HotHotLava

It's not that software engineers are not capable of doing the same when required (e.g. in the firmware for NASAs mars rovers, etc.) but that usually software engineers don't do that because there is a better alternative.

If architects could build a house multiple times a day while slightly rearranging the layout every time they'd do that in a heartbeat.

Since 2014 you need to have an official permission to use a flat for AirBnb. If you suspect these are illegally rented out, you can report them to the Berlin government here:

https://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/wohnen/zweckentfremdu...

Even if you put all of your efforts into #2, it will take years from the decision to ramp up the planning and construction efforts until enough houses are actually built to have a noticeable impact on the market. And you still have to do something about the situation in the meantime. That's why the rent freeze in Berlin is limited to 5 years.

> With rents capped, building new homes becomes less profitable.

At least in Berlin, the rent control doesn't apply to newly built apartments (leading to the "split" market the title refers to), so this argument shouldn't apply.

The Berlin government considers it a legitimate reason, and since they get to make the rules that's all that matters in this case. If the people of Berlin would disagree, it's up to them to elect a new government with different views on the topic.

"I want to move to Berlin", on the other hand, is not a particularly legitimate reason to kick out a current resident for a newcomer.

I wish scientists would start growing a spine and stop citing Elsevier journals. That's the only thing that will break the vicious cycle of everybody publishing there because it gets a lot of citations, despite nobody actually reading in the journal. Put up a link to the pdf on the authors home page as reference, if it is essential to the paper, or leave it out completely if it isn't.

Walmart is the App Store, Apple is the town, and Epic is the fertilizer company wanting to open a farming supplies store of their own because all the farmers already know them from farming fairs and word of mouth so they don't really need the exposure from being on display in Walmart.

It sounds ridiculous because the analogy is really far-fetched. A slightly better one would be that the owner of Walmart is also the mayor of the town, and he won't approve the business permit for the fertilizer store unless they agree to also sell their stuff at Walmart.

Once a bug starts causing exceptions, it's no longer undetected. Then it becomes part of the post-deployment "fallout".

I mean, how would you possibly know about the type bugs that you didn't catch? I once ported a medium-size (ca. 5k LoC) python library to native C++, and we discovered a ton of latent type bugs that had stayed unnoticed in the code base for almost a decade. Things can randomly work for a long time due to duck typing, and then break in unpredictable ways.

Over time, this has a very noticable impact on development speed, and in a very painful way for the individual developers who need to spending your time tracing the various call paths in unrelated code and build up a mental model of the involved types every time they want to do a nontrivial change, and then deal with the fallout of unintentional bugs due to missed code paths for an unpredictable amount of time as they are discovered.

So when there is a solution that can completely eliminate this class of bugs in an automated way, this sounds like a very appealing feature.

People like e.g. Bjarne Stroustroup or Linus Torvalds are also paid 6-figure speaking fees depending on the venue, and they're far less-known names than Yellen or Clinton. And not because tech conferences are trying to bribe or corrupt their speakers (i hope), but because having a big name really drives attendance.

It probably sometimes happens that speaking fees are paid as a bribe, but that's illegal and also not specific to speaking fees (similar popular schemes are to hire the person as consultant, or to buy something from him for a much higher price than the real value). It also raises the same red flags, when it turns out that the speaking fees were far above market value.

Unless that was the case here (I don't know how much other speakers are paid at Citadel), it seems premature to assume nefarious behavior.

There's no opt-out, that's the whole point of the change.

I'm baffled by the number of companies that should not have any need for third-party cookies and still go full-on dark pattern. In particular online shops: I'm already on their site, why would they loudly advertise "we're shady and want to trick you into selecting all cookies"? I've cancelled more than one purchase because I didn't want to bother with this.

Depends heavily on the project: For more electronics and hardware-oriented projects an Arduino or microcontroller might even be easier to use.

But imagine making e.g. an internet-controlled LED light strip. With an Arduino setting up the WiFi, accepting TSL connections, etc. would probably be a major pain and require additional hardware. With a Raspberry Zero W, this can be done via ssh in a few minutes, and it still has PWM ports to connect the hardware to.

> They all claim to be simple, but end up too simple in practice and cause just as many issues as they solve.

The number may be the same, but the set of issues is different, leaving developers the choice if they'd rather work around the lack of namespaces and comments in JSON or around the opaque meta definitions and annoying syntax of XML.

And the popular vote was pretty clear on which design is preferred.

Linus' original license did forbid making any money off the kernel:

> - You may not distibute[sic] this for a fee, not even "handling" costs.

Also I think the GPL was pretty important to the kernel, since many companies, especially in the 90s, probably would have kept contributions private and their code closed without that gentle push.

While the Sherpa were crucial to success of the expedition, it's also important not to jump to the other extreme and underestimate the contributions of the British party. This was not a "guided" expedition where the clients were just going up in the wind shadow. Back in 1953, it's pretty unlikely that sherpa party could have summitted on their own.

If I remember correctly (it's a while since I read Hillary's account of the expedition), only three of the sherpa were able to go up to camp 4, and two of those them had to turn back due to altitude sickness. Tenzing Norgay did not have the technical knowledge to operate the oxygen systems. Also, crampons were far less advanced back then, so the mountaineers were also responsible for cutting steps every few days for all the routes that the porters were using to haul gear.

I'm confused: The Assange defense team literally argues that the Obama DoJ decided not to prosecute the case, and that the Trump administration resurrected it in 2017 for political reasons. (The judge rejects the premise and argues that since there is no sufficient evidence that the Obama DoJ decided not to prosecute, the Trump administration couldn't have made a political decision to resurrect, since the case was always ongoing.)

Your position seems to be that the defense is mistaken, but that the case is still political because it was already started as that under Obama and continues to be politically motivated throughout the Trump and Biden administrations?

Why would the intelligence community be involved with decision-making inside the department of justice?

And Obama's DoJ apparently decided not to pursue the case, why would we expect Biden's DoJ to come to a different conclusion?

It's also interesting that this case has so many overlapping conspiracy theories that I don't even know if my initial comment is downvoted by US patriots for suggesting that the case might be politically motivated (which is the assertion made by Assanges defence team and many human rights groups), or by Assange supporters for suggesting that there was no ongoing investigation in 2010 and the Swedish allegations were not a plot by the DoJ :)

If this case is indeed politically motivated, one would expect the US to lose interest on January 21 and drop the case instead of appealing to the Supreme Court.

Well, it includes verbatim copies of the whole email chain, and those are looking pretty bad in itself without any of the surrounding text.

Unless you're saying they've been tampered with, or that there was additional communication in between that he omitted, it seems pretty clear that this is not a professional way to handle communications.

Isn't that how most people would have understood the offer anyways? Why should Google store the photos from e.g. your new OnePlus for free just because you owned a Pixel in the past?

They wrote a commit message with Nat Friedman's email address using a design feature of git, but it was still a design feature of GitHub that took this non-gpg signed commit and linked it with Nat Frieman's account, making it appear very legitimate in the GitHub UI, without an option for him to change that.

I'm wondering: Assuming Oracle wins on copyrightability, how will it affect BSD-licensed software? The license text just says

> Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: [...]

But reimplementing the API is neither using the source code nor distributing it, so would it be covered or not?

I believe he is saying, and I would tend to agree, that it does not matter if Google literally copy/pasted the Java header files or if they had merely copied the API (ie. the same structure, sequence and organization) in a different language; for example by creating a Go package having exactly the same package structure and providing the same functions as the Java standard library.

In both cases, they would have "copied" the API and both seem to me to be exactly the same case as in Baker/Selden.