This has been the law in the US as well, just few people know about it and the airlines still try to wriggle out of it. According ot the FAA previously if any part of your flight was cancelled, you were entitled for an up to 300% refund for the distance that was not covered by the airline on top of vouchers which are a customer retention and settlement tool. These regulations actually reduce the liability.

Then why didnâ(TM)t you negotiate a raise or quit?

You have never worked in management I see. The cost of legislation is much higher in most of these issues, even illegitimate claims are settled because they are expensive and sufficient attorneys will work pro bono because they know the process is significantly in favor of the employee (there are always more slighted employees than there are employers).

Fast food workers donâ(TM)t have non compete unless youâ(TM)re thinking about executives and managers in the fast food business. You cannot both have âoeat willâ and âoeunder contractâ. A contract cannot be one sided, it makes it void, legal in these companies know that, they would be an easy target for class action. Non compete allow employees to negotiate higher wages and exit packages, if you are in agreement, you do so for a reason.

I don't think making it smaller works yet. The focal depth problem is too serious. Until someone comes up with a way to solve it with holograms or something, we're stuck with bulky optics that still hurt most people's eyes. I further think you could use fiber, which would only make the device more expensive. Wasn't that supposed to be on the Firewire roadmap anyway? Hmm, I see they formally gave up on that back in 2013.

He must have had a strange LPT port and/or address then, because normally those wouldn't be in conflict. I've had cards with fairly huge numbers of dip switches, but as long as you could get your hands on some documentation you were OK. Even very cheap ATA multi-I/O cards usually had fairly generous I/O ranges. I had a 120MB Maxtor ATA disk in the 386DX25 on which I first ran Linux, on a $15 no-brand ATA card, and with a 1MB Trident VGA card. That $15 card had pretty decent UARTs, too.

I have no confidence in their estimate, either. I think they overestimated it by $20 billion.

Think about it. In the Bay Area, people travel just 10 miles per day on average. I think the state average is somewhere closer to 20 or 30. Even if you assume 30 miles, that's only ~7.5 kWh of charging per day. Spread over 12 hours of being plugged in, that comes to just 2.6 amperes per vehicle on average.

My air conditioner can end up running very nearly continuously during the day in the hottest part of the summer, drawing O(30) amps. And you're telling me that the local grid can handle that, but somehow can't handle a measly 2.6 amps of car charging power overnight (when air temperatures are cool and the air conditioner mostly isn't running)? Is this a joke?

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that somewhere in Southern California, there might be some craptastic circuits that can't handle it, and maybe a few mobile home parks here and there, but... I suspect the number is a heck of a lot closer to zero than to 20 billion, much less 40.

I tried to significantly upgrade the CPU in an AMD-based netbook that I really, really liked... it was 64 bit, but it was single core, and I was just trying to get it into the prior era at the time really and just get it to be a dual-core. And in theory this was possible and I even did it, but it was unreliable AF and I stalled out at the BIOS hacking stage and just got some other used thing. And now I have a $300 HP (I know ugh) Ryzen 3 laptop which... I doubled the RAM and quadrupled the SSD in. Remarkably, it has a combo SATA/NVMe M.2 slot. It's been great with Devuan on it, it's still running version 4 even. We watch youtube on it while we eat dinner, high tech shit. But suspend/resume works reliably, so I've got that going for me.

That's terrible, it means if you buy very much RAM in the frist place you're basically getting reamed.

I'm gonna want something Linux-based, and then it's not going to be all GPLv3. Otherwise, I'm happy to agree.

The fewer platforms I have to learn, the better.

The flip side is that when halfway through the development cycle, the dev decides to go a completely different direction and starts over with a radically different concept, now the people who bought in at the beginning don't have any ability to vote with their dollars and ask for a refund, which is problematic. So there are abusers on both sides.

More importantly, this change makes early access a whole lot less attractive and a whole lot riskier from the perspective of a potential buyer. As a result, I'd expect people to be a lot less likely to bite the bullet and give people money before something is complete or nearly complete. And I suspect that the people who do buy early access games won't be willing to spend as much money for that privilege because of the increased risk caused by this rule change. So creators are likely to get significantly less money by making something available in early access than they would have before this change to the rules — likely to the point where it doesn't even make sense to release something as early access until it is mostly finished, which completely defeats the purpose.

There's probably a middle ground somewhere, but my suspicion is that this will turn out to be a significant net negative for content creators, in spite of preventing a small number of freeloaders from taking advantage of it.

Also, if it becomes obvious that making things available for early access won't bring in a significant percentage of the final purchase price, I would expect most content creators to start making early access versions available through other vendors, either with a Patreon-like model or by making early versions free with the understanding that at some point, they'll charge for it, and only people who buy it will be able to upgrade past version 0.5 or whatever. And approximately none of those people will end up converting to paid ownership through Steam, so Steam will also end up making less money as a result.

So I'm having a hard time seeing how this is supposed to actually be a revenue-positive decision for anyone involved.

The funny thing is where they call this America's first true high-speed rail system, when it averages just 100 MPH, meanwhile parts of Acela express have been running 90 MPH for more than two decades, with peak speeds over 150 MPH. And over the course of this year, the equipment on that route is being replaced with new Avelia Liberty equipment that may actually make it average faster speeds than what Brightline is proposing.

To be pedantic, by 1985, Metroliner *barely* qualified as high-speed, because it could hit a maximum of 125 MPH, which is the absolute minimum for qualifying as high-speed rail. But in 1969, it was just 120 MPH, which isn't considered HSR.

The difference between Brightline and the California HSR is that the Brightline "high-speed" rail project involves only about 40 miles of new track, largely along an existing limited-access toll highway, with the remaining 195 miles using existing tracks, and as I understand it, exactly none of it is running at speeds that actually qualify for a high-speed rail designation (125 MPH for upgraded tracks, or 155 MPH for new tracks). In fact, it averages just 69 MPH, according to Wikipedia.

So sure, Brightline is a shining example of how to achieve "results", if by results, you mean spending as much money as California's high-speed rail system has spent so far, while only building 40 miles of track and setting up a new passenger train line that on average is within the margin of error of being the same speed as driving. If they get the speeds up, it might eventually be interesting, but right now, it just seems like a huge money pit to me.

At least California's HSR is designed for actual high speeds (max 220 MPH), rather than for half that speed, and when it eventually gets finished, will provide a very real benefit. And if Brightline had to deal with a decade of environmental reviews like the California HSR project did, they probably wouldn't have even bothered starting to build it. The delays in California have very little to do with government running the project and everything to do with other parts of the government getting in the way of the project.

That's really awful if the best they can achieve on a new track is 110 MPH. High speed rail *starts* at 125, so even that doesn't qualify as HSR. Many passenger rail projects built recently achieve roughly twice that speed. 110 MPH wasn't even state of the art in the 1960s. These days, that's a joke. Is there inadequate grade separation, or did they just cheap out on the trains?

Is it? It takes 3 hours and 23 minutes to do that trip by car. You're saying it makes that trip in 21 minutes? I don't think so.

Doing some quick math, the trains leave once an hour, so your average wait time should be roughly 30 minutes (assuming randomly distributed arrival times). Add that to the 2 hours and 45 minutes for the trip, and you save... Wow! You save EIGHT WHOLE MINUTES! That is TOTALLY worth $12 Billion! Oh, wait. Some of them take two hours and 50 minutes. So only three minutes saved. Maybe not such a good deal. [rolls eyes]

And to think some people don't think the California HSR makes sense. This gives new meaning to the phrase "corporate welfare".