Spectacle is not the only motive for journalism like this. Speculation about presidential conflicts of interest is valuable and relevant to national discourse because the public's reaction to their existence directly impacts their power.
This tool reminds me of the advice once given to NaNoWriMo participants (National Novel-Writing Month, super fun if you've never tried it in November). If you can't think of anything to write, just repeat "Ninja. Ninja. Ninja…" over and over again until you think of something. Just be sure to get words out and keep your mind-to-fingers connection nimble when first-drafting.
That's the point of extradition agreements. If we're worried that Brazil's Senate has passed morally incompatible laws and wants to extradite folks from the US, then we won't agree. The State Department is (or tries to be) on top of any foreign legislation that would change our agreements.
Agreed. As a former MS-focused engineer in a previous life, I was constantly surprised by how many executables just continued to work 20 years after authorship. It's a different set of tradeoffs than other OSs have made, but a really remarkable one.
Lots of great advice in this thread. But as someone with a moderate fear of flying who travels occasionally for work, one analogy has helped me reason through my fear. At speed, an airplane is dealing with air as if it were a boat in water. The air you're flying through is as thick and powerful at speed, and turbulence is nothing more than ripples in the water. The air is literally capable of lifting the gigantic vehicle that you're in. It's way harder for the plane to resist the thick-air than it is to keep on flying. Keeping this in mind has helped me worry far less about periodic disturbances.
While I support any effort to improve the situation of anyone being denied communication with their family, lowering the bullshit vendor costs of such a system seems like a cynical approach to what should be a human rights issue. The free market by definition can't operate on a population of a captured sub-population that can't weaponize their own capital to buy better rates.
We need to elect politicians that recognize the horrors inflicted upon incarcerated folks and their families and provide communication with family as a cheaply-provided right, not as a strange sub-contracted service provided within the silly prison economy.
I would second this. Enabling your child's interests takes observation and work.
One of the more surprising things I've discovered as a recent parent is how prominent tablets are as a distraction or learning tool.
I'm no exception. We bought our son a cheap, bulletproof Amazon Fire tablet, ratcheted the parental controls to the roof, and let him watch videos or play with it when he requests it (and use it as a helpful distraction when he gets bored in restaurants.)
I'm split on how to approach this. On one hand, I would have done anything to have this magical infinite learning device when I found myself bored as a child, but I also recognize that the content on it is more often than not designed for addiction. Our son is not yet old enough to understand even rough warnings of addictive behaviors, so we're kind of watch-and-waiting. We limit screen time per day, but as he gets older, and gets access to a web browser, I'm not sure how I feel about those limits in relation to traditional information sources.
While a valid point, setting up a merchant account also imbues the merchant with some trust properties that are not available with a cryptocurrency wallet. Namely, the ability to procedural and legal recourse if something goes wrong with any new transaction.
While I agree that a problem is exposed by these findings, let's not judge college grads by their ability to judge how well they fit employers' privately-held expectations of an entry-level employee. Companies suck at training, balk at its costs, but lament its effects on the sourcing of young employees.
Let's not forget the most important thing that I personally resisted for over a decade of my working life before legitimately giving it a try: allow yourself the opportunity to get 8 hours of sleep per night. You won't always get it, especially if you're a parent, on-call, or a thousand other reasons. But I went from being a person who "only needs 5-6 hours of sleep" but was always running out of time in the workday to someone actively seeking out new challenges because my work (and personal) time were spent so much more efficiently and pleasantly by default. Seriously, if I could go back in time and slap my mid-twenties self for ignoring this, I would.
Thanks for the explanation. As someone who in a past life developed Java systems (post-2006) for a variety of targets, I was never super clear on what Java EE's value proposition was or how it differed from frameworks that didn't require a separate install.
I now gather that it is a collection of helpful packages constituting a framework, but distributed separately from mainline Java core packages.
Initially, I didn't care for the few books of hers that we received as baby shower gifts. But after multiple readings, I've started to see them as not trying for Seuss-like verbal gymnastics, but instead acting as creative prompts for parents to act as silly as possible. Hamming it up while reading is highly encouraged.
Oooooh, snuggle puppy of mine! I literally just read this book twenty minutes ago before sending my kiddo off to school. They are pretty great, if a bit different than the rhyming books I remember from my childhood.
One of my favorite electrical engineering professors gave incredibly well-planned lectures via overhead transparencies. He was quick to adjust the pace of an individual lecture to the audience, but also provided his presentations as PDF downloads. His presentations were supplemental to the textbooks, but served as amazing base notes. In his classes, I found myself writing prompts for further review and stray observations, rather than attempting to summarize as the lecture progressed.
Having worked on online learning applications since then, I still think that his was the best system for transferring complex knowledge in a classroom setting.
Similarly concerning about cries of "witch hunts" in the media is that the term originated when a powerful group assaulted individuals with little power to distract from their own shortcomings, injuring or killing them in the process.
That metaphor is problematic in the case of the founder of a company facing charges of employee sexual harassment. At worst, let's use "sensationalist" or "disingenuous" coverage.
I totally agree. Mr. Fowler's article lays out a good case for ORMs being a good, leaky abstraction with manholes for diving deeper when necessary. That implies that we can't, as application developers, use it as a black box, because underlying knowledge is important. Until someone comes up with a magic algebra for paving over the details SQL, we're stuck mitigating or dealing with its realities.
One of the things I've recently prioritized is the ability to run arbitrary queries (generally read-only) at some sort of REPL prompt, for debugging and investigative purposes. ORMs and their offshoots offer a great deal of support in that area because you can converse with an ORM in a domain-specific way without dropping into raw SQL. That can be a big advantage.
It is relatively common to hear pre-roll advertising, and sometimes hosts do speak too slowly. A very niche solution to the problem is a popular iOS podcast player with a connected web service called Overcast (after downloading the app, you have access to a browser player with similar features.)
It approaches the pre-roll ad problems by having prominent "skip forward" and "skip backward" 30 seconds buttons, so usually two to three quick taps will bring me back to the content. It solves the speech speed problem by offering pitch-adjusted playback speed controls (so no-one sounds like a chipmunk.)
I assume those can be found in other podcast clients on other platforms, but I'm not familiar with them.
Wow. I remember playing the original almost 20 years ago on a PC that really didn't support it at a terrible framerate. The fact that I can play it now in a browser window on a netbook without it breaking a sweat is astonishing.
I agree that it would be neat, but I fear that the reason only big banks and credit card processors have attempted to dabble in this space is because you've just described a bank. Building one of those carries a whole host of regulations, even if the goal is a very simple, limited set of interactions.
Even a pilot has to operate within the constraints of the law or be sanctioned. They have operational authority to do pretty much anything while a plane is in flight, but that doesn't shield their airline from the legal consequences of forcefully pulling a man from a seat in order to shuttle airline employees to their next destination.
I was introduced to this site by a colleague, and it is indeed a good place to see thoughts explored. While I sometimes disagree with the conclusion reached by the author, the tone puts a great deal of emphasis on humility and empathy. It's a very welcome place to immerse myself in alternate views to my own.
My first thought was that this would be an interesting protocol for calling someone.
I often receive more annoying robocalls on my personal phone than welcomed calls from unknown numbers. My usual solution is to quickly google the number to see if any scam reports are available and then quickly answer if not.
But I might start the practice of texting ahead of calling someone unfamiliar with a quick message like “This is John Smith's phone. I'll be calling shortly.” That way, I would ensure that my call was picked up or at least given the priority they prefer.
Or maybe I'm just a weirdo that worries too much about the consequences of actually answering robocalls :)
This is a fair point. I don't agree with your conclusion, though.
I have felt outrage against specific policies in the past. The news media has expressed outrage against specific policies in the past. But political inertia, for better and worse, was a thing that we could rely upon to temper the public whims of any particular commander-in-chief. It meant that meaningful change required constant attention and guidance. But it also meant that the actions of any individual were unlikely to crater our democracy.
The new president has now shown in both tone and action that he intends to directly manifest some of the most extreme positions promised to his supporters. This, in the face of overwhelming ethical arguments, public opinion, and systemic protections that oppose them.
This is not a threat to the local status quo, one which our political system has grown to evolve slowly but meaningfully over election cycles. It is a threat to the maximal status quo, in which we can proudly identify ourselves as Americans because we believe that we aren't perfect, but we're working towards that ideal.
True, and I don't want to jump the overprotective-parent gun here, but what I think is worth keeping an eye on with these videos is how they are not an underrepresented group expressing their creativity, but rather a very well represented group targeting a vulnerable audience. There are no easy lines to draw, but I think it does bear further scrutiny and discussion (especially from folks used to defending forms of media from demonization.)
I love your description of the game, and felt the same way. But what interests me more, as an occasional Nintendo system-owner, is that this game provides a nostalgic, but limited on-ramp to full-fledged console or mobile games. If this game does its job, I suspect it will remind folks of Mario and their fond memories of their first platforming experience, and draw them to purchase a 3DS, Wii U, or (more likely) Switch. I'm kind of thumb-upping Nintendo for not releasing previous games on iOS because this approach mines nostalgia while providing a better baseline for gameplay amongst folks willing to seek out a solid mobile/TV experience.
I downloaded the demo today (have yet to buy the full game, but will likely give it a shot) and was very impressed. I didn't realize the internet connectivity was a requirement, which is a minor bummer, but I was gratified to find a small, focused game whose first three levels hinted at the challenges that may (or may not, again just a demo player) be hidden within.
I'm curious to find out how conversion from Pokemon Go -> Pokemon Sun/Moon games and Mario Run -> Mario Switch plays out, because both mobile games have succeeded at getting me more interested in investing time and money into their big-brother console relatives.
I had thought this was the case as well, but just tried signing up for a throwaway google account from the US browser homepage and it seemed to go through without a phone number or alternative email.
Neat article! Coming from a Haskell background in my first post-college job, I also modeled several problems using Haskell types and later translated them into C++.
It felt a little silly at first, but really did help clarify my understanding of the problem domain and let me play around with composing and operating on data structures very quickly in an interactive REPL. Once I was happy with the data structures and had a good understanding of the most complicated operations over them, it was a simple task to build the analogous C++ classes.
Also possible in implementing such a system are a variety of accidents or abuses that may unfairly benefit or harm different groups. "Seeding" the central database from the existing patchwork of forms, licenses, decisions, databases and other records would be inherently messy and even a quasi-legal database could cause a bureaucratic nightmare once any process starts depending upon it.
To be fair, those have been very effective in keeping my non-techie family members from accidentally installing malware because they'll at least check with me when presented with a scary system dialog. And it hasn't impacted my own use other than the occasional extra clicks. In a locked-down corporate setting, I can see how that could be maddening, though.