Agathos

McDonald's doesn't promise you tuna and doesn't give you tuna.

A sushi restaurant promises you tuna and still doesn't give you tuna.

You don't see anything wrong with that?

Serious accidents require both emergency treatment and follow-up treatment. Here's a scary example of getting one and not the other: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4954303/ns/health-health_care/t/wo...

But try to only have the kinds of emergencies that require no follow-up care.

The year of Linux on the desktop was around 2010. The trouble is, I'm still waiting for the year of Linux on the laptop.

So if I say, "Darth Vader was Luke's father," do you have to remind me that Star Wars isn't real?

My first thought was Pinky and the Brain. And somebody else just posted the necessary Douglas Adams quote. Come to think of it, our culture seems to dwell on the fear that our lab rats are smarter than we are...

Y.T.’s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta [her boss] does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:

• Less than 10 min.: Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.

• 10-14 min.: Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.

• 14-15.61 min.: Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.

• Exactly 15.62 min.: Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.

• 15.63-16 min.: Asswipe. Not to be trusted.

• 16-18 min.: Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.

• More than 18 min.: Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).

Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they’re careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

To me, "skyscrapers in space" feels like an attempt to capture the majesty of World War I and II battleships. Which is to say, not much better justified than the aerodynamic spaceship. I don't see why a hard-SF spaceship really needs to be big when it would still be quite fragile (given the energy of an orbital-velocity collision).

That is, unless you design your future weapons and FTL drive principles so they really do reward "bigger is better" (I'm on to you, David Weber.)

You can't beat Earth for easy access to liquid water. But you can easily beat the Moon. Mars beats the hell out of the Moon on that score.

And endless arguments about what caliber and kind of round has the best stopping power come up every day on gun forums. It's their vim vs. emacs.

I read somewhere (Wikipedia, I suppose) that Wreck-It Ralph was in development hell for decades. Long enough for its target audience to grow up into nostalgic 30-somethings.

Hey, it's the BeOS guy!

I want my tea water and I want it now!

Seriously, mine boils in almost no time. Needs a lot of power to do that.

I'm mostly thinking of the battle of Agincourt, which has long been celebrated in the English-speaking world as the victory of the common man over the elite, heavily armored knight, all thanks to the longbow.

It's nice to see the conventional wisdom confirmed for once, but... isn't this the conventional wisdom?

"Performance" sounds like sloppy thinking too. What kind of performance are we talking about? Latency, throughput, false positive rate, false negative rate, click through rate, conversion to sales rate? There are a lot of axes on which to measure performance.

Yeah, to my ears it sounds like someone is anxious that he won't be taken seriously if he uses a one-syllable word.

Short version sounds like: Python is a legacy language. We're not porting our legacy code and we're not starting new projects in Python.

I wonder:

1. Would this have changed if there was a Python 2.8 with some new features (but still a GIL) that ran most 2.7 code?

2. Is your experience representative, i.e. are teams just not starting new projects in any version of Python, even though so many did in the last decade?

>Would they?

Yes.

>Wouldn't they blame their bulb first?

No.

>It's like complaining to your PC manufacturer that a program you downloaded doesn't work.

Yes, and people do that all the time.

>Most people would blame the program and look for another one.

Bro, do you even tech support?

I hardly think Apple was first. What about Nintendo and the NES lockout chip?

Hasn't software been eating software development ever since the first compiler was written?

And sometimes the requirements are clear, specific, and wrong.

And how does a columnist get away with writing that sentence without mentioning IBM?

I remember reading years ago about studies that said exactly that, not just about oranges but about vegetables in general. Freezing is a great way to preserve all sorts of compounds including vitamin C.

True about household soaps and cleaners, but rwj has a point with, "stop dosing livestock with antibiotics as a prophylactic."

Here's an old animation of the construction of a platform over those rail yards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAc5hkCEYFU

Can you still be convicted on evidence coming from an imported, computer-controlled device, if a treaty prevents your examining it?

http://www.cnet.com/news/police-blotter-defendant-wins-breat...

So if I catch you in an error, I can not only call you on that but now I can imply that your are developmentally stunted as well? Sounds like fun! Let me try:

The Post argues that because the Democrats support gun control and protest police, they are becoming the “pro-crime party”.

Actually, the Republican-leaning columnist Ed Rogers argues this. If Scott Alexander were a fully developed adult, he would recognize that individual columnists' views may not align with those of the paper. If indeed "the paper" can even be said to have a single point of view.

I rigged my standing desk so it behaves differently under testing... no, I'm sorry, I have no idea how this is related to the VW diesel scandal.

They never would've had this problem if they'd just stuck with the pound.