cjensen

Many people would like to be able to record snippets of people approaching their door. Good to know what's going on when you're not there so you can calibrate your fears with reality. Now you need to send the recording somewhere.

You have two choices: maintain your own recording equipment, or upload. The former is a major hassle. Ring smartly found an opportunity to make a simple service people want.

You say the "US is such a bizarre place" but that is simply untrue. Petty theft is a part of many cultures. For example, petty theft in the UK is far more common than the US.

Yes. Here's a concrete example:

Google has (or had) a stray cat feeding station at the Plex. When birders complained, the security threatened the birders if "anything happened to the cats." The Plex is located next door to wetlands containing two endangered species that are at risk of predation.

Yes and no. This means you can sue despite not being a customer. It does not mean your suit will succeed.

"Take a warm bath" suffers from a lot of the same problems as this study. You can't actually have a blind control group, so there is effectively no control group.

So this is really just 17 people assigned to take a warm bath. The thing about mental illness is that it's really really hard to be sure if something helped. You're brain is the thing that is broken, and your brain knows you are being treated.

I have depression. I've lost count of the things I've tried, and when asked, I have to say "I don't know if this actually helped or if it's just my brain thinking it should have helped."

With depression, studies which are not double-blind are garbage.

Ecobee now sells the "ecobee lite" which has no Alexa and no microphone.

They gave you access to read... not to download and read later. So no shock you got blocked.

IMHO as a life-long ACM member... library access should be permanently free. But that's clearly not what they have chosen to do.

Yes, I get that... but there is an implicit "what should be fixed" attached to the complaint.

This white-collar punishment is going to hurt him badly. Is fairness best achieved by hurting him even more? Or is it best achieved by "only" hurting non-white-collar crimes with a punishment similar to this? It's important because the real question here is "are you complaining about his sentence, or the sentence of others?"

Personally I'm pro-reform. Would really like to see lighter sentences for a lot of things. So I'm not going to complain about this white-collar sentence at all. I'm going to complain about the harsh sentence for "people not like us."

Is your complaint that his sentence is too light? Or that non-white collar crime is punished too harshly?

I don't understand Apple's aversion to accessible DIMM slots and off-the-shelf M.2 SSDs.

It used to be that Apple charged a lot for RAM and Storage, but you could save a bundle by bringing your own. For example, my 2012 i7 Mac mini has maxed memory and a 2TB SSD. When Apple began soldering stuff in, they failed to reduce their punitive prices on expansion, which really hurts reusability and resale value. In other words, they are far less green than they could be since they must now be disposed of earlier.

Rotational speed of Earth is 1,000 mph at the equator where it is moving fastest. Other parts of the mass are moving slower.

The entire Earth orbits the Sun at 67,000 mph -- around 67X faster. And note that it is the entire mass of the Earth moving at that speed, not just the equator.

Changing the rotation speed by 1% is a whole lot easier than changing the orbital speed by 1%.

EDIT: NAB is Official Postponed now [1]. I got the email right after hitting send on this.

[1] https://nabshow.com/2020/attend/onsite-services/coronavirus-...

I'm in the industry. Many of our most important customers have already announced they are not going. The company I work for has pulled out of the show, along with many others.

The company I work for believes the show will be cancelled, so better to cancel flights and hotels now than later.

My bet is that like a lot of shows, they have a ton of money on the line. Their insurance/cancellation policies only kick in if the government steps in a says "you may not do this," so they are waiting for that to happen. Nevada is tourist-driven, so they don't want to do it. We need some leadership from the Executive Branch.

Brake pads have not used asbestos in several decades.

I didn't say or imply the cost wasn't worth paying, just noting it because it is an example of the economic impacts that can be anticipated.

Las Vegas is hosting it's third largest annual convention (130,000) on March 10 [1], though that has few international attendees. The fourth largest (100,000) in late April is notably international [2].

Worth noting that unlike GDC, both of these conventions feature equipment that is too expensive to demo at a customer site. Disruption of either of these two conventions will come at a cost.

[1] https://www.conexpoconagg.com

[2] https://nabshow.com/2020/

The iPad 1, which I owned though I'm not the parent commenter, came with iOS 3, and the final compatible release was iOS 5 two years later. It worked poorly with iOS 5 after two years, and was fully obsolete after three years.

Even for those early days, it went from new to obsolete extremely fast.

The discussion suggests heating and air conditioning as partial causes. It also discusses reduced infection (which is correlated with lifespan) as time passed due to antibiotics and anti-inflamatories drugs.

Boiling water is at 100C at standard pressure full stop. It is not affected by weather (humidity or air temperature). It is not affected by location unless your change of location involves a change in altitude which accompanying pressure change.

That's an interesting phenomena, but it is definitely not what has happened here. The introduction talks about it a bit, but the discussion really gets into it showing why it cannot be measurement error.

That was all based on a "green" news article being recycled on gizmodo. The original article was full of incorrect interpretations of data and so forth. E.g. lawns are not, contrary to the original article, the #1 crop by area.

Lawns in general are green by being carbon sinks. But as with all things, it depends. If you live in the midwest with plenty of summer rain, the lawn costs very little. If you're in Arizona or California, water use is an issue.

This "gigantic can of worms" is 40-year old settled law. All the appeals and considerations that can be thought of were worked out over 20 years ago. All your "could they" and "can they" questions have already been asked and answered.

I'm allergic to some dyes. The dyes are plainly non-toxic, but I can't wear them. I'm also allergic to dry cleaning solutions, so it sucks to be me.

Seems to me the issue isn't Land's End, which is making uniforms to spec. The issue is that Delta isn't accommodating employees with allergies.

In California, a helmet is required for an ebike that can go 28 mph (class 3 e-bike). For the 20 mph e-bikes (class 1 and class 2) no helmet is required for adults.

I'd really like to see more support for class 2 bikes on bike paths around the bay area. Class 2, which does not require pedaling, gets around the "I'm too sweaty when I get to work" issue. My dream: a bike highway to the silicon valley from outlying areas.

Sure. In the case of Qt, it was very expensive but well worth paying for because it does a good job. The LGPL stuff is important because it provides us with an "out" if the Qt company goes crazy with prices.

Avoiding the "out" makes me not want to make use of the new modules. And the hassle of audits makes be question the cost of the inconvenience to me, the dev, of having a license.

It's tradeoffs all the way down.

The behavior of the Qt company lately is a bit troubling.

First, the core can be licensed under Commercial or LGPL licensing. This let's non-paying developers use the core in commercial software. This policy was established to ensure trust with the community during one of the many company transitions. For all new modules, Qt evades that requirement by licensing under Commercial or GPL. I have mixed feelings on this.

Second and more importantly, they have started sending aggressive audit letters to customers. I guess that makes sense from a bean-counter point of view where you poke the customer and try to get them to buy more licenses either because the customer actually needs the licenses, or because the customer is afraid to let any dev work without paying protection money. This is a huge pain in the neck for me as a paying customer. They even sent the aggressive audit letter to an old license we have that had not been renewed (or used) in around a decade.

I'll definitely be rethinking my relationship as a customer when the next renewal comes up.

A lot of people are saying code is not an asset, so story time:

In Ancient Days, Ampex was the king of video tape recording and magnetic storage. They created a system for recording documents onto video tape, and then later a system for recording documents into mass storage. The software engineers on this project created a database system to manage the storage. When the project was inevitably cancelled, they allowed the software engineer to keep the code from project Oracle.

Of course the value depends on the what the code accomplishes, and what new ideas you can leverage it into.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-01794...

That's not correct. The California Constitution has always made beaches public[1].

The Coastal Commission was established in 1972 to improve access. The act grandfathered in properties with no access, but requires any improvement or change to pull a permit with the Commission. The Commission requires public access when approving any permit.

[1] Tidal beaches only. Beaches on lakes can be private

You're right the he is legally entitled. I wasn't clear enough: he is acting morally entitled. In this sense, "entitled" means a person who feels it is reasonable to use their wealth and power to do anything they want and other peoples wants are irrelevant.

The law is not implemented like that. Basically if there is a property which does not provide through-access to the beach, the law does not require them to provide it. If any change is made to the property, including improvements, then as part of the permitting process a requirement will be made to provide the access.

This is why at California beach areas and piers, old buildings have no access, but all remodeled ones do.

That all said, still amazingly entitled behavior by Khosla.

The license looks like a mess. They claim their own code is LGPL, but it looks like some of their code links to GPL modules (e.g. serialbus).

To my mind, this is entirely GPL and heaven help anyone who mistakes it for LGPL.

The version you are comparing against is ancient and assumes a low-memory footprint. It only uses something like 10KB of data. It also has a ton more features -- like command line parsing, the ability to read from a file on the command line or stdin, and locale-specific recognition of whitespace.

It's really not solving the same problem.