Don't forget Bungie, Ensemble Studios: both acquired by Microsoft and destroyed.
Don't forget Mojang and Bethesda.

The summary says, "A liberal arts education is essential to surviving in our polarized world. In educating students in how to respect differences and create dialogue over disagreement, a liberal arts education provides skills essential to maintaining a healthy and functioning democracy..."

I'm a Computer Science professor, and I don't think many Liberal Arts degree programs have anything at all to do with "educating students in how to respect differences." If that is what they try to teach, they are failing. The most intolerant points of view are common on campuses.

- Why accept to pay money to get access to your salary?
The vast majority of people don't. In fact, almost every legitimate employer uses direct electronic deposit to your bank account, and there is no paper check to be cashed. The key word is LEGITIMATE. As you noted yourself, a valid government issued ID is required for a bank account. In the USA, we have more than 12,000,000 undocumented immigrant workers who by definition do not have valid government ID. LEGITIMATE business are forbidden by law from employing the undocumented immigrants, and yet they all have jobs. They wouldn't be here if they didn't have jobs and a standard of living that exceeds the circumstances they fled.

- Why is it hard to get a bank account?
It isn't. There are many banking options everywhere including many grocery stores. We have Credit Unions and Savings and Loan institutions that are exclusively owned by the depositors. These institutions do not have minimum balance requirements, they have free ATMs and will often reimburse fees charged by other bank's ATMs. Most people have a bank account when they are teenagers.

- Why are a local bank office needed?
They aren't. Many grocery stores will cash checks without charging any fee.

In my opinion, the best solution is to provided documentation to all of teh immigrants so they are not subject to exploitation. They should have all of the standard worker protections, rights to minimum wages, and rights to unionize. With those rights in place, bank accounts will not be a problem.

As for documented workers who still use Payday Loans, they are financially illiterate or money laundering proceeds of criminal activity. They are primarily financially illiterate and likely illiterate.

The USA has some of the WORST public schools of any OECD nation.

What makes you think government run ANYTHING isn't just a mechanism to funnel pork to some senator's district. You asked for an example. You got one. Somehow it isn't a true Scotsman.

The USA government is incapable of doing anything even remotely competently. I turn your question on you: What is ONE THING the _USA_ government does better than industry?

- VA Medical? Medicare and Medicaid services are provided by industry. The VA Medical centers are your example of USA government provided health care. https://www.nbcnews.com/va-hos... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://www.reuters.com/articl...
- Postoffice? How are FedEx and UPS even possible in a world where the US Post Office is competent?
- Social Security Administration? https://www.gao.gov/products/h...
- DoD?

Does CVS make you waive your HIPPA Rights? I think they must. If so, you have no rights. If not, CVS will be sued into bankruptcy very soon.

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-...

Many services like MyChart and some doctors offices refuse service unless you waive all of your HIPPA rights, and once you wave them, you have no rights, no privacy, and no recourse ever again. So, if you want to renew your prescriptions online or get a flu shot, you must give up all of your medical privacy rights.

"Apple Has Gobbled Up Half of the Smartwatch Market This Year" https://www.fool.com/investing...

"How Apple’s iPhone devastated the camera industry" https://macdailynews.com/2019/...

"Counterpoint: Apple Music takes 25% of market share as COVID-19 boosts streaming" (more than any other company) https://www.imore.com/counterp...

By revenue, Apple's App Store (just the App store without the rest of the company) is the 43 largest company in the USA (similar in size to Boeing and IBM). "In 2020, customers spent an estimated 72.3 billion U.S. dollars on on in-app purchases, subscriptions, and premium apps in the Apple App Store. " https://www.statista.com/stati... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Palm CEO: Apple won't dominate handset sector https://www.fiercewireless.com... "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.''

Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, Camera makers, watch makers, music player makers, ... They all said eh same thing.

Google doesn't need to leave Australia entirely. All it has to do is make sure no Australian content sites ever show up in Google search results. Problem solved!

So, are you saying that if an IoT device is running Linux, and a major security vulnerability if found in Linux, you don't want to patch the vulnerability? If some process contains a bug, you don't want a software update?

Yes. The iOS and Android worlds also require or allow signed apps. Mac OS complains if apps aren't signed.

It is very nice to have defect free software and therefore vulnerability free software, but that software does not exist.

Secure code implies you know what code is executing and you trust its source. That is what cryptographic signatures give you. They confirm you are executing unmodified code, and the code comes from an authorized source. If you could self sign executables, then bad guys will self sign malware.

There are lots of situations where not executing improperly signed code makes sense. It is a primary mechanism to avoid malware. Any malware will either be improperly signed or will corrupt a signed executable to the extent that the executable will not decrypt properly.

iOS and Android already use digital signatures. Mac OS has it as an option. Linux and Windows have cryptographically signed loadable kernel modules.

BUT, this for of protection means you don't have a right to repair. You would need to be able to self sign changes to the executables, and if you could do that, it would defeat the purpose of signing executables.

For the Slashdot folks who think a right to repair is very important: You won't like this law!

"secure code, identity management" means cryptographically signed executables and inability to run unsigned executables or executables signed by the wrong identity. If the original equipment manufacturer goes out of business or just doesn't want to provide updates, you are out of luck. Even if the source code is open-source (with a license more permissive than GPL3), you can compile the code, but you still cannot sign it. You are still out of luck.

Right to repair and security are opposing goals. Pick one.

GPUs excel when the same simple math operations need to be performed on massive amounts of data in parallel. Algorithms like Fast Fourier Transform and all kinds of linear algebra benefit from massive parallel execution. Computer graphics is nothing more than applied linear algebra, and the algorithms are essentially to identical to signal processing. There are two major bottlenecks in GPU programs:

- supplying data as fast as it can be processed and retrieving results as fast as they can be produced
- conditional execution: a single if statement or loop can kill performance

If you need a lot of parallel processing from an ASIC, you end up designing an ASIC that works like a GPU. It's better to just use the GPU.

An ASIC or FPGA will win when the algorithm is fundamentally serial instead of parallel. An ASIC of FPGA can implement custom multi-stage pipelines so that a lot of data can be in the pipeline at any given time. You only get one result per pipeline per unit time, but you don'y have to compete one operation before starting the next.

An ASIC or FPGA will win over a GPU for algorithms that involve lots of conditional execution e.g if statement and loops. However, a modern CPU will usually stomp the ASIC of FPGA because the CPUs have huge caches, branch prediction, and other features that are difficult and expensive to implement in an ASIC or FPGA.

I am the author of "OpenGL ES for iOS" and co-author of "Cocoa Design Patterns" and "Cocoa Programming". The complaint about Apple's documentation goes all the way back to NeXT's documentation in 1988.

Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks cannot be understood well as a collection of parts. It is necessary to understand a dozen or so interrelated design patterns to understand the frameworks. You cannot take the design patterns a-la-cart. They are not really optional.

25 years ago, the comp.sys.next news group was full of statements like "NeXT's documentation sucks. Why can't I just do ..." and "...it feels like the frameworks are fighting me at every turn..." The reason, IMHO, for such comments is that if you are unaware of the design patterns being used, the frameworks absolutely fight you. From NeXT/Apple's point of view, there is a right way to do things and every other way is wrong. The frameworks intentionally fight "wrong" approaches.

Once you understand and can identify the recurring design patterns, Cocoa and Cocoa Touch almost don't need documentation. You can guess the class and method names. One aspect that NeXT/Apple has implemented brilliantly is naming consistency. I can identify a hand full of grating examples of poor/inconsistent naming, but they are very rare.

There are a few data points:

- Apple has "Hidden" all of the decades of code samples at https://developer.apple.com/li...
- SwiftUI is brand new, and as far as I can tell, Apple doesn't even use it much yet.
- SwiftUI is "intuitive" if you have decades of experience with NeXT/Apple's naming conventions. If you know the conventions, you don't need documentation to tell you the names of things. Documentation is still needed though :)
- Cocoa's design patterns originated with Objective-C, and there are some mismatches when using Swift. The Swift ways of doing things are sometimes antithetical to the historic Cocoa ways of doing things.
- Cocoa is generally elegant in design and implementations. It was a trail blazer. Much of it shipped commercially in October 1988. Having said that, modern Javascript frameworks are mostly very elegant. I've been learning Javascript React as a side project, and I am generally impressed by it.
- Developing with Cocoa is IMHO vastly more pleasant that developing with Android frameworks. Just compare designs for Tables and related classes sometime. Sigh.

Our middle class is shrinking because more people are moving UP than moving down.

- https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem...
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...
- https://www.latimes.com/opinio...