Okay, so whyTF did the company decide to fire the guy without going through the agreed-on procedure? The union may have had good reason to fear arbitrary firings (people are fired for illegal reasons all the time), and written consultation on firing into the contract. Instead, the company decided that it was more convenient to break the contract they signed rather than comply and take further steps if the union didn't do the intelligent thing, and that's the union's fault?

Unions have caused abuses, although I suspect in much lower numbers than management has, but this is not one of them.

*raises hand slowly*

No sub $11,000 electric car that has 100 mile range.
No electric car that can charge in 6 hours at home without spending thousands on a fat charger and an electrician and permits to install it.
No apartments with electric charging stations.

So nope.

My understanding is that the one month is to revert the upgrade when done in an upgrade fashion instead of the bare metal install.

RMS appears to think that making a living writing software is a fine thing, as long as you don't write software that is released under a proprietary license, and that really doesn't concern most programmers. He has also supported the "dual license" model of MySQL: release your stuff under GPL, and sell a license to use it in proprietary software for money to support the project and developers.

It's perfectly legal to take photographs from a public place. Google cars normally stay on public roads, so their operations are legal. Google has had legal problems when the cars left public roadways and drove onto driveways and the like. There are limits on what somebody can do to observe; courts have held, for example, that police can't use things like infrared imaging to tell what's going on inside a dwelling without a warrant.

The air above my back yard up to at least 83 feet is not a public place.

There is no Constitutional right to privacy against a private party, but there's nothing against a government passing laws against invading privacy.

From the stuff I've seen, you have an expectation of privacy when you can't be seen by another person outside your property. In a flat area, a six-foot privacy fence should do that.

I think you'll find that hitting a fairly small airborne object gets real difficult pretty fast as it goes up. If it's out of shotgun range, you're very unlikely to hit it with a rifle, and falling rifle bullets are a real danger.

Automatic updates for non-savvy users are overall a good thing, I'll agree. Set it as the default, and have no immediately obvious way to disable it (put it in a control panel somewhere) and you've got the non-savvy users on automatic updates. Then it's up to Microsoft to avoid screwing over these people too much, if they can manage. I'd rather deal with the updates on my own schedule, and I'd rather not have to pay extra to get that.

Only for Xbox one. Worthless.

now let me play games on my PC via my xbox one. Kerbal space program, dont starve, etc... Then it's competition.

Playing GTAV on my windows tablet? boring.

considering that's how it's always worked, yes

I'm a weather guy - running cloud model code on Blue Waters, the fastest petascale machine for research in the U.S. I don't think we've managed to get any weather code run much more than 1 PF sustained - if even that. So it's not like you can compile WRF and run it with 10 million MPI ranks and call it a day. Ensembles? Well that's another story.

Exascale machines are going to have to be a lot different than petascale machines (which aren't all that different topologically than terascale machines) in order to be useful to scientists and in order to no require their own nuclear power plant to run. And I don't think we know what that topology will look like yet. A thousand cores per node? That should be fun; sounds like a GPU. Regardless, legacy weather code will need to be rewritten or more likely new models will need to be written from scratch in order to do more intelligent multithreading as opposed to mostly-MPI which is what we have today.

When asked at the Blue Waters Symposium this May to prognosticate on the future coding paradigm for exascale machines, Steven Scott (Senior VP and CTO of Cray) said we'll probably still be using MPI + OpenMP. If that's the case we're gonna have to be a hell of a lot more creative with OpenMP.

I am a Buddhist. That sort of fits actually. I am an atheist as well. I like to point out, I am not a Buddhist, not a fucking monk. So, yes... I am suffering for a higher purpose (not a higher power). I want my atoms to be scattered to the stars and to be happy while they do it, damn it.

The most popular theory is that it's transferring momentum via virtual particles. That has some startling implications, but it's less physics shaking than violating conservation of momentum. I'm not sure anyone has come up with any solid testable hypotheses yet, but it seems to be something that is likely to be testable in principle.

You'd have to work out the math, but I'd be cautious being too aggressive with relativistic reasoning. Conservation of energy and momentum in special relativity are a bit tricky to start with, and don't hold when you start jumping between reference frames.

It was terrible before too, if you wiggled the mouse too much and you were 7 layers deep into the heirarchy the start menu would close or flip over to another folder, and you'd have to start all over...it was usability garbage.

The replacement in vista was still tedious, but the previous incarnation was gouge-your-eyes-out-bad if you had to navigate to something that was deep.