The advantage of the cars in this model is that they speed up unloading. Go and watch a freight train being unloaded some time, it's a massive endeavour. Now imagine if each of the trucks could just drive off along the roads on its own as soon as the train arrived at its destination.

Because, in the USA especially, lots of Federal government money has been spent connecting the major population centres with roads. Very little has been spent on the rail infrastructure. If you can make it work on roads, then you can take advantage of all of the existing infrastructure cheaply.

Lidar is typically used in situations where you have this kind of interference, but the solution is conceptually pretty simple. You tune the detectors to a specific wavelength and you vary that wavelength between devices. You can typically vary the wavelength in software, so if you detect a lot of interference then you just hop to another frequency. If someone is intentionally blanketing your entire band, then it's not really any different from someone shining a floodlight in the eyes of human drivers - you just point them out to the police.

That's true on the desktop, but absolutely untrue on mobile devices. You typically have an OpenVG accelerator in the SoC that uses a lot less power than the GPU (or is part of the GPU, but uses a lot less power than the 3D mode).

Comply first. Litigate later. This is the smart thing to do most of the time. For GitHub, it is not like they are being forced to give the keys to the kingdom or to hand over sensitive data customers entrusted to it. No no data is lost or compromised. It is simply inaccessible while GitHub tries to litigate hopefully with sponsorship by those GitHub users that are being affected.

That's an invective, not a counter argument.

In the 80's it was well known that the CIA was monitoring the USENET. Apparently there was a list of keywords that they searched for that became well known, so we used them all the time. We had it on good authority that the CIA had become amused by our antics. It probably relieved the boredom.

-Matt

You are talking bullshit here and waving your hands at a hypothetical based on a biased perception towards HR workers. Granted a lot aren't bright, but that is true in all professions, even among STEM workers.

People actually go through the pages in the contracts to see everything has been filled. In 18 years, I have not seen a one HR worker that has not done so meticulously. Scrawling "me no like it" like that will not fly either during review or in court should the near impossible (they not catching it) were to happen.

If you are planning on taking Bitcoins in payment for some real product then you want some assurance that you can sell the Bitcoins for more than the cost of that product. You get this implicitly with established currencies, because they have reasonably stable inflation rates and, most importantly, those inflation rates are usually tied to your local economy and so the value of the currency doesn't alter in terms of what you can buy with it in the short term (if you're hoarding significant amounts of currency, rather than investing it in your business, for example using it to pay your employees or buy stock then you're a currency speculator and so have different requirements). With an immature and volatile currency like Bitcoin, you effectively need to buy Bitcoin futures or have some other entity underwrite your Bitcoins.

If you want to be in the business of offering payment services that accept Bitcoins, then you want to be able to do this underwriting. People will be a lot more willing to accept Bitcoins if you can say 'the value of BTC fluctuates relative to USD, but we guarantee that we will always buy them at this exchange rate. If you use this exchange rate for setting your prices then you will never suffer from these fluctuations'. To be able to do this (and not make huge losses), you need to be able to influence the market price by buying and selling in large quantities and by avoiding selling when the price is too low. Having a large initial stash of Bitcoin helps with this.

Paper doesn't scale very well. I have a repository for a project that's been going on for a few years and has a few hundred photos of whiteboards. Trying to find one is almost impossible because there's no full-text search for photos of whiteboards. If you don't need diagrams, then running OpenEtherPad with a machine connected to the projector as a client and just saving the output is much better, but I've not found a good equivalent that supports drawing (especially not free-form drawing on a tablet or whiteboard and then automatically recognising shapes and handwriting, as the Newton's drawing program did 20 years ago).

Enforcement of non-competes varies a lot between jurisdictions, but there is some precedent for requiring the company that demands the non-compete to pay the employee's salary for the duration. This also provides a good incentive for non-competes to scale with employment time.

A contract does not require a signature, it requires a meeting of minds. A signature is one way of demonstrating this. Accepting the pay cheque and showing up for work is another.

How on earth are you buying CFLs with only a 3-year warranty for $12 each? The only ones I've seen that are that expensive come with a 10-20 year warranty. 5 years is about the shortest I've seen and that's on ones that are under $1.

The youngest CFL I've replaced was, I think, 3 years old. I left most of them behind when I moved house after living in the same place for 7 years and most of the CFLs had never been replaced since I installed them shortly after moving in. I was a poor student back then, so all of them were the absolute cheapest that I could find.

If you're rewiring and going all-LED, you can apparently save quite a bit with a DC main for lighting. And this also makes it easy to have USB and similar outlets for device charging. I wish more new builds would install a DC main alongside the AC...