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Can you imagine if people who manufacture components for industrial designs behaved like Google does? "We have these subway trains with busted brakes, but it turns out that they were manufactured by Google and they dropped the project two years ago. I guess we have to buy new trains then..."

I can imagine it. It happens every day.

In an industrial setting it is not uncommon to need a part but the stock version of it is not available. It could be that the manufacturer switched from making cooling tower components to fly swatters. Or, it could be that the system you're maintaining is a hundred years old.

You might find a 3rd party replacement part from China. If not, you try to build it from generic components (everyone uses the same bearings, o-rings, springs, etc). If that fails you find a company who sells a similar product and give them your specifications. Finally, failing all other means, you pay a machine shop (or a foundry if you're making the cast iron part of the braking system) to build your part. Anything that has already been built can be built again.

If you want security in terms of products you are buying, you get a warranty. There are laws that enforce warranties. So you get a warranty, and when its going to expire you get an extension, and when you cant renew anymore you plan to replace that product.

The same is true of utility companies. If you are worried about fly by night fiber companies, you should require a lengthy advanced notice-- perhaps a year or two. And if Google blesses some other city instead of yours because you wanted the warranty, then you let it go.

Hi, I just replied to the original comment but no there is no Hawaiian tribe. Many (most?) Hawaiians dont want to be a recognized tribe because they consider themselves a nation within a nation.

Hawaii is in a unique position because there are still plenty of native Hawaiians around. They arent a native tribe recognized by the U.S. government and some number (most in my mind) dont want to be. Because the overthrow of the last government of the Kingdom of Hawaii was done under shady conditions (basically the sugar barons formed a provisional government and then told the U.S. that they'd like to become a part of the U.S. They did this to join the free trade area that U.S. states enjoy to lower their shipping costs. They had actually tried this once before and then President Grover Cleveland shut them down. He stated that Hawaii had an existing government and seemed to have popular support of the people. But later they tried again and that time the U.S. agreed to annex Hawaii. It was operated essentially as a colony from then on until the 1950's.

So Hawaii is a normal U.S. state. It has state legislation. It obeys federal laws. Except, occasionally native Hawaiians will stand up about some issue. And when that happens, sometimes everyone else will bend toward their perspective. A lot of normal people do so out of respect for native Hawaiians. Politicians do it because it is politically tough to stand in opposition of Hawaiians. As a side note, there are very few republicans in Hawaii. There are none in the state legislature or U.S. representatives. There are a growing number of republicans that grow from the strong military presence.

The thing is, when Hawaiians protest its hard to figure out who or how many they represent. Because there is no official Hawaiian government. (There is the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA). But dont even get me started. lol) So no one can say "Hawaiians dont want the thirty meter telescope (TMT)". You can only say, "those people protesting over there dont want the TMT".

My instinct is that a large amount of this particular protest springs forth from the students of the University of Hawaii. When people started talking about the telescope students started to organize, hold meetings, and invite speakers. At one point the students built an ahu which is a an altar built out of stones right in the main field when you come upon the university, next to the president's office.

The University is probably too scared to remove it. Months later the students planted trees around it. It'll be there forever. Some say that native Hawaiians came to some professors at the University and asked them to help organize but that the core of the anti-telescope movement are native Hawaiians. Its impossible to say. There has never been any kind of survey or vote of native Hawaiians- which itself would be impossible as there is no real registry of native Hawaiians.

This was a long way to say, the only reason this went court was because of protest that, at least in part, included some native Hawaiians. No matter what the court decides, nothing is certain. It could still be slowed for years or indefinitely. If Hawaiians block the one road up the mountain, and are willing to get arrested on a daily basis, its hard to imagine that any politician would back the continued construction.

It just depends. If you dont have cable and can only receive one broadcast channel its probably PBS. If you keep the younger ones away from electronics they will watch PBS Kids and love it.

Once they get older and they get their hands on electronics they would much rather watch the seizure inducing fast cut shows on disney or nickelodeon because those shows are designed to appeal to kids instead of teaching them something.

The worst thing (IMO) though is youtube. They'll watch those horrible toy channels of parents pimping out their kids or the creepy ones where the adults pretend to be children playing with the toys. Hundreds of hours of toy commercials.

Then when they get a little older they start watching youtubers doing "challenges". And before you know it they are watching logan paul ching-chong-ping-pong his way around asia or watching fortnite on Twitch.

And at that point, your kid is ready to graduate to uninformed barely-literate ignorant citizen with no attention span and no ability to think critically.

whew Ok... got that out. I feel a little better.

Is it possible to "double down" where I can pay double and get double the mac n' cheese?

Do you offer an option to lobsterate my mac n' cheese?

Richard Stanton and John Volanthen are the real deal. People should read their wikipedia pages. Also, watching cave diving videos... even on their best day, when they're having a great time, it looks absolutely horrifying. lol

"I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while."

Sounds like a super fun place to work. ;)

Programming is easy. I taught myself. It just took 5-10 years.

Did anyone else notice that the bottom two windows are not different cameras on different boosters? The guy even told us, "I know they look similar but they're different". Nope, they are the same. Watch how you can see two pads and they both land on the pad on the right. And you can see the second booster burning in the same orientation. The roads leading to the pads also make it easy to notice.

Yes. This is exactly what is going on. In the same time period described the power dinosaurs (Google autocorrected companies to "dinosaurs" but it kinda fits in more than one way so I'm keeping it) have implemented polices to slow down adoption of PV claiming they can't build the infrastructure fast enough to hold the growth but all the while just hoping to figure out a way to remain relevant while not embracing any kind of change.

Lets play a game. How much would you have to be paid to drive a Chevy Bolt? I would probably do it for 50% of the cost of the thing.

Is there arbitration in cryptocurrencies? Arent transactions really slow though?

This person also forgot to mention that the original human genome project was not even the sequence of a single individual- it was several people.

The other thing this article doesnt mention is the idea of coverage. Its not like a jigsaw puzzle with one copy of each tile-- every time a whole genome is sequenced it is done so 30 times over to ensure that the pieces are correct.

Finally, Read length varies from technology to technology. This one claims average 10k base pairs.

http://www.pacb.com/smrt-science/smrt-sequencing/read-length...

Noam Chomsky.

I knew the answer after just reading "Is Haskell the right language..."

Yes. This one.

I used to think so too. I used ubuntu desktop and macbook for laptop for years. But every year the macbook has shifted to be more for your grandmother than me. Its always been overpriced but for the hardware you are getting now you really have to accept that you are a sucker to buy one. At an OS level everything is slightly different- different versions of tools, different packages, etc. My software is going to run on redhat or ubuntu based servers in production, so using those OS's everywhere makes life just a little bit more pleasant. And, do I even have to mention that stupid fucking strip at the top? What kind of programmer is ok with a virtual ESC key? I dont really pay attention to mac news but the last series had a huge battery problem that the company didnt seem to even bother fixing?

Windows for PUBG and Overwatch. Linux for everything else. But yeah if my grandmother asked me to get her a laptop I'd probably go with a mac.

Here is an alternative account of what has happened.

The government is trying to reduce protections of civil liberties, the environment, etc.

Why?

Because the party in control of the legislative and executive branches are removing those protections.

Why?

Because it is in their best interest and because they promised to do so in their election campaigns.

Why?

A. Because their corporate sponsors want less regulation.

B. Because their supporters want less regulation.

Why?

Because less regulation means more profits (If you ignore the environmental and human costs).

And, because many Americans equate regulation with infringement of their personal freedom.

We need to stop assuming that bad things are happening because a few bad apples tricked roughly half the population to support them. They are making America great again. Look at any point in time before now in American history and you will find less civil liberty, more oppression of workers, and more destruction of the environment. It was promised. Its being delivered. And no one was fooled. It is straight up whathalf the population asked for.

What is tricky about using GPL for commercial development?

So many people take FLOSS for granted- especially in a place like this where most people are just trying to figure out how to get equity in the next pied piper.

The bottom line is that everyone's life is better because of FLOSS. So many of us owe our careers to an army of forgotten programmers who share their time and brain power to build software for the public domain.

If offers artists in other countries an alternative to expensive software like photoshop. It allows a startup to lower the cost of opening a call center by not having to buy Windows licenses. The cancer researchers trying to find a personalized treatment for your colon cancer use FLOSS. Your state government uses software from Microsoft and Oracle. And even those are affected by and improved due to the existence of FLOSS.

I know you wont understand this. But there are a lot of kids reading this too and they should know not everyone agrees with you.

I agree with you that if the info is true that's good enough to use that infor. But it is still worth knowing the motivations of the people providing your information.

The truth is the most common source of bias in media is not telling out right lies but in deciding which truths to tell you. Its hard to believe that now given how much false information is being spread. But its still true. Propaganda is in the editing- choosing which stories get focus, which voices get amplified.

Doing 1-day delivery to the majority of your customers in U.S. is easier than you might think-- You just put fulfillment centers within 1 day of the east coast. There's a UPS hub in Louisville and a Fedex hub in Memphis. Those areas are also 1-day to east coast, the rent is cheap, and the locals will give you all sorts of concessions for bringing in jobs. I have seen one Amazon subsidiary that was capable of doing same-day deliver to a large portion of their customers 10 years ago. The trick is to make it cost effective. People pay for different classes of shipping from various vendors-- but getting the order to you as quickly as possible isnt the most profitable way to do business. There are sweat spots where they minimize the cost of shipping but its still "fast enough". Take for example shipments out of the continental U.S.. Every carrier has ways to pool packages in ways that make them cheaper to ship. The shipping still costs you the same, but it'll arrive later. Most of the time you'll be fine with waiting. The times you're not you'll complain and they'll upgrade shipping.

The behavior you describe is the way every investor should act. And the behavior of the underlying fund managers, and the executives of the companies below- they're all acting the way they're supposed to be acting-- maximizing profit, minimizing risk. Its not the fault of whales, greedy fund managers, poorly managed banks, or ineffective governance. This is capitalism and it is working exactly as designed- to funnel private wealth to a few people and distribute the risk among the masses.

"As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me."

Yeah, this is a pretty common sentiment. Jira is not a great tool, but the things devs really resent is being micromanaged and tracked in such a way that they are turned into a commodity. At the end of the day, if that really bothers you, there are plenty of ways to work free of this feeling- find a company that fits you better or a better manager within your company or strike out on your own. A better ticketing system wont make you happy.

What do you like instead of Jira?

I dont like Jira either but I do like bitbucket. I started using it back in the day because besides public hosting they also gave me free unlimited private repos and found it does everything I need.

I've often wondered what would happen if AirBnb only allowed hosts to rent out their own primary residence. Or, perhaps primary residence plus one other unit.

This would alleviate the problem of hotels claiming hosts are a hotel. And it would make AirBnb better as the worst hosts are the ones that are managing multiple units.

Having large multi-unit hosts expands the inventory. But the whole point of using AirBnb is that you dont want to stay at a hotel.

There is a critical point where, if AirBnb allows total number of multi-unit hosts to pass, I suspect the whole thing will crumble. No one wants to wade through that mess to find the thing that AirBnb became so popular for-- normal individuals connecting to strike a deal.

No one is going after Google for allowing third party stores.

Google's trouble in Europe is about:

1. Not paying taxes

2. Using their dominance in Search to promote their other products and services while obscuring competitors

3. Using their dominance in mobile to promote their search and web browser

4. Not allowing third parties to use the Play Store which is the default and dominate store for android devices.

Allowing third party stores is not just a great feature for third parties. Its also a good excuse for not letting them into the real store.

A lot of large U.S. organizations wont use software they cant buy support for. So, you can use RedHat and buy support. When you create software, your developers are going to use all kinds of tools, libraries, etc. and depending on the policies of the organization they are going to want to manage that risk. For example, if you're a bank and the devs who make your mobile app use some random authentication library that later turns out to have major security issues- the bank wants to have support for fixing the problem immediately. And, they want to know who they sue to recover the money they lost due to the security issues.

This is certainly a cultural thing. In some organizations (and even the governments of other countries) open source is well regarded and sometimes required. These organizations realize that a strong trusted community around an open source project is usually good enough- especially when you invest in good employees.

This is what happens when Russian Oligarchs make undisclosed income and need to was their rubles into Euros and Dollars.

We generally arent trying to cure diseases. I mean, individual researchers want to find cures (e.g. the dedicated clinician who went to med school because her mother had breast cancer, the passionate hacker who eschewed private buses and free lunches at some startup to work at a research institute) Generally though, the pressure of the overall system is to make as much money as possible.

If you cure someone's disease, they pay once. If your goal is to make money the optimal path is to manage symptoms but keep customers (i.e. patients) reliant on your treatments, ideally with their life depending on them.

Having said that, there are many people working to find new ways to control mosquito populations, especially with zika being in the news, especially with zika starting to affect the continental U.S. (No one cares when its just American Samoa and Hawaii but Florida is a little too close to home).

I just read an article last week where essentially researchers had designed frankenstein gigolo mosquitoes that would steal your lady, impregnate her, but the resulting bastard frankensteins would die before reaching maturity.