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It seems you fully consider cars to be an appliance.

Today, manual cars aren't about efficiency. Manuals are about driver engagement and the feeling of connectedness with the car and with the road. You can think. of it as more of a luxury than a necessity, and that is still a very valid argument for manual transmissions in road cars, especially those designed to be driver's cars.

Driving a manual car isn't about efficiency. It is about driver engagement. Yes, you can row your own gears with paddle shifters, but no automatic will ever give you the same kind of engagement or connectedness with the car as a manual with three pedals will.

But yes, if there is a smoking gun for the death of the manual in America, it would be our crumbling, congested roads and absurdly long daily commutes.

Katie's New Face 8 years ago

While I agree with you that stories about the plight of the underprivileged are certainly underreported, I strongly disagree with you that most of the hype around this story is due to race. Face transplant is a very new, highly risky, and highly experimental medical procedure that only recently became viable. There is an extremely non-trivial amount of scientific research, R&D, and funding that has gone into developing this procedure, and this story is nothing short of groundbreaking, regardless of the race of the patient.

For this particular instance, I think your claim is essentially the inverse of #whataboutism.

Katie's New Face 8 years ago

If you want to go that route, then you'll need to also remove the following instruments:

* Ropes or any kind of cords that can be used for hanging * Blades of any kind (kitchen knives, scissors, box cutters, utility knives, etc.) * Anything that can be sharpened into a point that can puncture flesh * Any kind of chemical substance that can be deadly in sufficient quantities. * Any bodies of water where one can drown * Any accessible point that is high enough for one to jump off of.

The list goes on. Eventually, the environment that is left would basically be a padded room in a psychiatric hospital in a straightjacket.

Kindly do yourself a favor and re-read Zeller's last words in its entirety. While yes, his attacker's actions are utterly despicable, and the experience in no doubt has been more traumatizing to him than we could imagine. At the same time, Zeller also goes into great details about how nobody has really been able to support and help him recover from that trauma.

On his relationships, he discusses how he was never really able to open up to his significant others about what he was going through: "So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever been able to talk about with anyone."

On the doctors he has seen: "I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was."

On his family: "I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they're dead—one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week."

"I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me."

And there's plenty more. The vast struggles that Zeller faced and described are not inconsistent with the points that @DoreenMichele is discussing.

I think people are missing the point that one of the reasons why Duplex exists is that there are many businesses such as restaurants that do not offer some kind of online service for booking or reserving a service, and the only interface they offer is via phone. The main purpose of Duplex is to make things more convenient for people do not want to go through the hassle of interacting with an establishment via the phone, in which case, they can have Duplex handle making the call and being on hold on their behalf. If more businesses offered online services that are convenient for customers, then there would be less use for a service like Duplex.

If Waze's police and red light camera indications cause more people to comply the law while driving, isn't that already better than not having this feature at all?

result is mass deaths and injury

Do you have some hard evidence that shows that most traffic accidents are caused by people not complying with speed limits vs. people being inattentive, people under the influence of drugs or alcohol, people making invalid turns, people slamming on their brakes but the driver behind them is unable to react in time, etc.?

The notion of "speed kills" is not always correct. If everyone on the highway is driving above the speed limit, then driving at the speed limit and slower than the flow of traffic would actually become a cause of traffic and increase the risk of a collision.

It's not named after the sky. It's named after the God of the Sky, which doesn't bother me any more than other planetary bodies being named after deities of couriers, beauty, war, thunder, agriculture, ocean, the underworld, and so on.

The main reasons to rename Uranus is 1) consistency and 2) the puns. Either name it Caelus to be consistent with the naming convention used for the other planets or name it Ouranos to be closer to its Greek spelling and pronunciation.

I prefer (1) because the current situation is similar to having a codebase where all class names are PascalCase but there's this one class name in Upper_Snake_Case.

Can we officially rename Uranus to Caelus? Uranus (more accurately, Ouranos) is a Greek god. Besides Earth, all the other planets are named after Roman gods, thus Uranus should be named Caelus to be consistent.

I believe mywittyname is specifically referring to the LinkedIn profile pages that are publicly visible without requiring a login and is not claiming that all LinkedIn's data is public. Thus, the question is why doesn't LinkedIn simply hide all profile data behind user authentication?

That's not a valid comparison. Different websites can and already charge different amounts of money for their services. However, we do not have Premium Luxury Highways where rich people can drive their Ferraris at 100 MPH while regular plebs sit in traffic all day.

Liberal western politics are based on individual liberty and free will.

However, mainstream science maintains that we're neither individuals nor have free will.

You are conflating government control and social interactions. Liberal western politics is based on individual liberty and free will in the context of government policy. Such policies are focused on reducing the control that governments have on individual rights and not how individuals are influenced by other individuals within societies, which is the topic that Homo Deus and Sapiens focus on.

To be fair, this is not the entirety of C++ but C++ following the Google C++ Style Guide, which limits use to a more manageable subset of the language. For instance, exceptions, which can be especially hairy in a language with manual memory management, is prohibited. Take a look at the Fuchsia codebase. The code is really quite clean and readable.

This coding style is standard practice for Win32 API development.

Do you have a public style guide that indicates this?

I worked at Microsoft, and while there are teams that (very unfortunately) went with this "diamond" style of error handling, code written in the CNF (Cutler Normal Form) style, such as the kernel code, use gotos and a central cleanup point at the end of the function, which is also the same style used by the Linux kernel: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

The "diamond" style hinders readability, especially when you have many levels of indentation). While it may be a practice adopted by many people, that is does not necessarily mean that it is good style. Even Steve McConnell's Code Complete, a book published by Microsoft Press, recommends early returns over deeply nested if statements for error handling: https://books.google.com/books?id=LpVCAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA764&ots...

Unfortunately, the Win32 API is full of technical debt, many of which cannot be repaid due to backwards compatibility reasons. Given it is likely most application code written against Win32 is in C++, the ideal approach would be to follow an object-oriented style and use destructors and RAII rather than cleanup functions, but that is not the world we live in.

The design of the Win32 API should not be used as guidelines for good coding practices or even API design. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading "The Worst API Ever Made": https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0029.html.

Similarly, our appendices, which are useless to begin with, occasionally decides to become infected, swell, and possibly burst, threatening our lives, just because biology a long time ago decided "this is the way to go."

Please provide some evidence that the majority of Google X projects are "poorly done."

Self-driving cars -> Not only has it become its own company (Waymo) but it also motivated many other companies to tackle the same problem and develop self-driving tech of its own.

Life Sciences, Google Contact Lenses -> Now its own company, Verily.

Google Brain -> I quote Astro Teller "It would be fair to say Google Brain (now called the Neural Network Project) is producing in value for Google something that would be comparable to the total costs of Google X — just that one thing we’ve spun out." https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/googles-captain-of...

Hard science and engineering problems take non-trivial amounts of resources to solve. How many start-ups are tackling the kinds of problems that X is trying to solve?

Except Powershell isn't a real shell in the same way that cmd or any of the POSIX shells are. It's a REPL for a language running on the .NET VM. I'm neither a fan of the language nor having to wait several seconds due to the latency of having to start the .NET VM when you start posh.