Origin, MS's store, Epic's store, GoG Impulse, Apple's store, physical stores, etc and most of these from companies that dwarf Valve in size.

You can install literally any other store you like on your machine and very few Steam games are exclusive to them (outside their games which are mostly 10-20 years old) nor are prices generally lower than other stores.

Steam only dominates because they are better, easier, and less intrusive.

If they're going to bust digital stores, Nintendo's store, Playstation Store, Xbox Live, Apple's App Store, etc where you can't install alternatives should be much, much higher on the list.

Heavy equipment isn't switching over to electric any time soon. Ore refineries aren't switching to electricity either because it's too inefficient when all you want is heat. As demand for batteries increases, we'll have to start excavating places that are more remote or that contain far lower concentrations of the elements we're looking for (primarily lithium). This will drastically increase overhead -- not just in terms of time and labor, but also in energy consumption.

The whole proposition is a joke until we have something more reusable, less toxic to make, more eco-friendly to make (no more melting mountains down to make batteries), that doesn't require drastically increasing the current power grid infrastructure, and that doesn't increase the amount of fossil fuels we're using (especially coal).

Have you read about the vulnerability requirements? You have to already control the machine before you can use these. If these are a problem, you already have a much bigger problem.

Try gnumeric. It's fast and allows Python scripting too.

Nothing for a very long time if they decide to go ahead. They introduced JavaScript as a VBA alternative in 2013. It's now 4 years later and while they've added a lot of APIs, there are still a ton left to go.

Splitting their API resources between Python and JS seems like the perfect way to get neither any time soon (and a great way to bike shed both out of existence altogether).

There's some truth here. You stick with what you know. 60 something percent of students are using Chromebooks. If MS wants them to use Office later, they have to make sure it's available as soon as possible.

There's a fundamental priority difference between webOS and iOS/Android.

Let's first take a look at macOS (this basically applies to Windows as well). How do you open an app? First, you check the dock for commonly-used applications. If they aren't there, you search the applications folder (or launchpad in newer versions) or use +Space to search for it. Notice that dock offers direct access, but other apps require extra steps.

Window managing is what a desktop OS is all about -- NOT opening apps. You have Spaces/Mission Control to group apps (because positional memorization is important to humans -- I suspect 2D spaces were superior in that regard to the 1D mission control desktops). You can drag windows around, resize them, put them side-by-side, etc. Closing Apps is also first-class with with just a +Q. Notifications are unobtrusive popups. Minor settings are available in the tray and major settings in Preferences (accessible by icon).

webOS follows that paradigm closely. Common apps go in the launcher. Less common apps are either in the app drawer or JustType to search for it. Launcher offers direct access, but everything else takes extra steps.

The primary view for webOS is for window managing. You have a 1D set of apps that you can move into Groups. Closing apps is a simple swipe up. There exists room to add things like side-by-side apps, but most of the devices were never big enough. Notifications are unobtrusive popups. Minor settings are available by clicking on the tray. Major settings are available in the settings view and accessible by icon.

The reason the webOS UI is so good is because webOS is the desktop paradigm you've been using for years.

Android and iOS have adopted many of these patterns, but they still feel foreign. Why? because launching apps reigns supreme. Instead of multi-tasking being the default view, their default is showing apps on the home screen. To change tasks, you have to switch into another, secondary mode and then back out of it. Android's and iOS's UI paradigm is upside down. First-class app opening with second-class task managing is bad UI.

In webOS, users tend to close uncommon apps and leave their common ones running which makes freeing resources the default (good for constrained systems). In iOS or Android, users simply cannot be bothered to use an out-of-the-way, second-class task switcher and don't even realize there are dozens of open apps. Instead iOS/Android app icons become a poor, ad-hoc task manager that is ill-equipped to manage apps and completely unable to kill them.

That's a very disingenuous opinion. There is a very large physiological difference between genders and an infinitesimally small one between skin tones. Likewise there is a very large body of evidence to back up the former differences and only the ravings of quack racists to back up the latter.

Facts don't care about your feelings.

Toshiba bought out Westinghouse a few years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Corporation#Timeline_of_company_evolution) as part of a plan to increase investment in nuclear power (they'd already bought most of the nuclear division around a decade before that).

My wife's brother worked on the SC plants. According to him, Westinghouse was tasked with making new designs with inexperienced teams. One of their bright ideas was to prefab the plant (to save engineer time and money I'd guess) instead of making a design tailored to the specific location. As anyone could foresee, they've spent billions of dollars ever since tailoring it bit by bit. That leads to huge wastes (15M/week -- on the site alone -- as everyone sits around waiting for corporate and government bureaucracy to reach an agreement).

You may have a point about Haskell, but not about ML. Further, SML basically gets everything right that Haskell gets wrong.

SML isn't lazy. Humans don't think in terms of lazy evaluation. Even though Haskell is much more popular and has much better tools, MLton will usually compile faster code.

SML allows side effects. Haskell talks about purity, but the presence and reliance on unsafePerformIO shows that purity has limits. The practical answer is to write without side effects then add them to designated parts of the codebase which gets you most of the benefits of purity without all the overhead and headaches for the last 5% of your program.

SML is immutable by default, but allows mutation if needed. Making everything immutable is great for some problems (eg, concurrency), but is generally bad for performance (determining when in-place mutation can occur instead of a new allocation is a hard, branchy problem).

The biggest question is why SML isn't ruling the world. Consider golang vs SML. SML is about as fast, has a similar concurrency model in CML extensions, has a much better type system, and has much more simple syntax (despite being a more powerful syntax). Golang is used because the tooling is very nice, but why did Google choose to pour resources into golang (or even make it in the first place) when a better solution exists? Because familiar beats everything.

In schools where SML is taught as a first language, nobody has problems learning it (compared to imperative languages). A lot of such people I've talked to even prefer the syntax. Most schools teach a language with a C-derived syntax and approach, so those devs learn to prefer that (and usually never even see ML-style syntax). Haskell has issues with popularity because of complexity. SML has issues with popularity because "popularity begets popularity".

The same companies that will do anything to get programmers except training them?

Most serious JS is definitely NOT open to the public. Common libraries certainly are (and the JS community is very aggressive about pushing the programming envelope), but most significant projects are closed source. You could argue that you can see the source anyway, but between babel transformations and minification, the output is obfuscated (to say differently would be similar to arguing that C projects are open because you can disassemble them).

Paying 3.75 million for what is probably the most detailed study the industry has ever had. A team of market researchers would cost far more and yield far inferior results (even in anonymous studies, people lie and/or forget).

Democrats said he was an outstanding, honest man when he dropped the case (while Republicans decried him as dishonest). When the case came back up, the Democrats and Republicans both completely flipped positions. I don't know if he's playing politics or not, but it seems obvious that everyone's hatred/love is tied to their party rather than the truth.

In any case, what could he have done differently? He announced the case closed going into election season. If he didn't mention the new evidence at all, then congress would have him for perjury sooner or later. If he released after and Hillary won, everyone would say he killed the investigation so Hillary could win. If he released before and Trump won, he would be accused of bringing up the investigation again so Hillary would lose.

Given that Hillary looks to win the election, he can claim that his release didn't adversely affect the election. That's about the best outcome he could hope for.

Sounding in from Chattanooga and EPB here.

EPB offers fiber because last-mile fiber was part of the new smart grid power system (and why not use all the extra bandwidth). The actual company offering the service is EPB Fiber Optics which leases the lines from EPB.

NOTHING keeps Comcast from leasing those same lines at the same rates (or even bringing a case to court that the cost is too high). They simply refuse and instead offer sub-par services with 300GB data caps (guaranteed to run huge overages if you're a cord-cutter). Your territory idea only works when greedy corporations with state-granted monopolies aren't in the mood to abuse the people locked into their service.

For the record, EPB is good enough at their job that they already have agreements to do the same thing in north-west Georgia and are still in talks to offer the same thing in north-east Alabama. People want and need good services from companies that aren't out to screw them over and they'll go wherever necessary to make that happen.