Many people cram their way thru intro-level courses, if not whole degrees. It's very undesirable, but it's not a "scandal" per se. It's simply an ongoing reality that educators, such as the ones you reference, struggle and experiment with.

A much bigger problem, IMO, is the bureaucratization of education. In higher-ed, you've seen it in the form of increasing administration-to-faculty ratios ("chief diversity officer", anyone?). In lower-ed, you see the obsession with trying to formalize, test, measure, and customize every aspect of a student's experience, at the expense of actual, you know, teaching. Perverse economic incentives then tempt teachers to forge scores and and teach-to-test, thus encouraging rote memorization and avoiding deep conceptual development. Sure, your suggested battery of tests may sound like a fine idea in isolation, but when you pile it on top of everyone else's fine ideas and impose it from afar, you end up distorting and smothering the education process.

Unfortunately, that lower-ed scientific management philosophy is creeping into higher-ed, and it'll be a major part of what kills off quality, affordable education in America.

Mesh Technology - Lets you enjoy an enclosed porch when the bugs are out.
Hardware/Software Separation - You'll get along with your spouse better if you have separate bathrooms (particularly toilets) and separate closets.
Social Media Integration - Parties revolve around the kitchen, so ideally have nice flow between the kitchen and (as applicable) the living room, porch, and dining room. In my case, I really don't want guest helping with the cooking or dishes, so give me a design that fences them off with a bar-top counter, but keep it open enough that I can peripherally participate in whatever's happening in those other rooms.
Dedicated I/O Path - Your pantry should be between your kitchen and garage/carport, so unloading is fast and easy. Also include a small desk and file cabinet for processing mail and keeping keys/wallets/purses out of site.
Security-Hardened Design - Minimize number of entrances; ensure perimeter and walks can be fully lit; install alarm system; include tornado shelter (if applicable).
Non-Paged Plan - This is VERY expensive, but you'll appreciate the absence of stairs if you spend your retirement years here.
DRY Principles - Make sure site has adequate drainage, that gutters are clog-free or otherwise easy to maintain, that bathrooms can be well-ventilated, that your roof isn't too complicated, and that you don't have a pool. Moisture is the enemy!

Yeah, obviously you can't do anything about that piece of dust except hope it misses you. However, there's a much greater amount of dust simply drifting with the stars around the galactic center. If you move thru the interstellar medium at 0.7c, you're going to have a bad day. Creep thru at a much slower speed and you have a chance, especially if you stay within the Local Bubble.

And the part about obliterating your spacecraft by colliding with interstellar dust at super-high relative velocities. The speed limit for arriving in one piece is way lower than c.

And under Firefox, don't forget to tweak your about:config:

If you don't need them, WebGL and WebRTC are just big security holes:

Not privacy-related, but...

To the contrary, Java's lack of expressiveness resulted in people writing tons of external XML files, code generators, DI frameworks, and build tools to glue the whole mess together. Instead of small, judicious bits of cleverness in the main language/runtime, it's been pushed to very clever tools on the periphery that come with relatively large learning curves. That's not really a win from the readability standpoint.

Doing some quick calcs, the inner rings would all lie within 1/6th mile of the South Pole; the starting rings would lie between 1 and ~1.16 miles away. (1 mile is the degenerate case, where you have to spin in place an infinite amount to "walk" 1 mile, so this probably shouldn't count.)

Of course, any elevation change in the terrain you're walking across would cause these rings to distort and contract inward. (E.g., the rings you calculate for a perfect sphere are going to be larger than the equivalent rings you calculate if you're going to count "walking distance" up and down slopes.)

No, all of those things would cost slightly more, because you've raised demand for theater seats and goodies. The studios want too make as much money as possible from their product... you think they're just going to return the extras money to consumers in the form of lower ticket prices? This isn't akin to a shoplifting scenario, where theft adds incremental cost to each unit moved. Piracy acts more like a competing business, and when your competitor shuts down you can raise your rates.

Not everything is an attack on your political ideology. True, the title is poorly worded, but if you read the fine summary (or god-forbid, followed the links) it's clear that timothy is really asking "Do developers still have to buy game engines?". He's not proposing anything that would infringe on the capitalist primacy you and so many other AC's are leaping to defend.

Also, don't insult your audience: repeatedly wrapping a slur in quotes doesn't absolve you anything. If you feel the need to use a slur, just straight up own it.

This is a HUGE number. There are only ~1.5 billion houses/households in the world, the vast majority of which could not begin to afford something like this, even on lease.

Also, it's hard to see where the demand comes from. If these things take 5-7 years to pay off using nighttime pricing, that's not very convincing. Better to spend that money on insulation or better windows. The argument for home batteries is better if you already have solar, but it's still going to be years before solar tops 2% of U.S. homes.

Supposing 10% of US homes go solar by 2025 and they all buy home batteries, then that's maybe ~12 million units. If US units account for 10% of world consumption (more likely I'd say 35%), than we're looking at 120 million units top in this rosy scenario.

'course, I'm just eyeballing various numbers. I'd love to see somebody do the math. Hopefully Musk has firmer numbers/models to support his optimism (either that or he's counting net demand over the next fifty years). I really want to like Musk, but sometimes I fear he's just blowing a bunch of hot-air. :-\ (Come to think of it, that's what the real Tesla ended up doing. :O)

Stupid SJW's... don't they know that government exist to protect businesses, not fret over the welfare of the little people?

/s

While interesting, this study is also sort of meaningless for making any sort of policy decision. I take far away vacations because the plane makes it possible. If planes weren't an option (due to price or policy), then I would shift to taking vacations closer to home (with maybe 1 trans-Atlantic cruise to explore Europe late in life), and my business travel would shift to teleconferencing. Would the resulting environmental footprint be better or worse? Hard to say. And presumably train usage would (after a few years of infrastructure investment) boom under this scenario, changing things again...

There are too many variables interacting for this study to "prove" anything.

Silly, silly Apple with their billions and billions of dollars made by paying extremely close attention to teh pretties.

Yes, I would. The original authors have (1) the most technical experience with their particular product and (2) strong financial incentive to provide a "good" extortion experience. By contrast, Talos is working from what they can reverse engineer, and they may not be aware of all variants/quirks of the malware.

They've already owned your machine with the payload of their choosing, and it's probably even self-updating. While I wouldn't exactly trust the malware folks to leave your machine clean, they already have the power to add whatever they want (whether you pay or not).

Fair point, but it's more true for EXEs and DLLs than it is for Office documents and text files, so you could do some measured restoration. And again, if they've infected your machine already it would have been simpler and more successful to just silently compromise your files to begin with.

That's for damn sure, but among homeowners and small business owners, how many people have the skills, time, and discipline to setup offsite, incremental, "pull" backups? And even a "pull" strategy (like mlts mentions in another comment) can be subverted if an attacker is clever enough.

Aside for those who want to get serious about backups: here's one strategy to consider. Combine with a weekly/monthly drive swap-out to offsite location for best effect, and remember that untested backups are no backup at all.