based on the user's location rather than that of the resolver. To date, we have deployed an implementation of the proposal for many large CDNs (including Akamai) and Google properties. The majority of geo-sensitive domain names are already covered.
Getting into orbit isn't about height, it's about speed. The vast majority of the work an orbital rocket does is to get going fast enough - getting the height is pretty easy by comparison.
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Did you read what I wrote? The vast majority of the airspace of this country - including lots of airspace that drones have been using - is regulated by the FAA. Inasmuch as "a fraction" is "a very small fraction, like If you're a pilot, but not a crop duster, what are you doing flying at low altitudes when not around an airport?
What? That's the regulation and I'm allowed to be there whether I'm a crop duster or not. What is the drone doing there, is the question. In any case, the vast majority of this country has no altitude restriction since it counts as "sparsely populated areas". Otherwise it's 500 feet - hence the RC limit of 400 feet (since they generally fly in "other than congested" but not "sparsely populated" areas).
Flying drones in [in approach paths] is already against the law. So what's the problem?
Exactly. Like I said, the FAA came up with rules in 1981 to have planes and RCers get along. The AMA is pretty careful about this, actually, and it works well. But these drones don't require any skill or investment (and hence limited likelihood of interacting with the community), and the self-regulation isn't working any more. Do you expect the guy buying a Phantom on Amazon to be able to read a sectional and figure out where planes are likely to be? If they all did, we wouldn't be having this problem! So we need tighter regulation to make sure the drone guys follow the rules... unfortunately for everybody who was getting along just fine.
Jet engines are designed to "ingest" a certain number of birds of a certain size. Not drones, which have pesky metal bits. And even then, it turns out that hitting birds can still ruin your day.
Not to mention that small GA planes aren't even rated for bird strikes. If I'm flying my Cessna 172 and I hit your drone and survive (which is pretty doubtful), I will be coming for you. Every pilot and person who "does" aviation feels the same way - and guess what/who the FAA is made of/for?
"A few feet" is probably "less than 50". But when even a boring plane like a Cessna 172 is going twice the speed of your car on the highway, and normally has nothing around it for miles, 50 feet is more than enough to make you change your pants. Hell, even 500 feet gets a pretty good pucker going.
And yes, generally pilots do report to the FAA (control towers) when they're near birds. It's a safety issue, and the tower will relay it to other pilots. You may recall a small issue with bird strikes a few years ago - it turned an Airbus with 150 people on it into a pretty lousy glider, so it's not something to mess with. The ATIS at my airport frequently says "birds on and in vicinity of the airport" as a warning, and it's also in the published airport information. Airports spend tremendous amounts of money on things like "population control" and more exotic measures like propane cannons to keep birds away.
Pilots report all kinds of things to the control tower, from birds to wind shear to problems with the runway lights. I definitely told tower when a drunk idiot on July 4th shot a bottle rocket into my wing on final approach...
"Navigable airspace" actually has a definition, you know.
"Navigable airspace" is airspace at or above the minimum altitudes of flight prescribed by the Code of Federal Regulations, and must include airspace needed to ensure safety in the takeoff and landing of aircraft. By policy, the term "airspace above minimum altitudes of flight" is interpreted to mean "airspace at or above minimum flight altitudes."
The referenced 14 CFR 91.119 defines minimum altitudes as altitudes allowing a safe emergency landing, and various other restrictions depending on whether you're over a "congested area", "other than congested area", or a "sparsely populated area".
So if you're over cornfields, the plains, a beach, or a lake (with no boats within 500 feet) it's perfectly legal to fly at 20 feet, and that counts as "navigable airspace". Hence the FAA purview. It's well established that the FAA has authority over all airspace in the country. The only rebuke the FAA has gotten in court has been "you have to go through rulemaking for this, you know" - which is precisely what they're doing.
Frankly, these drone idiots are ruining things for everybody. Model aircraft folks came to an understanding with the FAA something like 30 years ago, and the rules were quite sensible, and kept everybody safe and out of each other's way. But in comes Mr. Drone flying his just-bought Phantom out of sight at 1500 feet in an approach path, and now they have to regulate it.
I'm a pilot, and getting too close to birds gives me the willies. But birds don't have metal. If your toy puts a hole in my windshield with a closing speed of 230 MPH, it will probably kill me - what skin do you have in the game?
Citation really needed. I reject that integration is "promoting above everybody else". They're trying to provide the most relevant answers to their users, when they can. If you want to go off and do your own thing, the regular results aren't even below the fold! Try "sfo to jfk", which is clearly looking for specific flights - Google has a little box telling you the flights you can take, but immediately below that is a link to Kayak.com (for me). If you search the more generic "flights", there's a small widget indicating that you could've just searched the flight, but the first actual result is Kayak. I should note that the flight search stuff has a huge "Sponsored" text on it - if you don't want to use it, they could hardly make it easier to avoid especially since people are so hardwired to drill in on Google's real results. And if you do want to use it... well, what's the big deal? If somebody's literally just clicking on the first result anyway, and now they don't have to, that's a pretty mercurial and weak preference - would you say that a subtle algorithm change that happened to switch the first and second result was also worth breaking up the company? That's probably more damaging than Google launching its own thing. I imagine a lot of people skip right over the whole top block of "non-organic" results due to years of practice with the ads, but they still click the first organic result.
Let's use a less commercial example. Try searching for "triangle calculator" or "RFK mother" or "range of a cessna 172" or "how many bees are in a pound". They're obviously just trying to provide faster answers when they understand your query enough to do so. Do you really think they want to make money selling airline tickets? Or are they trying to put "ostermiller.org/calc/triangle.html" out of business as well?
And Google have an effective monopoly on search
Nope. First of all such a statement needs to be qualified - for instance, the 1.3+ billion people in China overwhelmingly prefer Baidu. It is clearly quite possible for people to avoid Google entirely, not just for search (which is, of course, even easier).
and are abusing it.
In what way? Because you don't think Google should use its other services to provide a more integrated experience? Without any sort of lock-in, don't pretend that's anything other than punishing success.
You're begging the question. If Google is a monopoly and they're integrating stuff, that's bad. And they must be a monopoly, because they're doing bad monopoly things like integrating stuff. But without being an actual monopoly with actual lock-in, there's no reason that integration is a problem at all - in fact it's quite the opposite, that's what they have to do to remain competitive. Changing search engines away from Google is as simple as typing a different URL or choosing something else from the drop-down, or even *not changing the default*. The idea that a high search marketshare can be anything other than direct user choice is ridiculous - and so what's the problem?
But this represents an existential threat - when viewed that way, it's a no-brainer to give up a market, even a huge market, if the price of admission is too high. Also, Google doesn't have to stop serving them, just stop doing business there.
Also, don't forget that Google pulled out of China, and China has a lot more population and will have the biggest GDP shortly. This is far more concerning than a little espionage.
Hi, I'm a white male. I believe strongly that women and men are capable of exactly the same amount of good and bad, and are equally responsible for their own decisions to do or not do things. I live my life like this - I'm a software engineer and I have an unusually high number of female coworkers, and they're as talented and respected as my male coworkers. We really don't think about gender at work - it's just not relevant.
Unfortunately, this is very much *not* feminism - at least any more. There is a certain kind of person who wants to control others, and modern ultrafeminism is overrun with them and their fans. I abhor the label "SJW" but... well, frankly, it does seem like a pretty apt description of some people. It's really sad for me, because there's probably going to be a big backlash soon - things like "shirtgate" really trouble people who haven't been tied into the echo chamber (they give you a blank look when you explain that people have a problem with it, and it changes to a horrified expression when you explain the scope and intensity).
But the only thin worse than a big backlash would be no backlash.
You know, when I was a kid, people like you kept telling me that I didn't understand stuff and wasn't responsible. That was a long time ago - you know what? Damnit, I *was* right! I was as savvy and responsible then as I am now. The only thing I've learned as an adult is that "is an adult" has a weight of exactly 0. I used to think the people in newspapers saying stuff had some authority, but really they're just "a dude said some stuff".
One of the great lies adults like to tell and believe is that there's some fundamental difference between adulthood and childhood. Here's the dirty little secret: nothing changes when you become an adult other than running out of milestones to point to and say "see? I'm not an adult yet!"
If you think you're wiser simply because you're older - well, you're not very wise at all. Wisdom comes from experience and intelligence - neither of which depend on age. Age is a free, lengthy way to get a limited amount of narrow experience - but reading and education gets you much more at a younger age.
Do you think your average 50 year old can say anything particularly wise? Really? People are basically idiots at every age.
Ah, OK. I wasn't sure which meaning you had in mind, but given the situation I thought "up the hierarchy" made more sense. Though I suppose death threats are the other sort of escalation...
Death wishes are never cool.
But what do you think people should do instead of escalate? I think at this point it's pretty clear that there are fundamental (some might say philosophical) disagreements at play here that haven't been resolved yet - and may be unresolvable (people are talking seriously about forking Debian over this). Escalation seems like exactly the appropriate step. When I'm at work, if I don't agree with a decision I talk about it with my boss - but if we can't reach an agreement and I feel strongly that it's the wrong decision, I take it to his boss, and so on if necessary. I would be remiss if I didn't!
Honestly, many systemd proponents seem annoyed that people aren't accepting their decision without question, when what they propose is a pretty serious departure from a pretty fundamental system design philosophy. I don't know what to make of that.
I honestly don't really care about this whole init debate, from a technical standpoint. I don't see a compelling reason to prefer systemd, and given the fact that it's changing a system that's worked fine (with a few tweaks) for more than 30 years, I'd just as soon stay with the old style.
But there's a few extremely troubling things I see from the systemd side:
- A complete disregard for precedent. Yes, it's good to be open to rethinking how we do things, but the fact is that Unix has worked for a very, very long time. There's many reasons for this, but the "Unix philosophy" is undoubtedly one of them. systemd is by no means "Unixy". Reading a directory of symlinks and executing shell scripts is simple, and minimizes the logic built into init - which a lot of people believe is a good guiding principle for pretty much the entire OS.
- An uncompelling value proposition. I don't much care about boot time (who reboots anymore, anyway?), and with Upstart my boot times were pretty quick anyway. If I'm running a server, I don't even care about boot time at all. What I do care about is simplicity of understanding and management. Systemd has failed to convince me that it does anything I want. Iin the absence of anything particularly valuable I'd just as soon stick with existing, robust, well-understood systems. I don't have my tonsils out for fun either - it's not change aversion to stick with things that worked fine in the absence of a compelling reason to change things.
- Poor architecture. The init system should be as simple as possible. Let it start things like dbus if the system needs it, don't build them in. Discrete components that are loosely-coupled, please - tight coupling is a black mark against virtually any multi-binary software package, but especially in the boot process. Building things into the startup process just reduces the number of things you're able to remove from a system that doesn't need them. DBus is a great example of this.
- Lack of concern for the server use case, and sysadmins in particular. People have raised concerns - many legitimate, some not - about systemd approaches, and the developers and (unusually rabid) community treat those concerns with indifference bordering on contempt. Here's a hint: when a group of competent professional acting in good faith doesn't understand why something is a good idea, it's your fault for having explained it poorly. Especially for an init system - the "average" user never did care about how his system booted! (Which, by the way, is something many systemd folk seem to disagree with - they say users are clamoring for it!) But the sysadmin does care, and has to manage it - best to treat him with respect, not contempt.
- Tying perfectly-good cross platform programs to Linux. systemd is, unabashedly, a virus. Why my window manager or graphics program has to depend on init, I don't know. But as long as it does and that package is systemd, it kills cross-platform compatibility. Compatibility is what got Linux off the ground, and with the exception of systemd it's not too hard to keep it going. Don't throw this away!
- Most importantly, the community is extremely toxic. What is Linux without community? Sure, there's bickering (since when is this bad, by the way?), but at the end of the day you have one of the most powerful and important pieces of software the world has ever seen. But the systemd mess feels like a Microsoft move, and the idea that there's a "Microsoft of Linux" able to move so unilaterally is extremely troubling. People voice concerns about systemd, and if they seem recycled it's because they haven't been well refuted! But the proponents are vicious, and vocal to an extent that makes one suspect astroturfing... which is even more troubling.
And the most troubling aspect of this toxic community are the attacks on opponents. The parent's comment is not the first, nor even the tenth, attack I've seen on a systemd opponent to claim that it's just someone afraid of losing their job and trying to set up some sort of
That's quite a beard for a woman
This is just google voice search, right? Try asking the distance to the moon, then ask "what is that in miles/kilometers" (whichever it didn't give to start)
Not even jumping out of a plane - just flying one! I'm a private pilot and I'm SOL for life insurance unless I get one that specifically doesn't exclude it. Annoying because flying isn't particularly dangerous - about as dangerous as riding a motorcycle, and it's easy to reduce your risk below even that, but there's an actuarial stigma to it.
3 estimated guesses, actually, based on the flus most likely to be seen in North America. The flu is a rapidly-changing and complicated virus - all the more reason to reduce its chances of mutating back into something really dangerous, eh?
... blah blah blah stupid thiomersal conspiracy ...
Oh. You're not careless, you're just an idiot. Carry on - just stay away from, you know, people.
250,000-500,000 people a year die from the flu, more than 50,000 in the US (that's more than both traffic accidents and gun deaths combined). It's not something to fuck around with.
It's sweet that you think the people giving you a hard time about the flu shot care about you. Sorry to burst your bubble, but nobody cares about you. They care about your elderly neighbor or the kid a few seats away on the bus, or the coworker with the pregnant wife. And you can and will give it to them before you even know you have it, so it's not a question of "well *I'm* not the problem" - yes, everybody without a flu shot is potentially the problem, because they can get the flu and infect others before there's any hope of avoiding it. Before there was an effective vaccine that was cheap and easily available, the flu was just something that happened - but now that there's something to do about it, choosing not to do it is a pretty dickish move.
The flu is scary. Lots of people think Ebola is scary - sure, the flu has a lower case-mortality rate, but it's compensated for by how easy it is to spread, so overall even if we pretend this Ebola outbreak is typical, the flu is still like 100x more deadly worldwide, and something like 50,000x more deadly if we just look at the US. The 1918 flu killed 50-100 million people - that's 3-5% of humans who were alive at the time, disproportionately affecting healthy young and middle-aged adults. It killed 10x as many Americans as did World War 1. Sure, sanitation and treatment weren't what they are now, but if you get the flu, you can't do much more than supportive therapy. If that flu happened today, the death toll would undoubtedly be lower than it was, but most people would still know someone who'd been killed that year by the flu. That is, without a vaccine.
You hear horror stories about poor accusations of harassment. And then you hear things like this. That's disgusting and I hope you pressed charges. Nobody (men nor women) should stand for that shit.
It really sucks that men are expected to make the advances in this area. It just opens the door for a lot of misunderstanding, hurt feelings, and serious repercussions. It would be better for everybody if there was an equal chance of a woman asking a man out. But unfortunately, sitting and hoping isn't a viable strategy for men, so it creates a pretty fine line to walk. Obviously continuing in the face of a clear rejection is far, far over the line (and starting with overt sexual contact has left the line beyond the horizon) but there's a lot more grey area than is really comfortable for anybody. Men have been conditioned since childhood to pursue women despite initial rejection, by everything from Disney movies to award-winning sitcoms to classic novels, and women have been conditioned to wait and be pursued by those same influences. Obviously there's a right and wrong way to pursue, and once again your (and countless other) examples are beyond the pale, but I think women tend to underestimate how much power they wield here. It's even a trope, a woman who "can't find any good men" because only the jerks are brave enough (or don't care enough) to risk going over the line.
And - don't forget - people ripped her company a new asshole for daring to fire her, whereas the blowback to the company that fired the guy was negligible. Despite the fact that she was clearly, unambiguously, and disgustingly in the wrong. I'm sorry, but overhearing some private conversation does not give someone the right to chime in - or take a picture to shame publicly. And "sexual" is not "sexist", and she was so caught up in her own narrative that she misinterpreted innocent talk about wanting to "fork the repo" (that the on-stage developer was talking about) as something sexual. A dongle joke is vaguely distasteful, but it's hard to see how it affects anybody at all unless you consider the idea of sexuality to be violence against women. Yes I know some people actually think this, but then there is no conversation to have.
And yes, what the trolls did to Ms. Richards was despicable and completely out of line. Rape and death threats are never appropriate, but (on the internet) rarely threatening. There's no getting around the fact that had a man done this to a woman, there would be few rape threats - maybe some death threats. But the overall amount of, and substance of, the blowback would be far, far greater. Look at what they did to Larry Summers for stating a scientifically uncontroversial fact (men have a higher standard deviation of intelligence, which leads to more men at the highest and lowest ends of the spectrum despite average intelligence being the same). It cost him his job and a presidential appointment. And it's only gotten worse since then!
The lesson was: if you're a man, don't ever offend a woman or your life will be ruined at a distance. And you don't know what might offend a woman, and there is no recourse if you didn't mean to cause offense (or can't understand how something could cause offense) since it's in the eye of the beholder and (explicitly - it's offensive to suggest otherwise) not open for critique. Ms. Richards lost her job as well, but her job was as a "developer evangelist" and none of the (predominantly-male) developers would ever risk speaking to her after that incident, rather compromising her effectiveness.
I'm very much a feminist, but "feminism" is no longer about the simple idea that "women and men are equally capable of both good and bad". Hint: how often do you hear "feminists" say in the same breath that we need equality and more women in a field, because women are better? No, I don't mean "diversity of opinion" (which I completely agree with - we need more women, black people, older and younger people, etc to make sure we make the best decisions), I mean things like "sexism is bad and we should have a woman president, since there would be fewer wars". Even if it were true that women in power act differently than men, which it's not, the proponents obviously don't at all think women are equal.
If you think men are equally good at it, you've never seen teenage girls. Holy shit, the cruelest guys I ever met in high school (and we had a few beat-you-until-you're-bloody-and-leave-you-under-a-bridge class acts) weren't one tenth as cruel as *dozens* of the girls. They organized a campaign against this one girl so vicious and drawn-out that she tried to kill herself. Eventually her parents put her in a different school a half hour away, and this clique was thrilled that they'd "won". Even after she'd left, they had a great old time continuing to undermine her in her absence by spreading the rumor that she'd gotten pregnant and had to a special school. About a month later, they'd picked a new member of that clique to ostracize. I knew 17 year old girls who weren't talking to other 17 year old girls because of some insult that happened when they were 4 years old. The guys would have a fight and get it over with, or if it were more of a bully-type situation they'd set their terms and the target would abide by them and be left alone - but the girls actively tried to find their target to inflict more pain. I eventually ended up unpopular enough that nobody bothered me, and wise enough not to care, that I managed to make it through alright.
I'm just going by my experience here, but it's been corroborated by almost everyone I've ever asked, including other women (who had horror stories that were more private and went far, far beyond anything I'd ever seen).
Hear hear. I went to a school that had this mentality, that there are two sides to every fight by definition so it's easiest to just suspend both parties. My brother was assaulted by some bully and didn't even fight back, and was suspended since "they had a fight" - thankfully, my parents had enough sense to rip the administration a new asshole.
We have a real problem with this mentality in this country - the cable news outlets and others have decided that there are always two equally legitimate viewpoints (or sides to an argument) and present them equally in the interest of fairness. Unfortunately, this is unfair if the arguments are unequally valid, which is often the case.
Hang on a second. One of the smartest things I ever read on the topic had nothing to do with tech - it was a female psychologist who also happened to be a private pilot, and she was talking about getting more females interested in flying. (I don't think somebody could write such a candid article about tech, unfortunately.)
Her basic premise was that females need more encouragement from other women who've "been there" in order to feel comfortable taking that path. Basically, the "odd one out" thing you mention. But males are more apt to do something even in the face of active discouragement. I've certainly observed this in myself and other males, barely (if ever) observed it in females, and it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint as well (intuitively - I don't know if there are any studies that explicitly show this, but if risk-taking is on a bell-curve like most traits, in general the standard deviation in males is greater than in females). In professional flying, there's a lot of discouragement - it's hard, pretty thankless, the pay is crap for a long time despite needing a lot of expensive training just to start, and you're away a lot. Most pro pilots I know are in it for some version of prestige, which we know motivates women less than men.
In other words, to use your language, women are "herding creatures" to a greater extent then men (though I'd probably say "social creatures"). Men are more likely to find a niche in which they can excel, while women are more likely to stick to a "tried and tested" path. Note that I said "more likely", not "will always" - there are plenty of men who go into some boring average field, and plenty of women who don't, but on a societal level the averages and characteristics are important. And I don't think either of these characteristics are necessarily bad, or desirable to change. Both approaches to live have substantial downsides, and it's probably better to have a mix.
As a guy who actually drives an ambulance, please please *please* don't go through a red light. We have a siren that allows us to break traffic laws, and warns other vehicles that they need to do something unusual. In fact, there's a school of thought in emergency vehicle operation that says that you really shouldn't use the lights and siren at all, since some percentage of people will do something stupid in their presence and some percentage of those will get hurt or worse. And those few seconds just aren't that important - minutes, sure, but it's rare that the siren saves minutes. I try to do most of my driving without the siren, and only use it to make someone pull off to the side or break a traffic law (e.g., running a red light) that requires its use - but if traffic is moving, there's really no need (and using it is poor driving).
If some emergency vehicle is right behind you with the sirens blaring and you're at a red light, flip him off and stay put until the light changes. He can and should turn off the siren so as to not induce people to do something stupid. It would have been even better to have not gotten himself stuck in the first place, since he's allowed to go into opposing traffic so as to not require extraordinary measures of the other drivers.
No they won't.
From here:
Getting into orbit isn't about height, it's about speed. The vast majority of the work an orbital rocket does is to get going fast enough - getting the height is pretty easy by comparison.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/