Because people will hike out to the middle of nowhere to manually make abusive phone calls when they can get a free untraceable VoIP number from anything that can use the internet, including burner smartphones.

That depends on a black-box microcontroller on the motherboard with direct access to the network adapter, that Intel also makes.

What the heck do they mean by backdoor? NVidia GPUs are just processors, they run any code you throw at them.

In any case, if they don't think they are safe they are free to use any other GPU they can get their hands on.

When and about what?

Because you need people to do things, like help sick people, fix roads, keep the power on, and ship food around.

If productivity is increasing or maintaining, and worker hours are decreasing, it doesn't matter. If productivity is decreasing, and worker hours are also decreasing, that's a problem.

An extreme example would be the economy of the Soviet Union. They didn't care about productivity at all, initially. After a few years of not being able to provide basic goods and services, they turned to forced labor camps to get stuff done.

Clearly not, because a Google streetview camera, which usually sits two feet above the roof of a compact hatchback sedan, was tall enough to see over. It's not like it's on a five foot boom.

A 6.5' wall does not afford privacy. Anyone in a large van will be able to see into your yard. A fairly tall person, or a tall person on a bicycle, will be able to see into your yard. A moderately tall person standing on their toes could see into your yard.

I'd put up with cigarette smoke any time if it meant that, when the person in front of me reclines their seat more than a quarter of an inch, my knee caps wouldn't get crushed into my femur, because there is literally nowhere else for me to put my legs. Also, if I dare to spread my legs into the aisle at all, the drink cart will smash into my knee, as well. Good times.

Air travel was so much better in the 1970s and 1980s, when you didn't have onerous security screenings, seats were roomier, everything was less crowded, food was better, and service was outstanding. Also, the average ticket was ten times more expensive than today, adjusted for inflation.

Problem is that median wage is a useless number. Wages vary all over the country. Wages are higher in San Francisco and lower in Pittsburg.

IMHO a better solution is to make the tax rate something like 60% with no deductions. If you want take-home pay to be $40,000, you have to pay them $100,000.

Why is this news? Three months ago an A330 caught fire in Orlando.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news...

The month before that a 737 caught fire after sucking a rabbit into an engine. Ditto a FedEx plane hitting a bird. Last year an A320 engine caught fire while rolling at O'Hare. If you are fan of air traffic control Youtube channels, there is a somewhat famous "Kennedy Steve" clip of him rolling a fire crew to a jet whose engines caught fire while they were turned off at the gate. This stuff happens pretty regularly.

So you have a file format going back almost 20 years, that supports embedding almost any kind of content anywhere, that has had new features bolted on almost constantly, and also is backwards compatible so that anything not using a new feature is readable by older applications, and is also forward-compatible so newer versions of the application can render these documents accurately. And people complain that said file format is too complex?

For a comparison, go read up on how complex the TIFF standard is, and that is, basically, a bunch of numbers corresponding to color values in a bitmap. The ancient base-standard document is 120 pages long.

I appreciate the post. This is what is happening in my friend's department.

He works in IT support. There used to be around 30 full time staff to support all major university functions. Email, blackboard, access to 3rd party sites, directory and security, stuff like that. As time went on, 20% of the staff were doing 80% of the work. You had new hires with no experience nor any desire to do any work of any kind. They were experts at making excuses as to why they couldn't do the work, or were overworked, or getting other people to do their work for them. Long story short, a department that ran efficiently at 30 people now has over 80 people to do the same amount of work. And, to this day, the same 8 people who did most of the work originally are still doing most of the work.

The large university near me has a 10-1 staff to faculty ratio. Not administrators, or academic staff. Janitors, groundskeepers, support, librarians, maintenance workers, aides to the higher-ups, etc.. This seems a bit excessive.

Fun story. I have friends who work for a smaller, though still quite big, local university. When a new president came on board, his wife was dismayed that he only had one personal aide and a secretary, and she didn't get one (at the larger university, the president has something like 15 aides, it's ridiculous.) So she asked the campus police to assign her a "bodyguard," whom would actually function as an aide/butler/driver. She also wanted a staff car. She also wanted a grassy spot fenced off near the president's house so people couldn't look at her while she walked her dog. She also wanted the sports complex closed for a few hours on the weekends so she could play tennis without anyone else around. You can't make this stuff up.

I'm sure if any give university were *thoroughly* audited, quite a few efficiencies could be found, along the lines listed above.

Theaters started souring on IMAX when, back in the early 2000's, they would regularly show 35mm films on IMAX screens and say that they were "IMAX" movies. We got suckered into seeing one of the Harry Potter movies at one. Problem is, a regular 35mm projector doesn't put out enough light to fill an IMAX screen, so it was *dark* A quarter of the movie were indistinct shadowy shapes moving around on the screen. It was also not as sharp as it was basically being enlarged on the screen, but the darkness was the main problem.

Anyways, IMAX caught wind and started pulling their certification from the screens, meaning they couldn't call their screens IMAX any more, nor would they get any IMAX exclusive releases. Now that IMAX is seeing a resurgence, as you can't get the same experience at home unless you have a bunch of money and a dedicated home theater room, theater owners want to still show regular movies on the large screen that are not IMAX. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for them.

By the way, the theater chain that showed the fake Harry Potter IMAX movie was AMC. That was the last time we went to an AMC theater, until we saw Oppenheimer in 70mm which was only playing at the AMC. There are two local cinema chains that are far superior to AMC where I live, and have absorbed most of the AMC locations.