From what I gather that's mostly for training purposes because they don't want to hand out their actual plans and intelligence against real geopolitical enemies beyond a very limited circle and it's a lot more politically accepted. What they really care about is planning the movement of troops, tanks, ships, planes, formations, supply lines, support columns and so on. It's not like they're all that different from the military's point of view.

And I suspect some don't understand version control at all. I've worked with the following (non-git) setup:
One production branch, at any time one active development branch. When we merge to production, we branch off a new development branch. Could it get simpler? I don't see how. Yet people manage to start developing on the prod branch (that they have access to for hotfixes), fail to understand that bugfixes to prod must go into dev or be overwritten at the next merge, branch the dev branch instead of the prod branch, not to mention the guy blindly checking in his entire old local code over the current dev branch and it's all a brilliant example of Murphy's law. One guy mostly understands it but doesn't want to be the gatekeeper for everybody else. Though he gets to play fire fighter instead...

No, it's roughly the limit of 20/20 vision. I checked using the spreadsheet here and my 28" 3840x2160 screen that I sit 60 cm in away from is perfect for anyone with 20/18.5 vision or worse. However, that's only the lower limit for what is considered "normal" vision, not perfect visual acuity:

I know that I at one point could make out most of the 20/16 line, not anymore though. Moving to 8K would double the pixel density so the same screen, same distance at 7680x4320 would be good up to 20/9.25 vision, covering 99.9% of the population in their prime. It is actually possible that this athlete could marginally detect a >8K monitor. So no, 8K makes sense if you want everyone to have a perfect picture.

I know the plural of anecdote is not data but that doesn't ring true to me based on those I know that have been in traffic accidents. Most of it is plain not paying attention or hitting some kind of blind spot where you thought it was clear. Even the ones where the environment played a role they misjudged that particular turn as icy and slippery, not that they were surprised by winter conditions. Or they made some bad assumptions about what people would do.

If you only count the "freak accidents" like tire blowouts or other mechanical failure, potholes, surprise oil spills, cargo falling off a truck, trees falling over the road and so on that go "above and beyond" ordinary driving and following the rules of the road I'd say those are a very, very small minority. Of course they've been in some accidents where they were faultless, but generally then the other person involved was at fault. Truly faultless accidents are rare.

You could make the exact same argument about the whole ADA, the truth is that it wouldn't happen by itself. I can't count the number of wheelchair users but I very rarely see one out and about shopping, strictly from a business point of view they're a <0.1% market that wouldn't even pay off the ramp. The only reason we give them special privilege in law is because they're not trying to be special snowflakes, they don't have a choice about being disabled. And beating shop owners over the head with the law has been the best way to get results.

I don't have any disabilities, but I do have a few food allergies. I can with certainty say I'd be pretty furious if I went to a restaurant and they said we serve a set menu, either you eat it or not but we don't care about your allergies and won't offer any alternatives. It's not as if I went to a sushi restaurant and they don't have steak. Sure some are just bitter but many simply don't want to be beggars, they feel they deserve and have the right to equal access and not be at the mercy of the owner's charity. Sometimes they just get a little carried away and try using the law where reality won't let it happen.

No, Facebook can only "put out" as much as everybody else puts in. For example my classmates from primary school are a tightly connected clique and since some of them have told Facebook they went to the same school, Facebook has correctly deduced that everybody in that clique probably went there too and is asking me to confirm it, but they basically know anyway. Another relative of mine did some genealogy thing and basically drew up the whole family tree for Facebook. Same with people tagging you in photos and checking you in and whatnot, even though you can hide it from your own timeline or even untag yourself Facebook knows that when a friend tagged you it was almost certainly correct. I doubt they really forget anything.

And most annoyingly, Facebook often knows when I send email because the one I send to has shared their address book/inbox with Facebook. There's no other way some of those "friend suggestions" could turn up on social media, so even when you try to keep a life separate from Facebook it's no good when the other end is being a tattle-tale. And I don't know if it's just my friends, but my impression is that you don't reach out and actually tell friends about the things that friends normally get told about. They post it to Facebook and expect people to have read it there, that's more or less the expected way to socialize. Not reading Facebook gets you the "Oh sorry, I didn't know you were stationed on a nuclear submarine under radio silence" looks.

You forgot the most annoying part about car pooling, you must be on schedule like a clockwork. At work I have to be there certain "core hours" of the day, while mornings and evenings I have a bit of flexibility as long as I get my total hours done. Can't find your keys in the morning? Need to leave an hour early? Work an hour late? Should have stopped to buy milk on the way home? Heck, even those who take the bus can mostly catch one leaving half an hour later. You get the door-to-door service, but it's the least flexible solution. If any of you are the least bit sloppy and unorganized, chances are big they'll either be annoyed with you or you'll be annoyed with them. It's not all of my friends I'd carpool with, to put it that way.

At least for Opus it's probably already too late, in two-three years MP3 and AAC will be patent-free, the relevant dates seem to be respectively 16.04.2017 and 14.02.2018 so by the time Opus goes mainstream patents won't matter. That war was fought and lost sometime around Ogg Vorbis. Even if they are slightly inferior to Opus in compression they have almost universal hardware and software support and just giving them a little more bit rate negates the quality difference. A mainstream patent free video codec would be great to have though, but I'm not holding my breath. You need to get the industry support behind it and these days most cameras record in H.264, YouTube delivery is just one part of the puzzle.

I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that LibreOffice would cover all my needs at work, but in my experience the conversion to and from .doc files has always had glitches. So here's what I hope should happen:

1. Make LibreOffice the default
2. Make MS Office one of those applications you have to order with an associated license cost.
3. Go through Group Policy options and set defaults to OpenDocument format

So if you prefer/need MS Office, you can have it but by default it'll save in the office-wide format. If you really need some MS magic you can do a "Save as..." to get Microsoft's own format. Pretty sure it's not going to happen but...

It's a form of seizure, but the supreme court hasn't found it an unreasonable one. And it's been used for a very long time. Basically, the issue was that without forfeiture they had a hard time catching the owners of smuggling ships. As long as you can't establish them as an accessory to the crime or you have jurisdiction problems, they can legally provide the supplies while the criminals operate on an asset-less basis. So the solution was to declare the assets - in this case the ship - used in illegal acts forfeit, making it a risk and a cost to be used in crime. This goes all the way back to the British.

I've been reading some of the court cases and it seems the minority has been trying really hard to find tortured ways of getting out of their own past precedents as the cases become more and more unreasonable but the majority falls down on "we've approved of civil forfeiture for 200 years, we can't overturn that now". They really, really, really don't like interpreting an old law in a new way. So without acts of Congress saying this is not okay, I don't think anything will change.

P.S. Civil asset forfeiture puts the US way ahead of the UK as fascist country in my opinion, I'm not really even sure if it should qualify as an "innocent until proven guilty" system anymore since you can be robbed blind and need to prove your innocence to the court. It stinks to high heaven.

Or not, either way is fine.
a) You're leaving for another company but during the notice period while it is our paycheck we expect you to be professional and loyal to your current employer. That means continuing to carry out your job duties to the best of your ability and help transition them to other employees. I'm sure they'll appreciate someone with working knowledge of the system guiding them.
or
b) I'm sure you know it's company policy to immediately terminate all access for leaving staff members, regardless of reason so don't take it personally. Think of it as two weeks paid vacation. Have you got everything in order? I can pretend I haven't seen this for another hour, but if you're ready I'll call the honor guard to escort you out. The check will be in the mail.

I mean you have to screw up pretty bad to make the last seem like a bad thing for an employee that's leaving voluntarily. You're getting two weeks pay for doing nothing. Pretty much the worst you can do is make them stay, but act like you don't trust them anymore.

And if they care a bit too much about their coworkers and start talking about transitioning, it should be pretty easy to to talk them out of it. Sure it'll be tough on the remaining staff, but it'll be like a "what if he was hit by a bus" exercise and we'll find out how much documentation and routines we're missing. They'll cope somehow and besides, it's company policy so I can't really make those kinds of exceptions.

You mean like browsers and Javascript? In that case 99% of the population has lost already. The pwn2own competition results are rather miserable. The part that /. probably doesn't want to hear is that the primary effect is centralization and gatekeepers.

Take Usenet for example, it got overrun by spammers and trolls because there was no real way to block them and the few moderated groups basically meant a few people were in control of the discussion. Instead we moved to forums, where you could use CAPTCHAs and various other tricks to block mass sign-ups, moderation, flagging of abusive users and so on. They're not perfect, but they work okay.

Why do so many people use Facebook instead of email? Same thing, much less SPAM. For the longest time, Linux users hailed the repository model over the Windows "download random exe from the Internet" model. Then Apple took it to the extreme with the "one store to rule them all" and suddenly it was a problem. Even on Android you have to pass by huge warning lights to enable third party repositories and Windows Phone has as far as I know joined Apple in the "one store" model.

My guess is that they'll push it to the cloud so all the application code runs on a server and they just need to lock down the browser, more per user&app sandboxes, more difficult time running unsigned software and more users with computers that need Apple's, Microsoft's or Google's sign-off to run an application. The average user simply doesn't understand the micromanagement involved, same way users won't use NoScript when browsing the web. They'll "outsource" it.

That depends on how much of peer pressure/boycott there is from your local church congregation and extended to their members to not shop at "gay friendly" stores and buy at stores that refuse gays service. From what I've understood the most successful such peer pressure in the US has been to make mainstream outlets "family friendly". Despite there obviously being a big market for adult material, they've managed to force adult stores out of malls, keep mainstream cinemas showing adult-only movies, video game stores from selling adult only-titles and so on simply by refusing to shop in any business that would touch it with a ten foot pole. You don't think the same can happen to a cake shop? I do.

Of course leaving out the small detail that basically every managed Windows desktop uses AD and Windows admins either know it or they don't. If I search for tools to centralized manage Linux machines, I get dozens of alternatives in the top 50 hits. Like with everything else on Linux, there is no single standard.

You'll never get away from the fact that flying is extremely energy intensive and has some nasty failure modes. What happens the day the drone and cargo drops out of the sky and hits a kid on the head? Remember that a falling coconut or icicle is enough to kill, a drone clearly has lethal potential.

We're working so hard on autonomous cars, why not autonomous pedestrians? Something like this making its way to your doorstep, you swipe the card and collect your pizza. Or your package from Amazon or whatever. Or it's the robot mailman dropping mail in designated mailboxes. Of course you need a human manager nearby in case it malfunctions or gets tipped over by kids having fun or whatever, but there's a lot less that can go wrong with <5 mph rolling robot.