Unfortunately, it's a bit iffy for individuals that have unreliable internet. The download link expires after a while (last time I tried to do a large export).
Sorry about that. Did you try the move to drive option? One of the reasons we added the ability to move the finished archive to Drive was to allow users with unreliable internet connections to use the Drive Sync tool to sync the finished download down to their computer. I know it is a little inconvenient but it should make it possible to download a large archive over an unreliable connection.
It does, there was a lot of debate on whether it should or not. If you have strong opinions one way or the other I would love to hear them as we are open to changing that behavior.
If you don't want that behavior, or just want to export part of your drive (or photos) collection you can expand that product in the Takeout UI and just select certain folders.
It's good that you're starting to think about your applications early. Applying to college is a lot of work and one way you can help yourself is by starting early. Do not procrastinate on this. Starting early, gives you more time to prepare and ensure that you have the strongest possible application.
In my experience, Top schools look at your application holistically as a package so there isn't just a single particular thing that will guarantee admission. For example, it is possible to for a candidate with perfect SATs to fail to get into Harvard. That's not to say SATs/test scores are not important - a high SAT score does, all things being equal, improve you chances. But rather, it is to show you that it alone is not sufficient.
So how do you get in ? You make sure each aspect of your application is as strong as possible. This includes things like your SATs test scores, letters of recommendation, application essay and the like. For SATs, one way to get high scores is to just take many practice exams. This is hard work (the exam is 3hrs+) but most of the question there follow a certain style and after doing it a few times you will naturally get good at answering those questions.
On recommendation letters, my suggestion is to get letters from people who know you really well and can speak candidly and accurately on your current intellect as well as your potential for college-studies. The contents of the letter matter much more than who writes it. For example, you say you lead your high school computer club. I'd imagine that you have had a lot of interactions with the computer instructors at your school in that capacity and so he/she is really familiar with you and your skills at an intimate level. Such a recommender is more likely to write a strong letter since they've seen and know your work first hand.
One strategy that may help you determine if a recommender is a good fit is to ask them: Can you write me a strong recommendation letter ? Most would be up front if that's not the case and politely decline if they cannot write you such a letter. So if you can get strong recommendation letter from someone at Google/NASA, go for it. Otherwise, I'd get one from people who know you well.
The other part of this is your application essay. Do spend time crafting that. Unlike most of the pieces of the application, this is one part where you have total control and you should use this to your advantage. Most top schools give you freedom as to what you can write about, so put some real thought as to what you'd like to focus on. Suggested topics to touch on include, why are you passionate about CS and how did that happen. It's a good idea to have a close-friend or instructor to review your essay. It helps to get a second pair of eyes give you feedback. Make sure though that your voice and personality still shines through in your essay after incorporating any feedback and making adjustments.
I realized that Adblock plus was a performance hog a long time ago and it is good to see that information being shared widely. The issue especially impacts those who have many many tabs open all at once.
Interestingly, there is a uBlock alternative which I had not heard about[1]. If the more efficient claims are true, it would definitely be worthwhile to switch over to that instead.
> It's broken because many people correctly calculate that the impact of their individual vote has less value than the cost of physically voting, and even less so than the cost of educating themselves about the candidates and issues.
Agreed but that becomes an issue if everyone thinks and behaves like that. That is, if individually everyone goes through the same thought process concluding that voting is not worthwhile for them on an individual basis what happens is that no one votes. There is an inflection point below which votes do actually matter.
> democracy in general is a bad way to aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people.
That may be true. The question then becomes what is a better way to "aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people" ? Perhaps, such an aggregation is not practically possible.
> There is an inflection point below which votes do actually matter.
Yes, that's true. In theory, as fewer people vote, the value of each vote goes up, and presumably there could be some equilibrium reached. Of course, I doubt that experiment would be allowed to complete without the government making significant fundamental changes.
But there's another closely related issue, which might explain why lots of people still vote despite my claim that it's irrational. My claim only considered the costs and benefits of the impact of a vote on the outcome of the election. But there are other benefits that many people receive from voting, namely, the feeling of doing one's civic duty (which many people are instructed to do from a young age) and the feeling of being part of rooting for a group (like a political party). The trouble with this class of benefits is that they are enjoyed by the voter whether or not the voter invests the time to research the candidates and issues (which is much more costly than the physical act of voting, but is ostensibly required according to the traditional civics class explanation of democracy). This theory predicts that voter education on the candidates and issues would be low, which is certainly the case in a few relevant polls I've seen.
> The question then becomes what is a better way to "aggregate the preferences of a large and diverse group of people" ? Perhaps, such an aggregation is not practically possible.
Plenty of suggestions are out there, but they're all obviously considered very radical in mainstream Western political philosophy. Most radical political philosophies you've heard of probably either aren't fundamentally democratic (like propertarian/market anarchism, anarcho-capitalism) or are democratic in a different sense (like direct action or direct democracy in left-libertarianism). For an alternative that is slightly less radical, though still politically unfeasible for any major government in the foreseeable future, take a look at futarchy, which combines democratic voting with (money-based) prediction markets.
I was curious too about my own code, so I looked at the last publicly available C code I wrote with fork in it[1], and yep I checked for the error case too :)
I think this just came from being drilled in school on the importance of checking error return values. No matter how unlikely never assume that something can't happen. If it really can't you should at the very least assert on it.
Yes. Infractions are crimes so yes. For the most part, they are not treated as crimes. You cannot be jailed based on an infraction. Most job applications I've seen typically explicitly exclude requiring information about past infraction violations.
>This newer 2013 MacBook Air is holding up much better than the 2012 model, and I'm consistently still getting 6-8 hours of life out of the battery at least.
It may be just my usage patterns but I never seem to get more than 4 hours on the 2013 Air. I mostly have a fair number of Chrome tabs along with a terminal window open and that seems to be enough to drain the batter rather quickly.
Here's a (naive) question: In the US, is a Supreme Court ruling completely final ? What options, if any, are available to the losing party ? Is change through congress the only way to try to appeal rulings?
If there are no practical ways to repeal Supreme Court rulings, what happens when the Supreme Court makes a mistaken ruling?
The supreme court is the ultimate court of appeals in the United States - once you lose there, your only remedy is to change the law, or in some cases, change the constitution.
Since the supreme court interprets the law, the way you to change the ruling is to change the law. In a few recent cases, the supreme court has basically said (paraphrasing) "we don't like this ruling, but this is what the law says. If you want to fix it, talk to Congress, not us."
There have been some very notable instances where the Supreme Court has changed its mind or modified its prior rulings (for instance around civil rights), so while its the end of the road for this petitioner, it doesn't bar the law evolving in the future.
In the US the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of how the law is interpreted. So, off the top of my head, there are at least 2 ways the effects of a judgement can be reversed. 1) The law can be specifically amended by congress and 2) the Supreme Court can make a future ruling which is different than it's original.
Of course, there are intricacies here. Especially in case 2 where the weight giving to legal precedence makes it unlikely.
Yes, it's very strong legally. Congress or the states can try for a Constitutional Amendment (but those are few and far between, last one was in 1992), or the Supreme Court can later reverse itself partially or in full. An example of that would be Plessy v Ferguson in 1896, where the Supreme Court ruled segregation laws were constitutional, but later in the 50's (Brown v. Board of Education) they reversed it.
Those are the only options if they're ruling on the constitutionality of a certain law. If they're just deciding on whether or not an action violated any given law (as in this case), you could reverse the ruling by changing the law itself (i.e. through Congress).
The funny thing about this question is that the Court previously (in the 1970s) did rule in favor of this type of service, at the time known as community antenna TV. Congress then passed a new, revised copyright law that specifically outlawed this type of activity; it was under this law that the Court ruled against Aereo.
So that answers your question about what the next step could be, as well as why the Court ruled the way it did.
There are certainly areas that github could use some improvement. One of the basic features that I see as currently missing is actual side-by-side Diffs like those available in Chromium Code Reviews[1]. This makes it so much easier to review code changes and thus improves the experience of collaboratively working on a project. The Github folks are smart people, so I'm sure they know this and yet years after launch this is still not available in Github while they continue adding things like improved map diffs [2] which while nice features on their own, it only serves to show that a good code diff experience is not as important to them now.
Secondly, I find Github search to be lacking in terms of fulfilling its potential. It seems we all agree that Github is the number one place most people put their public code on. This is great, we have one central public repository. And yet searching for, finding and discovering good code on Github is not as easy as it should be. I argue that it should be easy to find solutions to programming problems that others have already tackled. Imagine being able to type "compute sha256, c++" and seeing relevant code snippets right there. I am not saying this is an easy problem to solve, but I think it's definitely worthwhile one to try. Who knows, may be someone will build an awesome code search engine on top of github.
