And that's before you get into the weeds of in-system changes. My grade 7-12 years were in an Apple school. I started with Apple IIs, ended with Mac System... 6 or 7, I wanna say. Different floppy disks, different OS, still "Apple". My home machine was Microsoft. Which means DOS 6 -> Win 3.1 -> Win 95.

Even today - is anyone going to seriously argue that Win 7 = Win 8 = Win 10? Between Windows and Office, you're basically "switching" every year or so as they move a setting, hide a setting, "upgrade" something or other.

Whatever you give a kid today will not be what they're using in 10 years, or 5, or possibly next year. Might as well embrace it.

So what I'm hearing is that AVs shouldn't be road legal, because it doesn't understand enough to pass a driver exam.

I do agree that sending a letter seems like an odd choice, since they already have "this vehicle has just broken the law, fine and tow" as an option. 16 year old new drivers don't get a pass because they don't know the rules, so why should AVs?

As an Albertan (whose parents are going to be a couple miles from this thing), solar defeats the purpose. Our government doesn't believe in intelligence (artificial or otherwise). They want to burn the natural gas. They don't care if it generates power or runs a data center or if teens just lean over the stacks to huff the exhaust. Just so long as they're buying the gas.

As an aside - plenty of places in Alberta run solar or wind, even in the winter. It's just not politically expedient. If you want EVs and solar, you want to go to a communist province like.. (checks notes) Saskatchewan.

U.S. research universities are admitting less doctoral candidates.

Do people really think folks are just shrugging and say "guess I'll go sweep floors at the Quik-E-Mart instead", or do you think they're finding schools in other countries who will happily take advantage of the U.S. shooting itself in the foot yet again?

And note that talking to someone on the telephone is apparently A-OK. It's just "chatting online" that is the evil of the day.

I remember the same stories, substituting "telephones" with "smartphones". (For the young-uns - used to be there was only one phone line in the house, and your parents would get real cranky if you spent too long talking with your friends. Or for later-me, dialed in to internet.)

History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

True story - my grade 11 chemistry teacher specifically set up the pop quizes to spank otherwise high-performing students. He was extremely up-front about it, and each of us only got dinged once (and it's on a smaller quiz so it didn't materially affect grades). His point was that none of us were perfect, and a little humility was a good thing. I still remember taking the quiz, handing it in with the comment "was my turn, wasn't it" and his shit-eating grin.

Damn, I wish my kid had teachers like him.

Nostalgia time over - just pointing out that a teacher who is paying attention can 100% choose who is going to pass the test simply by question selection.

That just moves the question - you're in what is (at least through TNG-era eyes) a post-scarcity society. Why are you signing up for the military, to go get sent off random places and get eaten by negative space wedgies, when you could just replicate another bag of Cheetos?

Obviously - look at the laws in the 80s and 90s to prevent teenagers from getting access to tobacco, alcohol, dirty magazines and movies... we all know that parents and grandparents of today's teens didn't do any of those things growing up, right?

.. is creating boilerplate replies for unimportant messages. AI does management-speak well. (Probably because no-one can tell if it doesn't.)

What's sad is that you're saying "see, China does it" like it's a good thing.

And that's the catch - you're right, I wouldn't travel to China, because I could end up SOL with no recourse and subject to political whims. And now that's also true of the US. Sure, it's probably going to be fine. But there are plenty of countries in the world where it will almost certainly be fine, so why wouldn't I spend my tourism dollars there instead?

It can be, depending on the timing and who is involved. To posit a simple example: if I'm invested in your company and your poor accounting says "oh crap we're broke", and I use that information to sell my stake? When you find the money and go "whoopsie doodle we're actually SUPER profitable!", there's going to be some very hard questions about who was buying the company and what they knew when.

Clearly the solution is to make all the jumpers wear the mascot suit for the year's event. Consistent and a marketing opportunity!

On the good days they do it to add some nice-to-have features (one dialect I'm aware of added a keyword that says "yeah, just assume I put all those fields in the GROUP by clause", which IMO should just be in the main spec). But it definitely is also a play for vendor lock-in. (Oh, you used our nice extensions? Welp, guess you're stuck with us unless you want to rewrite all your queries sucker!)

The problem is that in tech, there's always young cheap labor. So they've learned from gaming that you can offer a "full time" job and then when it's time to juice your quarterly numbers you jettison them. Who cares if you've pissed them off? They'll either suck it up and come back for the next "full time job", or there'll be a whole bunch of eager STEM grads discovering they shouldn't have skipped history or economics classes and now get to learn about supply and demand in real time.

I agree, up to where the company runs into tax implications (because now you're employing someone working in another country, and they'd really like their share of payroll taxes and such.)

But within those boundaries? I don't see why I should fuss that my staffer got to house-sit for a couple weeks, so long as they're getting the work done and getting their hours in.