Not just Mars, but yes. Biodegradability isn’t even a factor since there’s no biosphere to speak of, which also raises philosophical questions like: “what is pollution, exactly?”

What will really bake your noodle is to imagine a future where we settle the Moon and Mars. Do old space program artifacts become monuments and parks (debris and all), or are they trash to be removed from the environment?

Now that you mention it, that’s probably why.

What I’m curious about is the “engineering model.”

All NASA missions have duplicate probes, satellites, rovers, here on earth. They’re essential for testing various scenarios like training astronauts (in the case of the Hubble repair missions), or testing the limits of the systems in question. I wonder if the engineering model for Curiosity has one of its wheels cut away in the same pattern, to simulate difficulties in navigation and traction?

The key phrase to remember here is: Price Discrimination.

Stores already possess the technology to track anyone’s shopping experience through loyalty cards. The “discounts” you get are really just a tax on everyone that doesn’t participate, and the benefits to the company for having your data are worth potentially losing business from un-tracked customers. That’s how valuable your data is.

So why aren’t we seeing per-customer targeting? This is not to suggest that businesses are benign here, but rather, just cautious about outright per-customer discounts and other price manipulation. Custom coupons are kinda/sorta a part of this. IMO, the door is still wide-open to find ways palatable to the customer (and courts) while dialing everyone in.

In that context, all cameras do is make the system practically impossible to dodge. Considering how much stores value that kind of information, it makes sense they’d invest to capture 100% of their retail activity.

For me, it’s all the suck brought on by a pathological fear (trauma) of authority figures abusing their power. In this case: TSA, and their ability to completely screw with your travel plans. To be clear, this is not rational and 100% nothing bad happens.

Story takes place in a whole-ass galaxy. Everyone winds up back on Tatooine for some stupid reason; the planet with barely one ecosystem, practically zero vegetation, no economy that matters, yet populated with two (?) cities. Other planets also have exactly one ecosystem, culture, and one optional urban center¹. There’s also only 12 or so planets that matter, yet half of everyone you meet are from all the other ones. You may not like what you see, but this is peak sci-fi writing performance, right here. /s

This story could take place in a diverse corner of a single Earth-like planet and it wouldn’t be all that different.

¹ - Meanwhile planet Coruscant is an urban center where the ecosystem can best be described as “traffic” and the culture is “city folk that inexplicably eat at 1950’s-style diners”.

I never played this game; is it really so good that fans were clamoring for a re-release? What am I missing if anything?

Also, I may be misremembering when this was launched but isn’t it a bit early for a re-master on this one?

Why am I suddenly staring at the sun?

I’m inclined to agree. I think the best path through would be to focus on laws that benefit multiple minor players that have a seat at the table.

Antitrust laws in general are a good example. These function at the direct expense of big monopolies, but are exactly what companies need if they want in on what was monopolized. And in the case of breaking a monopoly down, the resulting “baby” companies given more power, growth opportunity, hiring opportunities (job growth) and money making potential than the parent. This can also spur economic growth for all the fat cats out there by creating many new investment and hiring potentials. Overall, if you can get past the monopoly itself (read: take the ball away from your billionaire of choice), everyone else involved stands to benefit.

There may be other strategies, but I can’t think of any right now. I think the key is to tip the scale in favor of more favorable outcomes, then repeat that a few more times, achieving incremental progress along the way. Doctorow outlines the ideal end state for all this, but it’s up to everyone else to figure out how to get there.

While I don’t like the idea of embracing capital to improve things, the whole system is currently run this way. Standing with other monied interests that are aligned with the same goal might be the only way to go.

Just yesterday, Mrs. Warp Core was trying to enroll with an online service. The self-service email confirmation link refused to function correctly in Firefox on a desktop operating system (Windows in this case). It worked flawlessly on Firefox+iOS. Said link also shuttled the user straight off to the phone app.

I’ll add that nearly ever other aspect of their public facing web, including the online chat support, worked flawlessly everywhere I tried it. This all just reeked of hostile design.

When asked about why this is, I simply said:

The browser provides good security and choice for the user. Apps provide good security and control for the vendor.

Oh, it’s petty cash to be sure. If you have $100-ish bucks to throw around, you probably aren’t going to miss much by not doing this. Unless, of course, letting someone else take even one dollar from you in this way is against your religion or something (i.e. the principle of the thing). Conversely, if you need the handful of dollars this makes, you probably don’t have that kind of walking-around money in the first place.

Jesus. This makes it reasonable to just buy $100 worth of your own game every month, just to make sure. Assuming that the number of real sales cover Valve’s percentage and then some. Yeah, that’s a non-zero opportunity cost for you, and additional float for Valve, however petty it may be. But for a small developer, maybe that makes sense.

It’s also worth noting that the launch PS3 also had a whole PS2 inside of it, which partially explains the inflated price point. I say partially since I’m prrety sure that a PS2 slim cost a lot less than $330 in 2006 dollars; they could have just bundled both consoles or offered a rebate on a PS2 purchase and called it a day.

I just want to echo your sentiment with something I’ve been saying here for a while now:

Do not confuse information technology use for computer literacy.

Honestly, this is why I tell developers that work with/for me to build in logging, day one. Not only will you always have clarity in every environment, but you won’t run into cases where adding logging later makes races/deadlocks “go away mysteriously.” A lot of the time, attaching a debugger to stuff in production isn’t going to fly, so “printf debugging” like this is truly your best bet.

To do this right, look into logging modules/libraries that support filtering, lazy evaluation, contexts, and JSON output for perfect SEIM compatibility (enterprise stuff like Splunk or ELK).

Heisenbugs are the worst. My condolences for being tasked with diagnosing one.

Last time I did anything on the job with C++ was about 8 years ago. Here’s what I learned. It may still be relevant.

• C++14 was alright, but still wasn’t everything you need. The language has improved a lot since, so take this with a grain of salt. We had to use Boost to really make the most of things and avoid stupid memory management problems through use of smart (ref-counted) pointers. The overhead was worth it.
• C++ relies heavily on idioms for good code quality that can only be learned from a book and/or the community. “RAII” is a good example here. The language itself is simply too flexible and low-level to force that kind of behavior on you. To make matters worse, idiomatic practices wind up adding substantial weight to manual code review, since there’s no other way to enforce them or check for their absence.
• I wound up writing a post-processor to make sense of template errors since it had a habit of completely exploding any template use to the fullest possible expression expansion; it was like typedefs didn’t exist. My tool replaced common patterns with expressions that more closely resembled our sourcecode¹. This helped a lot with understanding what was actually going wrong. At the same time, it was ridiculous that was even necessary.
• A team style guide is a hard must with C++. The language spec is so mindbogglingly huge that no two “C++ programmers” possess the same experience with the language. Yes, their skillsets will overlap, but the non-overlapping areas can be quite large and have profound ramifications on coding preferences. This is why my team got into serious disagreements with style and approach without one: there was no tie-breaker to end disagreement. We eventually adopted one after a lot of lost effort and hurt feelings.
• Coding C++ is less like having a conversation with the target CPU and more like a conversation with the compiler. Templates, const, constexpr, inline, volatile, are all about steering the compiler to generate the code you want. As a consequence, you spend a lot more of your time troubleshooting code generation and compilation errors than with other languages.
• At some point you will need valgrind or at least a really good IDE that’s dialed in for your process and target platform. Letting the rest of the team get away without these tools will negatively impact the team’s ability to fix serious problems.
• C++ assumes that CPU performance and memory management are your biggest problems. You absolutely have to be aware of stack allocation, heap allocation, copies, copy-free, references, pointers, and v-tables, which are needed to navigate the nuances of code generation and how it impacts run-time and memory.
• Multithreading in C++14 was made approachable through Boost and some primitives built on top of pthreads. Deadlocks and races were a programmer problem; the language has nothing to help you here. My recommendation: take a page from Go’s book. Use a really good threadsafe mutable queue, copy (no references/pointers) everything into it, and use it for moving mutable state between threads until performance benchmarks tell you to do otherwise.
• Test-driven design and DevOps best-practice is needed to make any C++ project of scale manageable. I cannot stress this enough. Use every automated quality gate you can to catch errors before live/integration testing, as using valgrind and other in-situ tools can be painful (if not impossible).

1 - I borrowed this idea from working on J2EE apps, of all places, where stack traces get so huge/deep that there are plugins designed to filter out method calls (sometimes, entire libraries) that are just noise. The idea of post-processing errors just kind of stuck after that - it’s just more data, after all.

Yup. Nobody else gets those cookies.

Yeah, I know that the super-flat planar look was the intent, but there’s a reason why you don’t see much in the real world that resembles the cybertruck. It turns out that the non-planar features of typical car panels are there to add rigidity. Flat sheet metal wants to bend, twist, wave, and even flap in the wind. So there are probably internal supports or struts welded to the panel backsides, in order to keep them flat. Problem is, that process tries to distort the panels due to heat from manufacturing.

And since they opted for stainless, this adds additional problems. In this case: you can’t hide imperfections with bondo and paint. The panels have to be perfect, every time. It requires tolerances that belong on a sports car, not a pickup.