I'm not sure where to lay the blame - the execution team (people making the films) or the production team (people signing off on the vision), but the end result hasn't been very good at all. The one exception seems to be the remake of Casino Royale - which would have been a good movie even without the additional allure of it being a Bond film. That film had soul. Bond, the character, and not the Bond gadgets, are the things that made the difference in the plot of that movie. But all the subsequent Daniel Craig movies had a steady degradation in quality. Even the last one - "No time to die" - even though it was better than its predecessor, didn't come close to the high-watermark established by Casino Royale.

When one compares the creative gimmicks and the stunts of the series, the Mission Impossible series is much better. All in all, I'm just not excited about there being any future Bond films. If the Broccoli family wants to fight it out with Amazon, maybe someone can make an interesting movie out of that conflict. I think the entertainment needs to move on and focus on building new narratives, characters and worlds rather than using old ones as a crutch.

One of the problems that I ran into when trying to learn nodejs is that there are no unit test frameworks that support whitebox testing _and_ encapsulation. With Java, the PowerMock library is a powerful friend that allows one to write test cases that change the behavior of private methods which are invoked from the method under test (or even deeper in the call stack). One can do this in Javascript with some test libraries if one does not use classes and private methods (with the '#' syntax). When you use private methods there are no libraries that can support you, and this seems like a gap.

Having thought about this a bit, it seems like the approach the language is taking is that TDD should shape the way you write software, so if you find yourself needing to test in a whitebox fashion and access private methods, you designed your application wrong. Its a good thought, but I don't agree with this philosophy. IMHO, one should still have the freedom to articulate a good design without being shackled by the constraints of a testing framework.

So, while I'm sure the language is making progress with all these new features, I don't feel like investing further in learning it given this shortcoming.

Nuclear weapons and biological agents are examples where your statement becomes grey. The risk of a rogue person wielding those weapons and the damage that could result are serious considerations. National and international policy can shift on that basis - see North Korea. Back here in the US, we've had generals put in place safeguards post-2020 election to counter the rogue-agent-in chief:

From https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/16/power-up-top-us-general-warned-post-election-coup-new-book-details/

So its not quite that simple. The US has launched wars (the second Iraq war) on the basis that weapons of mass destruction were in the hands of a rogue agent. That the premise turned out to be wrong is irrelevant - multiple nations signed onto that war reacting to the premise of someone simply having those weapons. Do you not agree that the resulting deaths and chaos make this a moral issue?

No - minikube is not an alternative. Its a scaled down version of kubernetes and a prereq for it is a container runtime like docker. If you don't want to be dependent on docker, then you need to be thinking along the lines of podman (or its associated tools like buildah, skopeo, crictl etc - depending on your use case) or rkt (rocket).

fixing the grammar:

There are so many variables in how the requirements are interpreted, solutioned, and priced...

Google deliberately dropped out because they didn't want to compromise on their morals and work on a military solution. Or atleast, thats what they said.

Its somewhat pointless us guessing at what made AWS a better / worse solution than Microsoft. These deals are incredibly complex and there would have been teams of people at each vendor who would have worked on making sure that their solutions fit the RFP (which itself would have been a very complex requirements document). There are so many variables in how the requirements, solutioned, and priced, that reasonable people can disagree on whether one of the solutions was inferior to the other.

I wouldn't assume that Microsoft means substandard engineering. They have a _formidable_ research organization, and have demonstrated the ability to not just survive the march of technology, but thrive, evolve ahead of and vanquish their competitors

That's not the whole story though. I've been a unix geek for over 30 years now, and I work for a fortune 500 company, where for the past 12 years, my primary workstation / laptop has been a linux desktop (corporate build of Redhat Linux). I've always had to deal with problems when I've upgraded the OS or when I've upgraded the machine. All kinds of things ranging from the touchpad is uncontrollable (and had to be turned off), to hibernate failing, to time not being kept correctly on KVMs that run on the system and so on. In each case, I've had to research and eventually found a fix for all of these problem, but it was unbelievably painful finding the fix. And this process often took months.

Over the past Christmas holidays, I migrated to a new machine - along with an accompanying move from RHEL 7.6 to v8. What a pain! My 4K external monitor stopped working on Thunderbolt. Eventually figured out that I had to buy a new cable, tweak the BIOS and apply the nvidia drivers, along with a magic incantation of stuff in a config file. But until I figured all that out, my external display went from not working, to working but crashing the browser when screensharing was attempted, to finally full function, over 2 months. Even now, if I reboot, the internal and external display relative resolutions don't persist as I've set up.

My next hardware upgrade will be to a Mac. I've had it. The mac has enough of a command line for me to live with. I don't like Apple's "I know what you need better than you do" attitude, but it just _works_. I'll take that any day over the hell that Linux has become.

If one follows all the links and gets to the source tweets, I see that they are talking about $15 million (which comes from 10% of Uber's $150 million ad spend). The headline of the slashdot linked article seems to have made up the $100m and slashdot blindly followed.

Reading the article reminds of that Sherlock Holmes quote: if you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, is the truth. In this case, why not consider that empty space doesn't really have the light that this camera on New Horizons claims it has - i.e thats what is impossible. If one starts with that axiom, then what follows is that the camera has a source of error that we have not discovered before. Perhaps there is some source of noise that is causing the effect of light being there, when really there isn't. Its not clear from the article whether this source of error was considered and rejected for good cause.

They are a thing because the attacks are not done against a running system but from against a hashed password - such as found in /etc/passwd.

Many federal IT jobs cannot be done remotely. Even if your customer is the DO Education, access to the data / administrative functions may require a certain level of clearance, and this kind of access cannot be easily achieved outside of a cleared facility / SCIF. Such facilities are few and far between, and quite often one has to be within driving distance of such facilities. This is why many many federal jobs are concentrated around the DC / northern VA area.

I'll agree with most of what you say, but there is a common scenario where "sufficiently usable" doesn't cut it. This is when the person trying to use the software isn't a domain expert in the problem being solved by the software. For example, I don't know anything whatsoever about image layers, and alpha channels and whatnot: I simply want to be able to crop, and paste into / from images, but GIMP insists on speaking to me in those terms. I recognize the GIMP is a very popular tool, but the barrier of entry is very high for someone who has to use it once every few years. What would help is exactly the kind of documentation that walks me through the terms and how they apply to common scenarios.

I picked on GIMP here, but I don't want convey the impression that it is bad or the worst or anything like that. The problem is pervasive. The field of software is so broad these days, that it is almost a given that to complete a large project, you will have to casually use some tools where you are not going to be an expert, and will have no intention of being an expert (because that is not your primary area of focus / skill). Documentation really should be better.