Or, govern this stuff under international treaty. Internet traffic _is not_ like truck traffic. It's more like radio (in some places it is radio). It's the Ross Sea, not I-95. What gives any one nation (or subdivision, like a certain US state known for its leading position at the Darwin Awards) the right to meddle with a global resource like that? Well, as a practical matter, they rarely do. Instead, they usually let the oligarchs who own the ruling elites (as well as the infrastructure) in each country do it: except when it's more convenient to use government as a hammer.
Heh. Lots, actually. I'm one of them. Been at my current job for 25 years. Started in tech as a second career when I was 41. A colleague who is actually a year younger than me has been at it for well over 40 years (came on while still in school as a summer intern). In fact, the one thing my hiring director said that really got my attention was, "I've got people out there who are retiring after 30 years". People sometimes forget that tech isn't just about the FAANGs or startups. There are lots of us out here who working for big and small enterprises where 50 years and the gold watch are the norm.
Because New York City is like deep space: fundamentally hostile to life, especially human life. Once people get past their sensory overloaded twenties (or luck into the kind of wealth that triggers syncophantic personalities to suck up to them), it becomes clear that everything you try to do in the City involves a fight (and I'm not just talking about the days when you get multiple parking tickets, or the late nights when the F Train seems like it's never coming, or the kid behind the Deli counter gives you a sour look when you're counting out singles to pay for that double-digit sandwich on Seventh Avenue). A titanic struggle for survival in a high rise hellscape. And everyone is on edge, ready to pop off at any moment because they've reached their limit of being beaten down.
OK. The real answer is that The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that regulates vendors at its facilities is a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than Mos Eisley. Clearly George Lucas had experienced one too many visits to JFK. Or was it LaGuardia?
Well, the analysis at the engineering level was correct. Problem is, the engineers weren't allowed to confirm it. That was a management decision, made on the grounds that, "There's nothing we can do".
The novel was terrible, at least as art. But it was great fun. I used to think Hubbard was trying to emulate those stories we read in the pulp scifi mags of the 50s and 60s. Now I think that was just his usual style. It _was_ big. And long. The radio advert campaign for it at the time emphasized that. In the end, it really was the summer long scifi marathon in a single book they promised.
Travolta's treatment is very faithful to the book, and the FX isn't that bad for the time. The most memorable parts of the story are the humor at the expense of the aliens, and their self-destructive decadence. Kind of a mirror of our own place and time. The movie got those elements exactly right.
It's the addiction of staff officer ranks (mostly Colonels, Generals), as well as senior agency executives and politicians, to paper hardcopies. They all want their briefing materials printed out so they can scribble in the margins and look important (and maybe share them with financial advisors and donors). Although some enlisted ranks have had authorized access to this stuff in the past (Chelsea Manning), in many cases they're downloading and printing it out for their superiors. Can't have these VIPs doing their own print jobs, can we? The lot of them should be fired as at best too stupid and lazy to serve.
I _was_ a lawyer for a decade before going into tech. One of the good habits I acquired in practice was making sure to read all the way through every document, no matter how boring it got. I agree with you completely, except the article isn't just exaggerated: it's borderline FUD. Regulation is necessary because too many humans find self-regulation in the public interest too hard. The problem is that writing effective, targeted, regulations is also hard, and often beyond the capacity of those given the power to do it. Even when they mean well (never a given, as evidenced by a sordid history of self-sealing and favoritism), it often gets mucked up.
One intriguing line of analysis in _The Dawn of Everything_ is how people in early settlements would often just pack up and leave when their leaders started acting like a*holes (think human sacrifices in Mesoamerica). That reminded me of how many citizens abandoned frontier towns during the late Roman period, often helpfully directing advancing northern tribes where the wealthiest villas might be found.
Maybe the peoples in earlier times were simply less willing to put up with being bullied and exploited. Relatively low numbers and abundant unsettled land gave them more options that many humans have had since. The Nile watershed was a wonder of ancient agricultural engineering: it was also the largest slave society up to that point in history.
The salary range in a professional track does not _have_ to be too low. That's a choice, a value judgment, by management. Some companies do things differently. In at least one company I know, the professional track runs parallel to the management track: engineers can earn as much or more than senior managers, architects as much as directors. It's all up to whether the organization really values the services it's independent contributors provide. Sadly, many companies are not only indifferent, but hostile to the whole concept: playing at cost reduction theater and outsourcing to satisfy the avarice of simpleton investors. Bottom line is that tech pros need to take charge of their own futures and avoid the latter kinds of companies like the plague, when they have a choice. People need to make a habit of asking questions about professional compensation structures during interviews.
As someone who has owned or rented homes heated with oil, gas and heat pumps (the latter two in the SE US), my experience has been that the gas and heat pump systems cost about the same same to operate. But when the gas system in our current house had to be replaced about 5 years ago, I went the path of least resistence and got the recommended gas unit. I really regret that decision now, especially given the small difference in installed price. Same with the tankless water heater (although there, gas was all that was available on short notice). The momentum in favor of gas is still enormous, and at least around here strongly influences what installers recommend. Maybe better educated consumers will change that. Unfortunately, I'm going to be stuck with gas into the next decade, with the only consolation being that at least I'm done with oil (the last two oil burners I ran were from the 50s, for steam heat, and cost a fortune to run: one winter in the early 00s about $600 a month).
Something many have advocated for decades. But keep in mind that there are tens of thousands of elected offices in the US, most of them nonpartisan, local positions that cost little to contest: yet it's incredibly hard to find people willing to run. Voter apathy is a huge problem here, in part due to historic voter suppression efforts baked into the system, but the dearth of candidates willing to participate in elections is even more serious. There again, legal discouragements, especially in the most significant races (state and federal legislature, executive), are endemic. Still, too many offices at the local level (town and city council, special district boards) go uncontested: leaving one or the other major party -- or venal representatives of the FIRE sector -- in control to mismanage and misappropriate power in areas directly impacting public life.
What I used to call "grandious" or "pretentious" language when critiquing my kids' college papers. The voice of an FM radio announcer or a politician. For me it has the opposite effect intended: sounding insincere and possibly unreliable.
I subscribed to the NYT and a few magazines like The Atlantic when Kindle originally launched and really enjoyed the experience, but got out of the habit of reading them and dropped those subs long before prices went up. It was "too good to be true" from the beginning, and I think the knowledge it would just become another money pit contributed to my losing interest. Sort of like how that old Saab with its overheating engine helped me get over the allure of car ownership.
When Kindle first came out my kids were just starting to get into reading more, so I wrote a perl script to poll various RSS feed that emailed their own personalized "newsletter" to the Kindle for each of them. It was a fun project, but I don't think they paid it much attention. Eventually the feeds I was using all went defunct or threw so many errors I abandoned it.
Because he was competing with a private military contractor, and the US government is a wholly owned subsidiary of the MIC: or often acts like it is. Customs should have told RSA "no", "this is a private contract dispute", "hire a lawyer and file suit". Of course it was much more than that. Zimmerman put real privacy protecting encryption in the hands of the public, and the Many Eyes (that included state allies and adversaries) couldn't have that. But they needn't have worried: decades on the public is still ignorant about encryption, except as a marketing term, and most have no idea what a key pair is or what to do with it. Fraud around unauthorized access to government and commercial accounts is rampant (you _have_ set up and secured your online identity on your government's social security and revenue collection sites, haven't you?). That could have been prevented by early adoption and distribution of key pairs, alongside a serious public education campaign. Problem is, that would be at cross purposes with the goal of keeping the public uneducatable. Better for them to while away their time watching cable TV or delving into the latest conspiracy theory (pro or con).
Ha! My experience exactly, although I have to admit that this was for personal use at home where my patience is usually thin to non-existent. Docker CE on the home server saved me a lot of aggravation, where podman got me wondering if virtual machines were really that bad... Net effect is that I'm back on docker, plus two vm's I stood up during podman's interregnum.
Well, I _might_ be able to teach an AI how to do effective legal research and writing, or even to do pre and post trial discovery, but representing someone at trial? Not without full immunity from malpractice liability. It would be fun to see how an AI handled cross examination of a hostile witness, or dealt with a response to their hearsay objection like, "res gestae!".
Still, a sophisticated AI could be a real help in transactional legal matters like contracts, real estate, taxes, wills and trusts where boilerplate abounds. As far as grades go, my average in law school was C+ (I'd never seen a blue book before that first final -- in college it was all research papers), but I was also one of the 48% who passed a certain state's bar exam in 1982. So there is hope for those AIs who dream of a future in the legal profession.
Or maybe they'd just wind up as a sysadmin for a Fortune 200 company, and never regret it.
"No longer support writing on papyrus, in favor of more modern vellum based media."
And then, the Dark Ages.
Of course, backwards compatibilty will be maintained: at least to the end of the century?
Digital culture is already so ethereal, fragile, that you have to wonder if millennia from now our descendents may posit this period as another "dark age" because none of what we've generated since the 90s will remain (or be decypherable).
Nothing stops anyone from celebrating a stray (or neighboring) dog's birthday. The difference between a dog and a chair in that context is the dog will wag its tail in an expression of happiness if given a birthday treat. The chair won't. So being able to experience happiness may be an indicator of life. Just watch some young squirrels running and jumping over each other this Spring. That's life.
This is exactly what I'd do if I was still teaching. It's an opportunity to give students a different perspective, while at the same time improving their critical thinking skills. Also, like 80% of what you find on stackoverflow, it could lead to your mastering content that you wouldn't if the their answers could be trusted. It could also help promote an attitude of healthy skepticism towards this kind of tech.
I avoided learning SQL in the client-server training program that got me started in tech back in the late 90s, only to have to learn it on the job during a global ERP deployment a decade later. Should have taken the class, would have meant at least a few less sleepless nights.
A friend had this very same machine, causing me much envy. Meanwhile, I got through college and law school with a government refurbished Underwood that was the polar opposite of portable. By the time I went back for my masters (in history, the law thing didn't take) I was using vde and tex on a Kaypro 1. Those old manual typewriters were great, but editing and formatting with a computer was considerably less fatiguing: unless you had to write your own daisywheel printer driver to get some output. If I'd known how hard that was going to be, I would have stuck with the Underwood. Or maybe looked for a used Selectric.
I think Louis Rossmann said they'd worked on that bill for over 7 years, desperately trying to keep it from being compromised into oblivion. Then, on the eve of passage, the legislature amended away everything that mattered in it by adding an exception big enough to drive a... John Deere tractor through, and the governor (who was part of the process) quickly signed it into law. https://youtu.be/k9kXnm9uW5k . Keywords from the video: "Nicholas Cage Lord of War Supply Chain", "malicious compliance".
... because back in the 70s it was decided that disclosure (a/k/a "transparency") was all we'd ask of private companies (with exceptions, as in, some companies aren't even expected to disclose). Who do you think _actually owns_ the U.S. Congress anyway?
Huh. So basically these guys got access to stuff that thousands of companies and governments who subscribe to Experian already have, but didn't pay for it. Color me outraged.