BorgHunter

about:robots is still around, too. That one seems unchanged from when it was first introduced, including using the older style of Firefox error page.

This is the exact kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would still call it a road, though, if it can support limited vehicular traffic. "Pedestrian road", maybe. It's a good point, though, that you can support the use cases I mentioned without resorting to the more typical "road-for-cars, sidewalk-for-people" paradigm.

> Light rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely.

While I'm a firm believer that private cars (at least at a scale seen in the U.S.) and dense cities are fundamentally incompatible, I'm not quite onboard with getting rid of roads altogether. What about bicycles? Emergency vehicles? Construction equipment? Furniture deliveries? Deliveries of merchandise to stores? None of these things are going to be able to get around without a road network of some description, albeit hopefully one significantly reduced in scope from a typical American city.

My girlfriend does a similar thing with Siri. As a result, a lot of the reminders she creates on her iPhone end in "thank you". She's well aware it's a program and not a human being; I think, in her case, something about speaking a request aloud just automatically engages the politeness filters.

Even if the noise problem has been fixed, supersonic travel has another huge problem: Fuel consumption. Concorde positively guzzled fuel compared to the jets of its day, and this (among other things) made it uneconomical to operate. The authors of this article never even touched this topic. Has it improved considerably?

A couple weeks ago I got a "please come back"-type email from Duolingo with an identical image, but a more mundane message. Subject of the email is "We miss you!"

https://imgur.com/FOJubnI

Nokia was doomed before Elop took over. Kallasvuo was CEO when Apple released the first iPhone, and Kallasvuo was the one who decided that Nokia's existing offerings were good enough to compete, just keep minorly refining things every generation. By the time Elop came in, the ship was already sinking (or, if you prefer, the platform was already burning). Elop's decisions did not turn that around, but realistically, could he have?

I think that figure likely includes all contributions, not just questions. I took this same class in Summer 2015, and there are 1036 posts[0] and 11074 contributions[1] on the online forum for that class. The number of students is similar (370 in my class, 302 last semester).

[0] posts are questions and notes

[1] contributions are posts, responses, edits, followups, and comments to followups (i.e., everything)

Another take on the same theme: http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2009/05/21/a-surprisingl...

It really depends on the route. Personally, I live in Chicago, which means I have lots of options going to midsized and large airports, and prices can be very competitive.⁰ Small airports are often served only by one of the three airlines with a large presence here (United, American, Southwest), and it's these routes that have higher prices. In the past, I've taken 13 hour (overnight) Megabus trips instead of <2 hour plane trips just because United's prices on some small monopoly route or another were so outrageous. For those who live in a town or city with few options like that, airline travel is a lot more expensive than it is for us lucky ones in hub cities, takes a lot longer because of transfers, and is a lot less flexible with flight times and such. This is a factor behind a lot of corporate HQ relocations to big cities, as well.

⁰ I actually recently bought a roundtrip to Denver for $32 fully inclusive of taxes and fees. Granted, it's on Spirit, which is only marginally better than the bus, but can't beat the price.

My family all has Amazon wish lists for exactly this issue, in fact. Before Amazon was popular, we all posted wish lists on a closet door in my grandmother's house, and we either went in the den to look at them or called her and asked her what was on the lists.

My girlfriend's family doesn't do any of this stuff, and so I've had to do "educated guess"-type gifting, which I'm usually somewhat decent at. They tend to get me clothes, which is fine, everyone's gotta wear clothes.

The idea that "online classes" are the bullshit, easy-credit classes is false. When I was doing my undergrad years ago I took one class, statistics, online because of a scheduling conflict. The only way my experience differed from that of a person sitting in the classroom was how my lectures were delivered. Otherwise, it was the same homework, same quizzes, same exams, same everything. (The lectures were also the same, actually, having simply been recorded and put online a day or two later.) Moving your body to a particular physical location has a couple benefits, to be sure, and the trick to online education is to try to make that ground up. It's certainly not fatal to the educational process. Why would it be?

But that isn't how it is. Someone who says "um" a lot while speaking doesn't sound stupid. They're grating, to many in the audience, but that doesn't reflect on the speaker's ability (except, obviously, their public speaking ability). That means the audience will be focusing on the speaker's verbal tics instead of the message that was intended, which is the root problem. The word "stupid" was intended to startle the employee into action by how rude it was.

I mean, obviously, in this particular instance with this particular person, it was effective, and for all I know, the manager is a really sharp observer of her reports and knew this was the right approach in this situation. I don't think it's a good general approach, and I'm afraid people are going to take away the wrong thing from this article. It's not good managerial advice to say, "Tell your employees they sound stupid if they are bad public speakers!" It's better managerial advice to say, "Know your employees, and how each individual might be best motivated, and don't accept complacency." You have to be really careful when taking cues from drill sergeants, because for a lot of people, that approach will backfire horribly, and the message will be overshadowed by the delivery style.

What's wrong with, "As a listener, it's very distracting; moreso than you might think. You need to kick that habit to be an effective public speaker."? It's entirely possible to be candid without putting another person (your direct report, even!) down.

One person's gimmick is another person's killer feature. Say what you will about the usefulness of the convertible nature of the Surface Book, but it is thoroughly and competently engineered (unlike some other entries in this space). And if people find a competent convertible to be useful, they'll buy it.

You haven't really qualified "piece of garbage", so I have no idea what actually happened, but I will note that charger manufacturers have pulled some bait-and-switch tactics in the past. I bought a battery charger based on an NLee review[0], and was very satisfied. A friend later asked for a battery charger recommendation, and I went back to that very review and found that they'd started selling a "revised" model under the same listing, that was basically worthless. Something similar may have happened to you.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/review/RSYHTFQQYEGLG

It's pretty common to need to do something to your user object if it does exist. As a toy example, it's far better to have something like (using Scala syntax here):

    def getUserGreeting(userDao: UserDAO)(username: String): String =
      userDao.getOptionalUser(username) match {
        case Some(user) => "Hello, " + user.getFullName
        case None => "Not logged in"
      }

than:

    def getUserGreeting(userDao: UserDAO)(username: String): String =
      if(userDao.doesUserExist(username)) match {
        "Hello, " + userDao.get(username).getFullName
      } else {
        "Not logged in"
      }

For one thing, the first function probably only makes one database call, while the second (absent caching) makes two. Secondly, the second carries with it the (unlikely) possibility that the user is deleted between your DAO calls. Thirdly, I would argue that the first function is easier to read.

My point was simply never to underestimate the ingenuity of clever people working on something cool. If something cool is possible, then no matter how impractical there's probably someone out there interested and dedicated enough to make it work.

> Second, The likihood that anyone has the time and energy to go and build ECU software and flash it into their car is low.

I don't think this is true. There are plenty of enthusiasts who already do exactly this kind of thing. A friend of mine had an aftermarket ECU installed in his Mustang a few years ago. There's also the (idiotic) phenomenon of rolling coal[0], which also requires at minimum altering some engine tuning parameters in real time. Hackers abound in all walks of life, and this includes auto enthusiasts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

No worries! "Internal combustion engines" might be the best phrase to use, then.

The technical debt of petrol engines is not relevant to this article:

> The allegations cover roughly 482,000 diesel passenger cars sold in the United States since 2009.

It seems to depend on the totality of the circumstances, in Illinois, so I'd imagine the nonvoluntary nature of the termination would be taken into account. But there doesn't seem to be a clear answer. If it ended up in litigation it could get messy; there isn't a terribly large amount of guidance from the courts.

This depends on one's jurisdiction, in the U.S. at least. For example, in Illinois, non-competes are generally enforceable.[0] In California, they are generally not.[1]

[0] http://www.isba.org/ibj/2012/01/lawpulse/employmentcovenants...

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/calif-supreme-court-finds-noncompet...

I think the point is that the word "girl" infantilizes the women who put in a lot of work and effort to the project.

A better analogy would be jitneys, or perhaps airport shuttles that aren't restricted to the airport.

The article was moved from its original location to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi... . Its edit history is intact there; click "View History" at the top there to see it.

NiMH cells are expensive compared to alkaline cells. A quick check on Amazon shows that, when buying a decent amount of AA cells at a time, alkalines go for about $0.28 each compared to $1.67 each for NiMH cells.[0][1] Add in a charger (and consider that most cheaper chargers are really crappy--look for NLee the Engineer's reviews[2]) and many don't consider the benefits to outweigh the initial capital costs. (Also, alkalines tend to operate at 1.5 V for a good portion of the voltage curve whereas NiMH cells are usually around 1.3 V. This can cause problems in some devices, although less so today than, say, ten years ago.)

I absolutely agree that NiMH cells are superior in almost every way, but it's not irrational to prefer disposable batteries.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Performance-Alkaline-Batt...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-AA-Rechargeable-Batteries...

[2] e.g. http://www.amazon.com/review/RMWO7UZ9TAVRF/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per...

The trucking industry (among many others) would be badly damaged if roads were not subsidized, and air travel would have similar issues if airports were not built and operated by local governments with the assistance of the FAA. However, trains are the only mode of transportation on this scale I've ever seen people suggest should be operated without subsidies. Can you explain why you believe train travel to be different?

I've tried this with an old laptop and the site refused to let me download anything. It claimed, for Windows 7 at least, that you need a retail key; OEM keys are not supported and you must go through your OEM. Really obnoxious.

There's more volume in conventional-looking cars. Look at the responses to the Nissan Leaf and BMW i3, two electric cars that are legitimately funky-looking; something that looks weird will turn more people off than will be turned on.