Look. On the one hand, it will be virtually impossible to make the technology disappear that allows any government unprecedented surveillance powers.

Based on the historical evidence of the governments of men, it would also be rather reasonable to expect there will exist elements within our governments willing to exploit national security fears to abuse surveillance powers.

With awareness, ignorance is left off the table as a selection. At least if we are made aware, we then choose to make a difference or play along.

I'll call you on your trolling and bs. My wife works in the Comp Sci department at a major university and also works *with* people in the programs at others. Well over half the grad students in most programs are born and raised in the US, and many of the best candidates are from the US. This story is about outsourcing based on cost, not on 'deep understanding of theory'. If you're not trolling you're just woefully wrong.

It would be more like what is happening in Germany. Massive investment in wind, solar, wave and geothermal, but crucially also a massive investment in a new smarter grid to support it all.

I have no doubt that it will happen in Europe, but the US is going to find it hard. Things like subsidising residential solar are seen as un-American and socialist, even though it's fine to heavily subsidise companies building fossil fuel or nuclear plants. The grid is a money-making privately owned infrastructure, not something that is supposed to work for the public's benefit. In other words, the problems are all cultural.

R has more single function high level commands devoted to stats, these are done right internally and are self consistent with other functions for further processing. But its not as general a programming language as python. if you want something different than the canned functions in R then you will need to write them yourself at which point you might as well be using python. however if you like SAS then chances are R will seem more like what you are hoping for.

R has more single function high level commands devoted to stats, these are done right internally and are self consistent with other functions for further processing. But its not as general a programming language as python. if you want something different than the canned functions in R then you will need to write them yourself at which point you might as well be using python. however if you like SAS then chances are R will seem more like what you are hoping for.

But it is impossible to "not use any confidential information he had access to" without surgery. It's in your brain, you will use it if the situation arises.

"Please don't do an audio countdown. It doesn't work for us hard of hearing people."

Where I live, they have audio ticking for blind people. They make a ticking noise when it's green for pedestrians.
Although some of them seem to be made for almost-deaf blind people, since it's very loud even during daytime.

Take the semicoln in C. It's not needed. It's really just a pleasant confirmation to the compiler to let it know that your current statement is done.

It certainly is needed, if you want to keep white space insignificant. C compilers can skip over every space, tab, and line break that isn't part of a string. Getting rid of semicolons would needlessly complicate lexical analysis.

That you think C aids in expressiveness over Perl, Python, Ruby, awk, Go, Swift, Rust, D, C#, Scala, Clojure, or even C++ shows you're talking out the wrong orifice

I expect we're using the word "expressive" differently.

C is a lot of things, but it is not terribly expressive or high level.

Definitely not high level.

C lacks concise and easy to use language syntax to express ideas, but almost any idea that can be imagined can be expressed (implemented) in C. That is what I meant by expressive.

Higher level languages provide all sorts of direct language support for ideas that are not directly present in lower level languages, but all high level lanagauges ultimately compile down to machine code, which can be represented by assembler. Therefore, nothing that can be expressed in any language can't be expressed in assembler. Therefore assembler is maximally expressive. Anything else is just a subset of what you can do with assembler.

However there is PLENTY you can do in assembler, that you can't do in any other language, and C, is the lowest level language above assembler, and while there are some things that can be done in assembler that can't be done in C, there's not a lot that can be done in a higher level language than C that can't be done in C.

Not easily. Not concisely. And not safely... because if you implement a reference counting garbage collector in C to do your memory management (and you can) there is nothing in C stopping you from directly manipulating the GC state to achieve all kinds of stuff you can't do in the higher level language ...and should probably never do!! -- but this isn't about *should* -- its about *can*.

From the article, "City officials said the first units in Boston will be funded by Cisco Systems, a leader in development of smart city solutions, at no cost to the city."

As for why Boston got them first, rather than other cities around the country, my guess would be because they're a local product. "The high-tech benches were invented by MIT Media Lab spinoff Changing Environments, a Verizon Innovation Program."

Wait, what? I thought Email was cheap, 'cause, you know ... spam.

Really? Perhaps the folks from Detroit would perhaps learn something if they didn't act like they knew *EVERYTHING* about making cars. Have you seen the infotainment systems Detroit has stuck in their cars? Seriously? You guys should be listening to Google, Tesla, etc.

On PC desktop the QA is still terrible. For example, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ships with a media player which does not work properly with touchpad and which crashes when the subtitle setting is changed. Also the ACPI fan speed control is broken for a bunch of laptops. Sure, the correct solution here is simply to switch from Totem to VLC, and use a different kernel for the fan problem. Easy enough... but soon enough, some other glitch pops up. As long as Linux desktops (not only Ubuntu) are filled with these nasty surprises, the support costs will be enormous for fixing all these bugs or finding workarounds for them.

Certain parts of Texas have fully seperated the generation market from distribution. Distribution is run by a monopoly called Oncor, and they get to leech from your bill at a mostly fixed rate. You then sign up for generation with a variety of providers offering various contract terms. When I lived there I locked in a 2yr contract, flat rate at 8.9 cents per Kwh, and tried my hand at bitcoin mining via dirty old coal. But I could have had 100% wind or 100% renewable at even lower rates, but they were seasonal and they tended to have short terms. 3mo then you get dumped on the market again when the 8.9 cent deal isn't available. Longer term renewables ran 11 - 15 cents per Kwh.

This is the system California was trying to set up, but the mistake they made was to not seperate distribution from generation. Now they're stuck with a politicized PUC making decisions that deem 1 Kwh used by a company has higher economic value to the state than 1 Kwh used at my house. So I get a form of rationing by tier, and if I leave my computers on and do too many load of laundry, they start charging me 50 cents a Kwh. Just who get s to keep the difference between that and the actual generation costs is lost on me...

How is a PUBLIC list of PUBLICLY TRIED AND CONVICTED sexual offenders the same as a SECRET list of people who MAY OR MAY not have done anything wrong the same? Isn't one is a list of public facts while the other is a secret list of accusations.