I would hope that the last two decades of cyclical hiring + layoffs has disabused programmers of any seniority of the notion that their employers consider them anything other than a fungible product. "We hire rockstar dev" is just company code for "we shall blow smoke up your ass, force you to give us unpaid overtime until either the project is done or you burn out, and then fire you to save costs and get our management bonuses. Sure you're jaded now, but that's OK - there's a whole new graduating class of suckers we can hire instead."

I'm still a daily-driver VBA programmer. Ain't saying I'm fond of it, but Excel as a stealth UI can't be beat. People who will flail and gnash because they can't understand a Salesforce or web form will happily fill out cells that are quietly uploading values to server, because they didn't have to "learn" anything. It's just Excel.

Hell, I'm no guru but I know the answer for this - it's so you can run long tasks without having to tie up a limited terminal in the lab. Log in, start your task, log out and go for beer while someone else gets use.

Now, in this world of "everyone has their own computer and terminal", it's not as necessary a feature as it used to be. But that hardly seems a reason to arbitrarily flip the default.

No clue. But the threshold is a lot lower, because presumably it's sharing a lot of infrastructure with the existing solar panel. So as long as the incremental gain outweighs the incremental cost, this is a good thing.

It's a prototype, which means we're still at "hey, neat trick", not at "this will allow us to make our third-quarter projections".

That defeats the purpose for them. Keep in mind that Uber and Lyft are based in San Francisco. They don't operate in other cities. They just operate a web service, and leave it to the drivers to hold the bag when the authorities come calling. Right now they've got it great - they're getting their cut, and they've muddied the waters enough to make it politically unpalatable to go after the drivers for running illegal businesses. (Guess what - in most places your driver's license does *not* cover carrying passengers for hire. And neither does your regular car insurance.) So it's literally costing them *nothing* to be in as many cities as possible.

Because next time someone else might pick up. Or they'll be selling a different line. Or you might be in a different mood. Or the company just doesn't want to cross off a number.

Even legit telemarketers (like university fundraisers, where I did a stint 15-20 years ago) are *loath* to actually remove a name and number from the file. And with robocalls, it costs them effectively nothing to ring that phone again, so why would they remove it?

Honestly, it should be trivial to require that the number displayed connects to the source number. I get that large organizations and such want everyone's CID to be the front desk and that's a legit use - but the fact that the phone company will merrily show CID for a number that it knows full well has nothing to do with the actual caller is just extending the money grab.

That said, you do have to respect the telecoms for playing arms dealer to both sides. They'll charge me for caller ID to see who the number is, and then charge you to not send the number, and then charge me again to block numbers that don't display it...

No reason they can't be doing both. If I was immoral enough to be doing telescam work, I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't track live numbers while also overdialing. It's not like the people you're calling know who to complain to, right?

A thought experiment - take a married couple, put them in the same job. If they wish to have kids, the woman will suffer at least some lost time. You can argue that the man should take some of the hit on parental leave, but that doesn't change the fact that regardless of both the man and woman choosing to have a kid, only the woman is guaranteed to take a penalty to her "hours" and "experience".

This may be a cultural difference, though - Canada provides paid parental leave, so the perception may be different here. Or maybe when men take leave (I took three and a half months the year my kid was born) it doesn't get counted as a gap in hours or experience. At least, there's never been an instance where it's come up.

OK, I'll bite. Experience and hours worked I will accept with the caveat that you've given them a penalty for having kids. But exactly how does one measure "contribution" in a meaningful fashion?

That's because most researchers have to deal with undergraduates, so they've had to relax their definition of "intelligence".

I'm no Linux expert myself (my hotrodding days are behind me; I just need stuff to *work*, please and thank-you), and I can't say I have particularly strong opinion of systemd yet, beyond wondering what the benefit is. And I mean that in the simple sense of - OK, we're breaking some of the old cardinal rules of *nix (multiple small programs that each do one thing well, use plain text because then everything can talk to everything else), so what are we getting in trade for it?

My problems with Linux boxes over the years have almost never been boot-related (OK, the one time when I didn't realize that *nix "are you sure" prompts are waay more serious than the Windows versions), so I likely will never have a particular problem with it. But in the same way I don't jump to buy the newest thing, I'm not sure why we're all jumping here. What does it get us that the old way didn't?

Well, unless you're "the government or a public body", then you'd be correct - you're not a subsidy.

But assuming that you are the gov'mint here, there isn't really a difference between you paying for $10K worth of cars from Don's Dealership, and you giving Don 10K upfront. You've still given Don 10K, and presumably I got a slightly cheaper car. (To answer what I expect to be the obvious rebuttal - that paying for part of the car reduces the price - you only need to look at private universities for examples where the cost mysteriously rises by roughly the amount of the subsidy. There's no guarantee either way, barring regulations, of making sure that the subsidy money isn't ending up in Don's pocket rather than indirectly going into ours. Even if you give me the money directly, if it's a known that buying a car gives me an $X subsidy, that's incentive for you to raise your prices to capture part of that 'free' money.

And realistically, Shodan is offering a more useful service for free - showing people that their webcam is broadcasting to the entire world.

The fact that the "solution" is "hey, block this one provider" and not "holy crap, unplug that thing NOW and get one that isn't broadcasting our cash register to anyone with half a brain.

I suspect this will get fixed when someone gets hurt or robbed, and decides to take it out on the manufacturer. (I'm guessing there's a (media) case to be made in "hey, the webcam you sold me isn't secure, so the crooks watched my register to pick the perfect time to rob us")

While that's true, I don't know if "separate computer required" is a great bullet point on the feature list. Is there some sort of benefit to moving to binary logs by default?