Same story with Free ADSL: I used to get terrible speeds from anything on AWS (including our own services), around 100 KB/s, until very recently when suddenly I was able to saturate my ADSL line from them. Now I don't dread having to download GB-sized log files.
It didn't really make sense to me why AWS was a target of their bandwidth extortion tactics until I realized Netflix uses AWS.. So I guess thank you Netflix for paying the ransom?
There's one thing I've been thinking about that I don't see anyone else talking about, which is the role of hybrids in the decline of the ICE.
I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that most cars sold in 5 or 10 years will be at least hybrid electric. As battery prices continue to fall, it will make sense to include some electric capacity in addition to an ICE. So let's imagine a future where most new cars have a relatively modest 20 kWh battery with a range of more than 100 Km:
Most people, most of the time, drive short distances that will seldom require the use of the combustion engine and its fuel (many hybrids today come with special fuel tanks to prevent the fuel from "going bad"). Buying fuel will become an increasingly rare thing, and people will start to think of it as an expensive inconvenience. The current ICE fleet is reliant on a large, complex and expensive infrastructure to provide this fuel, and as people buy less and less of it, maintaining it will become less and less sustainable. As fueling stations start closing and the fuel prices go up (will they? I'm not sure about this point), it will become even more costly and inconvenient to fuel a hybrid, perpetuating the cycle.
At some point, the idea of a noisy, dirty ICE running on expensive, hard-to-get fuel will become so unattractive that it's no longer a viable option for most people. While this decline is happening, the cost, range and performance of all-electric will improve to the point where there really is no other reasonable choice.
"The most extraordinary things about Stephen Harding's The Last Battle, a truly incredible tale of World War II, are that it hasn’t been told before in English"
I'm quite sure I've read this story before, in English.
Rather than assuming that these soldiers negotiated truces out of purely pragmatic reasons, I think the article completely ignores that most people actually don't want to lie half-frozen in trenches killing each other. They had these "truces" because war is hell and everybody wanted a break from it. If there was nobody there to order them, most would've gone home.
It is common in Europe that owners of the phone lines must give other ISPs access to it (for a - regulated - price). This in turn stems from the fact that the owners of the phone lines are (or used to be) owned by the state.
I don't see anything pretentious about it. He's not bragging about being smart, just stating that he is what most people would call intelligent.
Intelligence can mean many things, but I like to think of it in terms of "brain power"; the amount of abstract thought you can hold and process, your brain's RAM and CPU power so to speak.
The term depression is very broad and probably encompasses numerous as-yet-undefined sub-categories, but his description is very much like my own experience: A dulling of the mind. It's like downclocking the brain's CPU and emotional coprocessor from 2Ghz to 200Mhz. Thinking became slow and required more effort, analytical capabilities pretty much went away and I didn't have the spare capacity to really enjoy anything. A song or a movie I knew I liked just didn't register because my brain wasn't capable of processing it the way it used to. Learning became uninteresting and a chore and problem solving became near impossible. In short, I felt really dumb. I knew I wasn't, but I couldn't "smarten up" however much I tried. Knowing this, not being able to enjoy learning, problem solving or experiencing something was the worst terror of depression.
The experience left me wondering about the immutability or genetic predeterminism of "intelligence". If we broadly define intelligence as "brain power", I know now that it can vary a great deal. I wonder how much of this brain power is predetermined through genetics and how much is affected by the environment. We know that diet plays a large role and that certain diseases affect the brain in this way. How much of a person's "dumbness" can be removed by changing the external factors? In addition, I think broader aspects of intelligence such as analytical abilities, memory and "abstract capacity" can be taught or improved through training. I know my own "intelligence" certainly has required lots of training through the years, not to mention the knowledge that plays a large part of it that had to be acquired.
I think XUL was/is vastly better then than HTML5 is today for what everyone seems to want: Actual applications (instead of web sites) that run in the browser.
XUL had/has a proper GUI toolkit with proper bindings to an event framework for user interaction. It was similar to HTML/CSS/JS but much, much better. The problem was people wanted "real" apps without having to do real work, and we're stuck with HTML which is a document language and will never be what we really want.
Oh, and it wasn't that complicated, it was rather easy.
I'd really be interested in knowing why it's not "Stripe EU" instead. What sort of problems they had trying to do that, and what needs improvement for that to become reality.
This guy gets it. Being proud of one's nationality makes no sense. You have no right to take pride in something you didn't have a part in. Likewise, you have no obligation to feel shame for something you didn't take part in, like a country's wars or human rights abuses.
Attaching your sense of pride and self worth on something you can't control is a weakness. It doesn't matter what it is, it could be a nation, a political ideology, a religion or a football team. As long as you don't control it, you're subject to its inevitable changes whether good or bad - your sense of pride or shame is outside of your control.
To be independent is to be strong. Your country maintains secret torture facilities or spies on its citizens? Not your fault; you didn't approve of it and that's as far as your obligation goes. You can be proud of your work to oppose it, but the shame belongs to the perpetrators.
I wasn't going to comment more as I don't have much more to say about the subject, but I just have to point out the flaw in this statement:
"There is a still a much lower mobility of the workforce in Europe than what you see in the US, much because of language."
The assumption behind this statement is exactly the kind of mentality I am referring to. There is little mobility because employers don't hire the employees because there is little mobility. It's circular reasoning.
With the jobless rate in certain parts of the south skyrocketing, you'd think this would be an active hunting ground for employers in need of people. You don't think the many 25-35 year old university educated people living with their parents wouldn't jump at a chance of a decently paid job in Norway (or anywhere else for that matter)? It's like a fat man complaining how everyone is making him fat and nobody is fixing it for him. The only real barrier is mentality.
The point about language is fair; it is a concern. But if you're a startup with any sort of vision that extends beyond the narrow world view that I've spent so many words describing, guess what the language of your business is going to be? Surprise, it's English! The company founders speak it, their customers speak it and the excellent but unemployed programmer living with his parents in Bologna speaks it.
This conclusion assumes that employees have to also be from Norway, which is emblematic of the insular and narrow mindset that is the real cause of the problem.
I am a developer and I have been impressed by other developers many times.
That being said, I don't care much for "show off" posts like "Look everyone, I made a functional web server in Brainfuck!". If you're trying to impress other developers, it is certain that you won't. It is not a worthy goal in itself.