"Herd immunity" isn't an argument for you getting the vaccine for your children (those arguments are already plain) -- it's an argument against you being able to opt out of the vaccine for your children (barring medical reasons such as allergy to the vaccine).

End result: the US with it's huge positive discrimination drive has the situation where men and women appear to compete opn an equal footing.

You really need to find a citation for that because if it's true it would be hugely interesting!

(Btw: I think the gender divide is basically universal. There have even been studies showing that women discriminate against women based on gender -- even when interviewing for positions which the women-doing-the-discriminating were occupying. It sounds absurd, but frankly I think social conditioning goes even further than this!)

That's pretty harsh...

Why not screw Beta gently instead?

And regardless, how idiotic is it to grade someone based on the number of pages of their notes anyway?

It's unbelievably idiotic and absurd... until you consider human nature.

The people above you are incompetent (cf. "Peter Principle") and will latch onto anything that they can use to judge you to avoid appearing as the incompetents that they are. Even when it makes no sense from an analytical point of view. We humans seem to be hardwired to avoid (being perceived to be, or actually) being wrong. (The book's also pretty good!)

Anyway, hope it wasn't too traumatic :).

Are you saying that gravitational lensing is just an anomaly?

Gravitational lensing seems to be one of the major evidences in favor of dark matter/mass, but it'd be interesting to see you (or anyone for that matter) argue that it's just an anomaly given that it can be observed in multiple distinct locations.

(Now, I think we both agree that dark energy is still just a hypothesis, but I think you'd have to come up with something better than claiming that it's "just an anomaly" to explain the existing evidence.)

One of the few languages in recent times with an interesting type system which isn't just a trivial rehash of existing (in practice) ones.

Of course they hadn't considered it earlier! What fools they've been shown to be!

(Hint: If you're a random commenter on Slashdot, then, yeah, the experts in the field have probably considered your idea before you suggested it.)

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT...

"switched to FF<N>"

PDF.js is unbelievably bad at font rendering and rendering in general. (Compared to Okular and whatever backend it uses.)

Hopefully Mozilla have some metrics for the number of users who switched to FF (where PDF.js was added as default) and immediately switched to the system PDF viewer. What a collosal waste of JS code.

... if all the lauch codes are zero anyway?

(Well, alright that was some time ago, but really... this points to systemic issues, and I don't think they'll have been fixed within a few years.)

We don't always agree, but well put, sir. (This and your original post.)

The thing non-experts always neglect when thinking about high performance is the importance of cache locality and memory locality... and the fact that these can often dominate even algorithmic improvements (for realistic N).

that the experience is real. Doesn't mean that you are actually out of your body. (There's a similar effect with lucid dreaming -- the experience itself is very real, but it's a product of your brain.)

Google became big. This happens to all big companies.

It's just the way of the world.

(/me goes back to reading Antifragile...)

Hats off to you, Xir!

(*) Xir = gender-neutral Sir... I think?!?!

.. better yet, buy an additional 2 or 4 GB of RAM. Given the prices, complaining about RAM usage(*) is absurd these days.

Btw, I'm impressed with how quckly the OP was able to try out 4.11 given that it hasn't reached most distributions yet...

(*) Unless you are are on a truly embedded/minimal platform.