Re: Why municipal?
I suspect it comes down to investment. It costs a lot of money to set up. And no matter the good will, poor areas just won't be able to afford it.
3265 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2011
" If it was all you vi users would be touch typists. I know a lot of devs, I can't think of any others who can."
Touch typing doesn't work for `(::x->*d)()` and the innumerable other squiggles languages insist on. It's also handicapped by dodgy autoinsert implementations.
The arrow keys, page up, page down, etc... are all their on the numeric keypad. You don't need them - unless some app insists on being pissy. (RESPECT THE NUMLOCK!) Get rid of them and there is space for the function keys down the side where the left hand can curl over. But, to be honest, I wouldn't care even if my keyboard was wider still.
Actually, it's Alt+2 in my editor, and has been since at least the 90s, because duplicating the current line is such a useful feature.
One of the things I still lament is the decision to move function keys to the top of the keyboard, rather than keeping them down the left hand side. Up there, they're out of easy reach and that restricts them to less frequent bindings.
What this shows is that Google isn't quite as irreplaceable as Facebook. I think Microsoft's Brad Smith was saying Bing would be happy to take up the slack, if Google walked away from the market. And there's probably truth in that - another search engine could be found. Block Facebook and there is nobody in the wings. And, as Facebook has shown, it doesn't depend that seriously on news; whereas Google failing to return news would be a much bigger dent in the service's functionality, and perhaps an existential threat to the Chocolate Factory.
I was about to have the same rant. The free market fundamentalists are classic bullies. When they're doing well, everybody should stand on their own laurels and government should be as small as possible.
But as soon things get tough, they're straight to government crying, "Pay for our R&D; subsidise our factories. It'll create jobs for all those people we've told you not to look after and who we said we'd create jobs for if you just cut our taxes (although, in reality, we used the cash to fund a share buyback so our directors' options became more valuable). BTW, did we say that last bit out loud?"
Social media is a tool. We can point at the harm. But we can also find good - for example, a woman tweeting a picture of a school meal provided by a business that's pocketed half the payment. In fact, the whole campaign Rashford has run.
Even the harm is dependent on context. Resisting a legitimate election in the U.S. - bad. Protesting a corrupt election in Lithuania or opposing Putin - good. (It's telling that Myanmar has shut down the internet and that China strongly polices what people say about Winnie the Pooh.)
So regulating it is not like regulating asbestos. It's more like regulating knives or alochol. I'm not afraid of bankrupting firms that manufacture lead water pipes. But I wouldn't want to put fertilizer manufactures out of business just because it can be used to make bombs. Social media is closer to the latter. We need to find way of minimising the harm done while preserving much of the good.
Maybe I'm missing something, but "type address in the box marked 'address', and search in the box marked 'search'" doesn't sound all that complicated, and isn't something I've ever had trouble explaining to anyone.
"So you definitely typed it in the address box?"
"What kind of moron do you take me for?! I know the different between the address box and the search box by now, and it's still not working."
"Send me a screenshot."
*looks at screenshot*
"You've typed it in the search box."
Users have a goal: they want to access a resource. DNS addresses, like IP addresses, have become behind the scene gubbins that they don't really care about.
"I don't think a government more competent than one containing Boris Johnson, Gavin Williamson, Mat Hancock and Liz Truss is a "hypothetical utopia" we can only dream of."
And what's amazing is they've achieved all this incompetence while leaving MVP Chris Grayling on the backbenches. You'd think any government without Grayling (reminder: he's a man who lost an election rigged in his favour) would be two orders of magnitude more competent than one with him.
Well that's altitude control solved. Heat to the bottom: melt your way lower. Heat to the top: melt your way higher. Normal running means tacking up and down.
It probably works in the horizontal plane, too. Heat to the front: melt your way forwards. Etc...
I haven't thought about any pressure issues.
It doesn't matter if the code is verified if, despite all the thrashings, the standard it's verified against misunderstands the problem or is incorrect. Because an oversight or omission in the specification means the verification won't be worth the bold font its printed in.
Come on, we've all been round the block enough to see code perfectly implement a spec that contains a flaw no one has recognised. It happens even in standards that have been thrashed out by field leaders in international standards bodies.
And, also, what you're asking for requires management to respect IT and give them the time.
"I'd still rather a drone fell on me than a helicopter."
If you're dead, you're dead. It doesn't matter if it was a 13kg drone or a 11 tonne chinook that did it.
And drones are demonstrably more likely to drop out the sky - because the pilots have less training, easy access to a kill switch, and aren't sitting in the beast putting their life on the line.
And because drones are cheap, we're likely to see far more deployed far more often. So overall, the risk to bystanders from drones, while small, will probably end up greater than the risk from helicopters.That said, drones will probably still be safer overall - because when a helicopter crashes, there are guaranteed humans in the accident.
It was aquabraking, not lithobraking. And I don't know how big the pond was,* but if it was the back garden variety then the operator had a pretty good aim and the military should higher them.
*I've googled it, and it's bigger than a cul-de-sac. This is where too much information spoils a joke.
It was the best of audits, it was the worst of audits, it was the audit of wisdom, it was the audit of foolishness, it was the audit of belief, it was the audit of incredulity, it was the audit of Light, it was the audit of Darkness, it was the audit of hope, it was the audit of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to court, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest auditors insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
In my limited observation, it's because where parking is available it is for one car. But there's probably two adults with a car and possibly a teenager and/or post-university student each with a car. We've organised the UK so that most working adults needs one.
Disclaimer: I don't have a car.
"Question, though, how do you convert the fusion end products into electrical current?"
That's the easiest task of the lot - you just capture all the neutrinos...
For pedants: yes, you can produce electrons - via reverse electron capture or neutrino absorption; it's a form of beta decay where a neutrino slams into a proton and converts it into a neutron and an electron. You see it in astrophysical environments, especially supernova.
*cough* <details></details> *cough*
:-P
But, in answer to the original question, consider something as a simple as an upvote: javascript can notify the server and tweak a text string in the page. The alternative is waiting for the server to rebuild the page (with any subsequent changes because it didn't record the state of the page when you fetched it) and then transmit it wholesale back to you, and then the browser then flickers because it's not the same page and the browser doesn't attempt to work out whether there are tiny changes or it's a 100% different.
Even if a truly excellent alternative to Android existed, history suggests the world would carry on using Android. (Look at that list of failed mobile OSes. Or look at the desktop and Windows.) Android has inertia.
And, as an app developer, two OSes are fine, thank you very much. If you're gonna faff around with another OS then I'm going to wait till it's an established platform with a clear pool of users safe in the knowledge that (1) you won't go all in but will also offer other android devices; and (2) that users will likely recoil from the non-android devices, even if they're cheaper, because they won't have all their apps; and that (3) every non tier-1 developer is likely to make the same calculation so I know I won't miss the boat.
Government intervention in the market changes that equation. This goes two ways: either Huawei collapses as a mobile manufacturer or they make it work. And, as a dev, I can see that straight away so I'm already paying more attention than I would if it was another upstart nerd fantasy. Even if China banned Android in China, they'd probably still be selling Android in the west and it would take a good while for China-OS to make inroads. But if Biden keeps up the pressure on Huawei, they have no choice but to make it work. And if they're succeeding, and play their cards right, other manufacturers might join them and try and throw off the Google yoke.
"...it is hard to see how it can be known to have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit..."
Well, it's Marie Kondo moments are what suggests there might be a Planet 9. (Also, it's pretty steeply inclined so it won't have to do much cleaning.)
But clearing out an orbit amounts to a mass limit without anybody having to say exactly what mass a planet has to have. (Remember Pluto is less than a fifth of the mass of the moon.) A super-earth is going to make the grade.
Well, this planet is ~3500 times more massive than earth, and is presumably around the diameter of Jupiter. Planet 9 is expect to be 5-10 the mass of the earth.
And while not quite heavy enough to ignite deuterium, this planet should still be bubbling like a witch's cauldron, which helps when you're looking in the near infrared. Whereas our planet 9 is probably icy and, if so, may be covered in soot.
Moreover we found this planet by looking in on another system. The region of interest was maybe a hundred milliarcseconds in diameter. We're trying to find planet 9 by looking out from our solar solar across the whole fucking sky.
But, apart from all that, I don't see why we haven't found planet 9 every bit as easily...
"...super-Jovian planet in the sort of a highly distant orbit proposed for Planet 9..."
It's HD 106906 b that is eleven Jovian masses - bordering on brown dwarf.
Our proposed planet 9 is a super-earth - thought to be 5-10 times the mass of the earth. That's what makes it especially fascinating - we'll get to see a super-earth close up. The first question being whether it's gaseous or rocky.
"you'll have a hard time to simulate the result of my dropping a ball through it (assuming a proper degree of imprecise and therefore hard-to-model nail positioning on my part)"
If we are allowed to measure your board, then it doesn't matter where you hammer nails. The ball is classical. The nails are classical. The board is classical. We can simulate this to very good approximation with the kind of computing power that is being deployed here. TBH, shining an array of lasers pointers would give us a good indication; there's no beam splitters doubling the number of balls nor constructive and destructive interference of these balls - we only have to worry about classical spin, air resistance and frictional losses.
Anyway, Scott's thoughts were this one doesn't have a currently foreseeable use but Google's was done using a practical quantum computer.
Cross platform development. I might fire up my "late 2014" mac mini for a day (good case) or a couple of weeks (bad case) every 2-3 months. Most of the time, it's switched off.
Amazon aren't the only people to offer this, so I had already looked at equivalent services trying to work out whether they were a better deal than buying a new one - as mine won't run the latest OS. If I spend £700 on a new one, instead of spending £250/year renting, then it'll be the third year before I squeeze a profit. And I'll be on three year old hardware, rather than the newest.
I think the usage was coined long before we knew about the big bang, that space was expanding or even that there were galaxies, and before we knew atoms had nuclei (remember the plum pudding model?) let alone that nuclei could fuse.
It's probably because of where absorption lines are in the spectrum. So we looked at the sun and saw lines for hydrogen, helium and other "chemical metals". (In fact the helium line was initially though to be a line for sodium - a metal.) It was only later we discovered non-chemical metals were much more abundant.
And it remains the case that most stars are hydrogen, helium and rounding errors. (Yes, that's because of the big bang, but you're looking at it backwards - if the big bang had produced a different pattern of elements it wouldn't matter provided stars had ended up as we see them today.) And when you look outside stars, helium becomes irrelevant; you find ionised hydrogen (HII), atomic hydrogen (HI), molecular hydrogen (H2), free electrons, magnetic fields and pretty-coloured soot.