My wife has those same pangs of concern from time to time. That balance of the logic vs those pangs of concern is interesting. I think it can be easy to let the concern outweigh the logic.
823 karma · joined August 5, 2008
I live in a fairly well-to-do bedroom community, it's a rural area a short drive from some bigger cities in Colorado. The neighborhood nextdoor.com info is an interesting read. The sheriff (we don't have town police, it's a small place, 5000ish people) is called for ringing and running, that's like the main offense. It seems like there are fears when there are work men of color in the area doing things (building new houses, etc..) it appears that their presence correlates to the crime of breaking in to cars in neighboring cities, at least in the minds of some. I can confess there is a slight feeling of isolation at times, like if you had a problem you couldn't solve, it could take 15-30minutes for a police officer to help you but in 8 years I'm unaware of such a problem happening in the town. For the most part it is insanely safe, like you could leave your doors unlocked and expect no issues.
When my son get's on the school bus, he has to swipe a badge. They can track where he get's on a bus and where he get's off. That's what we've come to. They have 4 different kinds of "drills." There is the fire drill we all grew up with. There is "lock down" where they all stay in their class rooms and lock the doors. There is a harder form of that where they stay in the class rooms, lock all the doors and windows and the try to hide. Then there is a drill where they go in the school basement, being that there are tornados in the area from time to time that's not too unreasonable but the staff is open with parents that it's for the event that there is some sort of a disturbance that is used to draw kids outside to attack in the open. The school itself (this is K-5) has locks on all doors, you have to buzz in, or swipe a badge at any time of day.
It's all in how you look at it, I guess. The technology is fairly inexpensive and if it helps with anything, then maybe it seems worth it. It's definitely playing in to the culture of fear that exists though. What's really shocking, at least to me, is how cool everyone seems to be with everything. We got emails from the school when the did some of the drills, just to let us know our kids might tell us about something odd that they did. I can't imagine how they'd possibly let middle-school or younger kids on public transportation around here.
I get all of my energy from a roof top solar system but to stay on the grid I have to pay a connection fee which in my mind covers transmission costs and infrastructure. Being that it's a utility I can see them charging for that stuff, some how, either by a fee or by arbitrage between wholesale and retail costs, that seems reasonable. It radically changes the value of solar though.
If you can sell energy at wholesale prices what's the argument for restricting your ability to buy it at wholesale? Could you buy it from a different provider and just use the utility to transmit it?
Guile now has an elisp interpreter and guile itself has JIT capabilities as well as a number of other features elisp hackers have grumbled about over the years. It's been mostly one man's work but it has spanned years to get guile-elisp to where it is. The discussions about migrating to it have been somewhat interesting to read. You have a remarkably solid, cross platform, well tested product and they're very very cautious to harm that, even with big speed and feature improvements on the table. It's one of the few good examples of "maybe you want to think twice about fixing something that isn't broken." Then when/if they do fix it, I bet you'll be able to build it with the old elisp for 20 years, just in case something isn't quite right...
From my perspective, GTK has been mired for a very very long time. Essentially from its inception it was something that was required for other missions. There have been tons of volunteers and people working on it but I'm not sure how much of that was because they needed it vs because that's what they love to do. I also have some suspicions that certain UXy/visual type problems just don't seem to be good fits for the bazaar model, all my evidence would be tied to GNOME, GTK, and GIMP for the most part so I could see how I might be wrong. If it's being held back by some Redhat folks that are paid to maintain it because Redhat went all in with it decades back, a fork could potentially revitalize it.
It's largely a matter of whether the case is winnable. Then if he acts anything like his public persona suggests, I can't see too many prosecutors going easy on him, if he's abrasive or something? It's entirely possible they give him the Schwartz treatment.
I don't disagree with you that there are troubled towns and cities but it seems really difficult to decide when it's beyond salvage or even what that means.
That just seems like bad architecture, period. Now if this can be exploited with RMI or something, I wouldn't be too shocked to see some client/server type applications using that as an interface.
are there session cookies that are serialized objects or something?
IBM's power consumption is probably mostly because they've never put the processors into energy sensitive applications. More importantly, they are sold because of some benchmarks and extreme reliability.
Nobody is going with Porsche for fuel economy but nobody is expecting to have their Porsche lose power due to a recall either. It's a premium badge, I expect them to dot more of the I's and cross more of the T's when I pay that extra $20-$40kk for a Porsche branded Touareg.
Maybe it's possible, but if it is, Porsche is really not the Porsche I think it is or want it to be.
The actual integration part isn't the problem, I don't believe. The dealers themselves could probably do that with a little help and some changes if you could deliver them a crate of all the parts. When you buy a Honda accord, there are at least 3 different power train options, a 4-cylinder manual (do they still make this?,) a 4-cylinder CVT, and a 6-cylinder automatic; and Honda has been amazing at actually reducing the number of options over the years. Do you build the power train on demand or do you attempt to forecast sales and stock an inventory? That's a very significant part of the overall cost. Many of those parts are forged and then machined both, just building the head takes some time and precision, let alone assembling it... there are interior changes that have to integrated as well, from the dash display to things like paddles for shifting in some formats.
With a lot of modern cars, I wouldn't be surprised if the rolling chassis for the different models is very nearly the same but subtly different depending upon the power train. Toyota has the highlander, it's a very popular platform, it also comes in a hybrid configuration, I suspect that are more than just some subtle changes to a lot more parts for that. Same with like an all-wheel drive as an option type products... or convertible roof. I think the navi-option on some mass market cars results in a different dashboard molding.
If you limit "options" to color and seat materials, this is an easy problem. The auto industry practically invented options though, like Ford and Lincoln and Mercury were the same vehicles for a long time, the fake options helped sell way more product. Today when you buy a Camry, it's almost like there are four or five entirely different products that are all labeled "Camry" from like an entry level spartan 4-cylinder edition up to the hybrid limited that costs nearly twice as much. The market seems to like that. That's the trick, if you could some how convince the buyer that they had real options but they didn't... Maybe electric motors are a big part of that, take performance off the table as an option and things can be made more simple.
Some implementations it'll really screw up any RT plans you might have...
Anyways, who picks up their phone and fires up an app to demand that someone comes over and cleans up their house, right f-ing now!
I also suspect that the "on boarding" process of learning to clean probably didn't filter out the candidates that were really passionate about the business so much as it found the ones that would put up with just about anything. I don't know too many top tier developers that would do that. I do value the concept that everyone should understand the dirty work but this particular case might be outside the useful realm of that.
A stupid person wouldn't be able to adapt, or might have trouble adapting from one tool to another. That's a stupid person. Likewise a stupid person might think that an organization that was shipping successful products and making money was making a big mistake by not migrating off of svn.
Stupid is stupid, age is a different dimension. "culture" especially regarding tooling like this is sort of a cop-out.
Diesel tends to be better at providing a satisfying driving experience with really high mileage. Better mileage means less CO2.
Diesel also tends to emit particulates and trace elements in the oil that it combusts. That means more smog, "acid rain," etc..
If you have to pick one axis, "acid rain" is out of vogue and CO2 isn't and diesel looks like a clear winner and you wonder why every car isn't one. If you pay attention to both axis then diesel starts to dramatically lose its advantage and you really have to use some exotic cleanup technologies just to keep it in the same league as gas engines.
I really don't know if there is big money involved, so much as just too simple a view of the problems. It's not like "clean coal" they both use effectively the same fuel that's just refined differently.
That doesn't seem quite right to me.
Does the content creator (since there would be no 'owner' without copyright) have any say over the use or distribution? I think of all those rock stars that have had politicians misappropriate their songs and then asked them to stop using them over the years. I wonder what that felt like, you wrote this hit song that was powerful and evoked emotion and then someone you are ideologically opposed to tried to use it for their purpose.
I've taken part on LKML and I've been dressed down on it and even privately a couple times and part of me wanted to crawl into a cave and disappear, another part of me took it with sort of the playful teasing the LKML hacker culture has. I had some issues with my patches, they got called out and there was some joking. It wasn't personal. Now there have also been some arguments where people up and walked away, clearly some of it has been taken personally.
I'm not trying to defend LKML, it can be harsh. Also a lot of people depend on Linux, the standards for patching it have to be pretty high and there has been a lot of abandonware patches added over the years. These higher profile flames and resignations draw a lot more attention than the incredible amount of noise from the other side of the spectrum... I've also had some incredibly helpful responses from very busy people that helped out when I clearly should have known a little more than I did. Sexism, homophobia, racism, etc.. seems a bit outside of what's acceptable though. I'm not denying that it has happened but I'd love some concrete examples if anyone has some.
None of that happened, I think the competitors knew and I also think the EPA knew in some capacity and it wasn't until some "small time" researchers got attention that it came out.
Maybe the others knew they were cheating, I can't imagine that it wouldn't leak out some how. I also can't imagine how you wouldn't go buy a hundred VWs and meticulously take them apart and understand them after getting brutalized in the diesel market.
With mid-sized and heavy trucks, there is an entire subculture of guys that mod them for "more power" and such. There is a little industry built on it and nearly a religion surrounding the "better mileage" and "more power." Some of the systems and devices are sophisticated enough that they have integrated on/off switches for passing smog tests and such. If we really really cared about it, that would be illegal, there would be much more stringent emissions testing more frequently.
I'm of the belief that the regulators knew or suspected there was some cheating but it's political to make waves.
Now the camera industry isn't the fastest moving, but all this means is DSLR and pocket cameras need/will to get better. I can see the low-end pocket cameras will disappear; phones are effectively that. I just can't see the various camera companies going down without a fight and arguably the people that buy and use $4000 cameras aren't the same market is those the buy galaxy phones. The bottom is getting better at a rapid clip though...
Other than booting it, and EFI is addressing that, it's a fairly clean and nice architecture. Some of the registers have legacy names. Are there any really odd legacy behaviors?
Everybody 'hates' DRM, it seems but I don't think it's going anywhere and I don't think you can ship a codec standard without it. You usually want hardware support for the DRM encryption. I don't know the specifics of their technology, but Netflix and Hulu and Amazon all stream tons and tons of media and I'd be surprised if it wasn't DRM'd in some capacity, I know the video apple sells/streams all is.
Similar idea and tool-set but it's 3 dimensional scenes and worlds.
Some people of questionable ethic and questionable intelligence gave a third party incriminating information about themselves and also gave them money all while hoping for discretion. (I say questionable intelligence because the real rich and powerful use different services provided by different people..) Any privacy agreement was a private one between 2 parties, at best covered by civil law, maybe Canadian civil law. Certainly nothing binding in any substantial way was signed.
It's certainly making light of online privacy but I'm not sure there is a battle here, it's just demonstrating that it's still very much the wild west out there. What should happen here? Should AM pay a fine to some government? Class action law suit? (I think that idea is particularly hilarious..)
Riddle me this, so suppose AM goes bankrupt. Can their creditors just take that data and sell it? It's an asset, right? Is it possible for a EULA or some sort of agreement to prevent that? Hackers or not, all that information could be in someone else' hands, that the users have no agreement with. AM is sort of the poster child for these problems but you may have given a lot of information to companies that you wouldn't want other companies to have.
If we replaced everything in C with Haskell, we'd have an entirely different problem. The attack surface wouldn't involve buffer overflows and stack smashing, it would involve various DoS attacks. Those might be easier to address though.
Is there any evidence of this?