Offtopic, but I feel this needs to be said anyway: take some econ classes and some sociology classes before you start making statements like "Uber is 3 times the size of the traditional taxi industry in San Francisco, meaning the taxi cartel's legislation was having the effect of cutting the market to 1/4 of its actual size." For example, are you familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons? It's a very simple but somewhat unintuitive problem: left to their own devices, competitors will deplete a shared resource until the whole market is at least on the verge of collapse, because each individual is willing to extract a penny's worth of additional value for themselves even if it costs a dollar's worth of value in the market.
If you have an unlimited number of people providing rides, the value of the service will drop through the floor, because there are only so many fares out there and they can just switch to somebody else who'll take them there cheaper. If the rates fall, the number of fares will increase but the money gained per driver-hour of will still go down. If you fix the rates, then the number of fares each driver gets goes down, until your drivers can no longer pay their bills.
You might think that in either case the market will correct before you get there - the number of drivers will decrease, because it's not worth it when you can just get a better-paying job - but in practice a lot of people can't "just get a better-paying job", and to an unemployed person it's still better to be underpaid than to be not paid at all. The only actual break-even point is where it costs the *individual* more money to take fares than not - when the costs in fuel and maintenance and insurance (assuming you are actually required to pay more for insurance on account of taking fares, which absent legislation you would not be) exceed the value of the fare - and when *you* reach that point, so does the entire market.
Hypothetical numbers time: let's say you have 600 potential drivers each day, 5,000 potential fares each day, and mandatory metered rates (i.e. the drivers can't negotiate with people to take the ride for more or less money, so the number of people willing to pay those rates is pretty fixed) that average to $20/fare. Driving at all costs $200/day, so each driver needs 10 fares a day just to break even. Furthermore, suppose each driver can only take a maximum of 40 fares a day; there just aren't enough hours to take more. Costs of living means each driver needs $200/day profit to make a living, so if they take less than 20 fares per day they're in poverty.
* If you allow up to 100 drivers, then those 100 make bank ($600/day after expenses, $60,000 in total value added by taking fares) but the other 900 make nothing and only 4000 of the 5000 people who want rides can get them, and they probably have long wait times for pickup. 500 service providers and 1000 service consumers are left out in he cold. Obviously this is bad for everybody; nobody would argue that we should keep things like this.
* If you allow up to 125 drivers, then those 125 still make bank ($600/day each, $75,000/day total) and all the people who want fares can get them (though wait times still suck), but 475 potential drivers can't take this job. This is a good improvement over 100 drivers and is the minimum logical number of drivers.
* If you allow up to 200 drivers, then every potential fare gets picked up, those 200 drivers make good money taking 25 fares a day ($300/day profit, still only $60,000/day total profits), wait times aren't too bad, and you have 400 could-be drivers who have to keep the lights on some other way.
* If you allow up to 250 drivers, then you have 20 fares a day and are making $200 profit/day, for total profit of $50,000. Your drivers are right on the edge of making a living, and the taxi industry is actually contributing less to the economy than they would be with only 200, *or* with only 100 drivers. It's 50 fewer people looking for other employment, but
Maybe he's turned over a new leaf, but I'm skeptical. It's hard to take a claim of being for quality over politics when you make explicitly political nominations while accusing "the other side"* of being too politically motivated.
* Is there, in fact, anything like a reasonably centrally-organized non-puppies slate out there that people are being told to vote for?
Landing Dragon should be *WAY* easier than landing a Falcon 9 first stage. You're coming in from higher and faster, but you have a heat shield, parachutes, redundant engines designed to operate at the scale of a landing craft (rather than a first-stage booster), far more structural integrity than a booster with depressurized tanks, no bending moment to speak of, engines places around your center of mass rather than at a single point below it, throttle capability sufficient to hover at least in Earth gravity (when nearly empty, a Falcon 9 cannot throttle even a single engine down to 1:1 TWR, so it can't hover), and a better RCS (thruster) system (although admittedly no grid fins).
Landing propulsively on Mars should also be much easier than landing propulsively on Earth, assuming you've got the fuel; less aerobraking (boosters can't make much use of that, although capsules can and do on Earth), but also very little wind (less buffeting, less shear) and a stable (though probably not smooth) landing zone less dynamic than a barge and bigger than a landing pad (much less a barge). Less gravity is almost certainly an advantage here too; even if it means Dragon can't hover (which I'm not sure it does), it also means Dragon doesn't need to use nearly as much fuel fighting gravity as it slows for hover or landing.
While I admire the creativity of your insults, you might have been better off by spending more time thinking about the problem than about how to insult people. You have no idea how knowledgeable your insultees are on the relevant subjects.
Also, saying "none of the precursors to this mission have been demonstrated, let alone successfully" is some serious goalpost-moving. Considering SpaceX alone, they have demonstrated Dragon 2's maximum thrust (and parachutes) and also its fine control (including hover). They haven't actually landed one propulsively yet, but I see little reason to expect that they can't do it. Falcon Heavy not launching yet is a valid point, but Falcon 9 has flown many times (as many times as single-core Delta IV rockets, at least) and its only failure was due to an extremely rare failure in a third-party component (since addressed). SpaceX has demonstrated propulsive landings knowledge, has demonstrated working long-duration space capsules, has demonstrated successful recovery of orbital capsules, and has demonstrated successful launchers. Those are all precursors to this mission, but I notice you didn't mention them...
As for going beyond LEO, while Dragon hasn't done that (and I'm not sure if Falcon 9 second stage has or not, though I expect it has), NASA and many private satellite manufacturers have; it's not exactly a problem we don't know how to address. Of course, until Curiosity, nobody had even demonstrated a multi-stage landing ending with a rocket-propelled skycrane (on Mars or otherwise), but NASA managed it anyhow.
Here, let me link you to something that a leader of the Sad Puppies said last year, posted on his own blog: http://monsterhunternation.com...
Crtl+F "Satan", and bear in mind that Vox Day is A) the leader of the Rabid Puppies, who don't bother with the pretense of their nominations being about quality B) the kind of bigot who makes comments to the effect of "Europe would be better off if it were run by neo-Nazis", so the comparison to Satan (at least politically) is way less hyperbole than you might expect.
That is not a claim compatible with "The Sad Puppies have always been about recommending the SF works that you enjoyed the most." Yes, the Sad Puppies leader liked Vox Day's story, but he didn't nominate the story "because there wasn't a better story available from somebody at least approximately as disliked by social progressives", he nominated the story because it was it was eligible and as close to Satan as he could come.
I'd be a lot more sympathetic toward the Sad Puppies (as opposed to the Rabid Puppies) if their leadership didn't have a history that includes comments like the following:
Not to mention that one of my stated goals was to demonstrate that SJWs would have a massive freak out if somebody with the wrong politics got on. So on the [Sad Puppies] slate it went. I nominated [Rabid Puppies leader] Vox Day because Satan didn’t have any eligible works that period.
Kind of puts a massive dent in the argument that the Sad Puppies are all about quality. It's not even "given two works of otherwise equal quality, we nominate the more rightist one." That would be understandable, in a "we encourage diversity, and most nominees are leftist" sort of way (ignoring the question of whether that claim is correct; the belief is understandable and the action would logically follow from it). "We set out to make political statements that make people mad" is just trolling, though, or perhaps more accurately flamebaiting.
Note that I don't consider this sort of behavior acceptable by any side of an argument, in case anybody planned to respond by pointing out some of the leftists who explicitly set out to anger rightists (or just to anger those who are insufficiently well tucked into their niche of leftism). It's immature and counterproductive, regardless of who is doing it or what context it's being done in. It deeply damages the credibility of any claims the speaker makes of being motivated by an apolitical goal (such as story quality)..
Speaking personally, I read a lot of authors whose political views I disagree with. Except for the ones who get Really Preachy about it, I'm generally fine with this. Card is an obvious example (in fact, he's better than many about being un-preachy, at least in most of his work), although I'll admit to now preferring to get his books second-hand. I also read a lot of stuff that, whatever the authors' views are or were, would be considered socially unacceptable today (some of what Heinlein wrote early on was very socially progressive for the time: things like including a named black character who wasn't immediately killed off, even if the way people interacted with him or her would be viewed as racist and demeaning today).
Or you could think about it for a whole second and realize that maybe he meant "what was, three years ago, thought to be ten years out - seven years from now - is instead happening now". I don't know if that's actually what was meant, but it's a plausible interpretation of the quote and suggests a 10-year estimate instead of a 7-year one, which seems more plausible to begin with.
On the other hand, three years ago, "seven years ahead" was 2020, so maybe they're saying that crypto is now where they thought it'd be in 2020. So either interpretation is plausible.
Actually, I bet a sufficiently-well-trained AI could win at CAH (for values of "win" equal to "get the most black cards"; in practice everybody wins in a good game of CAH). Even without a camera watching player expressions and so on, an AI can learn combos that work well (and who they work well for), and see all kinds of relations between cards in terms of how different players react to them. It would take a lot of training - quite possibly an infeasible amount - to be good enough to beat *arbitrary groups*, but a specific group? Yeah, it could do it.
In what way are AppArmor or SELinux in any way like launchd or systemd? Also, while you may be super 1337 and sandbox all your applications using chroot jails and who-knows-what-else, AA and SEL provide a hell of a lot more security than what people normally do, which is just run programs as whatever user you happen to be logged in as.
To be fair, that wasn't a comment made about a *specific* product or competitor, even if in practice there was only one meaningful competitor. But yes people have become more concerned with not just casually writing off large groups of people as lesser than everybody else. I'm very OK with this...
Speaking as somebody who frequently travels (both on business trips and pleasure ones) T-Mobile's free international roaming is a huge deal for me. Until another carrier offers that, or offers sufficiently-cheaper service to make up for the difference of adding that, I will most likely stick to TMo. Being able to get off the plane anywhere in the world and immediately have my phone work is just magical, as is being able to text my girlfriend without even needing to buy a new SIM and tell her the new number.
The unlimited music streaming is also very nice. I stream about 6GB of music per month over cellular data, and it doesn't count against my high-speed data / tethering limit.
Right, because choosing what to pay people is determined by rolling dice, right? I appreciate your kindness but I question your capacity for reason.
To within trivial margins, it is entirely possible for two intelligently chosen values to be equal, even if one of them has a hard cap of "shall never be less than the other".
In fact, if you're paying any attention at all, you'll notice that's pretty much exactly what Microsoft is talking about here: they've gotten the gender pay gap to a nearly-trivial difference.
Well, yeah, if you don't correct for education then of course people at the age of "right out of college" will earn more; more women get degrees! This is an unsurprising result of looking at the earning potential of those with and without a degree, and then looking at the gender ratio of college graduates. True, some of the high-paying skilled fields are male-dominated (software being an obvious example), but those don't make up for the relative dearth of men with a tertiary degree in general.
The fact that the trend reverses so sharply at 30 is interesting. One possibility is just that women in their 30s are far more likely to have kids and thus only work part-time jobs. Normally I'd say any study which failed to account for that was trash, but this study already appears to have failed to account for education, so yeah, it's trash. If part-time-working moms in their 30ss still make less than part-time-working dads in their 30s (especially at similar education levels), then maybe there's a problem. If childless 30-something women still make much less than childless 30-something men, then maybe there's a problem.
I say "maybe" in both cases because there's a ton of stuff to take into consideration. Education, part-time vs. full-time, and the field in which you work are all easy examples (easy to identify, not always to fix) but there are many others that may be relevant. Microsoft's work here is a good example of doing it right: by comparing title (which covers area of work, plus promotions) and level (seniority and past performance) with like title and level, they are correcting for many of the obvious problems.
Of course, as a whole, women at MS still make way less than men, but that's because there are ~4x as many man at Microsoft as there are women. That's an example of how easy it is to skew statistics, though, and nothing more. On an individual level, for the same kind of work, women appear to earn very nearly the same as men. That's an impressive achievement on Microsoft's part, especially since the tech industry is undeniably male-heavy and there's no reason to think that all the competing gender biases in such an uneven workforce would *exactly* cancel out and avoid preferential treatment for one gender.
This statistics used here are for within Microsoft, not for either the industry or the workforce as a whole. I'm not aware of any claims that women or minorities at Microsoft were making 77 cents per dollar their white male colleagues get.
Even if what you claim - that the 77 cent thing is a myth and a lie - is true, your ideological bias is showing really, really strongly here. If you want to be taken seriously, try to avoid equating two completely unequal things (Microsoft's compensation and the workforce as a whole).
From what I've read, the side booster stages of Falcon Heavy will always be able to make ground landings; they don't go nearly as far or fast as the central stage. I'm sure it still costs some payload to go for the ground landing with the side boosters, but not nearly so much. The central stage, though... that burns for a considerable while after the side boosters detach (it spends much of the flight at low throttle, plus there's the whole propellant crossfeed thing, assuming they ever get that working), and it doesn't ramp back up to full thrust until the rocket is already pretty far and moving pretty fast. By the time it separates, it's going to be way too far to get back to the launch site.
If you're counting from 1995, when Cygwin was first released, it took Microsoft only 4 years to get native Unix shells on Windows (and that's counting from when Microsoft made them available itself, not from when a third party offered them on top of the NT kernel's POSIX subsystem). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For many years, Windows (NT family only) had a POSIX-compatible subsystem built into it. Like the Win32 subsystem, this "Subsystem for Unix Applications" (SUA) took POSIX system calls and translated them into NT native syscalls (the NT kernel does not recognize either Win32 or POSIX syscalls, but rather implements its own calls that are a superset of both in functionality; Win32's CreateProcess cannot properly implement POSIX's fork, but NtCreateProcess supports both). SUA also provided a Unix-like filesystem (with case sensitivity, Unix file permissions including stuff like setuid/setgid, working/proc and/dev, and so on).
Microsoft provided a bare-bones set of tools and libraries for SUA, called Interix. As of Windows 7 (Interix 6.7), this included two Unix shells, C shell and Korn shell, which both suck compared to Bash but were sufficient to bootstrap the system. Interix also included a working GCC build toolchain. From this minimal start, you could install additional packages (NetBSD, Debian, and I believe Gentoo all supported building and managing their packages for Interix, plus there was an Interix-specific package repository that Microsoft funded). There were thousands of such packages available, from Bash to OpenSSH (client and server) to Apache httpd to Git to... you get the idea. X11 client libraries, plus a Win32 X11 server (typically Xming), meant you could even run graphical software.
Microsoft deprecated SUA and stopped all development on Interix with Win8.0; in Win8.1 and Win10 (until now?) the subsystem itself is unavailable. I'm really curious to see if they built this new "Subsystem for Linux" on top of the old POSIX subsystem, or did something else (and if the latter... what?)
That's an interesting difference from the old Subsystem for Unix Applications (SUA, formerly known as Service For Unix or SFU). SUA/SFU were source compatible with many (though by no means all) user-mode Linux programs, but the actual binaries had to be compiled as PE format (targeting the POSIX subsystem, though, not the Win32 subsystem the way normal Windows programs and Cygwin binaries do). They didn't have.EXE extensions (unless you wanted them to) and followed Unix-like loading behavior, but they were still PE binaries, not ELF.
Win10 *DOES* have an upgraded terminal emulator. It's still called conhost.exe ("Console Host"), but it is wayyyyyy better than the legacy one. Horizontal resize (with text reflow), line selection instead of block selection, copy-and-paste that doesn't suck, better keyboard shortcuts, and so on. It's a huge improvement. It doesn't support a tabbed interface (yet... they're still adding stuff to Win10 though) but it's a night-and-day difference nonetheless, and a decent alternative to the standard Linux console programs.
C# programmers, more obviously. Powershell is basically the runtime for.NETscript, which happens to also be usable as an interactive shell.
I actually quite like using it interactively, provided I also get Win10's upgraded console host (nothing can justify the shit-pile that is the legacy console host). The commands *can* be verbose, but tab completion handles that pretty well. You can also shorten parameters to the minimum length necessary to avoid ambiguity, which often amounts to single-letters a la *nix commands. The ability to invoke arbitrary.NET classes and functions can make what would otherwise be a moderate-length script a single line that can by typed interactively, too.
With that said, I also like using Bash on Windows. I've been doing so since long before this "Windows Subsystem for Linux" announcement, but that's another post!
Conventional PC hardware? Citation *very badly* needed. If weighted by the popularity of the hardware in question - which is the only intellectually honest way to measure such things - I'm just going to assume you're full of bullshit.
Nobody cares what the line count of your hardware compatibility list is. What people actually want to know is whether *all* their hardware will work, *correctly* and with more than basic functionality, under each OS. For PC hardware, that's far more likely to be true under Windows than Linux.
Even on OSes that still support the NT POSIX subsystem (NT-based pre-Win8.1 / pre-Server2012R2), it would take a *lot* of work to get Ubuntu binaries running unmodified. One attempt (since discontinued): http://cowlark.com/lbw/
Part of the problem is that the POSIX subsystem is kind of minimal. It doesn't implement a lot of the stuff the Linux has done on top of POSIX, like new system calls, IOCTLs, etc. Another part is that a fair amount of userspace translation is needed to make things like Windows UIDs comprehensible to Linux programs, which tend to assume things like "root is uid 0" (not true on Windows).
With that said, I'd really like to see the POSIX subsystem come back. When it worked, it was faster and better-integrated than Cygwin, and also supported stuff that Cygwin couldn't do (like setuid). It wasn't binary-compatible with Linux binaries (without something like LBW), but it was source-compatible with many of them (if they didn't assume Linux-specific extensions were present) and had a working build toolchain. I was running OpenSSH server natively on Windows for years before this project started. I was using bash as my default shell, even for running Win32 programs. When I needed to run a *nix program I'd pull a package, or build from source if the package didn't exist, rather than switching OSes or even using a VM.
Which is completely unconscionable and ought to get them taken to court, but of course their EULA says you waive your right to sue them. Which itself ought to be illegal, or at least unenforceable, but it's probably been upheld in the USA at least.
Less-corrupt countries, where it's slightly harder for corporations to simply buy a politician's favor, might have better laws here. In my case, I just stopped giving Valve any money.
... and they tried to argue "not doing business in Australia" anyway? Jeez, whatever Valve is paying their lawyers, it's clearly way too much (or not enough, if they couldn't be bothered to hire lawyers that can find their ass with both hands and a mirror)...
Well, aside from the fact that a lot of the game content - in effect, multiple entire classes, and occasionally even strict upgrades - is only available if you've got the various drops/unlocks. Even if you bought the game, back when it cost money, you may not (in a very real sense, separate from the DRM thing) own the (whole) game if you haven't been playing enough to have the latest gear.
I don't give Valve money anymore. I don't agree with their business practices, and I don't consider convenience an excuse for abuse of their position.
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Offtopic, but I feel this needs to be said anyway: take some econ classes and some sociology classes before you start making statements like "Uber is 3 times the size of the traditional taxi industry in San Francisco, meaning the taxi cartel's legislation was having the effect of cutting the market to 1/4 of its actual size." For example, are you familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons? It's a very simple but somewhat unintuitive problem: left to their own devices, competitors will deplete a shared resource until the whole market is at least on the verge of collapse, because each individual is willing to extract a penny's worth of additional value for themselves even if it costs a dollar's worth of value in the market.
If you have an unlimited number of people providing rides, the value of the service will drop through the floor, because there are only so many fares out there and they can just switch to somebody else who'll take them there cheaper. If the rates fall, the number of fares will increase but the money gained per driver-hour of will still go down. If you fix the rates, then the number of fares each driver gets goes down, until your drivers can no longer pay their bills.
You might think that in either case the market will correct before you get there - the number of drivers will decrease, because it's not worth it when you can just get a better-paying job - but in practice a lot of people can't "just get a better-paying job", and to an unemployed person it's still better to be underpaid than to be not paid at all. The only actual break-even point is where it costs the *individual* more money to take fares than not - when the costs in fuel and maintenance and insurance (assuming you are actually required to pay more for insurance on account of taking fares, which absent legislation you would not be) exceed the value of the fare - and when *you* reach that point, so does the entire market.
Hypothetical numbers time: let's say you have 600 potential drivers each day, 5,000 potential fares each day, and mandatory metered rates (i.e. the drivers can't negotiate with people to take the ride for more or less money, so the number of people willing to pay those rates is pretty fixed) that average to $20/fare. Driving at all costs $200/day, so each driver needs 10 fares a day just to break even. Furthermore, suppose each driver can only take a maximum of 40 fares a day; there just aren't enough hours to take more. Costs of living means each driver needs $200/day profit to make a living, so if they take less than 20 fares per day they're in poverty.
* If you allow up to 100 drivers, then those 100 make bank ($600/day after expenses, $60,000 in total value added by taking fares) but the other 900 make nothing and only 4000 of the 5000 people who want rides can get them, and they probably have long wait times for pickup. 500 service providers and 1000 service consumers are left out in he cold. Obviously this is bad for everybody; nobody would argue that we should keep things like this.
* If you allow up to 125 drivers, then those 125 still make bank ($600/day each, $75,000/day total) and all the people who want fares can get them (though wait times still suck), but 475 potential drivers can't take this job. This is a good improvement over 100 drivers and is the minimum logical number of drivers.
* If you allow up to 200 drivers, then every potential fare gets picked up, those 200 drivers make good money taking 25 fares a day ($300/day profit, still only $60,000/day total profits), wait times aren't too bad, and you have 400 could-be drivers who have to keep the lights on some other way.
* If you allow up to 250 drivers, then you have 20 fares a day and are making $200 profit/day, for total profit of $50,000. Your drivers are right on the edge of making a living, and the taxi industry is actually contributing less to the economy than they would be with only 200, *or* with only 100 drivers. It's 50 fewer people looking for other employment, but
Maybe he's turned over a new leaf, but I'm skeptical. It's hard to take a claim of being for quality over politics when you make explicitly political nominations while accusing "the other side"* of being too politically motivated.
* Is there, in fact, anything like a reasonably centrally-organized non-puppies slate out there that people are being told to vote for?
Landing Dragon should be *WAY* easier than landing a Falcon 9 first stage. You're coming in from higher and faster, but you have a heat shield, parachutes, redundant engines designed to operate at the scale of a landing craft (rather than a first-stage booster), far more structural integrity than a booster with depressurized tanks, no bending moment to speak of, engines places around your center of mass rather than at a single point below it, throttle capability sufficient to hover at least in Earth gravity (when nearly empty, a Falcon 9 cannot throttle even a single engine down to 1:1 TWR, so it can't hover), and a better RCS (thruster) system (although admittedly no grid fins).
Landing propulsively on Mars should also be much easier than landing propulsively on Earth, assuming you've got the fuel; less aerobraking (boosters can't make much use of that, although capsules can and do on Earth), but also very little wind (less buffeting, less shear) and a stable (though probably not smooth) landing zone less dynamic than a barge and bigger than a landing pad (much less a barge). Less gravity is almost certainly an advantage here too; even if it means Dragon can't hover (which I'm not sure it does), it also means Dragon doesn't need to use nearly as much fuel fighting gravity as it slows for hover or landing.
While I admire the creativity of your insults, you might have been better off by spending more time thinking about the problem than about how to insult people. You have no idea how knowledgeable your insultees are on the relevant subjects.
Also, saying "none of the precursors to this mission have been demonstrated, let alone successfully" is some serious goalpost-moving. Considering SpaceX alone, they have demonstrated Dragon 2's maximum thrust (and parachutes) and also its fine control (including hover). They haven't actually landed one propulsively yet, but I see little reason to expect that they can't do it. Falcon Heavy not launching yet is a valid point, but Falcon 9 has flown many times (as many times as single-core Delta IV rockets, at least) and its only failure was due to an extremely rare failure in a third-party component (since addressed). SpaceX has demonstrated propulsive landings knowledge, has demonstrated working long-duration space capsules, has demonstrated successful recovery of orbital capsules, and has demonstrated successful launchers. Those are all precursors to this mission, but I notice you didn't mention them...
As for going beyond LEO, while Dragon hasn't done that (and I'm not sure if Falcon 9 second stage has or not, though I expect it has), NASA and many private satellite manufacturers have; it's not exactly a problem we don't know how to address. Of course, until Curiosity, nobody had even demonstrated a multi-stage landing ending with a rocket-propelled skycrane (on Mars or otherwise), but NASA managed it anyhow.
Here, let me link you to something that a leader of the Sad Puppies said last year, posted on his own blog: http://monsterhunternation.com...
Crtl+F "Satan", and bear in mind that Vox Day is
A) the leader of the Rabid Puppies, who don't bother with the pretense of their nominations being about quality
B) the kind of bigot who makes comments to the effect of "Europe would be better off if it were run by neo-Nazis", so the comparison to Satan (at least politically) is way less hyperbole than you might expect.
I too once (naively) believed that the Sad Puppies were honest about that goal.
Unfortunately (for everybody), their claim would be a lot more credible if one of the leaders of the Sad Puppies hadn't not only put a book by Vox Day on the Sad Puppies slate, but then gone on record saying I nominated Vox Day because Satan didn’t have any eligible works that period.
That is not a claim compatible with "The Sad Puppies have always been about recommending the SF works that you enjoyed the most." Yes, the Sad Puppies leader liked Vox Day's story, but he didn't nominate the story "because there wasn't a better story available from somebody at least approximately as disliked by social progressives", he nominated the story because it was it was eligible and as close to Satan as he could come.
I'd be a lot more sympathetic toward the Sad Puppies (as opposed to the Rabid Puppies) if their leadership didn't have a history that includes comments like the following:
Kind of puts a massive dent in the argument that the Sad Puppies are all about quality. It's not even "given two works of otherwise equal quality, we nominate the more rightist one." That would be understandable, in a "we encourage diversity, and most nominees are leftist" sort of way (ignoring the question of whether that claim is correct; the belief is understandable and the action would logically follow from it). "We set out to make political statements that make people mad" is just trolling, though, or perhaps more accurately flamebaiting.
Note that I don't consider this sort of behavior acceptable by any side of an argument, in case anybody planned to respond by pointing out some of the leftists who explicitly set out to anger rightists (or just to anger those who are insufficiently well tucked into their niche of leftism). It's immature and counterproductive, regardless of who is doing it or what context it's being done in. It deeply damages the credibility of any claims the speaker makes of being motivated by an apolitical goal (such as story quality)..
Speaking personally, I read a lot of authors whose political views I disagree with. Except for the ones who get Really Preachy about it, I'm generally fine with this. Card is an obvious example (in fact, he's better than many about being un-preachy, at least in most of his work), although I'll admit to now preferring to get his books second-hand. I also read a lot of stuff that, whatever the authors' views are or were, would be considered socially unacceptable today (some of what Heinlein wrote early on was very socially progressive for the time: things like including a named black character who wasn't immediately killed off, even if the way people interacted with him or her would be viewed as racist and demeaning today).
Or you could think about it for a whole second and realize that maybe he meant "what was, three years ago, thought to be ten years out - seven years from now - is instead happening now". I don't know if that's actually what was meant, but it's a plausible interpretation of the quote and suggests a 10-year estimate instead of a 7-year one, which seems more plausible to begin with.
On the other hand, three years ago, "seven years ahead" was 2020, so maybe they're saying that crypto is now where they thought it'd be in 2020. So either interpretation is plausible.
Actually, I bet a sufficiently-well-trained AI could win at CAH (for values of "win" equal to "get the most black cards"; in practice everybody wins in a good game of CAH). Even without a camera watching player expressions and so on, an AI can learn combos that work well (and who they work well for), and see all kinds of relations between cards in terms of how different players react to them. It would take a lot of training - quite possibly an infeasible amount - to be good enough to beat *arbitrary groups*, but a specific group? Yeah, it could do it.
In what way are AppArmor or SELinux in any way like launchd or systemd? Also, while you may be super 1337 and sandbox all your applications using chroot jails and who-knows-what-else, AA and SEL provide a hell of a lot more security than what people normally do, which is just run programs as whatever user you happen to be logged in as.
To be fair, that wasn't a comment made about a *specific* product or competitor, even if in practice there was only one meaningful competitor. But yes people have become more concerned with not just casually writing off large groups of people as lesser than everybody else. I'm very OK with this...
Speaking as somebody who frequently travels (both on business trips and pleasure ones) T-Mobile's free international roaming is a huge deal for me. Until another carrier offers that, or offers sufficiently-cheaper service to make up for the difference of adding that, I will most likely stick to TMo. Being able to get off the plane anywhere in the world and immediately have my phone work is just magical, as is being able to text my girlfriend without even needing to buy a new SIM and tell her the new number.
The unlimited music streaming is also very nice. I stream about 6GB of music per month over cellular data, and it doesn't count against my high-speed data / tethering limit.
Right, because choosing what to pay people is determined by rolling dice, right? I appreciate your kindness but I question your capacity for reason.
To within trivial margins, it is entirely possible for two intelligently chosen values to be equal, even if one of them has a hard cap of "shall never be less than the other".
In fact, if you're paying any attention at all, you'll notice that's pretty much exactly what Microsoft is talking about here: they've gotten the gender pay gap to a nearly-trivial difference.
Yes, because "not less than" is exactly the same thing as "strictly greater than", right?
Did you fail math in elementary school or something?
Well, yeah, if you don't correct for education then of course people at the age of "right out of college" will earn more; more women get degrees! This is an unsurprising result of looking at the earning potential of those with and without a degree, and then looking at the gender ratio of college graduates. True, some of the high-paying skilled fields are male-dominated (software being an obvious example), but those don't make up for the relative dearth of men with a tertiary degree in general.
The fact that the trend reverses so sharply at 30 is interesting. One possibility is just that women in their 30s are far more likely to have kids and thus only work part-time jobs. Normally I'd say any study which failed to account for that was trash, but this study already appears to have failed to account for education, so yeah, it's trash. If part-time-working moms in their 30ss still make less than part-time-working dads in their 30s (especially at similar education levels), then maybe there's a problem. If childless 30-something women still make much less than childless 30-something men, then maybe there's a problem.
I say "maybe" in both cases because there's a ton of stuff to take into consideration. Education, part-time vs. full-time, and the field in which you work are all easy examples (easy to identify, not always to fix) but there are many others that may be relevant. Microsoft's work here is a good example of doing it right: by comparing title (which covers area of work, plus promotions) and level (seniority and past performance) with like title and level, they are correcting for many of the obvious problems.
Of course, as a whole, women at MS still make way less than men, but that's because there are ~4x as many man at Microsoft as there are women. That's an example of how easy it is to skew statistics, though, and nothing more. On an individual level, for the same kind of work, women appear to earn very nearly the same as men. That's an impressive achievement on Microsoft's part, especially since the tech industry is undeniably male-heavy and there's no reason to think that all the competing gender biases in such an uneven workforce would *exactly* cancel out and avoid preferential treatment for one gender.
This statistics used here are for within Microsoft, not for either the industry or the workforce as a whole. I'm not aware of any claims that women or minorities at Microsoft were making 77 cents per dollar their white male colleagues get.
Even if what you claim - that the 77 cent thing is a myth and a lie - is true, your ideological bias is showing really, really strongly here. If you want to be taken seriously, try to avoid equating two completely unequal things (Microsoft's compensation and the workforce as a whole).
From what I've read, the side booster stages of Falcon Heavy will always be able to make ground landings; they don't go nearly as far or fast as the central stage. I'm sure it still costs some payload to go for the ground landing with the side boosters, but not nearly so much. The central stage, though... that burns for a considerable while after the side boosters detach (it spends much of the flight at low throttle, plus there's the whole propellant crossfeed thing, assuming they ever get that working), and it doesn't ramp back up to full thrust until the rocket is already pretty far and moving pretty fast. By the time it separates, it's going to be way too far to get back to the launch site.
If you're counting from 1995, when Cygwin was first released, it took Microsoft only 4 years to get native Unix shells on Windows (and that's counting from when Microsoft made them available itself, not from when a third party offered them on top of the NT kernel's POSIX subsystem). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For many years, Windows (NT family only) had a POSIX-compatible subsystem built into it. Like the Win32 subsystem, this "Subsystem for Unix Applications" (SUA) took POSIX system calls and translated them into NT native syscalls (the NT kernel does not recognize either Win32 or POSIX syscalls, but rather implements its own calls that are a superset of both in functionality; Win32's CreateProcess cannot properly implement POSIX's fork, but NtCreateProcess supports both). SUA also provided a Unix-like filesystem (with case sensitivity, Unix file permissions including stuff like setuid/setgid, working /proc and /dev, and so on).
Microsoft provided a bare-bones set of tools and libraries for SUA, called Interix. As of Windows 7 (Interix 6.7), this included two Unix shells, C shell and Korn shell, which both suck compared to Bash but were sufficient to bootstrap the system. Interix also included a working GCC build toolchain. From this minimal start, you could install additional packages (NetBSD, Debian, and I believe Gentoo all supported building and managing their packages for Interix, plus there was an Interix-specific package repository that Microsoft funded). There were thousands of such packages available, from Bash to OpenSSH (client and server) to Apache httpd to Git to... you get the idea. X11 client libraries, plus a Win32 X11 server (typically Xming), meant you could even run graphical software.
Microsoft deprecated SUA and stopped all development on Interix with Win8.0; in Win8.1 and Win10 (until now?) the subsystem itself is unavailable. I'm really curious to see if they built this new "Subsystem for Linux" on top of the old POSIX subsystem, or did something else (and if the latter... what?)
That's an interesting difference from the old Subsystem for Unix Applications (SUA, formerly known as Service For Unix or SFU). SUA/SFU were source compatible with many (though by no means all) user-mode Linux programs, but the actual binaries had to be compiled as PE format (targeting the POSIX subsystem, though, not the Win32 subsystem the way normal Windows programs and Cygwin binaries do). They didn't have .EXE extensions (unless you wanted them to) and followed Unix-like loading behavior, but they were still PE binaries, not ELF.
Win10 *DOES* have an upgraded terminal emulator. It's still called conhost.exe ("Console Host"), but it is wayyyyyy better than the legacy one. Horizontal resize (with text reflow), line selection instead of block selection, copy-and-paste that doesn't suck, better keyboard shortcuts, and so on. It's a huge improvement. It doesn't support a tabbed interface (yet... they're still adding stuff to Win10 though) but it's a night-and-day difference nonetheless, and a decent alternative to the standard Linux console programs.
C# programmers, more obviously. Powershell is basically the runtime for .NETscript, which happens to also be usable as an interactive shell.
I actually quite like using it interactively, provided I also get Win10's upgraded console host (nothing can justify the shit-pile that is the legacy console host). The commands *can* be verbose, but tab completion handles that pretty well. You can also shorten parameters to the minimum length necessary to avoid ambiguity, which often amounts to single-letters a la *nix commands. The ability to invoke arbitrary .NET classes and functions can make what would otherwise be a moderate-length script a single line that can by typed interactively, too.
With that said, I also like using Bash on Windows. I've been doing so since long before this "Windows Subsystem for Linux" announcement, but that's another post!
Conventional PC hardware? Citation *very badly* needed. If weighted by the popularity of the hardware in question - which is the only intellectually honest way to measure such things - I'm just going to assume you're full of bullshit.
Nobody cares what the line count of your hardware compatibility list is. What people actually want to know is whether *all* their hardware will work, *correctly* and with more than basic functionality, under each OS. For PC hardware, that's far more likely to be true under Windows than Linux.
Even on OSes that still support the NT POSIX subsystem (NT-based pre-Win8.1 / pre-Server2012R2), it would take a *lot* of work to get Ubuntu binaries running unmodified. One attempt (since discontinued): http://cowlark.com/lbw/
Part of the problem is that the POSIX subsystem is kind of minimal. It doesn't implement a lot of the stuff the Linux has done on top of POSIX, like new system calls, IOCTLs, etc. Another part is that a fair amount of userspace translation is needed to make things like Windows UIDs comprehensible to Linux programs, which tend to assume things like "root is uid 0" (not true on Windows).
With that said, I'd really like to see the POSIX subsystem come back. When it worked, it was faster and better-integrated than Cygwin, and also supported stuff that Cygwin couldn't do (like setuid). It wasn't binary-compatible with Linux binaries (without something like LBW), but it was source-compatible with many of them (if they didn't assume Linux-specific extensions were present) and had a working build toolchain. I was running OpenSSH server natively on Windows for years before this project started. I was using bash as my default shell, even for running Win32 programs. When I needed to run a *nix program I'd pull a package, or build from source if the package didn't exist, rather than switching OSes or even using a VM.
Which is completely unconscionable and ought to get them taken to court, but of course their EULA says you waive your right to sue them. Which itself ought to be illegal, or at least unenforceable, but it's probably been upheld in the USA at least.
Less-corrupt countries, where it's slightly harder for corporations to simply buy a politician's favor, might have better laws here. In my case, I just stopped giving Valve any money.
... and they tried to argue "not doing business in Australia" anyway? Jeez, whatever Valve is paying their lawyers, it's clearly way too much (or not enough, if they couldn't be bothered to hire lawyers that can find their ass with both hands and a mirror)...
Well, aside from the fact that a lot of the game content - in effect, multiple entire classes, and occasionally even strict upgrades - is only available if you've got the various drops/unlocks. Even if you bought the game, back when it cost money, you may not (in a very real sense, separate from the DRM thing) own the (whole) game if you haven't been playing enough to have the latest gear.
I don't give Valve money anymore. I don't agree with their business practices, and I don't consider convenience an excuse for abuse of their position.