I don't care how much of a star you are, if you assault a colleague in the workplace, you *should* be fired, unless there are far, far, stronger mitigating circumstances than "my dinner was cold".

No previous straw required.

He's certainly one of the extremely interesting ones. Gore Vidal's book "Julian" is quite entertaining (and is not that bad, historically speaking).

You are right. There's no reason to make boob-grabbing a sport at work, or install under-table cameras and post the up-skirt shots in the Intranet. There's no reason to announce publicly the menstruation periods of every girl in the office, or enforce a dresscode that ignores female anatomy. Definitely sex should not be a condition for promotion, and meetings should not start with blowjob requests, made in order of beauty to the attending women. Likewise, putting a single toilet for women into the basement while having men toilets everywhere.

Oh wait, you were talking about a software joke project on some random Internet site that nobody is forced to visit or even know about? Yeah, that definitely is the dictionary case for "hostile working environment".

That's absolutely the same as a random Internet site that nobody... why am I wasting my time here, a monkey would see the difference.

This.

Half the world doesn't understand why blowing people to pieces is afternoon TV, but showing kids the same nipple that they sucked on a few years before is a national scandal.

Let's live in a perfectly politically correct world where our jokes, every sentence we speak and every message we write is controlled by the thought police.

And I say that as someone who was bullied at school. But here's the point: There's harassment, which has a victim and there's jokes about a class the size of half the worlds population and either you are incredibly insecure or unbelievably egomaniac to consider yourself the individual target.

Every real woman I've met in my life laughs about jokes that ridicule women in general the same way that I laugh about jokes where guys in general are the target. These jokes are funny exactly because they contain a piece of truth.

Everything, taken to extremes, is evil. That includes feminism, no-harassment policies and political correctness. No, wait. That last one is evil from the start.

Firstly, the general feeling that Postgres is engineered and designed and not cobbled together.

Secondly, support for non-trivial SQL is just a lot better. For a forum or simple application, MySQL is fine by language, but if you get into the more tricky SQL, it will fail you much sooner.

Thirdly, schemas, views, stored procedures the whole environment around the tables is so much more refined and powerful. Not that it's easy to say "MySQL cannot do this" - there's usually some hack or roundabout way in which it can do it, but in Postgres you don't need the hacks.

And it seems to me that it's so much clearer and better to do serials and foreign keys and all that. In MySQL it always felt to me like everything that's not trivial was added on, by someone else than the last feature. Postgres is just much more consistent in its approach.

Oh yes, and it does GIS. And blobs (properly). And UTF (properly). I just feel a lot more comfortable throwing everything at it and not thinking "will it handle it?" all the time.

I've used MySQL for almost 20 years for different projects of mine. In my professional life, I've also used ADABAS, Oracle and this and that other.

I was interested in Postgres some years ago but never went beyond reading one book. Then two years ago I decided to start a new project with Postgres from the start, because I wanted PostGIS.

I'm not looking back. Every future project I do will always use Postgres. Aside from the technical and functional and other rational arguments, the feeling you get is like graduating from BASIC to a real programming language.

This. In the 60s and 70s there was this shared vision of what creative and scientific progress mankind could make when freed from most of the boring busywork that many jobs are.

Then a non-conspiracy(*) decided "what if we just pocket all that profit instead and instead of being just very rich become super-filthy mega rich?"

(*) most cases where people see conspiracies actually are not, they are just cases where the interests of people or groups of people align so nicely that they don't even need to make a conspiracy to act as if they had.

As you are from this area, I'm sure you already know what I'm about to say, but maybe you have an answer:

The goal is not 100% detection rate. The goal is a detection rate that is equal to or better than that of most human drivers. I've driven roads where the line markings were so difficult to see (maybe just in the particular conditions of that day) that it was more a matter of guessing than actual detection.

So what is the detection rate of human drivers? Probably much lower than intuition would make us think, because we are very good and fast and automated in using other cues as well, and in many cases don't actually look for the lane markings, we "know" from other input where they are supposed to be and basically just check now and then if they really are or something is wrong.

Yes, it's a hard problem, and the more we do in the field of computer vision the more we understand just how amazing human vision is, but it is also full of bugs and problems, so the target is not perfection.

The same thing that happened to the ice cutters, coffee bean sorters, switch board operators and hundreds of other obsolete jobs.

There are lots of jobs for people without higher education. When we reach the development level where everything that unqualified people can do is being done by robots, we can also give everyone a home and food and other shit for free.

And I thought I just called the CEO of one of those "sharing economy" companies a greedy liar. I'm not a fan of this new buzzword, and frankly speaking half of it is scams. But if we're talking about cars, Lyft and Uber are not the future and I'm surprised people pump billions into them when their business will be obsolete in ten years. They really expect an ROI so quickly?

Maybe that's a thing in your area? With a single exception, all the car-sharing cars I've used for the past few years have been fine and on the level of taxis except for a little more dirt on the floor (and only the floor).

Thanks to the used car market, the price of buying a car is not the problem. The cost and hassle of maintaining one is. If you don't need a car every day, it's simply not worth it.

The ones I use have agreements with the city that they can park on any public parking spot for free, even if you need to pay with your private car there. I don't know if they pay a yearly flat sum to the city or if the city sees it as a quid-pro-quo deal because of the reduced space usage and traffic.

Yeah, I just don't get that attitude. Well, when you own a Lambo or a vintage car or something that's special, yes I get that. But "this Honda Civic is mine, it's so special from the other 20 mio. that came off the same production line" - sorry, I don't get that.

Agreed, sometimes you get a car just before they take it for cleaning and washing and it's a little dirty. But in several years of doing this, I had one car that was actually so dirty I would've taken the next one if I hadn't been in a rush. Most of the time, they're more clean than most private cars I know.

And this thinking that there are all the ghosts of everyone who has ever been in the car is too irrational for me. People who sit in a car do not leave behind a magical aura that affects you three days later.