Mobile GSM phones are well capable of talking to towers on the ground at 35k feet. That's only about 10 kilometres. There will likely also be several towers within roughly equal distance with good line of sight. Indeed, one part of the reason mobile phones have been banned in aircraft for so long is because they would interfere with the *ground*. The fear being that having thousands of stations moving fast overhead, in range of potentially dozens of towers at the same time and roaming across them, would be too taxing for GSM to handle, causing service issues.

I've had phone conversations with people in aircraft, at altitudes of around 20k to 25k feet (6.1 to 7.6 kilometres), with them ringing on their GSM phones and it worked fine.

Car dealerships are usually multi-brand. They're happy to see a new brand as long as they can profit from it. This is a big FU to dealership owners from Tesla, saying "we don't need you to sell our cars". And Tesla is right of course: they don't.

Never underestimate the political power at the state level of car dealership owners. They have name recognition and a marketing budget that dwarfs any state senator, and everyone in state government sees this. As an elected official, you don't pick a political fight with someone who already has his name and face across half the billboards in a major city, and spends more on ads every week than you did on your entire campaign.

That's easy for adults to manage but not so much for kids. I just think it's miserable that we're still making connectors like this in the 21st century - just make all connectors cylindrical, dammit. It's not like we're talking about 32 pins here.

Any cable that has any sort of orientation required to plug in is a crap standard and needs to die. All connectors need to be barrel or minjack style connectors, that are easy to plug in blind.

Fox News now has higher ratings than all other cable news networks combined. They have achieved their goal.

If you can actually find a news program on Fox News, it's the most accurate of the cable news networks (yes, really), but I don't think people actually watch these for the news, they watch them to see pundits shouting.

So now I have this cable from my tablet to my power socket. Where do I connect my USB speaker again? I don't think you'll ever have fewer cables than peripherals.

Let's remember who Google's customers are (hint: it's not the users). I think Google is specifically thinking of their customers in this move. It's the opposition from MS that baffles me.

I fully agree.

But something has gone horribly wrong in the world of managed code!

REM This is a comment in a toy language.

// This is a comment in a real language.

///<remarks>My God, what monstrosity have we wrought!</remarks>

Docstrings considered harmful!

This! Every system can be defeated, but each new system that has to be defeated is good. Plus, for anything serious more than one cop will be there, and stories about "accidental damage to devices" become even less likely to fly when it coincidentally affects all 6 officers who responded to the same incident, and no one else that day.

This is actually true, but it's not interesting, because the #1 lie programmers tell themselves is "I am writing good code".

And really, it's always worth documenting corner cases, and everything non-trivial has corner cases. Even the somewhat trivial stuff like what a function does on bad input needs documenting, though I'd prefer unit tests to English for that stuff.

The purpose of the function, and the way the parameters are used, is often clear from the names, but the returned value doesn't have a name and is unclear more often than you'd think. But really, is the "remarks section" of the comments that is usually lacking. The summary and parameter documentation is often content-free, but comments about the return value, and especially any other detailed notes are quite valuable.

1 isn't true the way people think it is. I can't pay my rent with cash, for example, and my landlord is free to price my rent in Euros or Bitcoin.

2 is entirely false. The currency markets are so much bigger than the oil market that it just doesn't matter what currency oil is priced in. Even if you want to buy "June oil" in "June Euros", the currency futures market is quite liquid.

4 is the main one. It doesn't matter what we use for currency, as long as the network effect is there. Currency is "the most easily exchanged commodity", whatever that happens to be at the moment.

The big missing one here is that US taxes must be paid in dollars. If your salary is already in dollars, you don't think about this, but if you get paid in Euros or Yen but owe US taxes, you'll be creating a significant demand for dollars relative to your economic output, just for this reason.

I've never understood this complaint. I've always found what I was looking for on the first page of DDG results (which of course is usually the same as the first page of Bing results), and almost never see link-farming pages.

Admittedly, I search for C#/MSDN stuff a lot, which one would hope Bing would be good at. What sort of searches is DDG so bad at?

Just remember their motto: "Don't, Be Evil!".

I'm a big fan of DDG. It may be mostly the same as Bing, but I prefer the clean front page and lack of tracking. (For some reason MS tracking doesn't bother me the way Google tracking does, perhaps because they're not as good at it, but no tracking is better still!)

I love you too, APK. But my heart is promised to another.