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Best posts made by CoyneTheDup
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RE: βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@PleegWat said in βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
@cvi said in βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
@r10pez10 You can express simple things with this!
Drink wine and gather the snow?
Drink wine and gather snow world wide?
World-wide drunk snow boxer?
I was trying to guess what that might be from: corporate project management software?
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RE: Could you pass a US citizenship test?
@flabdablet said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:
Influential people, Puritans. Judging by US workplace laws and prison policy, the freedom to do unto others as nobody should do to a dog remains central to the whole American project.
Yes, quite patriarchal in our structure:
- Thou shalt not regulate the patriarchs, or their edifices.
- But, but as proper authoritarian patriarchs, thou shalt regulate
the indentured slavesthy inferiors.
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RE: βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@Tsaukpaetra Oh, sure, this is just a demo.
But imagine it carried to a "logical" conclusion. For example, imagine a medicine-administering robot that gives the "wrong" people saline, while the "right" people get the medicine.
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RE: βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@candlejack1 said in βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
@CoyneTheDup then I'm not buying a car, am I?
Would you trust the algorighm to not kill you to avoid 10 pigeons or something else that would confuse it's AI?
what it should do is just brake when something odd happens
Such as when there's a boulder falling onto the highway, right where you'll slide to a stop?
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RE: Quotes Out of Context
For a more sensual experience, right?
The later is known to be totally insane.
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RE: βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@FrostCat said in βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
Bad idea: getting on a container ship whose owners went bankrupt:
Sadly bngbng quoted part of an interview with her where she demonstrates she's not very smart--or, more charitably, probably doesn't know a lot about economics.
The fact that nobody is rushing to buy these containers off of us shows that they cannot be needed that desperately in Asia. In some ways they feel very valuable (surely some contain food?!) but apparently they are worthless.
The contents of the containers don't belong to the shipping company.
I don't get your reasoning. True the ship can't sell them, but someone shipped those containers. That's their money trapped in a shipping container on a ship that can't offload.
Insured maybe? But what idiot insurer would pay off on this? If a bonding insurer, why not pick up the port fees and save as much of the bond as possible?
I vote with her: lack of interest by the
container ownersanyone suggests not much value in the containers.Declare the ship salvage, I guess.
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Entities render in preview, but not in saved result
When you use an entity such as Β½ in the topic window, it renders in the preview window (see below). But when you save the post, as you can see, it renders as the entity text (note previous in this sentence).
Don't care which way this goes, but I should see what I'm going to get.
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RE: Do this maths. It R Hard.
Or, just use a sat solver, once you know some algorithms to look for.
Everybody keeps talking about SAT solvers. But by the time one was programmed for this problem, probably Cheryl would be married with children.
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RE: The bad jokes topic π΄πΉπ¨
[spoiler]This is done in the style of input/response of the old ADVENT game. Anyone remember that one?[/spoiler]
> TAKE BAD JOKE
I SEE NO BAD JOKE HERE.
>
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RE: When you store dates in a text field
Wait until they insist you have to be able to tell the difference between...
11/01/12 (mm/dd/yy)
and
01/11/12 (dd/mm/yy)
and
12/01/11 (yy/mm/dd) -
RE: The bad jokes topic π΄πΉπ¨
[spoiler]This is done in the style of input/response of the old ADVENT game. Anyone remember that one?[/spoiler]
> TAKE BAD JOKE
I SEE ONLY YOUR BAD JOKE HERE.
>
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RE: The bad words and counting topic
I suppose it depends a lot on how it is used when it returns. Chimney sweeps used to be the lowest of the low on social scale in England; labeling someone a "chimney sweep," who wasn't, would have been a seriously derogatory attack. Yet we have a movie, with a chimney sweep as a starring role, "Mary Poppins."
But I'm going to come right out and use the word you're thinking of, "nigger," because this is an academic discussion and even I agree that it is oversensitive to regard the word as inappropriate for this setting.
The problem with that word is: It hasn't stopped being used for its derogatory purpose. To an extent, the use has been driven underground, but it is still in derogatory use.
What do you think that woman in McKinney meant when she called that girl a, "filthy nigger". When the Denver officer said, "Nigger, I'm trying to get through." When a Baton Rouge officer texted, "The only reason they have this job is because of the nigger in them!!" My own father used to use, "Fuck a nigger!" as an epithet.
The only possible interpretation of those words places the objective target's relative position in life: subservient, inferior, just dirt on the floor. Racism is not gone and the derogatory use of the word is not gone; it just lies low at the moment. So it can't "come back": it can only do that after it's been gone for a while.
Those people who are still racist have not forgotten the word is derogatory, and neither will those of us who want racism gone. It is a sad truth, though, that the focus is much more on the word than on the racism.
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RE: Ephemeral nature of social media
I disagree. People want to use the internet to communicate with others, it is a basic need of human nature and social networks are just technical implementations that make that more convenient. The sites which provide that may change, but there will always be a need for services supporting human interaction, and we may call them "social media".
To hold the equivalent of small talk at a party, yes. That's ephemeral, and I don't denigrate that use. But then people try to pretend it is a place for serious discussion about the world's problems...and it is not that--that thought is wasted.
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RE: Ephemeral nature of social media
I thought you said something stupid. That was me being open. If you disagree, then please explain why I'm wrong.
It is entirely reasonable for you to tell me my idea is stupid. It is entirely something else to call me an idiot.
I admit that's a fine point, but one is an attack on my idea, the other is an attack on me. That makes the latter a troll post, even though people tend not to think of it that way.
That is why I responded so bluntly to your imputation of "feigning offense" the other day: It was an attack on my person. You not only were telling me when I should and should not be offended, bad enough, but accused me of worse, of faux offense. That didn't have anything to do with what I was trying to say, it only had to do with an attack on me.
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RE: How can Microsoft Edge be so wrong?
I'm sorry, but when the big text says FILE_NOT_FOUND it's hard to notice the UNABLE_TO_DISPLAY in the microprint.
It's a matter of prioritization: larger print is clearly intended to be noticed more easily; especially when it is a title.
I can't give them a pass on this: their first, largest, title description was FILE_NOT_FOUND.
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RE: Ephemeral nature of social media
So it seemed more likely that you were being offended on behalf of someone else, i.e., feigning offense.
Well, first a bit of history. As it turns out, I was offended for nothing, because I failed to recognize that someone was trying to make a lame joke. Which wasn't offensive in the proper context.
But a personal note: I am really big on fairness, it is the core driver of my belief system. There is nothing that annoys me personally, more than gratuitous unfairness: People who are unfair on purpose because it gives them an advantage, people who are unfair because they just plain don't care.
People who screw someone and then declaim it, saying, "Hey, the world isn't fair."
The world might be unfair, but we as humans should try to make it more fair, rather than using its fundamental unfairness as an excuse to make it more unfair.
One of the main things that will trigger my anger faster than almost anything else is that bastard statement, "All x are y." You probably know what I mean, but here's a few:
- All blacks are thieves.
- All people on welfare are black leeches.
- All women are sluts.
Any one of those is false almost by definition; any logician will tell you that. Even if you aren't into logic, it is trivially established that any of those is false, by honest examination of the set.
Worse, they are used to justify unfairness, to make policy. "Let's end welfare, only black leeches use it anyway," or "We must drive all blacks out of the neighborhood because all blacks are thieves."
In that form, used for policy, such statements are the epitome of unfair.
The media portrayal of "Allahu Akbar!" is one of those. The direct translation of that phrase is, "God is great!" a statement of piety; no doubt used billions of times every day. But the media portrayal boils down to, "Every terrorist shouts, 'Allahu Akbar!' before pushing the button." Which is obviously untrue: do you suppose the members of the Army of God yelled that when they blew up abortion clinics? Right.
But then the statement above, of course, leads us to the corollary, "All people who shout, 'Allahu Akbar!' are terrorists." And that gets derived in turn as, "All Muslims are terrorists." And that is exactly the form to set me off. I'm pissed even telling you about it.
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RE: Almost going full Lorne Kates
Before (revised):
- The rich never had to worry about paying for healthcare.
- The middle class had robust health insurance.
- The poor had little to nothing.
- If you had any kind of pre-existing condition, coverage was not available at any price. If by some miracle you did manage to wangle coverage, you were knocked out of the plan at first excuse they could find for rescission.
After (revised):
- The rich still do not have to worry about paying for healthcare.
- The middle class gets high deductible insurance, but their jobs soak up a lot of the damage. They pay higher for healthcare than before because the elderly are paying less.
- The poor get super high deductible insurance that pays for nothing until they meet the high deductible they can't meet. This is an improvement over no coverage.
- Those with preexisting conditions get super high deductible insurance that pays for nothing until they meet the high deductible. This is an improvement over no coverage.
Arguably, it got worse for the middle class, assuming they don't have an employer plan. And, what evidence would anyone give that coverage got worse for the rich? That leaves the poor, and you're asserting that the fact they can only get bad plans, is worse (or at least no better) than having no coverage at all.
That is a desperately weak argument.
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RE: Ephemeral nature of social media
@CoyneTheDup said:
Worse, they are used to justify unfairness, to make policy.
Wait, do you mean they are always used for that, or they could possibly be used for that?
This seems like the type of statement that is either an unfair generalization or such a weak claim as to be essentially meaningless. 95% of everything has been used as a justification for something bad, once upon a time.
I was just giving a few made up examples because I was too lazy to dig up an actual example, but people often use statements like that to implicate action hat should be taken. For me, that's a problem only when the result is not fair, but others may see the same statements differently.
Just as an example, the FBI has been recording and observing every Muslim congregation they could sneak into, just like they did in Co-Intel days. When challenged about it, their response was a weasel-worded version of the "all Muslims are terrorists" generalization, which to me didn't help their case one tiny bit.
They used a similar generalization along the line of "all [people who aren't normal] are terrorists" to justify equivalent snooping into the ever-so-violent (NOT) Society of Friends (many people call them Quakers) which is purely stupid.
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RE: βπ THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
After thinking about this more, wouldn't Jake being drunk also mean that Josie raped him? Or do rapists not have to consent to the sex if they're male?
Methinks the poster is stretching credibility a bit, to extend to an SJW concept that drunkenness establishes rape. But then, yes, you run into a problem with who raped who: why couldn't "Jake" claim he was the victim? Seems like a push, to me, if they're both drunk, conscious, and neither said, "No."
To me it seems to be much more straightforward if we go by either "who said, 'No,'" or "who was unconscious at the time" (note that "unconscious" includes being zonked by a date rape drug). As @Cursorkeys noted in his example, the guy should have been able to charge rape.
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RE: The Official Good Ideas Threadβ’
Real Men Don't Eat Quiche
Real men eat any damn thing they please. "You got a problem with that?"
Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
Real programmers can use any damn language to do any damn thing they please. Real programmers can program with butterflies, if needed.
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RE: Chrome ignores keyboard locales
Found this...no idea if it will help. But you are not alone.
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RE: Fuck you Microsoft and your extremely narrow world-view
You're right about that, I rue Microsoft all the time.
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RE: USB Cable - so many options
When Chuck Norris gets this popup, he gets five more buttons to choose from!
..and the one he clicks is always right! (Because if it's "wrong," the system will change itself to make the selection right.)
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RE: Lastpass or Keepass (or something else?)
Keepass.
Not ready to trust someone else to keep my passwords in their file. Aside from the fact that I have nothing but their assurance the passwords are actually encrypted, what happens if they fold? Maybe I just don't know all the details, but when I was looking at their FAQ's, that was my #1 question.
OTOH, if I were a cynic, I'd worry that even if they encrypt my passwords, they can decrypt them at broad government hint. But it really doesn't matter since I am well beyond cynic and therefore am sure the government key logs me anyway.
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RE: Performance debugging
We called that "model 4-60 air conditioning", when I was a kid. (4 windows 60 mph)
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RE: Do this maths. It R Hard.
Okay, I have it now. Whew.
[spoiler]Albert ruled out May and June, but he wasn't able to rule out July or August because he doesn't know if it is the 14th, 15th, 16th or 17th. Bernard had not known the month until Albert ruled out May and June, but now he does. But if he had been told the 14th, he would still be lost, since he would not know if it was July or August. But he says he now knows the date, so his date was either July 16, August 15, or August 17. But he says he knows the date, which tells Albert that the date is not the 14th, since he knows Bernard would not have been able to rule out either month, if it were the 14th. But Albert had been told the one month, either July or August. If he had been told August, he would be lost, because he wouldn't know if it was the 15th or 17th. So the amazing, superhuman, extraordinary, astute observer (i.e., not me) knows that, if Albert was able to identify the date, then the month must be July and the day 16.[/spoiler]
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WTH is wrong with β β β β β β β ?
Continuing the discussion from π The Funny Stuff Thread:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/belgium/11661312/Belgium-defies-France-with-euro-coin-marking-Napoleon-defeat.html (Ok - uncensored link here.)
Belgium on Monday began minting β¬2.50 coins marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's defeat of at the Battle of Waterloo, after France forced it to scrap a two-euro coin made for the same purpose.
Β
Paris objected to the new Belgian coin, commemorating the French emperor's defeat by British and Prussian forces, earlier this year, saying it would create tensions at a time when Europe's unity is under threat.So they did it anyway...
But Belgium has managed to skirt the French protests using a rule that allows eurozone countries to unilaterally issue coins if they are in an irregular denomination - in this case, β¬2.50.
Bonus LOL's for finding a legitimate news story that gets censored on here...
So his story was censored because it has the totally offensive word B e l g i u m in it. WTH?! Is that just Discoevil or am I totally missing something here. Hmmm... let's try this:
Afghanistan; Albania; Algeria; Andorra; Angola; Antigua and Barbuda; Argentina; Armenia; Aruba; Australia; Austria; Azerbaijan; Bahamas, The; Bahrain; Bangladesh; Barbados; Belarus; Belgium; Belize; Benin; Bhutan; Bolivia; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Botswana; Brazil; Brunei ; Bulgaria; Burkina Faso; Burma; Burundi; Cambodia; Cameroon; Canada; Cape Verde; Central African Republic; Chad; Chile; China; Colombia; Comoros; Congo, Democratic Republic of the; Congo, Republic of the; Costa Rica; Cote d'Ivoire; Croatia; Cuba; Curacao; Cyprus; Czech Republic; Denmark; Djibouti; Dominica; Dominican Republic; East Timor (see Timor-Leste); Ecuador; Egypt; El Salvador; Equatorial Guinea; Eritrea; Estonia; Ethiopia; Fiji; Finland; France; Gabon; Gambia, The; Georgia; Germany; Ghana; Greece; Grenada; Guatemala; Guinea; Guinea-Bissau; Guyana; Haiti; Holy See; Honduras; Hong Kong; Hungary; Iceland; India; Indonesia; Iran; Iraq; Ireland; Israel; Italy; Jamaica; Japan; Jordan; Kazakhstan; Kenya; Kiribati; Korea, North; Korea, South; Kosovo; Kuwait; Kyrgyzstan; Laos; Latvia; Lebanon; Lesotho; Liberia; Libya; Liechtenstein; Lithuania; Luxembourg; Macau; Macedonia; Madagascar; Malawi; Malaysia; Maldives; Mali; Malta; Marshall Islands; Mauritania; Mauritius; Mexico; Micronesia; Moldova; Monaco; Mongolia; Montenegro; Morocco; Mozambique; Namibia; Nauru; Nepal; Netherlands; Netherlands Antilles; New Zealand; Nicaragua; Niger; Nigeria; North Korea; Norway; Oman; Pakistan; Palau; Palestinian Territories; Panama; Papua New Guinea; Paraguay; Peru; Philippines; Poland; Portugal; Qatar; Romania; Russia; Rwanda; Saint Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia; Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; Samoa ; San Marino; Sao Tome and Principe; Saudi Arabia; Senegal; Serbia; Seychelles; Sierra Leone; Singapore; Sint Maarten; Slovakia; Slovenia; Solomon Islands; Somalia; South Africa; South Korea; South Sudan; Spain ; Sri Lanka; Sudan; Suriname; Swaziland ; Sweden; Switzerland; Syria; Taiwan; Tajikistan; Tanzania; Thailand ; Timor-Leste; Togo; Tonga; Trinidad and Tobago; Tunisia; Turkey; Turkmenistan; Tuvalu; Uganda; Ukraine; United Arab Emirates; United Kingdom; Uruguay; Uzbekistan; Vanuatu; Venezuela; Vietnam; Yemen; Zambia; and Zimbabwe.
Only B e l g i u m. Totally does not make sense. Must be Discoevil.
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RE: π₯ Forget about clocks, now it's (bad) cucumbers and knives
@Onyx said:
@CoyneTheDup How does that change what I said in any way? Are you saying "A Muslim" is not a person? Are you saying "Islam" is a person or a group of people? If I say I want to see Scientology gone, does that mean I want to kill Tom Cruise?
You said:
@Maciejasjmj That's why I said "Islam" (ideology), not "Muslims" (people). But this distinctions seems to be hard for people, so I agree. That's where most of these statistic imbalances most likely stem from, too.
You can't drop the pretense that you're talking about the people who hold the ideology, by claiming you're only talking about the ideology. Especially when you mention statistics on the people.
According to one figure I saw, there are less than 200,000 terrorists in the world. Even if they were every single one Muslim, which I'm not willing to grant, that amounts to 0.013% of the total Muslim population. Bigots usually weasel word it, but what they mean is, "Every single Muslim is a terrorist!" and how does that compare with 0.013%?
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RE: Earnestly thinking NULL is a mistake is a symptom
If you do it like this, you explicitly agreed to crash if name is empty. It might be not immediately obvious, because "get" is such a generic and overused word in programming that you just skip your eye over it, but I blame bad interface.
But, but, but...the programmer tested it with one Person, and it worked. Remember, we're talking about people here too lazy to read the doc and do
if (pwithoutoptional.getName() != null)
. The point is that saying, "Everything is better with Optional," doesn't deal with these people. And these people will yield broken programs...there just won't be Exceptions.This is not the first time I've seen this argument that, "All my programs would be perfect if it just weren't for those @#%@^! Exceptions." Which is really begging the issue, because the Exceptions are nearly always the result of their lazy programming style.
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RE: So... don't switch?
The Paula name exists solely because Paul complained about it in the radio show, which predated the books
Oh, I got that, 'cause I have Google-fu; and a search for "Paul Neil Milne Johnstone" lead me to this article. (Damn! There's a Wikia for everything.)
But the first copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe I read used "Paula." (I don't remember Paula specifically, just that the worst poet ever was from Earth and female.) So clearly this *ahem* minor correction occurred before the publishing of that version--actually probably before the first edition due to the radio show complaint.
Sorry I didn't make that clear enough in my previous post.
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RE: Earnestly thinking NULL is a mistake is a symptom
I have seen null-or-false checks on fucking booleans.
LOL. Now that shows a clear understanding (not!) of quality programming principles.
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RE: Earnestly thinking NULL is a mistake is a symptom
In fact, the only ways I can imagine removing null from the language, is to make everything a list, with a list class that supports only 0 or 1 entries, or to make everything in the language a dynamic.
As in
Optional<T>
? Because that's what it does. If it was used for every "optional" reference, you might get rid of null.@boomzilla said:That's why you never rely on natural keys.
True enough. Except I'm not really talking about keys, I'm talking about composition of optional members.
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RE: π₯ Forget about clocks, now it's (bad) cucumbers and knives
@Onyx said:
@CoyneTheDup so what you are saying is that you believe it's impossible for someone to change their opinions about an ideology, or prove that some or all tenants of an ideology should be reconsidered and/or discarded?
If this is preparatory to the repeatedly and categorically discredited argument that Islam the ideology mandates terrorism, then yes, you just as well save your breath.
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RE: Earnestly thinking NULL is a mistake is a symptom
The other anti-pattern that I've seen rather a lot of is where someone catches an exception, logs it, and rethrows it on its merry way. In a complex application, this probably results in each exception being logged with a full stack trace 10 or 20 times. Yay.
Twenty times the log: twenty times the fun!
If you only allow inheriting abstract classes, I guess that solves the problem, but that's quite a huge restriction.
Second.
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RE: Why Oh My Zsh is completely broken (article)
The title struck a mental chord...
Oh where oh where has my Zsh gone,
Oh where oh where can it be...
With its quality short,
And its runtime quite long...
Oh where oh where can it be? -
RE: π The Evil Ideas thread
Here's predicting they pay $375,000, or about $0.78 per vehicle and have to promise not to do it again...this model year.
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RE: Bodging
...there are better scripting languages than AutoHotKey
But you gotta get your head in the game: if he used one of those it wouldn't be a proper Bodge.
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RE: No phylogenetic trees for you
Personally, I think Gangolf Jobb has an incredibly over-inflated sense of importance. A) His software would be replaced in a week, I bet, even if it weren't for all the other phylogenetic tree software; and B) his action doesn't affect anyone who made the political decisions, which makes it just idiotic ("The politicians made a stupid decision, so I'm going to punish just anyone I can!").
And the best part? His software isn't even on that list.
ADDENDUM: Something I missed: there is also a separate List of phylogenetics software. His software is on that list.
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RE: π The Evil Ideas thread
Business as usual; every other year some federal-wide operating company does shit like this (read: is convicted of this). The main difference is that it is one of the really big ones this time. Something must have gone really wrong if they couldn't suppress the news.
It's because it was too good a story to pass up. If it had been an ordinary fraud story (also known as a "dog bites man story") it would still have been reported...but in the proverbial two-inch article on page 18 of the business section. That's what business image management usually arranges with the news media.
But this was something new: software-enabled automobile testing fraud. It's too good a story for news agencies to bury the way they usually do, and also too good for the government not to make points with a suggestion of a "massive" fine.
Yet I'm sure this will pay out pretty much as usual: the US$18 billion fine will somehow wind up being negotiated to $20 million, which will be a huge lesson for a company that made a net profit of $10.6 billion last year. And, as soon as the novelty wears off, the story will be back to page 18 of the business section.
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RE: It's 2016 and software ***STILL*** has problems with spaces in paths!
The problem is command-line tools and command options. If all commands were Java classes or were parameterized like SQL, so the command didn't have to learn its input by parsing, then there wouldn't be a need to do BS like this in Linux (escaping):
sometool /home/me/My\ Broken\ Path/file
Or Windows (quoting):
sometool "c:\Users\Me\My Broken Path\file"
Or (a'la @GΔ ska , which is basically parameterization):
sometool {cc9ea878-9070-4a94-9bf4-69673f4540e1}
...any of which makes building and debugging command scripts a nightmare.
So long as command line parsing exists, there is always going to be some kind of headache with names-containing-some-characters being misunderstood, with the easiest solution being to tell the user not to use said characters.
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RE: *sigh*... Why do I even try? A novlet on StackOverflow
I think we boil down into two camps: Those who care about answers that are correct, and those who understand the reality of SO.
SO these days is definitely a mixed bag, and any useful answer you can find is usually incorrect in some details. Since I would estimate that questions have answers that are useful and to the point about 15% of the time: getting an actual answer to your question, much less a correct answer, is almost a miracle.
SO seems to like it that way; Wikipedia they are not. Wikipedia at least tries.
So I understand your desire to improve SO, but SO definitely is not inclined to want your help improving anything.
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RE: π The Evil Ideas thread
Except that it indicates a bunch of other stuff too, such as someone moving a ladder around
Oh, sure, but VW could just put a little blurb in the manual, "Important: Running with the tailgate open will reduce the performance of your vehicle."
But look how it is now. Above, there were remarks ( @dkf ) to the effect that now the people are going to suffer reduced value because their car is a polluter. That's not going to be it at all: EPA is going to make VW recall and reprogram all those vehicles--so wave bye-bye to all that wonderful performance you paid for.
All because the software guys didn't think to turn on the pollution controls if the tailgate was open.
(Not saying fraud is good, just saying that if they'd thought of one more tweak, we might never have known...)
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RE: Pessimistic Set Logic
Looks like a truth relationship similar to...
DNAT β PORIC
[spoiler]When I was a kid, and one of us kids did a non-sequitur, the usual parent response was a befuddled, "What does that have to do with the price of rice in China?"[/spoiler]