""engineers perform better in person,"
I'm an "engineer" and my wife agrees! :-)
(Ooerr missus!)
25355 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"always lived within commuting distance of their office"
I noticed that line too. My take on it is a little different though. Of COURSE people live within commuting distance" of the office. If they didn't, they'd not be able to get there. But of course, as you say, what IS "commuting distance" and and how far in distance and time are people prepared to accept? That's a personal, social and societal issue with many and varied answers for all of the reasons given by you and those who replied and probably many more too.
"and if an employer wants to treat their employees as identical work-producing units,"
But that is what is ingrained in corporate culture already. That's why the "Personnel Department" became "Human Resources" and why project managers talk about assigning "resources" to tasks when they mean "people". As one of those "resources", I take great umbrage whenever I see an email chain referring to me and my collogues that way.
"Right now, pretty much the majority of bus routes in Oxford end up in the city centre."
That pretty much describes every town and city in the UK and probably around the world. Public transport is geared up for large influxes and exfluxes[*] of people to the high density city centre offices. It's not geared up for people living in on one edge of town needing to get to a different edge of town. Travel in, then back out because nothing travels around the edges. And I can see why too, in these days or privately owned public transport. It's only busy at "rush hour" and the rst of the time the buses are almost if not completely empty so they need to make hay on the most profitable routes. While the services are in private, commercial operators hands, maybe we ought to stop calling it "public transport"?
[*] Is exfluxes a word? My spillchucker says not. It should be :-)
"I live in a subutrban area of a smallish city and the main thing within 15 minutes walk from me is charity shops, hairdressers and a dog shampoo parlour, unless you want to but a fireplace."
And that's the problem. The facilities you need or want are NOT within easy reach. That's the entire point of the idea. Or you you one of those people of the mind that this is Big Governments "plan" to keep people locked away in their own little areas and banning travel to other areas? Because if so, I shall point at you and laugh, with a little sadness.
I'm not surprised. Taco Bell may not have expanded beyond US shores back then. Even now, I'm surprised to find they actually have 132 restaurants outlets in the UK, one of which is only 7 miles away from me, the next nearest being about 40 miles away. I'm only familiar with the name due to so many US TV shows and films being broadcast here.
I wonder how many of those new MS Ts&Cs MS have "broken" themselves by scraping world +dog to train their own AI? And are they still doing it, despite trying to lock down their own toy box? When will we see them add a new condition banning scraping the published results of their AI spewings and how will any webscraper be able to tell what is MS AI generated and what isn't?
"Convicted criminals are still eligible to run for president (Eugene Debs) and could be president while in prison - until he works out how to use presidential authority to get out."
Just for shits and giggles, I think I'd quite like to see that happen! He gets sworn in and then other world leaders start inviting him to their countries for state visits etc and he has to make his excuses!
I noted especially their "abundance of caution", ie the ChatGPT recommendations are acted on first and then they will await further details and confirmation. If it's too hard to read 19 books first before acting on the "advice" of a known liar, ie ChatGPT, then they have much bigger problems.
Copyright is complex. It depends what the item is. But 70 years is way too long for any copyright as far as I'm concerned. And FWIW, UK copyright used to max out at 50 years, less in some cases. But the whole of the EU (which the UK used to be in) was "upgraded" to 60 years to match Germany who had the longest copyright period in the EU, despite the average across the EU being lower, there was never any serious attempt to reduce Germany down to an EU average. This was than later increased thanks to lobbying to match the US.
But, as mentioned, copyright is complex. The "authors death + 70 years" is exactly that. Author. It can be very different when the "author" is a corporate entity, or "performance", the medium etc.
Personally, I think it ought to have at least an element of renewability. If a work hasn't been "published" for 20 pr 30 years to some reasonable standard, e.g. quantity and availability, then there ought to be exceptions for the likes of Archive.org or just dump it in the Public Domain. No "publishing" a tiny run for sale in Uzbekistan to get around the rules and claim you are still monetising the item. There's huge amounts of copyrighted works that are not available to purchase at any price simply because publishers are sitting on them for no good reason.
China is big on AVs too. We just don't hear as much about it.
There's lots going on around the world. SE Asia is a hotbed of AV development, trials and startups. There's also quite a lot going on Europe too.
The difference seems to be that the English speaking world is the main focus of news on the subject in an English speaking press and most of the funny/scary stories come from the US because of (lack of) regulation and the PR US companies spew out because of the need to be "first" and the needs to secure funding. Having said that, there seems to be a need in some SE Asian countries also to be "first" and a lack of regulation, but that doesn't seem to get the coverage.
"Plain ol' SatNav is good for around 3m CEP. That's nowhere good enough for autonomous navigation."
You only need an accurate, centimetre grade navigation if that's your primary means of identifying where you are and what lane you are in. Having a 3 metre accuracy ought to be enough to identify which road you are on if, as with all AVs currently on the road, you also have other location and situational awareness devices such as cameras, radar, lidar etc. which does the heavy lifting for the immediate area, although for a safety margin, I'd expect an AV car based SatNav to be better than that.
""It's said the cars needed the connectivity to route their journeys."
If that is ALL they need a wireless connection for, why does it not have an up to date built-in mapping system, even a cheap SatNav they can connect to the rest of the cars systems as a backup? Grinding to a halt when there's no phone/WiFi signal is not a good look. Just try making a mobile phone call or using mobile data from somewhere where there are a lot of people, most of whom will have mobile data permanently turned on, WiFi turned on and many apps chattering even when they are not using the phone, sucking up what can be limited bandwidth many places. If I need to log into our work system while out on the road, it's not a good idea to pull into a motorway services around lunchtime during the summer school holidays. You might have 5 bars, but you ain't getting much data, so I'm not surprised those GM cars lost the wireless data in a busy, crowded area. You'd think that would be a major metric they'd have been monitoring for while they were running with drivers during the daytime.
Depends on what you plan on doing with it and what, if any, expansion abilities you may want.
If it's just to watch TV shows, anything capable of running KODI, from a Raspbery Pi 4 upwards will do or even go with OSMC who will also sell you NUC-a-like pre-installed for the job if you don't to just download an image to install yourself to your chosen device.
After that, a quick search of the interwebs on fanless tiny PC indicates a wide range of kit of varying power and price depending on how deep your pockets are, how much you are prepared to compromise and whether it needs to be ruggedized for a marine environment in case you live near the beach and are expecting heavy swells. (I saw one specced as "marine environment" for over £2500!)
There's plenty of alternatives out there. I can't think of a use case where only a NUC will do except maybe an industrial use built with a space exactly designed for a NUC sized device with sockets in NUC designed spots. And if that's the case, they are doing it wrong since even NUCs have changed over the generations.
I remember dealing with one client who insisted on just uploading the Excel spreadsheet to the website and expected customers to download it and read the price list. He could not be convinced that not all of his business customers would have Excel, let alone the very latest version he was using and private customers at home even less likely to have Excel at all. This was back in the days when importing data into a non-native spreadsheet was unlikely to succeed unless you'd already made that assumption and designed for that eventuality. We didn't get the job to re-build his website, thankfully.
On the other hand, you really should not be blaming someone for a mistake when a freshly minted grad is dropped in to not only do everything IT related but still do the shelf stacking and order fulfilment he was originally hired for. That's just asking for trouble. But, small business and a boss who probably thinks "IT" is a job title and of course a new grad will "know it all" :-)
"paid for posts that achieve high engagement."
Just creating a post to get "engagement" or more "followers", "likes", whatever other "social media" voting/rankings schemes are out there, has already lead to the inevitable degradation of post quality from "a concise thought in 240 chars or less" to "who can make the most outrageous or inflammatory posts possible". Paying for the same will only make it worse. Much, much worse. Rewarding bad behaviour with cash. What a wonderful idea. Not.
Social media desperately needs downvote/dislike buttons next to the upvote/like buttons. Who cares if 10,000 people "like" a post when there's no way to tell if a million people "dislike" a post? Although I doubt Musk cares. Like and dislike are both "engagement".
Is that an assumption or is there evidence of water in such a form that clearing out the ice will leave a useful void with something other than a "rubble" covering? I'd expect anything that close to the surface to be more like a permafrost, ie some water ice in a porous rock or similar structure.
"Probably SmartWare which is googlable."
Having used it (them), IIRC, the first version was Smart. Later, it became SmartWare II. For it's time, it was immensely powerful, even including a terminal client so you could pull in your data from the database, consolidate and mess with it in a spreadsheet and create some pretty graphs, and put all into a pretty formatted report via the word processor, possibly link to external programs if you need other stuff, then dial up and send the report to HQ, all under the scripting language control. Something that's still a pain the arse to do with MSOffice :-)
So, the response to the noisy, flashy intruder alarms is...nothing? It took a phone call to the security contractor to make time in their diary to come and let you out? I suppose they cheaped out on the security contract and relied on the noisy sirens and lights to scare off any real burglars.
"there doesn't appear to have been a signing in book (which would show somebody still "present")."
Signing in books are still quite common and reception are usually quite scrupulous in making sure visitors sign in. Signing out they leave? Not so much. I suspect if there was a real fire and an evacuation, the Fire brigade will be looking for an awful lot of visitor who've apparently been in the building for a month or more :-)
"Eventually someone decided which doors would be easiest to force to access the offending PC. I think it took about 2 hours to gain access and fix it. The problem is that it could not "fail open" from the outside as this would leave all the buildings with unrestricted access."
Was the eventual solution to have at least one access point that can be entered with a traditional lock and key?
"Unfortunately that's not the case. In most tax jurisdictions, a business may need to show a certain utilization rate for buildings before they can get a tax write-off for the (often substantial) leasing costs of commercial real estate."
Really? Didn't know that. Thanks for the info.
True, but the OP said "Look at all the time & resources the Romans & Greeks had, and they didn't develop anything.". "Technology" is a wide ranging topic starting with a simple lever, so I'd argue, with evidence, that the Romans did develop technology. Architectures, roads, concrete better than any before them and even capable of setting underwater are probably the least of their technological achievements, Just look at the Pantheon's almost 2000 year old concrete dome. Still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, Nowadays, we build reinforced concrete bridges and buildings and are lucky of we get 50 years out of most structures. We CAN build better concrete structures, but we don't because it costs too much and our children and grandchildren can deal with replacing that bridge after we've used it 20 years past its life expectancy :-)
"Look at all the time & resources the Romans & Greeks had, and they didn't develop anything."
They did quite a bit with hydraulics, mechanics and even dabbled with steam, but there was no economic incentive to develop most technology when they had lots of cheap slave labour.
My current model Brother laser printer does ESCP2 as well as PS and PCL6. Maybe something else I don't recall right now too. :-)
Yeah, Apple were always offering expensive options, even 40 years ago :-) PS was quite expensive to license back then. HP and other printers often had it as an optional extra on a plug-in "font" cartridge.
"You can find a bulb and replace it but its a really fiddly operation, its obviously never intended as a fix."
Look at the list of available "spares" for the big HP floor-standing office devices. The list is fairly small nowadays and is often entire sub-assemblies these days. Got a scanner problem? Replace the entire scanner/lid of the printer it's not just a roller or separator pad.
"But I’m sure the cost of implementing it has reduced to stuff-all by now."
It is. I would only ever consider a PS compatible printer. Although you do have to double the check the cheap end ones in case the PS is done in software by the driver. PCL6 comparability is also a nice-to-have or as an alternative. My use case is printing from FreeBSD,Linux and my wifes Windows laptop, so there's no real need for OEM drivers or worry that they may stop supporting it (eg new version of Windows often drop "old" printers) PS and PCL6 are so ubiquitous now it's hard to find an OS+driver that won't support a printer in most of ots functions. Likewise with scanners, I only buy stuff which is supported by SANE.
"desk occupancy rates need to improve."
Why? Can you show productivity improvements when people are at a desk in the office? In all the stories on enforced return to office, I've not seen a single quote from any employer that shows the evidence or metrics proving their case other then "we want to see you chained to the desk"
"1 thumb down "
So-called "recoilless" weapons seem to not only require gravity and/or friction, but from a quick read on the subject, not only do none of the systems, including spring and hydraulic, absorb all recoil, they primarily rely on slowing the movement such that the recoil is still there, just the energy dissipation is released slowly instead of in a single "kick". The energy is still imparted in the opposite direction of firing, so the "space marines" are still going to need something to brace against or at least take it into account by firing their backpack rockets.
As for the rest of my comment, I assume are not downvoting known and verifiable facts.
The risk is pretty low. Probably about as low as the chances of a launch vehicle carrying samples up to orbit, not reaching it's destination and dropping it's load in the wrong place after a rapid unscheduled disassembly. As you say, "accidents happen". It's all about calculating the risk.