IBM is the OG legend of lawsuits. Their lawyers got the nickname the Nazgûl (dark riders from Lord of the Rings, turn in your nerd card if you didn't immediately get that) for their persistent unwavering pursuit of lawsuits. Their team fought the *US government* to a draw over 12 years and 30 million documents in an antitrust case. Oracle has a ways to go yet.

But remanded with the ruling from SCOTUS that it *is* fair use. So...there's basically no room to twist this into a win for Oracle. The appeals court is bound by SCOTUS to find that fair use applies, thus Oracle gets nothing. Fair use is not an affirmative defense, it is a legal use of copyrighted work.

Annihilating 0.5g of antimatter would release approximately one Nagasaki bomb's (20kt TNT) worth of energy. 0.5kg would be 21Mt TNT which would be a fairly large thermonuclear warhead.

GP's not saying he can't see a reason, they've provided a nicely explained breakdown of why they don't think this should be labeled UBI. Maybe don't make a knee-jerk comment without understanding what's being said?

I doubt it. It's coming from private funds. Private entities are allowed to be racist when it comes to giving money away. Whether that's good or not is up for debate, but it's not illegal. And I seriously doubt there's a cause of action for a tort claim in civil court.

To be fair, it's privately funded. It is still racist, but not everything racist is illegal (or even necessarily to be frowned upon). Private companies/foundations/individuals are allowed to be racist in certain things, and distributing funds is one of them. For example, a scholarship specifically allocated to LatinX people entering STEM majors would, by definition, be racist, but not illegal.

There's certainly a discussion to be had about whether this specific racist action is acceptable or not, but it's not really Oakland directing this, they're just facilitating because hey, free money for some residents.

You can't fool me young man, it's turtles all the way down.

Umm, speed of light is 299792 km/s, so...It's closer to the (speed of light / 1000) / 3600.

Trump's administration has basically been a quality assurance test for the republic. It's pointed out a ton of deficiencies that exist because Congress, in its cowardice, delegated authority thinking that it wouldn't be used in the ways it was. Why? Because it was easier than crafting the laws narrowly to accomplish what was required. So our system gradually turned into a loophole riddle mess. Hopefully this gets Congress off its collective butt and fixes a lot of these problems.

SSDs don't have an RPM to them. Unless you're saying it runs a 120Hz clock? That would be an odd tic rate in a DC system.

It is possible, but way harder than just straight learning the necessary concepts instead of discovering them all over again. Unguided learning takes a lot more effort than frontloading much needed concepts. That said, good for you for teaching yourself, that's tough work.

You can learn programming basics with a high school education, but if you never take a class on boolean logic (either as part of philosophy, math, computer science, or electrical engineering), linear algebra, graph theory, and statistics then higher level computer science material will always elude you. You can't competently do algorithm analysis without a solid graph theory background. You will never get to efficient graphic engines without linear algebra (admittedly, the truly talented can teach themselves linear algebra along the way, but you're really biking uphill with that route, and relearning a lot of stuff that could have been handed to you).

So yes, you can become a programmer without the college education, but without that backfill of diverse coursework, it will at a minimum be harder for you than it has to be, or else you will be a substandard programmer.


P.S. And yes, people with a college degree can still be terrible programmers. I'm talking more about having an understanding of underlying concepts, not what classes you managed to somehow pass without learning anything.


P.P.S. Oh and high school dropouts can become brilliant programmers, but a handful of outliers do not a data set make (see statistics comment above). And even those rare geniuses learned the concepts I mentioned, probably the hard way, and I respect that, but imagine what they could have done if they hadn't had to take the long road.

Obligatory XKCD.

The latest WHO sitrep shows a 0.84% mortality rate for South Korea, which is the lowest among countries with a significant number of cases. Where are you getting 0.2% from?

I would argue that South Korea's aggressive testing regimen probably reduces the error bars for that country somewhat. At last count they were showing a 0.84% death rate with thousands of confirmed cases (see WHO sitrep). That would still put COVID-19 at around an order of magnitude more deadly that the seasonal flu, but maybe not quite as bad as first feared. It will probably be weeks before we get a more accurate count though.