Monarch is monitored by a second instance of itself known as meta-monarch. It’s a fraction of the size, of course, but still mind-bogglingly large. Meta is in turn monitored by the main Monarch instance.
Note that $15k isn't tremendously more than public school costs:
> Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States in 2013–14 amounted to $634 billion, or $12,509 per public school student enrolled in the fall (in constant 2015–16 dollars).
Wow, that New Posts chart is brutal. This nearby link[1] seems to claim that Yahoo failed to "not screw it up", but the details are extremely vague. I'm unclear what could have caused such a dramatic reversal. ~Everyone left, but why? What changed?
I wonder if your friend is also incensed by all the low- and middle-income families moving into those high-rises, or just by the "billionaires" who make that feasible.
Could you share more about your experience with elastic actuators? What did your hardware look like? I'm working on something similar, and would love your input.
I used a Rapsberry Pi (and a lot of Dynamixel servos, LiPo, gyro, etc) to build a small hexapod robot. I was mostly interested in learning about legged locomotion, and got a bit carried away. Using a normal-ish Linux platform with GPIO and USB devices made it really easy (and fun) to hack everything together.
So disappointing that Google (disclosure: my employer) couldn't figure out what to do with these incredible companies. Let's hope Softbank can put them to better use.
Dynamixel servos are expensive for sure, but there are a couple of low-end models which are pretty reasonably priced given their (excellent, as you note) capabilities. The XL-320[1] is only $22. They're puny, but I've had fun with them.
I've always been intrigued by this stance. Do you believe that heroin should be available for purchase, like e.g. cigarettes? Is this a matter of individual liberty, or some other reason?
This is a great feature to get started, but it's unfortunate that the "ssh" file hack doesn't set up SSH keys and disable password auth, or at least change the default password. That must be done manually. I dread to think how many Pis are out there in this configuration.
I hope that in future, a proper/official headless image will be provided, to provide more sensible defaults. Until then, I made a little tool to patch the Raspbian images to set things up this way:
Hello! I was one of those annoying "architects" saying no, but it wasn't because only three languages are allowed. When I left the Times about six months ago, systems were actively being developed in the following languages: PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, Scala. (And ObjC and Swift, if you want to count those.) Plenty of unmaintained legacy systems in other languages, too. So proposals to add yet another language (Clojure, right?) were I think understandably received with some skepticism. It's not that it couldn't happen, just that there'd have to be a hell of a good reason, and there wasn't. It was unfortunate that months of work were invested before a proposal was written, but that wouldn't have been a very good reason to approve it.
For what it's worth, I agree with almost everything else you said.