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orourkek

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if you are in a miles country no one is converting it to km or vice versa

My relatives & friends visiting from Europe often appreciate knowing such values in km/C. There are various other reasons to want to do the conversions too, and sometimes speed > accuracy. It's a bit ridiculous to think that _no one_ is doing these conversions and that shortcuts/approximations like this are not useful.

"Smart" TVs seem to fall into the same category. Manufacturers realized they can make much more money and hit a (much) lower price point by packaging telemetry and using/selling the data. Nowadays "dumb" TVs either aren't available or come at a premium.

Taking badges out of the cloud reduces points of failure by several orders of magnitude.

I'm not convinced that's true, or at least certainly not an order of magnitude. Wouldn't a badge system hosted on-prem also need a user management system (database), a hosted management interface, have a dependency on the LAN, and need most of the same hardware? Such a system would also need to be running on a local server(s), which introduces points of failure around power continuity/surges, physical security, ongoing maintenance, etc.

This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web.

About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, ...

I remember double quotes being infinitely more useful 10 years ago than they are today and much more strict (i.e. good for technical searches). You could put actual code syntax into double quotes and it would return meaningful results containing that syntax. Nowadays there is no way I'm aware of to force google to respect every single character within double quotes — it's much more fuzzy now and frequently characters like `!;.,/\|{}[]` are ignored/dropped from inside quotes and the quality of (technical) results suffers. It's the 80/20 optimization problem discussed elsewhere in this thread...

Not entirely true. From the article:

The Federal Reserve's easy money policies have also kept mortgage rates near historic lows, pushing up demand for housing

That said, I agree with your sentiment more than the article's reductionist view that the low rates simply "pushed up demand."

For that figure to be true you would have to ignore the requirement that you maintain awareness and control of the vehicle at all times. Autopilot !== FSD. Your car did not "drive itself," you were in control of the car 100% of the time — at least I hope so...

Personally, my sell threshold is when my BTC is worth enough (after CG taxes) to pay off my student loans. Given the latest price increases, it's getting very close :)

But look at the last 15 years of foreign policy from "statesmen". We had two wars, Obama missed seeing the rise of ISIS, Syria is a humanitarian nightmare, we had a huge financial crash, and terrorism is on the rise.

There are factors in play here beyond the background of the US president; Global politics, foreign leaders, policies in other countries, civilian actions, etc. To say that the US president being a "statesman" caused all of those things is a massive leap in logic.

https://xkcd.com/552/

I see the current crop of "half-assed hybrid cars" as a necessary step on the road to EV market acceptance; Public charging infrastructure is not at an acceptable level for the average consumer, so automakers found a way to capitalize on the success of their existing ICE products and production lines, while gradually introducing electric technology in a usable-in-the-real-world package. Capitalism 101.

Furthermore BMW never claimed that the BMWi brand was exclusively EVs, nor have they ever marketed the i8 as anything but a plug-in hybrid.

I fail to see how them building a photo organizer app has any relevance in his wish for a security minded email application. Sure, the company might know what they're doing, but nowhere in the introduction video did they discuss security - the most talked about points were usability and aesthetics. It seems to me that dguido's comment isn't actually FUD, but rather an observation about their proposal...

> So she should apologize because someone was offensive, got outed for it, and their employer felt that was reason enough to can them?

No. What he said was:

> I do not believe it would have been out of line for Adria to have said something like "I heard one of the guys in the photo I posted on Twitter yesterday was fired. I just wanted to say that I'm terribly sorry to hear that and my intent was never to cause harm! I'm very sorry!"

Not that she should have done it, but basically that he thinks it would have been a good idea and could have been a solution to the entire fiasco.

For someone who is so publicly concerned with professionalism, I feel Adria should/could have either:

1. Not taken a semi-secret photo of the guys with the intent of publicly outing them. If she was really offended by the comments she should have gotten up and contacted the event staff. The unprofessional thing to do would be to take a conversation out of context, pair it with a picture of the guys, and tweet it to thousands of people. What's the end game there?

2. Assuming she did tweet as she did, the professional response would be to apologize to the guy that got fired. Saying that she's sorry that he got fired (not even that she's sorry for getting him fired, which is obviously debatable) would have, as the above poster noted, nipped the whole thing in the bud.

The other factor here is that Adria was obviously villainized and attacked seemingly from all angles. I understand that this would be a hard thing to deal with, but I can't exactly empathize with her. Tweeting about the incident is one thing, but taking a picture of them is taking it to another level entirely - and not a very professional level at that...

It's more of a plot hole than fan-fiction. The article is an exhaustive look at provable (written) arguments that can refute the eagles as a possibile solution to the Mordor trip. The author is trying to prove that the plot hole is, in fact, a plot hole by nature of it being plausible.

Using other possibilities to refute a possibility goes against the spirit of the article, where the author looks for concrete facts that would render the plan implausible.

In the end, there's nothing I know of (or that the author could find) written in the books that disproves it as a possibility. It simply isn't addressed directly in the text, even where there was a prime opportunity to strike it down (Council of Elrond).

I agree, but the author's note about the Council of Elrond is extremely convincing. If Tolkien wanted to strike this plan as a possibility, he could easily have added 1-2 lines into the Council talks where they discuss (and refute) every plan they can think of. In the end there's nothing concrete in Tolkien's work that refutes the 'eagle plan' as viable. Suggesting fan-fiction and/or 'the unknown' as proof that it's not possible isn't in the spirit of the article, per this section:

> My question is not what fan-fiction we can add to the story to rule out the "eagles" plan; my question is what Tolkien has written which rules it out.

That being said, your thoughts about the Hobbits' stealthiness is agreeable, but again it's more of a matter of what can be proven by excerpts from the books, not what can be guessed/assumed.

Given that the people in question are there for just days/weeks per year, their "use" of the services seems in line with the taxes they pay. Without knowing specific numbers it's hard to get exact math, but if someone pays property tax on a multi-million dollar condo purchase and is only in the city for 3 weeks per year, surely they aren't overusing the services?

Even if they do understate the issue, It's limited to US-EAST 1, and is an EBS issue. Saying that EC2 is "down" because of this is totally off the mark - I've got dozens of EBS volmes in EAST 1 that are unaffected, plus all of the other zones that are operating normally...

> the merchant's customers are probably classified as the users.

I believe his subdivision of "customers" into "sellers" and "buyers" was to solve that issue - "sellers" are the merchants, and "buyers" and the sellers' customers. It all makes sense to me, but you're right - only in a context where you actually have customers