dspeyer

The likelihood of getting a proper BRT system when a city sets out to build one seems a lot lower than the probability of getting working light rail. Granted, both are low.

In NYC, we have "dedicated lanes" for some of our buses. But there are no spikes in the ground and when someone parks in one, the bus doesn't actually smash the car out of the way. So we're back to the mercy of traffic.

> [H]e’s heard ... that I’m a magazine writer looking into California’s almond boom. He demands to know what my angle is. Am I going to blame almonds for the state’s mounting water woes, like other articles have?

> When I assure him I’m after the whole story, he softens.

And yet, is not blaming almonds exactly what the author proceeds to do?

I'm not saying they aren't to blame, but this seems a bit dishonest.

Any idea how hard it would be to genetically engineer an almond tree that could drink sea water?

It does have one benefit. www.google.com has its IP served from google's dns servers, whereas google.com comes from com's. Google does lots of dns-based load balancing that com doesn't support.

Am I the only one hoping they have the same favourite charity?

Wouldn't you need standing for that? If you were actually trying to found a competing ISP, that would work, but "I'm a customer who might get better service in a freer market" doesn't sound like standing.

How about putting in that effort for the 10 languages with over 100 million native speakers?

If the soda started dissolving the aluminum, I doubt it would stop until it had dissolved a hole straight through the can.

Not quite.

There isn't a large group of stupid people loudly calling themselves "gay". Nor is "gay" the only widely-known English word for stupid.

I admit, I've given up.

The word "cracker" has no traction whatsoever. Partly because it sounds like something you put cheese on and partly because prominent crackers refuse to embrace it.

I'm not saying the current situation is ok, I'm just saying the fight is hopeless.

ESR is talking about building a replacement

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5948

Aural style sheets? Do they work?

I haven't tried it, but http://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2013/11/02/quick-tr... seems plausible.

You can also shape culture using rules. For example, at Google SRE, there was a rule that after any outage a post-mortem was to be written. It described why the problem happened, why that happened, etc. and how to prevent each level from re-occurring. Things like "it was person X's fault" or "we will be more careful" were forbidden. Fault and fixes had to be in technology or procedure, not people. It helped shape a culture of coming forward with problems and of looking for solutions. It didn't work perfectly, but it helped.

IIRC, mathoverflow maintains a "nothing an undergrad could reasonably be expected to know" policy.

Other way around. One of the options engineers receiving the mailing have is to go to the hearing and present their opinions on the settlement to the judge.

Most won't, but with 64k plaintiffs, most of them long-winded, it'll still need to be a patient judge.

That's more recent.

The parenthesis in this attack are sufficient to prevent that warning.

    return ERRCODE;

Would have produced the exact same bug.

What does it even mean to shut down the control systems on a moving car? All stop? Coast? What's the physical behaviour that isn't likely to kill someone?

> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting?

When I was at MS, we usually used the command line to change settings. It was horrible. It used GUIDs. Literally GUIDs. But it was a stable target. You didn't have to relearn it every nightly build. And you could script it.

We sort of assumed that if the control panel would sit still we could learn it easily enough, but that assumption couldn't be tested until it was too late.

It's worth remembering that Google doesn't have a single SRE team. Each major service has a separate SRE team. There's a lot of specialized knowledge in each, and redirecting the Search and Storage SREs doing the AMA to help with gmail (or login, which was probably the problem) would have only resulted in being in the way.

With power comes responsibility, and he has more than most.

That's not the only way a project can backfire.

For example, if BlackGirlsCode produces a generation of black women who are perfectly capable programmers but believe that they're only capable "for black girls" and not by the tougher standards of asian men, that's backfiring. Such graduates will not go on to found startups or even apply for jobs at the best companies. They will probably have less overall life success than if they hadn't entered the program.

Or if the graduates are fine, but it's a resume stain, because everyone who hears about it thinks "These are people who need special help. I don't want to work with people like that. I want to work with self-sufficient people." So the graduates can't find jobs or investors. That's a backfire.

Or if it works well for the small number of people directly touched, but the much larger number of people peripherally touched become more likely to think that programmers are divided into "black" and "nonblack" and subconsciously act on that. It's a smaller effect, but a larger group of people and could easily be a net loss. That's a backfire too.

Isn't state controlling everything normal for Java? Now if you tried to write OCaml...

Include that in the calculations. There's a certain absolute sideways g-force (decreasable by slowing or straightening), and a certain absolute downwards gravity. These add up to a single total force. So long as the magnitude is at least 1g, there exists a seat orientation such that the passenger feels 1g toward the seat and something on the back.

How much you can spin the seat without those movements causing problems is an open question.

Airplanes are an encouraging precedent. They often make quite sharp turns at extremely high velocity, but tilt into them such that there's almost no perceived lateral acceleration.

Not massively enough. If the US tried to arrest these targets and bring them to trial, the arresting forces would get killed.

That sort of standard works when the executor has massively more power than the executee. For the US versus an ordinary criminal, we can do it. Facing something that looks more like a war, applying standards of justice generally results in losing.

Do drones have a higher false positive rate than human-piloted air support? Numbers are going to be hard to come by -- the military doesn't want to reveal anything. Qualitatively, the Collateral Murder video that wikileaks posted a while back (in which a US helicopter gunned down a pair of Reuters reporters because they were carrying objects that could have been weapons) sounds very similar to what's described here.

On the other hand, sometimes a webcomic character says something I've been thinking better than I could.

Not Something Positive :)

I think this article would be improved by removing the gender-specific parts. All these things happen all too often in any gender configuration and are real problems. Sexism or its spectre is a distraction.