You can argue that a true meritocracy still wouldn't be ideal (as Young did), but that argument seems irrelevant -- the problem in the real world is that we pretend that we have a meritocracy, but often the person who gets the promotion or whatever isn't actually the best at their job, but is a cousin or fraternity brother of the person in charge -- the old "it isn't what you know, but who you know".
That hits. I've always been terrible at lying, so I just try my best not to. I'm so bad at it that I wear it on my face. I've been passed up for many opportunities in life that went to someone who was better at it.
> An 18 hour highspeed NYC to LA train would be amazing.
Often I think of the cut intro scene for "Escape From New York" where Snake robs some sort of bank and then escape in the inter state subway[0]. That future is grim but at least they got high speed long distance underground subways.
High speed around the world rarely gets people taking more than about a 5 hour trip. I'm sure a few would take such a train, but not near enough to make it worth the cost of building an maintaining it. In the mean time everyone talking about that distracts from building transportation that people would use.
If you want trains in the US then you need to focus on the DC-NYC-Boston route - this should be an obvious route with affordable high speed trains every 10 minutes all day. You also need to get local trains to stop bloating the costs such that nothing but the most dense areas can afford to build them. Solve those and then start focusing on areas where trains are harder.
It was mandated because, in some cases, getting data from the patient is actually harmful. A CT scan is not benign. So to ensure that CT scans from manufacturer A could be read on a review station of manufacturer B, the DICOM standard was created.
But there is a real health element to it. Although I perfectly agree that standards are good for the consumer, the incentives here are not as strong.
Yes, but their production volume is limited (imho) compared to the two companies I mentioned. Good callout regardless. I'll have a post put together to share here enumerating and comparing.
(i track global fossil generation production capacity as a component of tracking the overall rate of global energy transition to clean energy and electrification, but some of my resources are simply an excel spreadsheet)
> USB-C charging—no more scrambling for AAA batteries
Bear with me if you’ve already seen this comment, but I dug out my old TI-89 a while ago for some reason, and all I had to do was plug in four AAA batteries and it worked.
If it had been fitted with a rechargeable battery, 30 years ago, even assuming it was still functional, I would have needed to recharge it... but with what?
Now we have USB-C rechargeable AA/AAA batteries, so there’s really no excuse.
I haven't seen that comment, but please keep making it every time it's relevant.
Non-user-replaceable batteries are terrible. It turns devices into e-waste. I wish device manufacturers would understand that. I wish consumers would understand that.
Alkaline batteries also create e-waste when they leak and destroy the contacts. Only a few people will be able to repair it.
I agree with you, also for things like radios alkalines are great as a battery that stays outside of the radio and is used when you need it, and doesn't leak much charge at all.
The reason it would be a problem is because USB didn't have a suitable port in 1998.
Upgrade to 89 Titanium and it already has a USB (mini) port built in. Mini is not ideal but it's fine. You can get a whole pile of mini and micro adapters for a couple dollars.
The fact that batteries wear out is a significant issue for longevity. Backwards compatibility is a solved problem if you use USB.
There must be a law of system design about this, because this happens all the time. Every abstraction creates a class of users who are powerful but fragile.
People who build a system or at least know how it works internally want to simplify their life by building abstractions.
As people come later to use the system with the embedded abstractions, they only know the abstractions but have no idea of the underlying implementations. Those abstractions used to make perfect sense for those with prior knowledge but can also carry subtle bias which makes their use error prone for non initiated users.
> Those abstractions used to make perfect sense for those with prior knowledge but can also carry subtle bias which makes their use error prone for non initiated users.
The shell thinks that you're trying to run the portion before the & (command) in the background and the portion after the & (2>&1) in the foreground. There is just one problem. The second part (2>&1) means that you're redirecting stderr/fd2 to stdout/fd1 for a command that is to follow (similar to how you set environment variables for a command invocation). However, you haven't specified the command that follows. The second part just freezes waiting for the command. Try it and see for yourself.
$ command 2>1
Here the shell redirects the output of stderr/fd2 to a file named 1. It doesn't know that you're talking about a file descriptor instead of a filename. So you need to use &1 to indicate your intention. The same confusion doesn't happen for the left side (fd2) because that will always be a file descriptor. Hence the correct form is:
$ command 2>&1
> I think shell language is simply awful.
Honestly, I wish I could ask the person who designed it, why they made such decisions.
I like abstractions when they hide complexity I don't need to see nor understand to get my job done. But if abstractions misdirect and confuse me, they are not syntactical sugar to me, but rather poison.
(But I won't claim that I am always able to strike the right balance here)
Written in the 50s it's prescient to what has been happening since.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
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