The Russians were very aware of/scared of EMP. The MIG-25's little vacuum tubes were in part a response to the EMP threat from a weapon like this one.

Well, a large proportion of the developers I worked with over the last 40 years preferred and still use the Mac. In part that's because when they need to, they can pop up terminal.app and do something with the familiar Unix toolset, such as setting up a quick tool stream using pipes.

So I'm sure it makes some people here happy to toss insults at Mac users as all computer-illiterate hipsters. And I'm sure there are a lot of those using Macs. But that's not the reason why I use it, or my developer friends use it.

p.s. I stumbled across my "POSIX Pioneer" certificate, signed by Jim Isaak, when looking for something else.

about "OpenAI" is its mouth.

(And yeah, I stole that line from someone who used it to describe another organization with "Open" in its name. But it worked then, and it works now.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Google's market definition was set by the jury in trial court. Apple's was set by the judge and affirmed by the appeals court and implicitly by SCOTUS. So it's not clear to me how strong the Apple precedent is.

I was surprised the judge assigned the market definition to the jury in the Google case. I thought that would have been a 'ruling of law'.

IANAL, but it seems to me SCOTUS has implicitly accepted the Appeals Court ruling accepting the trial court’s definition of the market. Now a judge’s ruling here could be considered as a matter of law (vs of fact, which is jury business.) So at a minimum, this could set up a basis for Google to appeal the ruling in its case, and if Google loses, that could then set up a potential for further SCOTUS ruling on ‘legal definition of a market.’

The ‘market definition’ is at the absolute core of these anti-trust cases. So if I were doing Apple’s legal strategy (or other big tech firm), I’d be looking for both certainty and favorable rulings-of-law on -my- preferred market definition.

This would likely violate Hanlon's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

My experience explicitly differs. A good checkout person is much faster than any self-checkout I've tried. That's because the self-checkout systems have to do a lot of extra work to make sure they're not over-billing and to guide the user through the process. And that includes the one time when the self-checkout clerk herself did the scanning while I watched to see if it was "just me."

It's clear stores did not do this for 'customer convenience,' but rather to save money on checkout clerks. Again anecdotally, what I've noticed is customers move to self-checkout only when they see lines at the registers with clerks. The 'magic number' seems to be 3 customers, more than that in a line and some people move to self-checkout. Less than 3 in the queue, and people join the line for human checkout. Some people do prefer self-checkout. But I bet if stores, particularly those that have substantially decreased their staffed registers, polled customers, they'd find substantial distaste for self-checkout.

I generally avoid stores (particularly Target and WalMart) that no longer adequately staff checkout lines. And acknowledgement to our local Market-Basket, which has NO self-checkout lines.

I commented already, so I can't mod parent up +1 funny....

The problems with C++ are pretty well known. If the community is going to do wholesale change, moving to a language that offers much more support for formal verification, better type-checking, and overall better security, seems to be a better -return on investment-.

That being said, I generally don't like the idea of 'recoding working software', the likelihood of introducing new bugs outweighs the putative arguments for "easier to maintain."

Having observed Dennis Muilenberg for almost 10 years as the Boeing PM on Army FCS, it was clear that 'engineering' was not his interest. His primary interest was earning 100% of the award fee each year. Despite the well-documented problems with Boeing engineering, Muilenberg exercised no oversight to fix the engineering problems. "If the government pays full award fee, we don't have any real problems." I still remember watching him and the Army PM standing in front of the assembled "OneTeam" claiming FCS was running within 2% of perfection on both cost and schedule, to -3 significant digits-. This was not credible, major programs don't run that close to perfection, quarter to quarter, let alone knowing "perfection" to that much precision.

That story that everyone involved denied, but Bloomberg has never retracted?

Caveat lector.

I think the links I posted have graphs of P/E, which are instructive, particularly if you compare the two trendlines.

Valuation is "stock price x number of shares". One way to think about stock price is P/E, the ratio of the price over earnings. Apple's PE is 29.60 )(https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/pe-ratio) , Microsoft's is 35.19 (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/pe-ratio) So that says that Wall St values Microsoft's earnings more than Apple's earnings. (Tesla is 79.88, showing Wall St pays A LOT MORE for a dollar of Tesla earning, than it does for either Apple or Microsoft.) So if we assume Apple and Microsoft revenues grow at the same rate, Wall St would have to continue to value MSFT's earnings more than AAPL's.

All this is to say that valuation is just a 'construct' of the markets, based on how the market perceives future value of current earning potential. Could Wall St decide that Microsoft is more likely to grow faster/better than Apple? Sure. Does that mean that Microsoft is earning more money or more importantly, more profit? Not necessarily!

Actually, I usually 'search' Amazon through DuckDuckGo when I'm looking for something specific. The chance top item actually matching my full search criteria is much better in DuckDuckGo than Amazon. Amazon gives preference to their 'sponsors' which often do not meet the search criteria, which DuckDuckGo does not (instead providing the fully conforming item in the first link.) I rarely use Google these days, so I can't comment on how well/poorly Google search works in the same situation. But I suspect the incentives for Google to return approximate 'sponsored' results in search is much less than for Amazon.