It'd be impossible to limit the use of drones to just recovery, some people would use them for tracking down the animals which is a horrible idea to allow.
Actually that is quite common in Germany, just for the completely opposite purpose - farmers use Mavic 2/3 Thermal drones to scout out for baby deer prior to letting a corn or grain harvester raze a field... because turns out, baby deer just freeze up when they are afraid of the machines and end up getting chopped up by the blades.
In ex-Yugoslavia countries using gr (usually without a dot) for grams used to be a fairly common thing. Last few decades as EU standardization takes place it's a lot rarer to see. Also in Croatia in everyday life people will far more often use decagrams (10g), shorten colloquially as 'deka', than grams - which leads to even more confusion because the SI abbreviation for decagrams is dag, not dg (which is decigram, 0.1g), and it's often mixed - even some primary school books had these typos.
Also makes UNIQUE indices much harder to use. You can't just delete and later re-insert the same data, you need to "undelete" it instead, but that can actually mess up the chronology of the data, so then you need a separate table to track dates... and things just get over-engineered quickly...
> For example, you don't soft-delete a customer row, you "deactivate" a customer
I'm all for naming things more precise, but functionally speaking at that point it's really just semantics, you still end up with some DB column acting as a flag, and from then on you need to take it into account in every single query that touches that table in the whole app. Since most modern ORMs know how to handle soft-delete internally, it's far easier to just stick to the defaults and use `deleted_at` if you really need a way to keep the records around. And you often need, for the referential integrity of the historical data.
Nah, There's a structural difference between (A) adding a status column to one table and changing your queries and joins to care/not care about it, versus (B) adding is_deleted to every table and layering get in as a bonus where clause everywhere.
In other words, The thing being solved is not suitable for a cookie-cutter table/row-level design. It's a real business-logic quality of your data model that lives in particular places and mean slightly different things in those different places.
> these poor people served as a "buffer" against the Mongols, saving Europe from the slaughter ...
You mean saving Western Europe :)
Mongols ran over (and did a lot of slaughter in) the most of Eastern and Central Europe, including Poland, Czechia, parts of todays Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia and Austria. There was no "buffer" that stopped them, they've stopped eventually because their Great Khan died. As the leadership broke down and fights for power arose, they've been forced to return back home.
Mongols invaded Eastern and Central Europe several times, but they always turned back. There are at least two common explanation for that.
First, European countryside was infested with castles. Defeating the king and sacking his capital wasn't enough to pacify the land. Mongols would have had to deal with every local warlord separately, and Europe wasn't worth the trouble.
Second, Mongols were getting too far away from the steppe. Their armies could not stay in Europe in the long term due to the lack of large enough pastures.
The hills and forests of Western Europe were also unfavourable for their preferred cavalry based tactics. And even the damp weather was against them since they couldn’t use their compound bows in the rain.
Well, they were basically a highly-mobile light cavalry/archers combination, so while they progressed very fast they were not spending much time sieging heavily fortified cities or going into mountains and other hard to cross terrains. Also it took Europeans a while to learn how to fight them efficiently, but eventually they did figure out that European heavy cavalry is a good match for them. So it's not they were "unstoppable", they simply avoided hard targets, and pillaged the villages and other less defended areas, and moved quickly through disorganized European kingdoms fighting each other.
That's not unique to the Mongols. Another easy example would be Alexander of Macedon. History is filled with great empires, many of them expanding, which fell or contracted after the leader passes.
PS. I wonder what - if anything - implications that has for leadership or management - you know, the whole achievement falling apart, missing one individual ...
(Or, to project management - low "bus factor", so to speak ...)
Varangians came primarily from todays Sweden, and were initially going inland into the today's Estonia, Belarus and Russia from north, from the Gulf of Finland, using rivers. The group of them called Rus under the leadership of Rurik created Novgorod in 862. About 20 years later they've also conquered Kiev (some 900km more to the south). They were initially raiders, but over time they've conquered the local Slavs, established their rule and became very important traders, as they've created the trading (and also slave) routes all across the continent from the Baltic in the North down to the Black Sea - using huge rivers like Volga and Dneper - trading in south with Byzantin empire and Abbaside Caliphate. It was one of the main trading routes between West/North Europe and Arab world of that age.
And as their presence grown stronger, the Rus started more frequently raiding the Byzantin Empire, sacking even the big Constantinople a few times. To stop these attacks, in 10th century the Byzantines did the same move as king Charles the Simple did in Francia with Normans, they gave Varangian leaders some titles and employed them all as a royal guard. Problem solved.
And then, as you've said, the viking era was over, and they assimilated into the Slavic population (just like Bulgars and others did).
Another interesting note, the Rus ethnonym also got into many Slavic languages as a word for fair blonde or reddish-blonde hair ("русая" in Russian, "rusa" in Serbian/Croatian, etc.). In Serbian 'rus' was historically used in folk language with a meaning 'red', for instance for skin rush, names of some herbs, etc.
The ancient Greek word for "Slave" is δοῦλος, pronounced "doulos". I'm struggling to see how that comes from "Slav". The sources I've looked up say the derivation is uncertain, but noone mentions "Slav" as a possible origin[1]
Yes, but I believe it was Latin, not Greek (Constantinople was a capitol of Easter Roman Empire, and they used both Latin and Greek). Latin term Sclavi that meant Slavs started to be used for slave servants, because there was so many of them.
> How do you remotely detect if car stinks or not?
Why do you think they need to? These cars go to a centralize ___location every night, I would assume, and cleaning at scale can happen. How often do you think an Uber driver cleans their car in comparison?
Not to mention the problem is pretty eminently solvable: let users flag a car as having an unacceptable condition. If that happens dispatch a new car and send the dirty car directly back to home base for cleaning.
The main problem with Uber/taxi quality is that the responsibility for cleanliness is on individual drivers, with widely varying results as a natural outcome. In fact a lot of problems with Ubers and taxis is downstream from the ownership and responsibility model.
The advantage of something like Waymo is that the responsibility is now on Waymo itself.
Worth noting that this is a problem in other lines of business: it's harder to ensure quality in franchises vs. stores operated directly by the brand. The more independent parties you have in the mix the more incentives become misaligned and the fewer levers you have available to ensure compliance to some standard.
This also isn't impossible to solve with human drivers, because ultimately this isn't a technological problem but an organizational one. Livery car services where drivers are employees (as opposed to independent owner-operators contractors) can centralize cleaning and training, and have more means to ensure compliance to a standard.
The "downside" of such a model is that there are many more laws to ensure you can't shovel your own expenses onto the employee.
I love this part: One of the other pilots on the mission was reported to have radioed Foust during his descent by parachute that "you'd better get back in it!"
Yeah, that one confused me too. Visiting Chernobyl was mostly a walk in a park, as no other people around and forrest slowly taking over everything. Honestly, it felt way safer than big cities in Ukraine to me - hell, even safer than big cities in my own country :)
It's definitely not "relatively safe" in what I as a European would consider a safe place - although I was told it got a lot better in the last decade. If you look like a rich tourist than you need to be careful, like pretty much anywhere in S. America. However if you present yourself as a nomad hippie looser with nothing worth the trouble of messing with you, you can go around and probably you'll have no big problems, but still requires a bit of common sense in interaction with people. And speaking at least some Spanish. It's not that people are not friendly, they're just poor, and the line between being friendly and hustling you is very thin.
