> There are even people who are upset about the mere existence of the SSN for weird religious reasons.
The religious reason is generally about seeing insurance and/or investment as gambling, as I understand it. I wouldn't call it that weird.
> Also utility bills are a valid proof of address for some reason.
Well, yes. A utility bill means that there's a highly-regulated company that is providing you a recurring service to that address, billing you at that address. If the electric company is billing you at a house, for providing electricity to that house, presumably that is your house. It doesn't seem especially unreasonable, it's going to be more up-to-date than the record of when the house was bought or when you started a lease, and it's cheaper than sending a government employee to verify. It doesn't have to be a hard, unfalsifiable proof; it only needs to be stronger evidence than writing down whatever address you like without any checks.
Problem: Too many places already use them as pseudo-passwords, and no amount of forewarning would stop at least some of them from not moving away from that in time.
And I'm saying, don't pass judgement on the fuzzy ones. Draw the line where it's indisputable; you'll miss some but it's better than missing everything.
Kanji is logographic: each symbol is a complete word, phrase, or idea. Hangul is alphabetic-syllabic: each symbol is a segment (vowel-or-consonant), except that they're written in two- or three-letter blocks each representing a syllable.
The boundary may be fuzzy, but that doesn't mean there aren't clear things like "if you're promoting or smearing a particular candidate for an elected political position, that's a political ad".
Fair enough. For me (in the US), I have a driver's license but don't own a car, I don't need ID often, but if I leave it in my wallet, there's a much smaller chance that I'll forget it when I do need it (e.g. picking up a prescription at the pharmacy)
I'm not sure I follow the argument at the end. The author has given a good explanation for why our current metaphors describing the lambda calculus might not be applicable to aliens (requiring the concepts of direction and containment), but I don't see why, for example, the gas-planet aliens might not have their own metaphors relating to wind patterns or aerial acrobatics or something we wouldn't understand at all. There can be multiple metaphors for the same math.
> (although I recognise that in the US, carrying a driving license everywhere seems to be a weird cultural phenomenon).
Perhaps less "weird cultural phenomenon" and more "it's about the same size as a credit card", plus "it's probably the only broadly accepted government-issued ID you've got, so there's a variety of things things you might need it for, some of which you might not expect when you leave the house", resulting in "just leave it in your wallet or your handbag or wherever you carry such things".
If you're already generally leaving it with all the other miscellany you carry by default, it'd be more effort and more risk to take it out whenever you don't think you'd need it than to just leave it in your wallet/bag. If you're going to buy something, generally you'd have your wallet.
How do you handle such things, then? Honestly curious.
At least one GBA game (Megaman Battle Network 4) had a major glitch (game hangs in the WoodMan scenario, in a particular area of the game, after a random battle) that only occurred on some hardware (Nintendo has acknowledged the issue on the original DS [1]; I've seen a Let's Play [2] claiming it happens on the GBA SP as well but cannot confirm that for myself)
The cause is different behavior on trying to load invalid sprites; to my understanding, the NDS keeps reading until the address wraps around to a valid sprite, locking up until then; other hardware stops reading immediately. That scenario has a problem with one particular animation when the map reloads after a battle. It seems plausible that other games would have the same issue, but MMBN4 Blue Moon is the only one for which Nintendo's got an acknowledgement of the issue on their site, so maybe literally nobody else made that mistake.
I wonder whether they caught that? On the one hand, it's a (relatively) known issue, in that Nintendo has mentioned it on an official support page. On the other hand, it seems to only impact a single scenario in a single game, which has a load of other bugs anyway. But then, they're not trying to support DS games, so the only way for the bug to get in (if they're going for an as-close-as-possible emulation of the GBA and doing so successfully) would be if the bug does in fact cause hangs on the SP and they used that one as their reference.
Post may start (and end) with a screed against Apple's warranty and repair policies, but in the middle there's what looks like pretty useful advice on cleaning out a MacBook keyboard.
Arguably, if you knew that A: there was code in Lisp and B: only one person knew how to support it, they should have either rewritten it while the one who understood it was still there, or had more people learn Lisp, or hired more people who knew Lisp. It shouldn't have been allowed to reach the point where someone quit without anyone else having a clue.
> life-drawing is a practice that is good training for a specific use of that tool - portraiture
> The question is, why did they continue for so long?
Well, as said in the original quote, it's apparently also good for internalizing a sense of weight for animation. So presumably they continued at least in part because it's good for things that aren't as obsolete as portraiture -- animation isn't the only way to make money in art these days, but it's not exactly in low demand.
I'd wonder why they dropped it, but at a guess, it's some combination of low demand (first they make it non-required, then students who don't realize the broader applicability stop taking it) and higher cost (you need to hire one or more models).
> My suspicion is that in 20 years, many of today's games will be forgotten but people will likely still play FFIV on emulator - not because some artistic quality were better but simply because you can.
Inn 20 years, emulators will probably progress enough that the (non-server-based) games people still care about will be playable -- anything where there's no server, or the server is just a DRM check and all the gameplay happens clientside. Some of the servers will probably be replicable locally for single-player or small-group play, too; I think there's already reverse-engineered server emulation for some online-multiplayer DS games, some of it even having been made before the official servers went offline.
You're saying "taxes will be too high on the masses" but this proposal would reduce taxes on everyone below the 95th percentile (or perhaps 90th?) in income. If almost everyone gets less taxes, how will that make them too high for the masses? You can disagree on whether it'd be practical, or whether the knock-on effects would be good, or whether the philosophy behind the decision is something you agree with, or any number of other things, but... I don't see how you can see a proposal that explicitly lowers taxes in almost every bracket, and say most people are going to complain about their taxes going up.
An honor system on ticket-checking can work fine if there's high enough fines for being caught without a ticket. If there's a 1 in 10 chance they'll check your ticket, and the fine on riding without a ticket is at least ten times the cost of a ticket, the government comes out even as long as the cost of enforcing the fines isn't higher than the money saved by not having to hire as many ticket-checkers (or spend as much time waiting at the stop because of not needing to check everyone's ticket).
My point is that public primary and secondary schooling seems to have been more effective (anecdotally) than private higher education. This is a strike against the idea that the government shouldn't be paying for it, in that in at least this one case the government paying for it seems to be working better than a non-government organization doing that doing so. Since educational institutions aren't going to disappear altogether, those are the alternatives.
Because they ought to be more than that? In some cases, perhaps, because they _are_ more than that?
I'm pretty sure my K-12 education (public school) and college (private university) were both above average, but I definitely learned _something_ from at least a few classes every year in K-12, and at least could tell you what sorts of things I've forgotten from them. Meanwhile, I couldn't tell you what about half of my college classes were even _supposed_ to have taught, shortly before graduation, despite passing all of them with (almost all) high marks.
I wonder how hard it would be to use this with Unity? Getting a REPL into a running game is the biggest reason I'm interested in Lisp in games, but engine options are limited (the one I've tried is LOVE with Fennel, but Fennel is a bit odd as a Lisp and doesn't actually give you a REPL into a live program without extra work, and LOVE gives a lot less engine-stuff than Unity).
Generally, I think artisanal soapmakers buy lye flakes rather than making it from ash. Fundamentally, you need lye, water, and fat (or oil). Usually I think vegetable oils are used, rather than animal fat.
Some people are mindful and/or empathetic, and it's not inconceivable that more people would be if society/technology/whatever was more encouraging of it.
"By nature" is not a useful qualifier here. Maybe it's nature, maybe it's nurture; either way, I for one think it would be better if more people were "mindful and empathetic", regardless of whether you attribute that gain to societal encouragement or the removal of societal discouragement.
Leather has the advantage that one animal produces multiple things -- US beef and milk production produces leather as a byproduct. If people want local beef and milk, there's also going to be local leather. Leather keeps better than meat, so as long as the demand for beef (measured in cows) exceeds the demand for bovine leather (also measured in cows), stocks go up and prices go down until someone decides a local supply chain is worthwhile (or until someone decides it's not worth it to pay for the warehouse for unsold leather).
> “Consumers want choice — but only up to a point,” said Kevin Westcott, Deloitte vice chairman and U.S. telecom and media and entertainment leader, who oversees the study. “We may be entering a time of ‘subscription fatigue.'”
Missing the point hard here. To the degree that "consumers want choice", I would expect the choice they want is the choice of media, not the choice of subscription services. People don't subscribe to Netflix for its own sake, they subscribe because it lets them watch something they want to see.
It's definitely possible to have multiple Bluetooth peripherals on a single device in the general case (see: laptop with wireless keyboard and headphones). So that would just come down to software on a per-phone basis (and may or may not be a feature an app could add if it's not supported baseline).
A third route is to offer journalism or other content for free while soliciting donations. That works for Wikipedia, it works for NPR, and it works for a wide variety of smaller writers and artists through Patreon.
There's also the advertising-only-if-you-don't-have-a-subscription model, as on Twitch (which may or may not have journalism, depending on what exists that I haven't seen and on whether you count talk shows on current-events).
Do they? I've only ever seen major TCGs sold three ways (not counting secondhand): Regular booster packs (fixed number of cards, odds of rarities in small print on the back), preconstructed decks (fully known, no randomness), and bundles (box with five or ten regular packs plus one specific card or random known-rarity card).
A little easier? Seems to me it would make theft a lot easier; it removes the requirement that everything you're buying has to come out of the bag and in front of a cashier.
Self-checkout still requires things to come out of your bag, so the person who's there for when a self-checkout machine inevitably needs cashier assistance can be keeping an eye on several stations at a time.
With scan-and-go, those eyes need to be moved to the shelves, which is a much larger area and won't all be in one person's line-of-sight at once (and the person can easily obscure vision of the shelf).