Note I said that both of them are living off their credit cards. I'm well aware of the poor state of the UK's finances.

Did you just claim that mass shootings at schools in the USA happen less frequently than nuclear meltdowns?

I constantly wonder how they became this way.

Someday, you will get a project with physically (or at least, mathematically) impossible requirements. You will, rightly, point this out. You will end up needing to doing it anyway.

This won't happen just once. Over the course of your career, you will literally lose count of the number of such requests.

You therefore have two choices - Stop caring, or have an aneurysm from frustration and rage.

Note, however, that you don't need to lose your love of coding. You just need to learn to accept, with a calm and detached indifference, that your paycheck requires you to write defective-by-design code. If it helps, you can make little games out of it - As one of my personal favorites, I write the code to function correctly and then, as the last step before showing something to the user, I throw it all away and replace the results with the requested garbage.

Wait... old slashdot, blackjack, hookers, AND a bar designed for tall people? Shut up and take my money.

Okay.

On a more serious note, I'm one of many that would be willing to a pay a small amount for an ad-free Facebook experience. Remove the ads and the buzzfeeds, the link-spam, and remove everything with more than 10 'shares' or reposts. Show me only my actual friend updates and comments and photos. In fact, that was in the news last year. Social Fixer is good for a workaround, but the company could make people the customer instead of the product if they wanted.

Those other nations are more than welcome to turn the tables or create their own rules.

Herding Cats - Hurd and Catz. LULZ.

That's DOCTOR Who, to you, Sir!
 

Logic is a binary function. Something is in a logical set - or it is not. Being illogical is not a synonym for being mistaken. Degrees of precision are irrelevant for set inclusion. Fuzzy logic is not logic.

BTW: It is illogical to conclude that a Tomato in NOT a vegetable, simply because it belongs to a taxonomical subclass, "fruit". It as if I were to say your testicle is not animal.

that nobody cares about ... or PBS).

Your ignorance is showing.

Exactly. I will not buy a device that doesn't have cheap, easily available removable memory. I've always been that way. I bought a Minidisc player when MP3 players were starting to get popular because Minidiscs were $5, while 128 MB cards which held about the same amount of music were around $200. Sony really could have maintained the market on portable music for at least 5 more years if they didn't put so much DRM on their Minidisc players. They could have made them as easy to use any other MP3 player, and they would have outsold everyone because you could bring so much music with you. They would have eventually lost out as flash drives got cheaper and larger, but for the initial period when MP3 players first came out, there's no reason why anybody should have been buying them at all.

And that's the root of it. The socialist hatred of profit.

Ouch. I've seen quite a few family breakup analogies, but this is the first time I saw Scotland be the child instead of the spouse.

If we're going analogise a country to a person, actually I'd say it's pretty natural to seek out unions even though they involve giving up some independence. That's why people get married. That's why the EU keeps growing. Even the most perfect couples don't always agree all the time, but they find ways to figure it out because it's better together than apart. Divorces are universally considered a tragedy in our culture exactly because we recognise that unions bring strength: when one partner stumbles, the other is there to help.

Salmond's behaviour with Scotland has been like going to a wife in a working marriage where decisions are taken together and telling her constantly, repeatedly, that she's too good for the man she's with. That her husband treats her unfairly. That she's oppressed by him. That everything wrong in her life is her husbands fault. She didn't get the promotion she wanted? Husband's fault. She doesn't get enough attention? Husband's fault. She can't afford the clothes she wants? Husband's fault. He's just so unfair. How could she not be better off without him? She's strong and pure and good and she needs to break up with this loser.

Oh, the husband objects? He doesn't want a divorce? That's just bullying. He's promising to give her more say? It's just lies. He's asking how she'll pay the rent without him? Scaremongering. Of course you can pay the rent. Sure you may not earn enough to pay all the bills each month and you've both been relying on the credit card, but selling off the family silver will take care of that.

I could go on but you get the idea. The ultimate legacy of Salmond's failed campaign is that a significant chunk of the Scottish population has bought into the idea that they're somehow superior or morally better than the emotionally deformed English, whereas such feelings were not previously widespread. This is a toxic legacy that could take generations to resolve. It will certainly not make anything easier in future.

"devices capable of emitting electromagnetic radiations"

Does this mean they'll confiscate the alternator on my car? And what about my brain?!

As a user of Xubuntu who brings out the GIMP at least twice a week, I'm interested in how you'd name them better.

• What better name would you suggest for the GNU Image Manipulation Program? It "at least tries to vaguely describe the function of the program".
• How is Blender (English for "food processor", referring to a 3D modeling app) any better than Ubuntu (Zulu for "humankind", referring to a Linux distribution)? Is it just that English is historically more prestigious than Zulu as a naming language?
• Xfce (XForms Common Environment) used to be descriptive back when it used XForms, but it became an artifact title once Xfce switched to GTK+. The X part can be reinterpreted to refer to the X Window System, but then the F needs a meaning, a problem that it shares with FVWM (Something Virtual Window Manager).

LAME was developed in the same way, by replacing pieces of the ISO's reference MP3 encoder until it was finished in May 2000. Is there a better name for this "ship of Theseus" method?