> These are the factors I would like to know more about for the Brazil and China flooding... Is it just bad governmental town planning?
The systems Porto Alegre and Canoas had in place used to work. When the river there goes over 3 meters it starts to flood some places, okay? Once every few years there was a flood of like, 3.5 meters, 3.7 sometimes. Those were floods that rose slowly, giving ample time to answer to situations as they arose.
In this case, on the 2nd of May, the river reached 3 meters. By midnight, the river was at 3.60 meters already. 24 hours later, the river was at 4.9 meters, and it still rose, slowly now, to 5.3 meters.
The system that was in place was completely overwhelmed. Pumping stations failed and the water started coming through the pumping stations, for example.
That said, yes, the writing was on the wall. If a place regularly floods a bit to the point you need to have dykes and pumping stations in place, eventually it will flood a lot.
> The stroke of a pen makes police do whatever they want so yeah.
You mean like when an order telling the police to remove people camped in front of military bases asking for a coup was signed in early December, but it took until the actual coup attempt in January for the police to actually do anything about it?
Okay, no, let's be completely fair. The police was since December making sure the camped people didn't spill over into the street and block traffic. So yeah, the supreme court controls at least Judy Hopps.
> Hell, I remember watching a video of one of these judges literally say out loud he was proud of being partial towards the communists.
Assuming this is true, I'd really like to know what communists they were talking about. The current party in government was already considered in the 80s to be center-left, and they only mellowed more towards the center in recent years, with pretty much all internal factions that had moderately radical ideas leaving the party. Emphasis mine on the last line.
- Workers' Cause (CO) – seceded from the party in 1990 as the Workers' Cause Party (PCO)
- Socialist Convergence [pt] (CS) – seceded in 1993 as part of Unified Workers' Socialist Party (PSTU)
- Workers' Socialist Current (CST) – seceded in 2004 to form the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL)
- Socialist Left Movement (MES) – seceded in 2004 to form the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL)
- Popular Socialist Action (APS) – seceded in 2005 and joined the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL)
- Tendency for the Workers' Revolutionary Party (TPOR) – Trotskyist faction that seceded in 1990 as the Workers' Revolutionary Party (POR)
- Marxist Left (EM), the Brazilian section of the Trotskyist International Marxist Tendency. Marxist Left released a statement saying that "for the revolutionaries, there is no more room for the construction of socialist ideas within PT".
I mean like when they walked all over the constitution by censoring Bolsonaro supporters left and right. Literal unabashed unconstitutional censorship, openly biased against Bolsonaro at that.
There's plenty wrong with the literal concentration camp they set up in Brasília too. People imprisoned without any charges. Only recently did they vote to turn some of them into actual defendants. Not to mention the embarrassing videos that leaked recently that imply that whole "terrorist" thing was a false flag operation. Meanwhile they released PCC drug traffickers involved in the torture and assassination attempt against the Lava Jato judge and his family. It's comical.
> I'd really like to know what communists they were talking about
PT, obviously. The fact Lula is a communist is news? It's becoming a pain to have to constantly remind people of this. There's videos of him literally saying his objective is to install socialism in Brazil. Decades old videos. I have no reason to doubt the man's own words and his actions certainly don't leave any room for doubt. Whether the other communists think he's a real communist... Who cares, really?
> There's plenty wrong with the literal concentration camp they set up in Brasília too. People imprisoned without any charges. Only recently did they vote to turn some of them into actual defendants.
Welcome to the life of anyone accused of any charge in Brazil. The Criminal Process Code (Código de Processo Penal) allows for up to 81 days of jail without a charge. After that time ends they can just release you without a charge and you can't do anything about it.
If at any time before that period ends, if the prosecutor's office has started any form of case you can still be held for at least more 102 days before your trial, up to 180 if anything that delays any part of the process happens.
This happens every single day in this country to many persons and the media is only making a fuss because now it happened to a bunch of rich white people with a charge that doesn't allow for bail / habeas corpus. I am totally in favor of changing it, but I don't think my reasons are the same as yours, sadly.
> There's videos of him literally saying his objective is to install socialism in Brazil.
Lula is just like Joe Biden. Makes for nice strawman arguments, but anyone who stops and thinks on what they can realistically accomplish will see they're more of the same, except with a rainbow flag coating.
Words are empty without action, and Congress is set to stop any action; Just like for the previous 10 years PT was in power, where they at best passed a few stopgap measures that did nothing to stop the long term destruction of the middle class that started in the 80s, further throwing Brazil into inequality.
> I am totally in favor of changing it, but I don't think my reasons are the same as yours, sadly.
Good, then we are in agreement. I don't know what you think my reasons are but the result is the same in the end.
> anyone who stops and thinks on what they can realistically accomplish
I'd rather not take my chances with a known communist in power. In 2009-2010 he faced heavy resistance when he tried to push socialistic stuff. Now he basically owns the supreme court and the same media that resisted him back then is backing everything he does. Only chance this country has is to somehow get rid of him and put the vice president in charge. They needed him to get Bolsonaro out but now he's overstayed his welcome.
Taken case by case, no. The absolute majority of those cases are used to get ISPs to block pirate streaming sites, or sites selling personal data.
However, once every few years, a high profile case suspending something like Whatsapp, Youtube, LinkedIn or Facebook appears. They are usually thrown out of appeals court so fast there's no time for the block order to actually reach the ISPs.
The ones that actually do result in a block have a police investigation behind it, making the whole bureaucracy more slow as there needs to be some back and forth between the police and the company. The fact that Telegram's entire team in Brazil is one lawyer might make this worse.
For example, this particular incident may have come from a misunderstanding. The police asked for all available data on all users of a group chat called "Movimento Anti-Semita Brasileiro" and another with a similar name. I hope the translation should be obvious.
What did Telegram deliver? The requested data of the group admin, not all users.
So now they get blocked until they deliver all the data.
I once did some low-level GPU programming on a project aimed for the Samsung Galaxy S8. It was a case with extra features like an iris and fingerprint scanner, connected via the USB port.
It would work perfectly on our test phone and occasionally crash on other phones. Long story short, we narrowed it down to it crashing on phones with a specific SoC that was used in other parts of the world.
For some reason, when you copied an image straight from the phone camera (used to recognize and align eyes compared to the infrared iris camera) to the GPU and tried to access it, it would segfault in the non-western SoC. The data wasn't initialized yet.
My (hurried, we were releasing next month) fix was to add a rsdebug("This fixes a crash!\0"); to the code. The extra delay to go to the kernel and back fixed the race condition almost all the time. Someone later fixed my code from 99.99% stable to 100%, but I was in another project by that time, so I have no idea what they did.
There's a very simple way around this. Grab any encoding that uses a dictionary, like, I think zip does. Sent tiny zip files with an excerpt of a .wav file or something that needs to be compressed.
The decompressed data is always the same, but the data in the dictionary used is where you store your sneaky bits.
Sure, that's still mildly suspicious. But way less than the actual music data changing all the time.
You could also hide the bits in eg timing of package transmission or omiting an expected package every once in a while, it'll just look like udp dropped a package.
You can use a channel with lots of noise, because you can use error correcting codes to to restore the intended message.
(To elaborate with an example: sometimes a package might already drop randomly, or timings might be slightly delayed anyway.)
> Yes, this is performant enough for games. Yes, it's being done in AAA games.
Every time someone says something mildly controversial about weird technology being used for UI in games, I like to point out Skyrim used Flash for its UI. Bunch of .swf files inside the packed data file. It used some weird non-100%-standard player, but it was still Flash.
Probably used scaleform. It was used by many games. It was a massive headache for engine programmers. The thing really had very very poor performance... I think it was always heavily hacked so that it could run decently, both the actionscript side and the scaleform side. At least that's what a programmer did for a year to get something decent. I can't believe it could have ended up anywhere else with that tech. Still, it was amazing for artists.
Arena Wars was one of the first games using .NET already in 2004, years before Managed Direct X or XNA came to be, with direct bindings to OpenGL. [0]
Then we have quite a few sucessful ones in XNA, some of them them ending up as quite relevant IP franchises.
Minecraft being a success, regardless of being written in Java.
Runescape, a plain Java applet that kept legions of gamers occupied.
Or for that matter the 1990's game development literature trying to move the ecosystem from raw Assembly to C, and how long C++ needed to gain traction over C in most studios. Even today many of them rather code in "C with C++ compiler" style.
Which shows that even C++ had quite an uphill being adopted by the industry.
Tech doesn't matter if game design and IP is compeling enough to make people enjoy the game.
A great engine, with a top language and bad game design, doesn't go far.
It really isn't that hard once you have to do it, as long as you have the time to get a test / feedback loop with the client going. They probably had a dozen test versions of the Furbies for whoever was doing QA to play around with.
With the moon lander code, they surely had a very good specification of what it was supposed to do.
I worked with the second case once, some IoT-ish sensors that would be buried in the ground in greenhouses, to monitor soil data. The business logic was 90% specified, and of course, the remaining 10% took 50% of the time. Before you ask why we didn't do it in C at the very least, we had a very solid codebase from the previous products. Sure, we had to port things from a Toshiba microcontroller to an STM8, different architectures, but since we were working with 8 or 16 bits inputs it was kinda trivial to test every single possible input to make sure things matched.
My only previous experience with assembly at a Computer History college course where we coded for the PDP-11, the 6502 and a stack machine. So yeah, not a lot. Winging it while admitting you don't know what you're doing can get you decently far in some circumstances.
Reminds me of what we dubbed "the cosmic ray incident."
During college, we were arranged in groups of 2 or 3 to do some pair programming for the more complicated exercises.
I had attached the debugger and had set a variable to 99, so the loop would execute one more time and we could test if our changes would work.
Went through the instructions step by step, and suddenly we got a segmentation fault. Between setting it to 99 and it accessing some data later on, the value changed to 107.
Quite a bit of confusion ensued. I made a backup of the executable before recompiling. Running them again, both the new version and the backup worked perfectly. The files matched bit for bit. To this day we have no idea what caused that bit flip.
The systems Porto Alegre and Canoas had in place used to work. When the river there goes over 3 meters it starts to flood some places, okay? Once every few years there was a flood of like, 3.5 meters, 3.7 sometimes. Those were floods that rose slowly, giving ample time to answer to situations as they arose.
In this case, on the 2nd of May, the river reached 3 meters. By midnight, the river was at 3.60 meters already. 24 hours later, the river was at 4.9 meters, and it still rose, slowly now, to 5.3 meters.
The system that was in place was completely overwhelmed. Pumping stations failed and the water started coming through the pumping stations, for example.
That said, yes, the writing was on the wall. If a place regularly floods a bit to the point you need to have dykes and pumping stations in place, eventually it will flood a lot.