kire456

I am guessing, for the same reason I can have a picknick in the local park with a few friends and discuss intimate matters. This takes place in public because that is convenient, but I still don't appreciate random passers-by interjecting their opinion. It's fine to listen in though, if you're sitting close by. Most people intuitively understand this.

Online, this intuition sometimes disappears, and people feel that the fact that something is readable to them, implies it is meant for them to interact with.

It wasn't like that when I visited a few years ago. We just booked a hotel, got on a plane and went there. I can't find this requirement on their COVID page either. Do you have a link?

Testing :)

You are advocating willful destruction of property. Property that is neither yours nor FTDI's. This is illegal, and broadly considered bad taste.

A counterfeiter commiting crimes against FTDI does not excuse FTDI committing crimes against a third party (i.e. the consumer). The world being safer without the counterfeit products also does not excuse the FTDI destroying things that aren't theirs. The justice system being ineffective at addressing counterfeiters is also no excuse for FTDI to take matters into their own hands. Vigilante justice is usually illegal.

Programmers make mistakes. A bug in your counterfeit detection code may end up destroying legit products. In addition, you can not be sure destroying a product will be safe - if the chip is in a medical device, you might be killing someone. The entire idea of destroying a product without explicitly being told to do so is fraught with peril.

You deal in false binaries. The third, imo correct, option is for FTDI to design software that works correctly with their own product, and spend no effort on the counterfeits - neither to get them to work correctly, nor to brick them on purpose.

A fourth option, if you want to spend some effort on something other than destruction of property, is to take option three, and also alert the user that they are using a counterfeit chip with unpredictable behaviour, and in your airplane example, advise the user they should probably not take off. If you want to be pro-consumer, this is a better way to go about it than smashing their stuff.

From the consumer's perspective, they had a working device, and a firmware update bricked it on purpose. It is possibly out of warranty, in which case they end up footing the bill (or experiencing frustration) for replacement and downtime. It takes Olympic levels of mental gymnastics to view that as 'pro-consumer', imo.

The OS vendor could "destroy" you by making changes to the OS that affect your app, right? The Old New Thing[0] is full of stories of apps that exploited undocumented implementation details of the OS, and were surprised that those aspects were in fact changed in a later OS version.

To its credit (though not everyone agrees), MS has spent a lot of effort making compatibility shims, basically doing other people's work for them, but they have no such obligation.

0. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

Please just let me opt out of this cookie consent idiocy.

This addon [1] will let you do just that. You can configure it to tell all sites to slurp as much of your data as they want, if that's what you prefer.

How are we making anything better with all these cookie consent pop ups?

"We" are giving people back control over what happens with information about them. This is widely considered a good idea, though perhaps not near you ;) The pop-up part can be automated by software if you prefer a one-size-fits-all configuration, as described above.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

I am quite turned off by the following passage near the top of this page:

bits of configs can't be reused. For example, while YAML, in theory, supports reusing/including bits of the config (they call it anchors), some software like Github Actions doesn't support it.

I use YAML configuration for Home Assistant all the time, and the includes work just fine. This article is off to a really weak start by saying "config files can not have X, because well they can just fine but arbitrary software Y doesn't support it". Especially damning because the proposed solution is to embed a whole other programming language within your program! If you can change the code of the consuming program, then just add support for imports, instead of adding a Python dependency.

The #[non_exhaustive] feature makes me unreasonably happy. It is a problem I hadn't even realized might occur, and the solution is very elegant, forcing depending code to be sufficiently general.

From a non-US perspective, I find it highly surprising that having children and wanting to care for them is framed as a deviant "personal choice" rather than something most humans do that is very normal and expected.

Do you honestly think making people choose between raising children and having gainful employment is normal and acceptable?

To answer your question, yes, being a parent is a normal part of life and society should be accomodating to the needs of parents, to the extent that is possible. (In fact, I struggle to see why working somewhere else than your designated office for a few hours a week would be a 'privilege' if the particulars of the job allow for it. I get the impression that bosses that disallow this are on a power trip and do not have the best interests of their workers, and thus their company, in mind.)

I really don't get the time picker design that basically works as two long comboboxes side by side. Especially the minute picker requires far too much scrolling/swiping for what it's worth.

I much prefer the Android dialog, with a clock face that allows me to select the right time with two clicks [1]. Am I alone in this, and is it hated by all and thus ignored in other OSes? Is it patented and thus unavailable for anyone but Google? I don't get it.

[1] https://en.proft.me/media/android/android_time_picker_dialog...

Your entire first paragraph as written conveys that the situation can not be changed, and the victim must change themself. This, in my opinion, is fatalist.

Please clarify what you mean if you find you have been misunderstood instead of getting angry and assuming malice.

I know several people in my tiny part of academia alone, whose eminence is well established, and who would not much change this by telling colleagues a certain individual is impossible to work with. I agree that it would take a vindictive mind to do so, but I am asking you to explain the facts any other way:

Firstly, my eminent and influential PhD supervisor had let it be widely known that they thought I was an unpleasant person, impossible to work with, fundamentally stupid, and that I definitely shouldn’t be doing a doctorate.

I know no decent people who would say this about someone in a professional setting, let alone write it down and send it to many people. Also, no honest assessment of someone's academic skills can include the words "fundamentally stupid" if they are able to get into a PhD program, right?

Yeah stuff like that happen, have and will, (...) good luck fighting that

Fatalism like the kind you suggest adds nothing to the discussion, and indeed to the academic community. It allows bad actors to keep acting badly. An article like this might motivate someone in power to examine whether this kind of conduct occurs in their institution. I don't know about you, but I see a positive expected value.

And I am not sure what you mean by the other side of the story. She has positive feedback from another supervisor, if the article is to be believed, so isn't the probable explanation a difference of personalities? And is there really any non-pride-or-ego-related reason to try and prevent someone not just from working with you, but in the wider community of which you are part? I can not interpret that behaviour in any way other than malice.

Let me pose this unfair question back at you. Are you willing to pay the price for providing an alternate means of sky observation at a scale suitable for astronomy, and for cleaning up the debris that might result from expiration of, or collisions between, tens of thousands of commercial satellites?

You are implying that launching many commercial (American) satellites is the best, or even a good, solution to the problem of many people not having what you consider adequate internet. Moreover, apparently this problem is so urgent and the solution so perfect that you feel the need to chastise these scientists for even expressing concern. I don't think you are approaching this discussion in a fair manner.

I can't speak for where you live, but being a student is a full-time job here.

And your last statement makes no sense. If you don't expect students to work after work, then don't follow it up with the remark that you'd see them jobless.

It is a nitpick for sure, but I am still amazed that a machine like this, obviously designed to be the best and look (and cost) the part, comes with a measly 1 year warranty out of the box. It takes away from the feeling that Apple has confidence in the product, imo.

For reference, European regulations will force them to upgrade that for free to at least 2 years, which is deemed a 'normal life time'.

Not parent, but Javascript enables a lot of nasty business and often slows pages down on my not-so-fast work PC, so I disable it. If a website has a good reason to need it (e.g. apps like Google Docs), it gets whitelisted. Typically, one doesn't need a script for displaying text and filling forms.

Let's reverse the question: the task "map this text input to a list of links" could be done in 1998 with no scripts, why is it dependent on JS in 2017?

I was once a "true beginner", having been forced to use basic terminal commands in school and having decided to get a raspberry pi and shove Raspbian on it for laughs. There is no GUI over ssh from Windows unless you already know what you're doing. In that context, accidentally opening emacs is bewildering :)

I would have to disagree about (1). The right to be forgotten is quite important in preventing criminals from being punished twice (first by the law and then by random vigilantes). This fosters reintegration into society, which is considered an important part of our punitive system, perhaps even its primary goal.

In my opinion, this is also far beyond the "good" free speech (as in, free statement of opinion and political dissent) and into the realm of trying purposefully to do damage, by using speech in bad faith, which I think should not be free at all. Then again, e.g. cursing at police officers seems to be legal in the US as well, so I guess this is a cultural difference :)

Not really a fair comparison. For editing config files I often have to go to man pages to find out what the syntax is for the things I want (and sometimes, where to find the file). Especially if editing bash/zsh.rc, there is no hope of getting anything done without Google unless you already know how to do it.

Conversely, most group policies I have ever needed were pointed out, including where to find them, after one web search, and their use is extensively documented in the config editor.

That's.. staggering. Thanks for your reply.

Just curious - where I live, traffic going straight has priority over traffic turning or leaving the road in some way. So if the bike lane is to the right of the car lanes, the cars have to yield to bikes if turning right (in fact, they have to yield to pedestrians that cross the side road as well). Is this different in the US? (Am I assuming a bike lane that isn't actually there?)

Fwiw, I followed this course at my university[1]. The 'schedule' and 'setup' links provide an idea of what is treated, and the full book is available[2]. The full course took slightly over six months, so yes, it takes a while :)

1. http://www.icce.rug.nl/edu/ 2. http://www.icce.rug.nl/documents/cplusplus/

I don't connect the "darkness" of the story to the app, no. I do agree that it is not a typical place to put a story like this, and I wonder how the friend feels about having what happened to her used in "your" story of starting a business. Can't really shake the feeling, because of its location, that the story is there to get me to try the app, which seems shifty. Worked, though, and I'm glad I read it since I wasn't aware of the charity.

For my phone it is

    *#*#service#*#*

It did actually, even longer ago[1]. I used Interix for a while, but it required (in my experience) an even greater love for yak shaving than most unices and was eventually scrapped. I'm excited to see whether this new attempt will work.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix

My phone plan (Netherlands) has a data cap of 500 MB. I thought this thread was showcasing an uncommonly generous service provider.

Non-American here: glad to hear they can. Will they, in cases like this, do that by themselves? Or should someone (EFF) appeal this ruling? Or can only the suspect/criminal in this specific case appeal?

Why is giving up all your other interests aside from your work a prerequisite for a "remotely interesting tech scene"? Surely you too see why people whould find that a slightly strange mentality?

I see why the two or three people CEO'ing a startup invest their free time, but it feels like you're advocating a culture where they can force that way of life onto all of their employees and calling it "good for startups". Well, it is, but so is slavery ;)

To believe that one can compete with the psychologists who design addictive behaviors into today's modern day entertainment is not a bet I would take.

Perhaps. But maybe it works the other way around too. Today's adults are bombarded with addictive, manipulative products all the time, and most find themselves woefully unable to resist (cf. phone-staring parties).

Isn't school the best place to get kids to develop some ability to resist this kind of addiction? External pressure stops working as soon as it's gone, but internal resilience doesn't.

Then Intuit mobilized against ReadyReturn, hiring lobbyists to oppose the effort in the capital and financing candidates who pledged to overturn it.

“People in other states who had been interested in it started saying, ‘We just don’t want to pick a fight with Intuit.’  ”

Excuse me for not understanding US politics, but.. How is this not considered blatant corruption?