FTA

I have not seen any evidence in journals that climate change will inherently reduce predictability of short or medium range weather forecasts. I believe you're implying that without climate change we could somehow be predicting hurricanes years ahead of time in the current year, which is really not the case.

Assuming 2016 is when they started working on this, that is the correct date. It should convey the first date of publication and not be some listing of what years it is copyrighted.

Really this is a widespread problem in electronics not limited to TVs. I have bought two different Android phones in the past 7 years on Amazon for a certain cell phone provider that have been rendered essentially unusable after OTA updates. It's a small sample size, but both have occurred about two years after the phones hit the market.

The first was a Galaxy S4 I bought in 2013. It had only a decent camera but it got the job done. An update was pushed in summer of 2015 that caused the phone to lock down every time I tried to open my wifi ''more settings'' option. Because I purchased it from Amazon, I could not get any technical support outside of the vendor (who wanted me to hard reset the phone...okay, great, until I get to the configuration screen on first new boot and it locks down because, guess what, it opens wifi more settings to let you select a network).

The second was an HTC One M9 that I bought shortly after that debacle. This phone was very snappy and had a stellar camera on board. It was also surprisingly rugged given that I dropped it at least 8 times on concrete with never more than a few scuffs on the meta. Early this summer I got an OTA update on the phone that broke GPS and MMS. Oh and did I mention one of the updates the prior year made it so you cannot stop the updates from installing--that the phone will restart 24 hours after first receiving the new update, regardless of what you do or who you're on the phone with?

So, I settled for a dumb phone. A $30 flip phone. And when I go on vacation I take a professional camera with me instead.

There is a systemic issue that we are serfs on the lands of tech giants (I think I read that great phrasing from Naval Ravikant). We pay up front for the pleasure of hardware, but are held hostage of usability of the device by the software that actually runs it--just as the land you buy upfront is still at the mercy of governmental bodies allowing you to keep it.

Family and friends look at me funny when I tell them I try to build whatever electronic I want when I am able to. I won't let my music player, fitness tracker, or smart home features be held hostage to 1) the longevity of these companies and 2) their mercy for not bricking my device. And unfortunately many consumers just don't care enough so it will be difficult for us to reach a critical mass of complaints.

This is the second major outage of GH this summer. I'm fearing we should all become less dependent on this single service for bug reporting, merging, etc. and instead leverage the decentralized power of Git to host on a variety of platforms. That way if one is out, you just fall back to another.

Does anyone know of libraries that can sync at least the filed issues between GitHub and GitLab or Bitbucket in near real time? That's the main thing from GitHub that I'm truly missing when there's an outage.

I think Steam's exploration queue is a great tool for finding off the beaten path games. While some may only go through it during an event where you get cards or something for doing it, I go through a few iterations every week.

It keeps track of games you've seen and up or down voted, so you're able to really explore the library without completely mindlessly walking around.

I've found some niche, not reviewed often games over the course of a year or two. I haven't explored how you actually get your game listed (so perhaps there is some required marketing by devs) but I'd recommend that effort if you have indeed made a game.

Though the following may not answer many of your questions, I found these three videos to be very illuminating in regards to the blockchain and ICO processes and futures. They really helped me because I knew next to nothing about the whole field but saw lots of talk on social media and wanted to learn more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1mkxci6vvo Investment Panel with Naval Ravikant, Meltem Demirors, and Garry Tan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnHRnlrO6bQ Payments Panel with Balaji Srinivasan, Elizabeth Stark, and Ryan Charles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrSn3zx2GbM A conversation with Naval Ravikant (who is very prescient in this field)

This reminds me a bit of the common argument for locks: it keeps regular people honest. Watermarks are designed really to deter you from casually copying an image and pasting it on your site, unless you don't care at all about a watermark showing (e.g. a blog site with a few followers).

I'm sure a mixture of the original computer vision technique plus some smearing on the original image could wash away even these randomly perturbed watermarks.

Just with many other security matters, you will always be trying to stay one step ahead of someone attempting to circumvent protections. So really the best protection against someone removing watermarks is to file a copyright infringement against the infringing party. DMCA (fixed acronym order :]) is a powerful tool in the USA.

In either case, this was a neat article.

Here's their budget plan from a few years ago: https://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/458/748/FY14-Budget-Business-Pl...

Amtrak offers this with "roomettes" all the way up to 4-person rooms, though whether it's an overnight or a day trip depends on your origin and destination (for example, Chicago to Dallas is an overnight). You mention that Germany had eliminated all but the profitable ones--well, the U.S. government loses money on these routes to keep them running even in spite of the high prices. I'd usually pay $800 roundtrip for CHI->DAL; meals _are_ included and you get I believe up to two carry-ons and two checked bags for free.

I will say it is definitely a lower stress option. You can show up 30 minutes before your train is leaving and there's no security lines. Depending on the station, it could be just an empty train station in a rural town or a large station interconnected with other transport services (e.g. Boston, Chicago).

The population you are traveling with is much different compared not only to airlines but also coach on the train. Generally your sleeper carmates are retired folks who don't want to deal with the hassle of TSA, running between connections, arriving three hours early, and so on. I've met some extremely nice people with amazing stories (you are seated with strangers at meals, so this is almost forced on you). If you are not in a hurry and have a few extra bucks, it's worth it at least once to experience the journey, especially across the Upper Midwest or coasts.

FTA: "I’m excited to hand the CEO reins over to Kerry to allow me to fully focus on the role of the Chairman and the long-term."

Yet another example of VC ending up subsidizing America. We could just cut out the middleperson and go to basic income paid for by VCs.

Not that I agree with the statement, but it could easily be the case he wrote it on his own time and shared it at work on their internal Google+. Unless you have a source for your accusation, in which case I stand corrected.

Based on the article, they're suing over @realDonaldTrump and not @POTUS. I think that may be a key distinction in the case--one that favors the defendant and not the plantiffs--as that could be considered his personal account.

Maybe check out geojson.io then. It may be too lightweight but perhaps it meets most of your functionality (assuming you will have a web connection).

geoJson or vector style editor? For the former, QGIS is a good bet. For the latter, maputnik.

Just a note to those who only look at the chart and don't dig into the details:

''Promises Not to Sell Out Users'' relates to the platform not allowing unfettered access to the API by entities that have designed surveillance software to monitor open sources (i.e. public postings on a site).

Can someone describe the differences between this and something like ResearchGate [0]? The article here, which reads like a press release, does not provide much information beyond 'democratizing access' and 'curating content'. Oh, and throwing some punches at the big journals.

A cursory browse of their website seems to indicate they are just indexing abstract repositories and providing links to arXiv or the journal articles. Further, searching a topic like climate change science [1] yields only 89(!!) results, of which only 24 are displayed. And those appear to just be the most recently published--little value added.

From the headline, I was hoping this would be a paradigm-shifting new publishing company fostering a variety of open access journals. Instead, it seems to be a "machine learning applied" version of ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and many other similar platforms.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net [1]: https://www.sparrho.com/search/climate%20change%20science/

This sort of setup can also be used to monitor aircraft squelches. I got a few Raspberry Pis during a B1G1 sale, so I have one of these setups at work and at home. I like watching the planes as they take off from the local airport and queue up for arrival, and also seeing the nightly freight flights.

More info here: http://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/

You can feed into sites like Flightaware and FlightRadar24 and get accounts with them that normally cost a lot for free.

Look at programming competitions from an assessment perspective: what are they measuring and is what's being measured good or bad for a job?

Ability to work under short time constraints (probably good), to hack out some solution that will work temporarily (good) but probably not solid (bad), to forego much time to consider the implications of design and implementation choices (bad), to develop without communication if solo competition (bad) or without communication outside of the small group of core developers (bad), to build a solution without getting feedback and refinements from stakeholders (bad), and so on.

This was my same experience. I spent three solid work days trying to install it from source since it's on a server with other services and their default nginx etc. setup couldn't work. All the different microservices made installing from source very difficult. I ended up finally giving up and using the black box omnibus installation and fiddling with the configuration file for a while.

It works now but I can't hack the source to make custom improvements, so it ends up not being as open source as I would have hoped. There's one particular issue in trying to push that results from being on a URL subpath (http://.../gitlab). I can't fix it myself because of that.

Don't get me wrong--it's a good program and has worked for the team I support. But click and deploy is not useful for people who don't have bare bones servers they can spin up and instead have to work with shared servers.

Oh, by no means am I endorsing it as being sufficient. I just wanted to update the info since I know some people read only the comments on submissions.

FWIW, other sites are reporting they are indeed refunding the child's ticket and more.

http://fortune.com/2017/07/05/united-airlines-shirley-yamauc... http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/35811846/hawaii-teacher-f... http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/united-airlines-forces-m... http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2017/07/05/united-airlines-giv...

I've noticed in international teams that there can be a culture clash when it comes to communication. People from some countries favor communication that is much more flourished and gentle, while folks from other countries are much more blunt and to the point (not necessarily to be curt, but rather they just get to the point). I've seen this clash also on mailing lists for open source projects that have an active global community.

Also, in academia, there is a similar phenomenon for letters of recommendation that can actually really hurt your chances if you are not familiar with the intricacies. For example, if you are applying for an American position, letters are expected only shower praise upon the applicant. But for European positions, letters are intended to be a straightforward and honest assessment of the applicant--highlighting both the good and the bad (e.g. [0]).

I'm not trying to justify this action by any means. I can just see how it may come about.

[0]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/53876/postdoc-r...

> But what's the incentive for the manufacturers?

Possibly reducing the companies' environmental footprint on the world.

Instead of cheap devices being scrapped every two years and sent to the landfill, consumers could instead hold on to the companies' products for much much longer. If products have comparatively more time and quality parts, the cost will indeed go up--both for manufacturing and retail price.

My grandmother had the same bread mixer the whole time I was growing up. And I know she had it long before I was born. It was built to last and she took care of it. My mother, on the other hand, went through at least six different plastic, Made in China bread mixers over the course of my childhood.

Where's the corporate responsibility for all the waste that is generated by crappy products?

If you were KitchenAid or another brand, wouldn't you want to set yourself apart from the others as a company who cares about the environment by making products that will last for years to come and acknowledging that in advertising? Products that can also be repaired if there is an issue, as opposed to chucked aside for a new one because of their lack of value?

I'd consider such a company the "Whole Foods" of appliances. Citizens who share similar conservation values will likely pay more for that product, just as those who opt for solar/wind energy over coal.

Do they even check if you've paid for a full carry-on as opposed to a personal bag? I've flown Frontier a few times worried about the size of my backpack, and I never saw anything on the computer when I scanned my boarding pass to indicate any of that information. I'm fairly certain the gate agent didn't even look at my baggage.

Essentially VC is subsidizing part of America's goods then. We could always skip the middlebusiness and just go straight to universal income paid for by these firms.

Another recent incident involving LANL and nuclear waste: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-new-mexico-nuclear-dump-....

Essentially, they used a chemically incompatible kitty litter in bins of nuclear waste (I read another article somewhere that went more in depth about how the decision to switch went down...unfortunately I can't find it quickly, but I recall it had something to do with a lack of clarity in communication). That bad reaction caused the bin to explode underground in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and release radioactivity.

Shortly before this event, there was a truck that caught fire underground at the waste repository, shutting down operations. I think that event happening kept the amount of workers exposed in the bigger incident down.

From my experience, safety in these sorts of situations is more of a burden than a lifestyle from a worker perspective. Holding individuals _and_ their superiors accountable--not only those that do not follow safety practices but also supervisors--I think is the only way safety will actually be fully practiced.

For someone who gets anxiety about judgment from others for what they eat (and what they don't), this would be absolutely horrifying.

I've noticed many times a similar very faint street gridding around Rio Rancho and always thought it was just foresight by the city. Turns out it was yet another one of these communities. Thanks for the info!

This sounds a lot like stereotype threat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat). I'd say though, rather than "it's acceptable to be bad at these things," people instead avoid it _because_ they feel they will do poorly and fail at it if they try.