You already have a trusted intermediary between you and anybody you pay online: your credit card company. Neither Apple no Google have meaningfully convinced me they are doing anything for me besides saving me typing out the card number. People seem to be getting much more worked up about who can see their credit card numbers than they need to be, the entire purpose of a credit card is to allow people you don't fully trust to charge you for goods and services. If a bad actor gets your card it you can just report the fraudulent transactions and get a new card. Now if you're using a debit card it's another story, but you've gotta be a special kind of stupid to use a debit card online. If you really insist on it, at least go through a virtual card platform and set spending limits per-merchant.

One way or another, the first lesson of any programming course aimed at students that don't already know a different language is going to involve them copying a bunch of code they don't understand, running it, and then having the teacher explain what each part of it does. I don't see how omitting the "public static" really helps, because one way or another students won't understand most of the "hello world" program their teacher gives them until the teacher breaks it down, and they're going to have to learn about classes and the public and static keywords pretty soon anyways. Now, this would make it easier to write one-off utilities in Java, so I'm actually all for it, but the headline is dumb.

It should be acceptable to get an F, learn from your mistakes, take the class again, and have that grade go away. Failing a class just shouldn't be a big deal. Students should be able to push the boundaries of what they can do, and sometimes reach their limits. I failed a classes in college, and that experience really taught me a lot about myself, and made me a much better student. The problem is that GPAs expect flawlessness throughout the whole educational process, not just in the end result. So, my great learninge experience significantly hampered my ability to get into a top grad school, making pursuing a master's degree pointless. If overall GPAs and transcripts didn't go beyond the confines of a single school, an F wouldn't be nearly as big a deal, and students would be a lot more willing to take risks, and learn better because of it. If you can demonstrate that by the time you graduated you met the same standard as a 4.0 GPA student you should be considered equally to them for the purposes of grad school admissions and hiring.

Tell me you've never left the US without telling me you've never left the US.

I keep seeing this brought up in discussions on in-flight WiFi. The thing is, seatback phones used to be fairly common, back in a time when phone calls were a much more common way to communicate. As far as I can recall, people making long, loud phone calls on planes was fairly rare. Now that so much of our communication has moved to text-based formats, it's hard to imagine people would actually make that many calls on planes.

Cheap, fun, and purley cosmetic, the way NFTs should be. Most of the hate for NFTs comes from people trying to make them into some kind of investment and shoehorn them into places they don't belong.

Already a huge number of parts on aircraft are subject to testing requirements and mandatory swaps after their service life is up. It's hard to imagine batteries and the associated meters would be any different. As part of the certification process the manufacturer will work with the FAA to develop maintenance standards that mandate testing and replacement at specific intervals and then airlines using the planes will be required to follow them.

Seems useful enough, but I don't get why Intel would be the one to develop this software. A tool like this should be either tightly integrated with the phone, the OS, or preferably both. Sure, Intel has plenty of experience making Windows software, but it's hard to imagine they could do better than the similar features already built into Windows. What does this have to do with CPUs anyways. Are they going to artificially lock it to only run on Intel machines or something? Also I really find software like this is better when integrated with the phone OS and carrier. Being able to directly access your phone's messaging backend is amazing, because you can access your messages even if your phone is offline. Same for pictures, I'm going to want some kind of claud backup for my pictures anyways, so I might as well just grab them from there if I want them on my PC, no need for dedicated apps to sync directly between my phone and PC. Notification sync is also worse than just having a desktop / web app for every service I use that properly syncs its own notifications with the mobile app.

The other licenses essentially say "yes I own this, but I'm granting you the right to use it," while the CC0 license says "nobody owns this." So in the case of most OSS licenses, patent claims from the creator are irrelevant, since they've already given the explicit right for somebody else to use your IP. With the CC0, they haven't granted that right explicitly, they've just ruled out copyright as a way to claim ownership. So, the original creator could come back later and claim patent rights.

Keywords "where possible." The problem in America is that we're determined to push the envelope and build bigger and bigger roads and parking structures into areas that are far too dense for cars to ever make sense. And so we have cities covered in massive highways with a shocking portion of their land taken up by parking, and still everybody complains about sitting in traffic and not being able to find a parking spot. Sure, driving between two small towns beats waiting for a bus, but that breaks down pretty quickly as density reaches even suburban levels.

Every industry uses the profits from selling today's dominant technology to fund developing and building out the production lines for tomorrow's. I'd say the trend of car companies reinvesting their profits from selling ICE cars is actually a good sign for electric vehicles taking over the market, because it means that legacy car manufacturers are seeing EVs as a legitimate source of future revenue, rather than them being VC-funded long shots or ultra niche toys to bring down the average emissions of their product line.

Oh I totally agree, and that's why I said it's not a fair trade. Totally stamping out crime through enforcement requires a a much higher tolarence than I have, or that any reasonable person should have. And you're right, the availability of data opens the door to capricious enforcement.

Well, the average citizen does get extremely low crime rates. In less authoritarian countries a lot of petty crime goes unpunished simply because it's severity doesn't warrant the resources required to launch an investigation to track down the perp. If you already have all the data, and a legal system that doesn't restrict its use, it's much easier to stamp out petty crime. I wouldn't exactly call it a fair trade, but there are some things authoritarianism does well. It's important to recognize the legitimate benefits of a surveillance state so we can recognize when they're being used to sell the public more than they bargained for.

I try to be hopeful, but I'm really starting to think climate change is a lost cause. What isn't istThe west's dependence on despotic regimes for liquified and gasified prehistoric life forms. Forget climate change, the real prize is being able to tell OPEC they can go suck a fat one.

Well, sure, but it can still be a net reduction in carbon emissions, and general environmental harm. There's a lot of emissions associated with sourcing both fuel and the raw materials used to make the stuff that eventually becomes garbage. So if you send your trash to a landfill and then use coal to generate power you have the emissions from making the stuff that becomes the garbage, the inevitable methane emissions from the landfill (even with solid capture devices there is some leakage), the emissions from mining and transporting coal, and the emissions from burning the coal. On the other hand, if you burn garbage you cut all the environmental impacts of both coal mining and landfills out of the equation, and the wast to energy plant doesn't produce significantly worse pollution than a coal plant at the end of it all. Obviously, coal is going to be the most favorable comparison for waste to energy. If you compare it to a less polluting energy source, it will stack up worse. However, a lot of areas still don't have a lot of real alternatives to coal, but everybody produces tons of garbage.