After decades of gleefully using signal handlers to handle all sorts of contingencies, systems programmers were solemnly informed that signal handler functions were very dangerous indeed, because a bunch of other stuff was on the stack and undefined while they were being run, and therefore, handler functions couldn't call anything that was unsafe or non-reentrant.
Systems programmers were told that the best signal handler function was one that set a flag, a volatile int, and then exited immediately without doing or touching anything else.
Sort of defeats the purpose of the elaborate signal-handler-callback-pointer-to-function system we had in place, but them's the breaks.
I could probably wax poetic about how it is perceived as a time of innocence but high culture, before "technology and science" ruined stuff, a time that is immortalized in literature such as Robin Hood, King Arthur, and imitated today by Tolkien and Rowling alike.
It is especially interesting the way people tend to portray it drained of all religious overtones and entirely secular in nature, so that it is palatable to all comers, whether pagan, Christian or Jew.
TFA completely fails to mention the utter fandom that has grown alongside RenFaires: The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). People who are involved with the SCA basically have ongoing year-round RenFaires of various magnitudes. They develop entire in-world personas for themselves and they're assigned to Kingdoms and such, regionally. I'm not sure of the relationship between the two, but it's certainly symbiotic and RenFaires give a taste of what people can have, 24/7 in the SCA.
Medieval life is also attractive to traditionalists of a Christian nature, again -- before everything was "ruined" by science and modernism. We all love going back to the 16th century to see how it all went wrong, or the 11th century to see how it also went wrong!
What's more, plenty of other subcultures draw on medieval tropes, such as goths and filkers and whatever con-going fandom is up to these days. Any competent cosplayer can "seamlessly" meld into a medieval princess or wench just by designing the right costumes, and there are plenty of YouTubers and Etsy sellers ready to assist!
The SCA is way more fun than Ren Faires in my experience, but you typically have to play the part to experience the fun. So much so that Ren Faires seem boring to me these days.
The following info is dated to about 2004-2008:
I was fortunate enough to live in the Phoenix area, where the second largest gathering occurs in Feb, called the Estrella War (it since moved south to Florence). There are about 5k people that come out for the event, and a giant camp, marketplace, battlefield are all set up.
I spent my days fighting in giant battles, and the evenings were spent with friends and acquaintances. Nights brought parties, etc., but nothing beats falling asleep in a tent to the near-distant beating of drums and occasional bagpiper.
There are a variety of arts and sciences, crafts for children, and of course royal court proceedings. I had an absolute blast as a college student participating.
One day I hope to participate again and venture to Pennsylvania for Pennsic, the biggest which was about 16k folk when I played.
Who knows how the SCA is now; I've been out for so long with a shoulder injury. But I've considered getting back in for rapier combat which looked like a lot of fun but not nearly at the battle scale of hardsuit.
It's because shops were traditionally named after the people who owned them. There are still loads of shops bearing people's names, even now.
"Sainsbury's" supermarket used to be "J. Sainsbury's" named after its founder John Sainsbury, &c. "Morrisons" was "Wm Morrison" founded by William Morrison. So when you refer to a shop you say Sainbury's as in [Mr.] Sainsbury's shop, or "Morrison's" as in Mr. Morrison's shop.
Then this becomes so ingrained it gets misapplied sometimes. I don't think I'd ever say Asda's though. But I would say Tesco's, even though Tesco is the initials of three people.
It is this grammatical "mistakes" that make it so obvious a scam is a scam. I often raised my eyebrows at phishing messages and wondered if they knew grammar, but then realized in Nigeria this is their most appropriate grammatical structure and language begins with "Dear Sir..."
Except it isn’t money at all; only suckers call it ‘money’.
It’s considered a security; a representation of value for sure. Move it around all you want until you’re blue in the face.
But money still has to come out of an exchange and through some sort of bank. So it’s all a shell game that’s decidedly not anonymous or protected at all.
That’s why so many have concluded that crypto is a scam; we might as well be smuggling Egyptian grave goods.
Herein we find a fundamental flaw in the way society today treats gluten-based grains, bread, pasta, rice, etc.
Pasta that is not married to its sauce has not done its job. The point of putting a bunch of wheat-based filler into a food is that the flavors of the sauce and other liquids are absorbed and adopted by that bread/pasta/sponge type stuff. Then when you reach the end of the sauce, you still have pasta that is infused with its very essence.
I die a little inside, every time someone slaps some breadsticks on my plate and not enough sauce to soak up. The whole point of a breadstick is wiping that stuff up and sponging it out of the dish!
I die a little inside, every time I see a frozen "TV dinner" that has a little sauce on top of dried-out rice. You mean I am supposed to heat this up and it will magically be delicious?
I've been ordering rice bowls from a fun "healthy foods" restaurant in the college area. They dump a bunch of cooked Jasmine rice into a bowl and then whisper a curry sauce over the top. I gave up after 3 extra sauce orders didn't cover all the rice. And you can't "resuscitate" a dish by applying sauce afterwards: that is what the cooking in the pot is for. Marry the sauce to the rice or dump it in the rubbish.
One time, America's Test Kitchen published a photo of how to rescue old stale bread by dumping pasta sauce over it, while it's frozen. I told them, that's the dumbest thing I ever saw.
The whole reason for leavening bread is so that it becomes like a sponge! For God's sake, the whole reason for inventing the sandwich, the pita, and the Cornish pasty were to save the hands while the sauces absorbed into the bread! That you actually had good-tasting bread in the end, or for a tin miner, bread you could toss in the rubbish!
At this stage, I am convinced that 95% of "gluten intolerance/sensitivity/allergy" is induced by people who are improperly eating all these grains, just dry, just no sauces or liquids inside it. It's fundamentally stupid and ignorance of cuisine, and it's all based on industrial-scale food production and cost-cutting even in the nicest kitchens.
So it turns out that some infractions in some jurisdictions are "owner liability" and so all the authority needs to do is cite the registered owner, because they're always responsible for anyone who is permitted to drive their car.
If the jurisdiction is not "owner liability" then it may be necessary to ID the driver instead, but the ticket is still sent off to the registered owner for handling, because the ticket and the car and the driver all go together.
Regarding a sibling query if the car is stolen, I'd say the owner has bigger fish to fry, and therefore would have reported the incident already, and so untangling a speeding offense would necessarily involve documenting the report and the incident of theft prior to those infractions. It may get a little sus if the owner said "hey my car was stolen and then returned to me just around the hour this photo was taken! it weren't me bruh!"
Let's not forget all the disparate jurisdictions and patchwork of laws which make up this sort of scenario. We can never make blanket statements that cover every situation.
That will not be a viable response for very long. Will it affect the entire fleet in one market or the entire fleet worldwide? How long will it affect the fleet? When robotaxis are an integral part of a local economy, then the incentives diminish for taking them entirely offline. The three instances you mention are fleets under testing circumstances and not commercial service, so there's a distinction!
Sooner or later we'll be making so many omelettes that the occasional broken egg will be, reluctantly, accepted, and the penalties will amount to the usual corporate wrist-slapping, and that will be that.
That’s a good point - I’d naively thought of it as “self driving gets way better than humans -> self driving ‘goes to prod’”, but there is a real possibility that
regulatory scrutiny falls off too early, or worse, the lack of incentives results in backsliding on safety after regulatory scrutiny is off.
Rollouts seem conservative enough for the former, but the latter…
What about pronunciation? Many of the assertions I've heard about adults in a foreign language is about our ability to recognize, differentiate, and reproduce the different phonemes, many which do not exist in our language.
These phonemes are even more difficult to recognize when we're not conversing face-to-face and in-person! So if you're listening to "comprehensible input" if it's on audio, or video voice-over, it is much inferior to seeing/feeling/hearing a native speaker make sound-shapes with their mouth!
I made many efforts to imitate my Spanish teachers in my youth, in terms of pronounciation, mouth shapes, accent and emphasis, etc. I credit the in-person instruction with achieving a nearly fluent comprehension and ability to make myself understood.
So the argument goes: if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?
> if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?
The answer is sort of "yes". If an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, they will have a more difficult time with the phonemes of a new language than an infant would.
However, "learning new sounds" is not a correct way to think about it. You're born knowing all the sounds. You unlearn the differences between certain ones. If you, as an adult, have unlearned a difference that matters in your target language (because it didn't matter in your native language), you will have trouble with that difference. An infant can't have this problem.
Note that the cutoff point where an immersed child will fail to learn the pronunciation of a new language "automatically" is somewhere in the late teens, though.
It is really nothing new to offer up credentials to some third party who promises to act benignly on your behalf.
When my niece was about 10, so let's call it 2005, she wanted to access some Barbie service. And I think it was the legit Barbie, mattel.com-affiliated website for children.
So she navigates there, and gets a login screen that wants her email credentials. Like from yahoo.com. I don't know why--to add her to a list or something? Was it an early "federated identity" login that I wasn't aware of?
And my jaw dropped open as I looked at what they were trying to do and I shouted "That's phishing! Don't ever do that!" and I force-closed all the windows and handed her over to her parents.
And looking back, I almost had a twinge of regret because I had come to find out that the Barbie service was not some Russian hacker but actually Barbie just asking to log in to her email, and it was totally normal for thousands of kids. So was I the bad uncle for stopping her in this regard?
Systems programmers were told that the best signal handler function was one that set a flag, a volatile int, and then exited immediately without doing or touching anything else.
Sort of defeats the purpose of the elaborate signal-handler-callback-pointer-to-function system we had in place, but them's the breaks.