cnnsucks's comments

>> “Engineers are like that,” Mr. Kim said. “We don’t lie.”

Hmm. That's pretty general, but he may be right. The engineers willing to lie tend to get promoted to management to do the necessary lying on behalf of the engineers that aren't.

Indeed. I observe that women somehow managed without 32% of all births being Cesarean[1]. The last time I looked up that figure a few years ago it was 24%. What a racket.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/delivery.htm

Manuals. Compilers came with comprehensive manuals. When you paid for things like Turbo C++ or Paradox or MS Cobol you got a well edited, indexed and quality printed book that covered the entire language and tools comprehensively. From there you wade into existing code bases, learn by maintaining the work of others, and eventually you originate new work. Along the way you dog-eared the manuals.

The Internet has obviated the need for comprehensive books for the bulk of contemporary programming. I suppose there are obscure enough and/or proprietary platforms that still follow the "comprehensive documentation" approach, but it seems it's possible for widely used tooling to be poorly documented and rely on online forums to fill in the gaps with crowd sourced answers and examples. This makes "mind share" crucial to the usability of a language/platform.

I am sometimes frustrated with the contemporary model, but the old way wasn't a panacea either; just broken differently. If you want a good taste of "what it was like" find the manuals for Turbo C++ 3.0 (1991.) You'll learn things about C/C++ that you've never seen written down anywhere.

Typical rent seeking behavior that happens during long periods of peace.

Ok, so you're past claiming that "pretty much everyone in the country" has the benefit of "wide availability of cellular service that provides broadband speeds."

Well, that's progress anyhow.

Is that actually the case? The cell services I know of have very low caps, one or two orders of magnitude higher cost and suffer congestion problems.

"Conclusion: Parallelization isn’t too bad in either language. Each has its own annoyances. In Go’s case, this is due to not having a real type system. In Rust’s case, it’s due to the libraries being immature and not doing everything you might want."

So, on one hand you have Rust with it's immature libraries that will likely improve and eventually satisfy, and on the other you have Go, a language governed by people that have demonstrated an aversion to complicating Go's simplistic type system.

The former seems the better bet, especially since Rust folks are very aware of the issue and have made dealing with it a priority: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14275512. That is objectively better in my mind.

I would, since the figures show that it's not necessary. If it becomes necessary it will be because WMF failed to control spending growth, something the cynic in me says is likely.

Yes, geology is a big factor in engineering a well. Pressure is another. Every well is engineered to the prevailing conditions and requirements. Sometimes it is possible to elide heavy casing which can save large amounts of money.

"Anyone know as to why this is the case?"

Think of a telescopic antenna. That structure is similar to what is done to bore a well. You start with large casing diameter and add progressively smaller casings until you reach the target depth. The deeper you go the bigger the casing you must start with. Offshore deep water stuff can be a meter in diameter with 10cm solid steel walls; monstrously heavy and costly materials. And you use kilometers of the stuff.

There are a lot of reasons why costs scale as they do with depth; casing is just one of the more obvious.

I see. So they're operating in the ISM portion of 2.4 and 5GHz. In that case they can encrypt. So the original question seems a good one; why haven't they yet?

Many of these systems are using the amateur radio service bands. Often 5GHz for video, 2.3-2.4GHz for control and telemetry and less frequently 1.2GHz, 900MHz and 70cm are also used. The FCC doesn't allow encrypted traffic on amateur bands except for specific cases such as satellite telecommand. I suppose that has discouraged adoption of cryptography.

What are commercial operators doing? Another limitation of Amateur bands is that they can't be used for commercial purposes, so licensed commercial drone operators must be using commercial bands where cryptography is permitted. Don't know myself; haven't looked into it.

"but inappropriate to cut obligations to creditors we call 'bondholders'?"

The part where I said bondholders should be held harmless is a fiction inside your head. When the gears finally strip the bondholders in these cases (Detroit, GM, etc.) take epic baths, and I don't shed any tears for them either. $7 billion in bondholders’ obligations in Detroit were erased, for example.

So I suppose there is little difference between supposed "creditors we call pensioners" and actual creditors; everyone gets wrecked.

Well that's not the precedent. When these mismanaged governments finally throw in the towel and hand the reins over to grownups what happens is the pensions and retiree benefits get cut. Detroit just had this happen after the state stepped in and dealt with that mess. Cleveland is in the process of cutting benefits before it goes bankrupt. CalPERS cut pensions last December for retirees from Loyalton. Same thing in the private sector; GM cut retiree benefits with the help of the Federal Government. Last year the Iron Workers union saw huge pension cuts. USPS is going to have this happen as well, probably very soon; you can be very, very sure Trump and the Republicans aren't going to bail out that hot mess.

We're actually getting pretty handy at cutting retiree pensions and benefits. The deals negotiated decades ago predicated on fantastic rates of growth aren't really plausible and they eventually have to be reworked. That means cuts. That's reality and reality has, at long last, arrived for Puerto Rico.

So expect cuts. Don't believe there is some pot of gold out there filled with untaxed entities that just need to be tapped to fix everything. Its fiction and it won't happen like that.

The big reckoning after Puerto Rico is going to be Illinois. Producers are straight up evacuating IL while the state government just keeps digging itself deeper into the hole. That situation is going to set all sorts of precedents for how this nonsense gets resolved.

Seems to me that keeping the labor cost reasonable isn't really that difficult. The only real problem is concealing the process well enough that it doesn't provoke outrage. Understand as you read what follows and the hairs on your neck stand up that this is --- after enough layers of BS are applied --- very close to what will evolve.

Just yesterday we read about how Facebook 'helps' marketers 'track when people were feeling overwhelmed, worthless or insecure' [1]. Focusing on people that exhibit this frequently, particularly if they're being bullied, would catch a bunch of these online suicide cases without squandering labor on everyone else.

Then all you need to do is invent enough euphemisms to enable a degree of profiling; the rape streams that go unreported for days are almost always gangbangers. Should be a trivial job to factor that group out, by their grammar alone.

There you go; the chronically depressed types and the gangbangers account for probably 95% of the headline making cases Facebook has to worry about. Focus a small workforce on those two groups (and possibly a few others; extremists, etc.) and Bob's your uncle.

[1] http://www.moneyandmentalhealth.org/facebook-mental-health/

Experts are those employed to say what The Powers That Be (tm) prefer to hear, regardless of how wrong they get it. Others get no play.

The first claim in your first link... exactly what I expected to find: "By overbooking it actually does help keep the fares down"

Money. Low low prices. That's why people that have paid for tickets are getting beat up and kicked off planes.

In all sorts of other aspects of our world we're expected to gladly accept higher costs as the price of our "values." Higher energy costs, mandates for various types of insurance, taxes to fund one agenda or another and on and on. Perhaps you haven't considered this yet but delivering the seat that a paying customer has paid for and not subjecting any of these otherwise compliant paying customers to the possibility of being thrown off a plane --- by martial force if necessary --- is a "value" we might aspire to.

And if that means maybe you are a little more careful about just how often you bop across the continent in a 600 mph jet because the cost is a little higher, or you can't play ticket games with as much abandon as you're used to well... perhaps that isn't really the end of the world.

Indeed. If you believe HIPAA has ensured everything is encrypted you've been suckered by the potemkin village that is EHR compliance pencil whipping. The work is farmed out to all sorts of fly-by-night shops that are expert at passing the audits and filling out the applications that make the grant money flow and get the necessary boxes ticked with the feds.

Add no point in this piece of clickbait will you learn "Why" criminals target patient data.

It's isn't important. This is what you dwell on and write about when you find yourself living in paradise and all your actual problems are solved.