Dude, you're being ridiculous.

That's clearly not the intention here if the end result of passing through the luxury terminal is boarding the same airplane as those masses, and it is. It's obviously just to make the airport part of the travel experience nicer, in ways that would be too expensive to apply to the regular terminal. It's the same thing as airport lounges (I'm a Delta Sky Club member myself, a privilege I pay money for so I have the option of a nicer place to wait, the availability of hot showers on long trips, food, drinks, etc.) just scaled up to cover the whole airport process... right up to boarding time when the people get shuttled to board with everyone else.

LOL. I specifically mentioned that I use correct capitalization... so of course I screwed up the capitalization.

Tiny, tiny minority. And if you think you want that, you're wrong!

Also, it's worth pointing out that finding matching pages in a database of pages is indeed trivial -- and building that is utterly insufficient, because for any query that trivial matching algorithm will return a huge number of pages. Thousands, even for the most obscure technical terms, millions or tens of millions for more-common words.

The hard part of building a web search engine (and it's very, very hard) is ranking the results once you've found them, so the thing the user wants is on top. That was, in fact, Google's big innovation: PageRank was Larry Page's idea for how to rank pages by examining the link structure of the web and prioritizing pages with more inbound links. That specific mechanism quickly broke down when SEO companies began exploiting its structure, but in addition to being gameable, PageRank had another problem: What if the search terms are used in multiple domains? The classic example is the query "python spacing". Am I looking for information about how large an enclosure I need for a captive python, or am I asking about indentation in programming?

So Google, and every other competent search engine, has shifted towards supporting queries in natural language, as well as using contextual information when available, such as the user's search history -- in the "python spacing" example, unless the user is a zookeeper who also writes code, their search history will point to the correct domain.

If you're writing queries as lists of terms that you want matched in pages you're doing it wrong. You'd actually be unhappy with a search engine that gave you exactly that, and you're also artificially reducing the effectiveness of the much better search engine you're using. Try typing questions instead, e.g. "How much space does a 10 foot Python need?" (correct spelling, capitalization and punctuation are not really required, but I use them anyway). This will give the engine more contextual clues about what kind of thing you're actually looking for and you'll get better results.

That said, it should be pointed out that if what you really, really want is "include only these words, exactly as I spelled them", Google will give you that. Just put them in quotation marks.

It's too bad they don't provide numbers, because the numbers are incredible. I occasionally checked the search qps numbers when I worked at Google, just for fun, and... wow. Say what you will about Google, their scale is incredible. The services work so reliably and quickly that you don't often think about what the infrastructure must be like to handle it -- and you can't achieve that kind of scale just by throwing hardware at the problem, either (though lots of hardware is required, obviously). Every layer of the stack is finely-tuned for performance, with both macro optimizations like sophisticated distributed consensus-based eventually-consistent storage and micro optimizations like libraries that squeeze maximum value out of every cycle.

Supporting tens of millions (maybe hundreds of millions now?) of queries per second against a multi-petabyte (maybe exabyte now?) database is an incredible feat of engineering, as is keeping the whole system humming along with near-perfect reliability. There are a lot of damned fine engineers at Google, and "engineer" is absolutely the right word when you're talking about global-scale infrastructure.

One of my first "Google-scale" moments was shortly after I joined in 2011. The global data center status pages had a bug, which was that the field that displayed the aggregate on-line storage (basically all spinning Rust back then, I think; the SSD transition was just about to get under way), was a Java long, a signed 64-bit integer, and it had just wrapped; Google's online storage had exceeded 2^63 bytes. That is a big number. They just updated the code to use a BigInteger instead.

No, but they'll record the punch, then call the police. The recording will be evidence in the subsequent prosecution for assault and battery.

All of the big tech companies incentivize their employees to write up as many patent ideas as possible, and anything that looks remotely plausible gets filed by their patent attorneys. This in no way means the company has any plans to build the thing patented.

Why do they do it then? To build up their "patent warchest". Every company knows that they're going to get sued for patent infringement, because it's just impossible not to. Hamstringing your engineers by having patent attorneys scrutinize everything they're doing to see if it happens to be somewhat close to a thing that someone else patented will drive everyone nuts and drive productivity to zero. And you definitely don't want your engineers searching the patent database themselves... if they stumble across something vaguely close to what they're building or thinking about building, then go ahead with what they were going to do anyway, it's now "willful infringement", eligible for treble damages.

Instead, companies file for patents on everything possible, mostly with no plan whatsoever to build it, so that when they get sued they can then dig through their warchest to find something vaguely related to what the plaintiff builds/does (assuming the plaintiff is a company that builds stuff; patent trolls are a separate issue and require a different strategy), then threaten a countersuit. Then the lawyers get together and craft a cross-licensing agreement, which rarely includes any money changing hands or anyone changing what they're building and selling.

Patent filings like this one aren't news, they're noise, and /.'s editors should know better.

I doubt it. I'd bet it's more of a problem of feature parity with OS X. Even though Windows has backup and restore, it still gets ragged on for not handling device moves or replacements as nicely -- even though the main problem is users and/or app developers not turning it on. I'll bet that first MS offered the feature and left it to users to discover and enable, but hardly anyone did. Then they started nagging people to turn it on, and most still didn't. So now they're turning it on by default.

I saw this same story play out on Android (when I worked there), firsthand. Backup was added to provide feature parity with Apple and to reduce user complaints about lost data. But approximately no one turned it on. In Android there were actually two obstacles, because out of abundant concern for privacy the backup solution required both app developers and users to opt in. User opt-in improved when users were nagged to enable it at setup time, but then they were annoyed that when they restored a backup hardly anything was restored because hardly any app developers opted in. Eventually apps were opted in by default (app devs can still opt out, but most don't) and the feature became somewhat more functional -- except for apps that were broken by it because app developers didn't expect to have their app and its data suddenly appear on a different device.

I had a front row seat to this saga because the component I owned (Android Keystore) was a significant motivator for requiring apps to opt into backup. The problem is that Keystore's core purpose is to provide hardware-backed cryptographic key material which is permanently and irrevocably bound to the device (and is strongly guaranteed to be wiped on factory reset). When an app that uses Keystore keys has its data restored from backup and then tries to load one of its Keystore keys, it gets a null pointer. If the app developer didn't check for null, that turned into a NullPointerException, and if they didn't catch the NPE, their app crashed. Net result: after a restore, most banking and many other apps crashed on startup because one of the first things they do is try to use their keys to authenticate to their servers.

I designed a key backup and restore scheme but my scheme would require app developers to opt into key backup on a per-key basis, at key generation time, because adding any automatic backup/restore solution would have broken the fundamental security property of Keystore. The scheme was moderately complex because it tried very hard to make it impossible for Google to ever access the backed-up secrets, and it relied on some internal server infrastructure whose sole purpose was to make it possible for Google to store data it could not access. That infrastructure was expensive, fragile, high-maintenance and not much used so it was at risk of being turned down because the teams that used it couldn't afford to maintain it. Strongly authenticating the new device and the user before releasing secrets was also tricky. At the end of the day, I never launched the Keystore B&R scheme (though vestiges of it remain visible in the Keystore secure key import scheme, which was designed for B&R but is useful on its own. Specifically, the import format includes a "masking key" field that isn't really useful in the normal import flow, but was crucial to the scheme that kept the secrets impenetrable to Google).

At the end of the day, app developers eventually fixed their apps to deal with being restored, mostly, and forcing users to make a backup/no-backup decision during device setup generated high adoption. Android B&R works fairly well today (except where device OEMs screw it up), though people still complain that the whole system isn't as smooth or as seamless as iOS', I think mostly because Android apps can opt out, but iOS apps can't (AFAIK).

If you pay it off every month, it's not really debt, is it? You never pay any interest, and the only way it translates into actual debt is if you have more expenses than you can cover -- but in that case you'd be reaching for debt of some sort regardless. But with a CC you do get the fraud buffer (the fact that you haven't happened to need it, yet, doesn't mean anything), and you get to delay your payments by about one month, which IMO is really quite nice. I not only get a short interest-free loan, letting me keep my cash in an interest-bearing account (currently about 1%, not a lot but not nothing), but I also have the flexibility to decide which account or accounts to keep my cash in (I actually keep most of it in a couple of brokerage accounts, not a regular bank account; yes, it's still insured by FDIC).

Plus I get 1-5% cash back depending on where I use it.

I realize that The 2-6% I get back (rewards + delayed payment interest) is paid for out of the fees the merchant pays and passes on to us all. I think it would actually be better if merchants were allowed to itemize those fees on my bill, which would discourage use of high-fee cards and change the calculation. With the system as it is, though, I'll absolutely stick with my credit cards.

This is very regional, but if you're talking about populations that speak 3+ languages fluently, it's generally not because they learn them in school.

Learning multiple languages in most cases has nothing to do with parenting or nutrition or leaning habits. Most people who learn multiple languages learn them because they live in communities where multiple languages are spoken.

Multilingualism is weakly correlated with intelligence. It's strongly correlated with growing up in an area where people speak many languages.

Well, this data says that your best bet is to have learned a lot of languages as a child. The study found that earlier acquisition of multiple languages was more effective than learning additional languages later in life.

I agree with the first sentence, but not the second. I think this is an honest attempt to protect kids from something that is clearly harmful to them. I just don't think it will work. I think it's a situation where people see a real problem and feel like they must do something, but don't really know what can work. This is something, and there's a non-zero (if small) probability that it will do more good than harm.

It was never anything more than an invitation. A degree is a prerequisite for many jobs, but it has never been a guarantee.

That's part of it, but the smaller part. The more important parts are that a college degree demonstrates that you can learn, that you can take on a large, somewhat challenging, multi-year task and complete it, and that you succeeded at acquiring some level of broad-based education. Engineers and other specialists tend to scoff somewhat at "liberal education" because it doesn't seem like it's useful... but there have been endless attempts to substitute narrow vocational education in technical fields and they don't stick.

In the late 90s I worked with people who'd graduated from BM's attempt to provide narrowly-focused education. IBM had scoured the factories for the brightest then sent them to an intensive two-year course in software engineering, paying them to learn. The result was competent software engineers who were difficult to work with because they knew absolutely nothing but software. Their thinking was full of the basic misunderstandings of politics, economics, science, literature, etc. that you find in typical people without any post-high school education -- and who didn't pay much attention in high school either.

They knew information theory and could write good code, but their lack of general education negatively impacted their ability to build software systems in many ways. They didn't communicate well in writing (though technical writing courses had been part of their IBM education), but more fundamentally they just weren't very good at understanding the complex problems of the business. It's hard to pin down precisely what the issue was, but it was real. They were as smart or smarter than many of the college grads... but they were just less effective as employees.

IBM ultimately abandoned the approach and started sending bright young factory workers to regular universities. Even that was less effective than hiring people who had gotten to and through college on their own, though.

Indeed... though I also think that the trap is less crushing than many like to describe. I think the biggest issue isn't that the loan repayment is crushing, but that people don't like paying for something they got years ago. I don't mind paying my mortgage because I'm paying for a house I'm living in now. I would definitely resent making payments on a house I already sold and moved out of.

Personally, I didn't get any student loans. It would have been financially smart for me to have done so, actually, but I didn't.

Or a cheap four-year school, which was my strategy. Even better if there's such a school close to where your parents live, so you can live at home. A lot of the cost of education isn't the education, it's room and board, and if you can get that from your mom & dad for free, do it. This was my plan, though I ended up not following it because I got married -- but I married a woman who is a couple of years older than me and was close to graduation herself. She graduated a few months after we got married and started work that fall as a school teacher; not a lot of money but enough. Financially this strategy worked well for her; she quit teaching after a few years and has since lived on my income, which is an order of magnitude larger than she'd ever have made.

Another alternative is to join the National Guard or a reserve branch of the military. I joined the Air Force reserve. It qualifies you for most of the GI Bill benefits, but only requires a few months up front of full-time service for basic training and specialty training. After that, one weekend per month plus two weeks per year (which your employer is legally obligated to allow you to do). If you pick a military job that is related to your career plans, the specialty training could be extensive, as much as three years in some cases. Or you can pick something with less training requirements. I became a Security Policeman because the training was short... though what I learned about physical security has actually been useful in my software career.

I mentioned above that I should have gotten some student loans... I didn't realize until too late that part of the GI Bill benefits was that the government would have paid off my loans for me. I met another kid who was going to school on scholarships + GI Bill money who took advantage of this: He borrowed $20k (in ~1995) for "school", but used it to buy a brand new Camaro, then let the US Army pay it off.

Start to end, it took me 8 years, though I took a two-year hiatus to be a missionary. The last four of those, I was working full time, writing software. The last year of that time I was actually teaching a C++ programming course at night at the university I was attending, getting paid a small amount as adjunct faculty and getting 50% off of tuition for my own final coursework. That last part was not a common situation by any means, not something you can plan on, but it worked well for me.

I think it would have been marvelous to have done a "traditional" college education, living away from home, immersed in the college culture with lots of other young people. But I graduated with zero debt, and having already started my career, and my family, so it was a great outcome.

CaptQuark's main point is absolutely right: You don't need large student loans to get an education.

Find an independent EV specialist. They can probably get or build you an aftermarket LEAF pack with more modern guts.

There's a ton of aftermarket support out there.
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> Might be. But it is not far outside the window of actual expense

"Yeah the evidence is fake but that doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong."

That's basically politics in 2026 in a nutshell, I guess.
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