"numerous experts advise against teaching children to code, a skill that will soon become redundant"

Yeah we've been hearing that for years.... Long enough that "soon"'s definition is stretched beyond measure. "What programming looks like" is an ever changing beast and I imagine how we go about it may be completely unrecognizable in the not so distant future BUT that does not mean the concept goes away. Even if the concept of writing text that gets compiled to run on a processor of some sort gets obviated the many associated skills mentioned above (Logical Thinking, Simplifying Complexity, Automating Processes, etc, etc) will always be useful and someone with these skills will rarely/never find themselves "redundant". This article reads like it was written by someone who is going to find themselves redundant pretty soon (if they haven't already)

To the OP point I've never been a fan of scare-tactic advertising but frankly our field has negative unemployment and we need as many people getting into the business as possible. The younger they start the better they will be once they hit the job market and also, given that exposure, the more likely they will pursue a career in this field. As was also already mentioned you're not forcing anyone into this career path but knowing how to wield a computer at any level is a pretty critical life skill these days so you put it in front of the children. Many of them will not be interested and go on with their lives (probably improved for that added foundation) some of them will get excited by it an make it their profession. Either way you improve the gene pool.

This among other responses. Let's call it "your experience may vary".

Our company went 100% WFH from March -> June and since then we're on a weekly half-on-half-off rotation for people who really want to be in the office (anyone with their own actual offices can be there whenever). Most people are still choosing to stay home and earliest we're looking at rolling back the "optional" part is this fall but might be even 2021 at this point. Our company already had a very friendly WFH policy and we have several global offices so were already equipped with the technology (Zoom/Slack/etc) to facilitate that. The team I run is half in my city and half in another (actually a 3rd now with a few contractors but anyway) so we're always on the screen we just now have more screens involved.

SO: Our productivity is up. Our teams communicate as effectively or more now that we're all on equal remote footing. We respect our boundaries and don't harass people outside of the work day (well unless they are on-call). There are definitely people who have more distracting households and would love a vacation from their kids. There are definitely extroverts who miss the in-person social interaction and are looking forward to returning to the office. There are also people emotionally affected by this unprecedented time with CoVid AND I live in Minneapolis where our world caught on fire this year. Management is encouraging people to do what they need. Stay at home; Return to the office, take extra time off, bring equipment home to improve your home office situation, volunteer your time to rebuild our communities and fight for social justice.

Long story short the problems you are experiencing are not endemic of where we work but symptoms of a culture that had the same issues in the office just less noticeable. I don't expect every company to shed their offices and go full WFH. Heck our company isn't selling of any floors of our buildings and fully expects to go mostly in-office sometime in the future BUT this situation forced *every company to give it a try and not just token but really do it and work out the glitches and see how it can be. I think most companies will at *least have a more friendly WFH policy into the future.

Professionalism is a state of mind not the clothes you wear or the cubicle you slave away in. Work on improving the culture and you won't have to force it so much.

What do you call a racist that won't login to post?

A: Anonymous Coward

Since a quick scan shows everyone in this thread ranting about TFT and TFS...

I actually read TFA and it specifically quotes the guys involved saying:

Since they've violated a patent there is indeed the possibility they could be sued and due to the IP involved they had to reverse engineer the part themselves as the company would not provide the blueprints BUT... no actual threats were levied.

Now you can go back to the ranting I so rudely interrupted...

Something involving big data... and lasers.

I thought Tinder was how you got the actual virus...

Also not a great argument because both Ford and GM have very specific, and generally reasonable, terms for what constitutes "voiding the warranty". The people who choose to swap their engine do so at full knowledge of and comfort with those terms. (or are outside of said warranty period anyway)

Apple doesn't want you to make the changes at all. Regardless of warranty... to the point of suing companies that facilitate your ability to do so. (One of a long list of reasons I don't buy their shit)

TBH, As it is I have literally never brought (read "needed to bring") a warranty claim on any of my cell phones. The brand has changed ownership at least a few times in the last 22 years since I became a cell phone consumer but Motorola continues to make phones that work as expected for longer than any warranty provided AND they don't see it as their responsibility to get in my business about what I do with the phones I have bought from them. I'm actually a bit sad to be considering a different brand at the moment because their latest models have fallen behind in the feature category enough to make me look elsewhere..

My only laugh about this article is that there is absolutely nothing compelling to me about Apple's phone hardware so why would I go out of my way to run Android on it? If I'm going to run Android there are a multitude of better devices that are built for it that I would rather buy (and would cost me less)

This. I straight laughed at TFS's comment about "a troubling precedent for automated social control". That government "by design" would be considered "a troubling precedent for MANUAL social control" and they have plenty of AUTOMATION already.. this may be a new "flavor" but it certainly isn't new.

If a more democratic government was doing this it would be somewhat more troubling but as you say we're not as far from this reality as most people realize anyway so "troubling" but far from "surprising".

I called this out in an above comment but to reiterate to this point specifically:

The hoards of Uber/Lyft vehicles are frequently *occupying parking not freeing it up. In the case where someone chooses to not have a car at all sure but that's not the typical. The cars are still on the road sitting parked around various residences (that largely don't have off-street parking). Around businesses, downtown, etc most of what was available parking is filled with rental cars waiting for a fare. Traditional cabbies do this as well but there were a number of statutes at least around here that put restrictions on that behavior. Uber/Lyft drivers don't respect this and fill up significant amounts of already limited business street parking.

I want to highlight the "bunch of idiots on the road going nowhere" part.

Cabbies were already annoying for the type of operation but at least they seemed to have some amount of ethos around how they operated their vehicles including required taxi-stands vs. general curb usage at bigger events/locations (like the airport / stadiums / etc) and in many municipalities statues about where they can idle / etc.

Uber/Lyft threw that out the window. Somewhere between the MUCH larger number of vehicles trolling the roads waiting for a fare to sitting occupying the already limited number of street parking spaces we have also waiting to *CONSTANTLY* double parking especially in places where they are completely blocking traffic. Even if they weren't resulting in a net increase in cars on the road (which they seem to be) they are already making traffic worse by explicitly blocking or significantly slowing traffic and blocking limited parking.

I have many many friends who drive for Lyft/Uber and they are not all terrible drivers but my experience with the hoards of sticker laden vehicles on the road would suggest otherwise. "No you cannot park / wait there" "No crawling along at 5-10mph is not acceptable on this thruway" "No your 'hands-free' phone isn't helping when you're staring at it all the time" "No having directions baked into the app doesn't help when you're not paying attention to the route and making last second cuts across traffic!" This is not hard stuff here.. they need to do better and would have less of an effect on traffic that way.

Not really... I mean it's entirely possible that could be happening but the comment the restaurateur was making was supposition. As stated by GrubHub they created entries for high demand restaurants and where those restaurants don't contract for delivery they "fake it" by calling in a Carry-Out order, picking it up for you and bringing it to your location.

The guy pushing the article (and forthcoming lawsuit) is imagining a worse scenario where they are pretending to be his restaurant and delivering food he didn't prepare under the guise of it coming from him. As far as the article and any other evidence are concerned there's no indication that is actually happening.

There are plenty of restaurants that ARE contracted with GrubHub who have inaccurate menus on their site. Seems highly likely a non-contracted one would be even more likely to be wrong. If a customer orders something the restaurant can't actually deliver you get a follow up message from GrubHub saying part of your order can't be fulfilled.

To be clear there's a whole lot about all of this that could get even more shady and fraudulent and at best GrubHub is probably stepping outside of their purvey by offering carryout for restaurants that don't provide it BUT as long as the restaurant offers carry out at all who cares if it's the actual person or some service picking it up and handling the money in-between. If you want to demand people eat the food prepared and presented fresh in your restaurant then don't offer carry out at all.. it's that simple.

...and we are making that choice about 2/1. Just because there's a choice doesn't mean unnecessary diversity can't be reigned in.

Your example of Power is a perfect one. I'm guessing you haven't traveled very much based on your comment. At least country-to-country there are standards and that makes living in this world at least somewhat manageable. Still the fact there are many different kinds of "normal house" sockets supporting an industry of adapters is irritating. Standardization of plugs would save massive amounts of manufacturing overhead as well as traveler expense and there's nothing about the standard house plug that requires that much diversity in the ecosystem other than continuing to support legacy devices (which wouldn't exist in such large numbers if these standards had been put in place decades sooner).

The fact the US and others went with 110 instead of 220 goes to how you arrive at the best standard not against having standards in the first place. If a 220V standard had been in-place maybe we would be living in a more efficient 220V world here instead?

Apple is even a part of the body working on USB so them deciding to go off on their own against a standards body they are a part of is decidedly anti-competitive / cooperative not promoting freedom in the space.

Comments on 3 points:
1) Can't speak to robustness of the connector because not aware of how much that's baked into the standard but it doesn't seem pertinent.. There is already a spectrum in quality of cable construction that doesn't seem to be hindered by the USB standard so If someone wants to sell/buy a cheaper cable let them. If someone wants to spend more for a cable that may or may not last longer / function better I'm not aware of any part of the standard blocking them from doing so.

2) "lightning goes plenty fast for syncing phone backups": Sure.. agree to disagree on "plenty" but referring to just my OS/Apps/Settings that's not the majority of my data transfer needs. Dumping down tens of GB of images, music and video are and the USB2-like speeds most lightning devices have takes ages for that transfer. The MacBookPro that now has the USB-C connector is backing that with Thunderbolt which is MUCH faster. USB-C devices that are backed by the USB-3.1 standard are even faster yet and we're talking seconds vs. minutes or minutes vs. hours so that's pretty meaningful to my day.

3) "and 1 amp charges your phone pretty fast": You're kidding, right? 1 amp takes *hours to fully charge my current devices which is why none of my chargers are that small. I haven't used any less than a 2.5A charger for many many years and all of my recently acquired chargers are PD or 3.2+A. I can charge my phone from 0-100 in minutes not hours and that's *very meaningful in terms of QOS for these energy sucking devices.

3) Forgiving plug: My current phone is still Micro-USB but all of my other devices are USB-C and I've never had to fight with the connection ever. 1-handed goes straight into the port without issue. I'm sure there are devices with tighter tolerances but I'm talking multiple devices and cables across multiple manufacturers all with the same user experience so.. who made your cranky cable/port? That's definitely not the norm.

TFA is significantly better than TFS that misses the point but both are missing some important information:

1) Britain has been using facial recognition for decades. What's "new" is, in real-time, actually acting on that data at an event's checkpoints. The tech isn't new. The usage of it isn't new. Pulling people aside because of a hit on the WL as they are walking in the door is new (or at least being public about it is).

2) They need to clarify which "Watchlist" they are using because it makes a BIG difference to what kind of a "violation of privacy or freedom" this may be. Specifically: If the list contains people who have warrants then their presence in free society is a violation in of itself. Using technology to identify these people in public is an efficiency matter and where better than a large event where you have a reason to interact with a large number of people. BUT if the watchlist is more broad to included people branded as suspicious (not having been actually convicted of anything or under jurisdiction of the state) then interfering with their ability to enjoy the event is a violation off their personal freedoms. (Systems like this are used more often than people think they are but generally more for "Hey these people of interest are in the building so security should be aware" more than "Ding Ding pull that person aside and interrogate them because of what they might do"

Plenty could be discussed about the fairness of a LOT of laws and how they are enforced including how the expansiveness of the legal code makes everyone a criminal ripe to be punished or have their rights infringed... BUT for the purposes of this conversation let's presume the legal code is fair enough so to that I'll say a person who is on the lam should have no expectation of privacy when they expose their likenesses in public. That's a terrible way to hide anyway...

That was my thought reading the summary glad to know they're already thinking of it.

Transplantation is great and glad this helps but the real win is the ability to temporarily extract people's own organs, repair / regenerate them, and re-implant.

The liver is more suited for processes like these better than most if not all but the eyes but hopefully similar techniques could be used for other organs as well!

The Future: "Wow it's been a decade already?? Time for my decennial organ refresh!"