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Comment Re:Doing anything in SF is Expensive and Inconveni (Score 1) 218

SF is highly walkable. When things are closer together, you don't *need* a car. Muni, BART, CalTrain, Uber, and Lyft all provide excellent alternatives to driving within the city. In most of the Bay Area, it is much harder to get around if you do not have a car.

As for why people would want to live there, there's lots of entertainment and social events. There are many, outstanding restaurants. There's some of the nicest beaches, parks, and views in the entire country, with many more a short distance away. There's a government that favors social equality and workers. Lots of people don't *want* to live in a suburb, and would gladly pay a lot of a smaller place to live in a downtown area.

Comment There is nothing unexpected here... (Score 1) 218

The SF Bay Area has been gaining jobs, not losing them. https://www.siliconvalley.com/2023/03/14/bay-area-job-gain-tech-covid-layoff-google-facebook-january-economy/ Tech workers have a greater than typical ability to work remotely because of the nature of their work, and they make up a very significant percentage of the Bay Area's employment - much more so than most metropolitan areas. The tech industry is currently in a downturn, primarily caused by a sudden drop in advertising expenditures. DC is also very tech heavy, but its economy is primarily centered around the US Federal Government. Other cities, such as Los Angeles, are less tech focused, and more focused on other industries, such as aerospace, defense, and entertainment, that are more difficult to do from home. Despite articles like this, SF is a beautiful, vibrant, and amazing city with some of the highest housing prices in the country - because people REALLY want to live there. Additionally, the tech industry had an unusual boom during COVID because of the need for its services for people who had to do work remotely. Booms never last forever, and demand in SF is returning to some approximation of normality. You would *expect* cities which have economies based on different industries to do well at different times.

Comment Orange? (Score 1) 319

Orange is very pervasive throughout Ubuntu, but isn't often used elsewhere, at least not in the US. I'm wondering if this is your favorite color, or if it is more popular in South Africa, or if there is some other reason that orange was chosen as Ubuntu's signature color/

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What stands in the way of a truly solar-powered airplane? (gizmag.com) 2

centre21 writes: So I've been reading about solar-powered aircraft all over the Interwebs, as well as solar power in general, but I'm wondering, is it more than just solar cell efficiency that's preventing the creation of a solar-powered airliner? Conspiracy views aside (which may be valid) it seems to me that if I were running an airline the size of United or American, eliminating the need for jet fuel as a cost would be HIGHLY appealing. So I'm asking: what stands in the way of creating true solar-powered airliners?
Education

Submission + - Falling Demand for Brains?

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times that information technology seems to be reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers (reg. may be required), because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing. One good recent example is how software is replacing the teams of lawyers who used to do document research. “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” says Bill Herr, a lawyer at a major chemical company who used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.” If true this raises a number of interesting questions. "One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war," writes Krugman. "Another is how we [can] have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income." Remember the Luddites weren’t the poorest of the poor, they were skilled artisans whose skills had suddenly been devalued by new technology."

Comment Re: What's missing from this article? (Score 4, Informative) 757

The thing is, if a group of engineers discusses an idea, sooner or later an idea pops up that everyone at the table agrees is the best possible solution, given the problem to be solved and the resources available to solve it. Then they go put their solution into practice. Politics isn't like this. There are always a few nimrods who will denounce even the sanest solution to any problem as "statist" or "communist" or whatever the appropriate political insult is at the moment, so the end solution is almost never the sanest one.

QUICK: Name the last president we had with an engineering degree.

A: J. Carter

He didn't work out too well, did he? :(

Carter inherited a disastrous economy, which resulted from a prolonged war funded by future earnings. When the bill came due at the end of the decade, the economy had massive problems. Sound familiar?

Submission + - Doctor marries Doctor's daughter, exploding TARDIS (bbcamerica.com)

techmuse writes: In a veritable Who's Who of Doctor Who, 10th Doctor David Tennant is marrying Georgia Moffett, the daughter of 5th Doctor Peter Davison, who played the Doctor's daughter in an episode of Doctor Who. Except that the Doctor's daughter was a clone of the Doctor, which meant that she really was Who. So a newer Doctor is marrying an older Doctor's daughter, who is a clone of the newer doctor, but only has half the DNA of the older Doctor.

Comment Bad logic (Score 1) 5

I see this logic repeated a lot, but it isn't correct. It's true that Windows has the vast majority of the market share, and is therefore an inviting target. But given that Macs have approx 10% of the market share in the US, you would expect 10% of the viruses to be written for the Mac. Virus writers use Macs too. However, only a few proof of concept viruses have ever been developed for OS X, that rate has not increased as the Mac as gained market share, and none have been successful in the wild. Therefore, it seem very unlikely that OS X is as vulnerable to viruses as Windows.

Note that not all exploits are viruses. Both Windows and OS X are vulnerable to other kinds of exploits. However, because OS X ships with almost no services enabled by default and does not require them to be enabled to be functional, it's much harder to attack a default OS X configuration. Additionally, there are some fundamental differences in the behavior of programs in general on OS X. For example, Windows has a 15 year history of programs running in the background in the system tray, and an entire ecosystem has been built up around supplying small utility programs for windows that potentially create new threats or open new vulnerabilities. OS X will refuse to run any code downloaded from the Internet or installed from an outside source unless the user permits it to run first (using signed code hashes to validate the executable). It's much harder to run exploit code when the user must approve it.

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