Looks to me like they realized a few things:

1) Practically NOBODY upgraded Windows on their machines, they simply got a new computer that had the latest version of Windows on it when their old machine got too slow, died, or was no longer shiny enough.

2) Circa Vista and Windows 8 it became clear that people were actually going with older OS's on new machines rather than adopting MS's vision of how they should use their computer, and still never upgraded. MS was pretty powerless against this. Even their attempt to push touch by tying it to Windows 8 on laptops backfired and people would rather take Windows 7 on a laptop to avoid a touch based laptop with Windows 8 on it.

So MS is loosing almost no revenue by keeping you up to date, but they get to push whatever new "vision" they have on us at almost any time. So we can get Vista'ed, lose the Start menu, get tiled, Clippy'ed, or Ribbon'ed any time they decide to "improve" our lives.

Just cleaned out my wife's car. I found ample evidence that will be used to continue to enforce the rule that nobody (especially my son) is allowed to eat in my car.

And I doubt cops can deal with them even if the cars could handle it perfectly. Traffic cops make a lot of eye contact to figure out if their instructions have been understood (and many of them are lousy at giving clear instructions too). An autonomous can that fully understood hand gestures may still freak out a cop who just sees a tuned out driver swiping away at here phone. "Cop tazes robot Lexus...again" may be the next click-bait news story.

Similarly I doubt an autonomous car could handle a burnt out turn arrow, detour signs that may or may not actually be active, 4-way flashing Red lights or a power outage where half the drivers ignore the whole waiting your turn thing, and so many other obscure but unavoidable situations.

Yes, but without details it is hard to know what the story really is. One big fear is that self driving will result in apathy of the drivers.

Had the humans *just* taken over? Were they merely shuttling the thing to the test site? Were the other drivers simply distracted by Sauron's eye being bolted to a Lexus? I see a huge danger in the hand-off of a self driving car throws its hands up at a construction site, or due to snow, or if it sees a paper bag that just might be a rock in the road.

A scenario I expect is that we will see a net increase in accidents by human drivers of autonomous cars that outweighs the gains while HAL is in charge. It will likely be a very long time before autonomous cars can handle 100% of the driving, leaving humans to tackle the hardest ones after possibly weeks of never being in control, and while they are completely tuned out of the situation. Would that be OK?

Should we instead compare the costs and safety benefits of adding HAL to every car vs. spending similar amounts to require all drivers to take a couple day driving refresher every 10 years to renew their license? Heck, it is pretty shocking that we let folks get a license for a car without ever taking a proper driving class first, but I digress.

I was chatting with a guy who runs a small wood fired brick oven pizza oven at the local farmer's market. Turns out he is a former IT guy who quit his day gig to do the farmer's market circuit year round. Gets to be outdoors, and his work load is a lot lighter for about 7 months of the year when the days and hours scale back for winter. Can't say it would be my first choice, but compared to cube life it doesn't look too bad. So starting your own business is an option.

In my case I do mixed signal ASIC design for a German company, so I am actually on the off-shore side of things (there is a limited talent pool in Germany more so than a wage gap). While there plenty of places doing ASIC work, it still appears that the barriers to entry are high enough that design shops pop up where there is a critical mass of workers with experience rather than just where the rent is cheap.

Workplace fun has all been drummed out of existence, for better or worse. Way back when companies had more picnics, beer bashes, and tolerated more hooliganism as ways to build teams and blow off steam. Those "good old days" had issues too, but the point is that fun has been squeezed out which also reduces chances for new guys to be brought into the fold and gel with the company.

All that said, this sounds a lot like another round of blaming the new generation for being inferior to the last one. Just as every previous generation has been judged as been inferior, and as will continue in perpetuity.

As soon as things are in absolute rather than per capita you know it is BS. Big round numbers mask anything meaningful. If New York has twice the populationof another city, but is compared in absolute terms it is not a useful comparison. I stopped reading once I saw it was a BIG ROUND NUMBERS hatchet job.

That is probably a tactic to be used by the authorities. If they get a hold of the laptop and sneak in some piece of hardware to make the USB drop every now and then, the suspect will pretty soon disable it.

Way back when I worked for a 3 letter acronym this was a pretty low tech solution often employed to circumvent alarms of all sorts. Just randomly trigger the alarm a every few hours at night and within a few days it will be turned off out of disgust or at the orders of any cops that have been dispatched the last half dozen times. Now you can waltz in and do your dirty work.

The laws of physics were not simply written, nor is anyone I know of claiming they are a done deal. We are running out of corners of the physical universe that have not been fully explored (as far as physics is concerned) and modeled, and have moved into the nooks and crannies. Occasionally we need to amend the laws of physics to cover new discoveries, but these amendments have been pretty small.

Dark matter is a weird subject, since it is a thing we apparently can observe the effects of, but cannot directly observe. I still have a skeptical eye and would not be surprised to find out there is a much more mundane explanation than a spooky material we cannot interact with but has gravitational pull.

Similarly I would not be surprised to found out that this EM drive is simply getting hotter at one end and being propelled by black body radiation from the hot end, still looking for a good enough write up that says they factored that out.

I at least have choices, well a choice. I have Frontier 25/5 for $35 a month which is decent, or I could go Comcast (F Comcast). Comcast will never get a penny out of my hands, too much bad history.

Frontier annoys me, hard to get costs without calling. The operator was nice enough, but spew lots of numbers so that it is very hard to figure out a simple speed versus dollars. My service is actually $50/mo, but DISCOUNTS!!! I have no idea what the discounts are, but I had to wait through the guy exuberantly telling me how many he had found only after I started to sound like I was about to hang up.

Google Fiber might be coming to the area. Not sure if that will make things better, or if it will be a repeat of Animal Farm.

Funny, I live way up in Portland and my electricity usage in summer is about 3x what it is in the middle of winter and our summer time is much more moderate than Sacramento's. I would have expected that solar in summer would be perfect for running your AC. What the hell are you doing in winter that burns so much power? Indoor pot farming?

Singling out a single company provides a rallying cry.

I will violate Godwin's law for a second, and point to Anne Frank. Did she matter if the grand scheme of things? Not really, she was just one person. But by putting one little girl's face on Nazi horrors you can send a more powerful message than listing big round numbers of dead victims.

Disney does a good job maintaining their all American family friendly facade, and showing a little of their behind the scenes rapacious capitalism may be sufficiently jarring to cause action. I see them as a very good poster child to beat up on given their high profits, high prices, and desire for a family friendly public persona.

Nobody owes them a tax break, or subsidies either.

Nobody owes them totally "free" trade either.

Yet I had to struggle to get 4 weeks of vacation time.

The obvious medium term band-aid to is start restricting working hours to 45 absolute max a week, and restrict the number of work days per year to make people take time off and regain some mental health. Get rid of the salary sham for all those working for under $100k (indexed to inflation). If your company relies on 60 hour work weeks, then hire more people.

We could soak up huge swaths of idle labor if we prioritized quality of life more.

I tend to agree. When 10% of the class fails, blame the students, when 90% fail blame the professor. I find that true of individual problems, tests, or whole classes.

All that said, sometimes statistics conspire to give you a really cranky/rowdy/rude group of students all in one class at one time. Without being in the room it is hard to tell what is going on. I get the feeling this is an exasperated professor who wasn't getting backup over discipline issues and decided to call the administrations bluff by using the nuclear option.