Are you sure? They have had quite a lot of advertising across many forms. I distinctly remember a bunch of ads involving some woman's talking pillow who was kind of an asshole.

My guess is that even with that advertising, they aren't getting enough women to sign up (because what's going to attract women better than an angry pillow berating them for spending an evening at home instead of on a date) so they resort to stuff like this to make their male customers think they actually have real people to talk to.

While I agree with you (even fancy things like a Phantom DJI aren't really drones...they can return to you automatically, but they are still just remote control quadcoptors), this is a university doing it.

Odds are that many of the people making use of this pavilion will actually be working on things that can be called drones. Seems like a perfect place to experiment with completely autonomous flight since you don't yet have to handle weather and you don't have to worry about bystanders.

Serious question. What does walmart think about shipping costs?

They are now closing the loophole to block matching to 3rd party sellers (which is probably fair), but what if the $80 PS4 were legitimate? An $80 PS4 with $350 shipping. The original $80 price was either taken down quickly, or someone tried to buy it (and then had it declared out of stock by the 3rd party seller), but if you sold it for $80 plus a shipping cost to make up the legitimate cost of the unit like many ebay sellers used to do, would walmart honor it or would they try to calculate shipping?

Granted, there have probably been a lot of improvements since 1997, but at that point they already had 40 years of engineering improvements and they decided "Dangling men with squeegees over the side of the building" was still a better option than trying to find a new rotating solution.

I think robots will be the answer. Trying to build some kind of mechanism into every single window becomes astronomically expensive...especially if that mechanism is only going to be used once a month or less. Having a couple of robots that can do a whole building (or a whole block) every month is going to be a lot more efficient. But since statistically, window washers are not anywhere near being one of the most dangerous occupations, it won't happen until the robots are both cheaper and better than the human window washers.

Except right now, this kind of works.

The people going to those bootcamps already have college degrees and may have worked for years in unrelated industries (or non-coding functions in related industries). So when you hire someone out of one of the bootcamps, you may only be hiring someone with "Junior Developer" level coding skills, but they aren't going to behave the same way as the 22 year old brogrammer you are also interviewing for the same position. They have experience working in a business environment, collaborating with others on multi-year projects, interacting with people outside of +/- 3 years of their own age, possibly in managing employees. Since many are coming from lower paying fields, they probably have similar salary expectations to what the 22 year old is looking for. l

As a catalyst for a career transition, the boot camps aren't a bad thing. But if you step away from college grads with work experience (and the few exceptional kids who went for a boot camp instead, but probably would have been successful either way), I think it starts to break down. Other posters have mentioned the growing market for the "auto mechanics" of programming (or even the "quick lube techs")...but even if that were true and it had potential to be a long term career (without having to eventually go to college anyways to step up from the trenches), I don't know that the boot camps are appropriate--they aren't an equivalent to vocational schools. I know it is harsh to say, but many of the people who become mechanics instead of engineers are not going to thrive in the intense environment of a 19 week boot camp. The people I know who have done them worked hard. They found the programs challenging despite being college graduates from good schools. So even if your goal is to just produce code-monkeys...you aren't going to get anything good from pushing boot camps on high school kids.

That has been tried. One Prudential Plaza had rotating windows. Normally held in place by inflatable moldings, they could be deflated to allow the windows to rotate for easier washing.

Must not have been all that great though...because after 40 years, they decided to replace them all with conventional windows and start using window washers.

It is ok, the complainers don't live somewhere where the trains have wide ranging routes and service that can be faster than driving. In those cities, I don't know that a shared ride service is a threat.

Here in Chicago, you pay a premium to live near a CTA line in the city (or a metra stop in the suburbs). Living near one means you don't have to have a car (or maybe your family can only have one car since you don't need to make separate commutes). When people look at jobs or new homes, they factor in access to public transit so they don't get stuck in situations where people say "oh, I could take the bus, but I would have to transfer twice and it takes 3 hours". I have the option to take 4 different routes to work: Motorcycle, Bus, Bicycle, Train. I live a short walk from the train and right next to an entrance to Lake Shore Drive (basically a highway straight to downtown) so I can take an express bus that gets on the highway and skips stopping in the middle.

The difference between this is mostly a tossup. The motorcycle is faster in the summer unless traffic is randomly bad, in which case it is slow (and once school starts in the fall, I think a lot more parents start driving again and traffic gets worse). I am able to sneakily park the motorcycle for free, but I would be paying $235 a month to park a car. The express bus involves very little walking and I always have a seat and can read, but it is subject to the whims of traffic and since it does make some stops, it will never be faster than the motorcycle. The bicycle is quick...I am a fast rider, but I can probably beat the bus unless there is zero traffic (and we have showers at work, so I just leave earlier and shower in the office instead of at home). The train requires a bit more walking on either end, and I usually don't get a seat in the morning, but it is consistent rain or shine since it is not subject to the whims of traffic, and it takes about the same time as the bus on a low-traffic day.

Where does an uber car pool fit into this? I occasionally take a normal taxi or uber/lyft if I am running late (or if the motorcycle isn't working) since by the time I am "late", traffic has lightened up. But if it were some alternative car pool scheme where they had to drop off extra riders, I don't see the advantage over the bus or train. The public transit options are already almost as fast as driving through traffic. If you add in the time to drop somebody else off or wait for a pickup...you aren't gaining anything. The fact that a regular Uber X/Lyft is significantl cheaper than a taxi (which I understand is not the case in NYC), does mean that I sometimes use transit less, it doesn't replace the 2x a day I use it for the commute.

I can see it hurting the crappy public transit systems in smaller cities where they have mostly been relegated to the poor...but maybe at that point it is really becoming purely competition for the local public transit. If the local public transit makes you transfer between two buses that only come twice an hour, and this can get you an "app-delivered" car pool in 10 minutes (and then skip the transfer)...then maybe these things deserve to win (or at least kick the local transit into action).

Lake Point Tower in Chicago has an automated window system that seems to work pretty well.

https://lakepointtower.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/doing-the-windows-at-lake-point-tower/#more-461

Here is a terribly done youtube video that purports to show the machine and process (but...well...let's just say he isn't a very good cameraman). Of course, it is a design that is fully integrated with the building. I worked in the building for a while and I always found the windows to be quite clean. Better than other buildings because they could clean the windows more often. You need tracks running down the edges of all of the winows, so you couldn't retrofit this onto an old building...but this problem does seem solvable for new constructions.

Significantly more complicated for old buildings. I am in a ~100 year old brick and stone facade building. The windows are inset, and not uniform in size, They have window sills and some of them are divided into multiple panes while other areas have bigger sheets of glass. I don't know how a machine would manage this...and having a custom machine might make sense for a large condo building (pretty sure the lake point tower cleaner robots are running most of the time since they have 70 stories of wall-to-wall windows to clean), but a custom machine for a shorter office building with limited windows is not going to be more effective than having a couple guys scrub the windows every few weeks.

Here, the guys that clean the windows actually rappel down. I think a lot of older buildings have too much stuff sticking out (and the windows are more spaced out), so having a hanging scaffold doesn't make sense. Instead, they just harness in and kick themselves around the building, using a suction cup to hold themselves in place while they clean a window. Incredibly fast and even considering they get paid pretty well, incredibly cheap.

And don't forget, in many places, the taxi license has nothing to do with driving skill. Here in Chicago, it is entirely about knowledge of local roads and landmarks. Sure, it is annoying when an uber driver has zero idea where they are going and needs a GPS to find the highway... But the way the cab companies talk about their "specially licensed" drivers, you would actually think it meant something about car-handling skill.

To be fair, many rebates from things you buy at a store are manufacturer rebates.

Best Buy isn't the one paying you for the rebate...so how are they supposed to give you the rebate at purchase time? Microcenter will pre-fill your rebate forms and give you an extra receipt--at that point, if you can't be bothered to mail it in, you probably don't care about the money.

What happened to user tagging of articles on slashdot? I don't see it anymore.

How else am I going to tag all of these stories with 'fuckbennett' and 'ohnoitsbennett'?

yeah, but these kids probably are taking code from stackoverflow since it is usually the top result in any search and is the easiest place to ask other people to do your homework.

Usually it is pretty obvious--real world programmers usually aren't writing a program to order a limited set of pizzas from the command line (and if they are, their question will probably be something about using the Twilio api to send confirmations or how to actually store the orders in a database rather than just write them back out to stdout). I remember the aforementioned pizza question...something like "Use loops to order pizzas". You could google phrases from the question and find the problem set posted on a university page. Some people were of the helpful sort: "Not going to do the homework for you, but I suggest you read about XYZ" while others decided to instead provide a solution that used no loops (if you exclude recursion), and eventually someone submitted it as a Code Golf problem to solve the homework using no loops (for/do/while/goto style) in the fewest characters. The professor was given a heads up to look for any obvious cheaters who attempted to submit an assignment that ordered pizzas without actually using loops.

But if that guy had obfuscated his question a bit more? Or maybe actually attempted it and then posted broken snippets of code? Somebody would have solved his problem for him.

That's ok. They just have to wait until the inevitable account-compromising security flaw is discovered and THEN rightfully ban them from the store for potentially exposing their customer's entire bank accounts to theft...

Will they hand me a charging cable if my phone is dead?

I can see how the phone is convenient, especially if you are already wandering the the aisles of the store with phone in hand, texting away, but people's phones die all of the time. Hell, maybe the reason you are making that purchase is because your phone is dead and so you are trying to pay for a taxi instead of calling your husband to pick you up?

Doesn't seem like a battery powered device is going to be a suitable 100% replacement for a card anytime soon.

And even acknowledging those glaring issues with Paypal, calling it the shadiest and most deceitful site on the internet is gross hyperbole.

The ebay/paypal double dipping is frustrating, and the money freezing risks are pretty sketchy, but for the most part, paypal is a useful and functional service. I have used it to buy and sell many things (both on and off ebay) without issue. I also use it to print postage for most things (their multi-order shipping thing is easier to use than any other site I have come across and I don't have to enter any new payment information since there is always a couple of bucks in my paypal account). I transfer any large amount of money back to my bank account right away, so I am not that worried about it being frozen.

If I were running an ebay business, I might be a little more concerned about the forced use of paypal, but at the end of the day, that is the price you pay for using their storefront service, having them market for you, and accessing the faith and trust of their customers vs trying to run your own online store. Sucks when something happens to your paypal account, but at the same time, half of your customers may only be comfortable dealing with you knowing that paypal can freeze your money if you don't deliver the item.