Custom hardware gives it the ability to communicate using body language.

Whether that's worth the extra cost, I don't know; probably not. But it does make it more interesting than "just another app".

HHGTTG was a manual.

But that was never the intent of a carbon tax, was it? It's not a reparations program.

The purpose of a carbon tax is to make carbon emitting-technologies more expensive, so that the market will be encouraged to find alternatives that emit less carbon.

Without that, it's difficult for alternative technologies to get a foothold in the market, as they are forced to compete with carbon-based technologies that are allowed to pollute "for free", thus neutralizing (from a monetary perspective) the advantage of the non-polluting technologies.

Here they are. The solar industry of the USA now employs more people than the coal industry of the USA.

Funny how you weren't aware of that fact, isn't it? It's almost as if your media sources chose not to mention it, because it doesn't fit their narrative.

Or, they succeed, but the right-wing media bubble pretends not not notice. Cherry-picking reality might help them keep their market share in the short run, but as time goes on more and more people will realize they're full of shit.

If the price of a new car was $180M, I would definitely stick with my trusty 70s car.

How did Southwest find out about this tweet?

Do they have a team of people sitting around watching a Twitter feed, so that if anyone mentions Southwest they can pounce?

If so, good job guys! You really saved the day here. SWA stock is going to go up tomorrow for sure! :^)

Indeed, it carries MUCH more precision than just "Ebola", which can mean any of the following:

"Ebola River" is a tributary to the Congo River.

"Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever" was the name of a disease first discovered in people living in the remote Ebola River watershed.

"Ebola Virus" (abbrev. "EBOV") is the infectious agent that causes "Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever"

"Ebolavirus" is the taxonomic genus to which the "Ebola virus" belongs.

"Ebola Virus Disease (abbrev. "EVD") is now the more common name for Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. We can call it that because we have definitively identified the infectious agent that causes the disease (EBOV). Changing the name pre-emptively differentiates EVD from other hemorrhagic diseases that might arise from the same area.

Laymen simply say "Ebola" and let their audience sort out what they mean -- if indeed they mean anything precisely. I once had this conversation with an elderly relative.

Relative: 90% of bats have rabies.

Me: That's hard to believe.

Relative: It's true! I read it in the paper.

So I went to the paper and found out that she had it hopelessly garbled. TEN percent of bats SUBMITTED FOR TESTING had positive SCREENING tests.

I worked in public health informatics for many years, and it's a longstanding tradition to use three letter codes. I think this is the legacy of old systems which provided three or four character fields for codes, but it certainly speeds things along when you're keying data into a spreadsheet.

The tradition isn't formalized, and so it's application is somewhat irregular, but it's important in this case to realize that public health surveillance makes a strong distinction between a *disease* (a disorder of structure or function in an organism like a human) and an *infectious agent* (the parasite, bacterium, virus or prion that transmits the disease). That's because you can find the infectious agent without finding any cases of the disease -- for example in an asymptomatic human, in a disease carrying vector like a mosquito etc. Non-specialist use the same terms to refer to either the disease or the agent (this naming by association is called "metonymy", a word every system designer should be familiar with). So of course the abbreviations experts use seem nonsensical to non-specialists.

The abbreviation "EVD" maskes perfect sense -- it is the *disease* caused by the Ebola Virus (EBOV). A non-specialist uses terms loosely and would say things like "They found Ebloa in Freetown." A specialist wouldn't use such loose language. He'd say "We found a human case of EVD in Freetown," or "We had a serum with a positive titer for EBOV from Freetown."

There's only one thing you need to know about the H-1B program to see that it's not about providing skilled labor *here*: after 6-10 years of working the visa holder is kicked out of the country to make room for a less experienced visa holder.

If H-1B led automatically to a green card, then we'd be keeping the *most* expert workers here, rather than replacing them with less experienced ones. Change that *one* aspect of the program, and it's be an asset to the US as a nation.

I went back and got a degree after 25 years. It's not the *degree*, it's the *education* that matters, and I got a lot more out of the education than my younger peers. This was a new perspective on things I was already familiar with, and I was able to connect a lot of dots I wouldn't have been able to when I was eighteen. I could immediately see what stuff was good for, and I discovered a number of things that would solve commonplace problems I'd seen occur over and over again, even with personnel wit advanced degrees.

Then I got out and discovered that the world didn't want to hire a fifty year old who'd been "out of work" (going to school) for three years....

My intuition tells me that this would cause the codebase to become an incomprehensible mess over time, as it would not have any consistent organizing principles to speak of. Is my intuition correct, or is that not generally a problem in practice?

Well, you are unlikely to be the *only* one who doesn't think this is all that impressive, because you're unlikely to be the only one who didn't read the article or looking up the device on the company's website.

The robot in question is designed to capture energy from surface waves for propulsion. So it is not a deep submersible, it waddles along a six meters below the surface, tethered to a streamlined surface buoy that it drags along and uses to capture wave energy. Making it through a major storm is a significant proof-of-concept for such a system.

I'm a rare advocate of preventing rapists from ever having children. Face it, rape worked for the whole evolution of humans. Those aggressive traits worked and the evolutionary pressures rewarded them. There is no reason society can't decide to finally do something about promotion of that behavior into the gene pool. Males are genetically evolved towards the behavior and you can't condition all of them properly from birth to get the results you demand (thank goodness we don't know how because those skills would be used to control people in bad ways... and what we know already is abused.) Perhaps this could lower the need to dominate as well and cut down on domestic abuse (another big source for rape and similar abuse... we don't even have good stats on raped partners because they don't report it or rationalize.) Geeks are probably better than most male demographics at controlling their urges - the anonymous tools free inhibitions for EVERYBODY not just geeks.

No, it is not a slippery slope to eugenics and if you think so you need to look up the slippery slope fallacy.

Mozilla asks for user data and people who do not opt-into that are not contributing data. Me being one of the many who do not-- I suspect intermediate and advanced users comprise the majority of this group. This means their data of people not using things like menu bars because they getting metrics from the most daft users of firefox.

Good designers will use metrics only as a factor not as a mindless system to think for you. Simplistic metrics are a whole issue in themselves along with improper use of statistics (on metrics) which is a common problem as well. Menu bars are never used heavily but they are extremely useful - of all times, in 2014 when phones have more screen space than a desktop did in the 90s we suddenly become obsessed with screen space??

Great designers also will accommodate advanced users and the large base of existing users by not arbitrarily pissing them off. Necessary changes can be done more gradually along with instructions on how to change the feature. (like making sure the user knows how to get to menus when you killed them... and to not foobar the pop-up menu version of the menubar... proper grouping and hierarchy make large things easier.) Also the current situation of "don't make me think" is likely a fad in the design world; I hope that users want to use their brains effectively in the future; otherwise, Edward Tufte etc. are irrelevant as we devolve.

If Mozilla wants to REALLY be a community they will let users choose and try something democratic, such as opt-in or opt-out of a major interface change. Since opt-in would never gain a majority of the users on these recent changes; the designers would naturally push for an opt-out policy but at least they could measure their failure by making opt-out easy to do (like force the user to use it for a few months before presenting the option.) At least then users at all skill levels feel empowered and PART OF SOMETHING (mozilla could even use the opportunity to leverage altruism and promote an organization image unlike the top-down corporate browsers.)

FURTHERMORE, it doesn't matter how many more daft users you have over the advanced users. Your software is not default like IE was. Users install Firefox because of people like slashdot readers. I have brought mozilla 100s of users and I can take them away, some already left for Chrome anyhow... but many do what their nerd or IT staff tells them to do (or whomever sets the default.)

Too true, and I'm not sure what the compensating benefit is. There are situations where anonymity can be beneficial, but a social/gaming arena is not one of them. Why allow anonymity if it only encourages people to act like irresponsible douchebags?

A half-serious solution for a gaming platform that wants to reduce the douchebag problem: make all gamers register under their real name, and record all of their in-game communications in a searchable database that the world (including present and future employers) can Google. That ought to clean at least some of them up.