FTFY.

And I'm sure most people do understand, even if they purport to decry these occurrences and would never acknowledge that they'd do the same when they're in the same state of ignorance, especially if they thought their lives or the lives of their families were in danger.

It's a normal distribution, with enlightenment at one end and depravity at the other. Most of us exist somewhere in the center, no matter what we'd like to think about ourselves.

Theseus.

Don't like my choice? We should arrange a bout and see what Vegas thinks.

See, the airlines base their regional rates around Amtrak rates. So without Amtrak (or one with fewer hooks into local transportation), the airlines can screw over their customers that much more. The airlines aren't the only ones who'd love to see Amtrak disappear either. Big oil and their lackeys the car manufacturers all would love to see rail transportation disappear completely. They can't touch freight because that's private, but Amtrak is Federal which means it's easier to neuter.

I haven't seen any indication Obama's done anything to reverse the trend of ripping up rails and replacing them with roads. I could be wrong. Now, interesting thing is that Amtrak doesn't own most of the rights of ways that it operates its trains on. The NE corridor (Washington-Boston) is one of the few where they do own the rail. And it's one of the few profitable lines. This derailment may be a symptom of insufficient funding to maintain their infrastructure (quick check of Wikipedia says this is the case). In which case, I'd say no, politics is holding Amtrak by the neck and we're not going to see much improvement if any at all to the nation's rail infrastructure.

Hell, the bike movement is stronger than the streetcar/light rail movement, even in places where you can realistically ride bikes only around five to six months out of the year, so that tells you just where public sentiment is.

It's too bad Lucas wasn't a better filmmaker/storyteller.

Hey, if you can get a Verizon rep to promise FiOS to some of the places where they're still using AOL dial-up, that would be an amazing deal.

Yup. Those arguments seem pretty weak to me. Both inheritance and exceptions are a total crapshoot in C++ (among other so-called features). Any change to those parts of C++ can only be a positive, including completely removing them from the language spec.

Just from TFS, it sounds like somebody who's only dabbled with C++ or maybe even Java and not C++ at all. Like somebody else posted above, whoever says C/C++ most likely knows neither language well, if at all.

I haven't looked at Rust at all, but if it's strictly C with classes and better memory management, it's worth looking into. It doesn't even need templates (which is often another big no-no in production engineering shops along with exceptions). All that's missing from C is good class syntax and maybe a better way to do function pointers, and it's about as good a language for both high and low level programming as you're gonna get. Though if anything, the biggest (fundamental) problem with C is the assignment operator. They should've gone with the Ada := instead of =. If Rust (or whatever other C-derived language) fixes those three things, the rest of the C family of languages would be made completely obsolete.

DRM should generally be rebranded with this backronym. If only we could convince the media to begin adopting it. Public sentiment would be far less neutral if people knew it for what it really was.

The AOL/TW merger was too little, too erly. It was too little in that AOL didn't take enough control of TW. It was too early in that traditional media didn't start dying until long after Case left. Once traditional media began its slow but inevitable decline, Case could've finally taken the reins over and mandated the switch to internet-based media distribution. But by then, it was too late. The TW folks had taken back control of the board and it was all downhill from there. Specifically, I should say the Warner folks (like Ted Turner), because both HBO and TWC were Time Inc subsidiaries prior to the Time Inc/Warner Communications merger, and they were the most tech-oriented of all the divisions outside of AOL in the 00's.

Of course, Case wasn't the first person to make the mistake of trying to leverage the content of Warner Communications (now Time Warner). When it comes to regressive thinking and implementation, you just can't beat Hollywood executives.

It's called pilot suicide. And it certainly is not the first time in aviation history it's happened. There are reasons pilots go through mandatory psychological evaluations. These are not policies instituted because airlines thought it'd be a nice perk to give to their pilots.

The problem with using bookmarks and stuff is that's it's extra maintenance overhead. Sure, if there's a page I keep referencing, I'll bookmark instead of Googling for it again each time (though I have no qualms about that either).

But if I'm in the middle of reading something and I get interrupted and don't get a chance to go back for a few days, or if I think it's important (a link say), but I don't quite have the time for it yet, or if I have it on auto-refresh for the updating content (/. article, or forum post, or even a site that doesn't have search bar capability but that I search on regularly), it's going into a tab. Bookmarks/favorites mean I actually have to create the bookmark, find the bookmark when I want to read it, and then remove the bookmark later. That finding the act of one bookmark among many is much more of a pain than scrolling through my tabs to see what I need to finish/catch up on.

And that's only the simple case. If I'm in the middle of reading the content and am interrupted, I have to go back to the position in the page.

And to top all that off, since I'm already using bookmarks for one purpose, to mix a different purposed bookmarks in there makes all of my bookmarks worthless. It's thumbing through my RSS feed in my main browser screen. Other people might stand for it, but it breaks all sorts of workflows for me.

But that's why there are tab-saving extensions that restore tabs on crash and all that. Tab mix plus is the better extension (at least on Firefox; I know nothing about Chrome).

Vegan or not, those calories have to come from somewhere. And unless you're solely eating out of your own farm (using your own farm-produced manure as fertilizer), your food's probably going to have a sizeable carbon footprint.

Sounds like a solution would be to switch to hybrid/all-electric. Hybrids use the electrical motor at low speeds, where you do a lot of stop-and-go. And when they run the gas engine to recharge, it's fairly constant. The only problem with hybrids (at least the older ones I've driven) is the pickup, means the car eats gas the moment you try to do something strenuous.

Tesla seems to have solved that problem. I can't wait for the Model 3.

Does it not get stiff enough for you anymore?

Those professions have boards and certifications. Programmers like to put themselves on par with other technical skilled labor (full disclosure: I'm a programmer myself), but programming as a skill is closer to design (think graphical design or interior design) than any technical skill. But instead of colors, we work with 1s and 0s.

Nor is programming is so different from writing professions like journalism or editing. Writers say things; programmers do things. Writers work with words; programmers work with numbers. Writers are constrained by linguistic grammar; programmers, well, are constrained by mathematical grammar.

That's the long and short of it. We're not engineers. We're not doctors. We're not lawyers. We're artists and designers. We're craftsmen, not tradesmen. Our reward isn't the work itself, but the ultimate output. And when the output is unrewarding (as it is working for most corporations), then we lose interest.

Imagine asking a violin maker to make a french horn. That's what most corporations ask of us, and they don't really care what the french horn sounds like, only that it looks enough like one. Besides the paycheck, why would anybody of any caliber take them up on that request?

Sounds to me just like the viruses of the 80's and 90's, pre-internet days. Back then, it wasn't about stealing passwords or holding data for ransom. It was about causing mayhem, and wiping a computer some time after infection, or otherwise damaging the computer's ability to operate normally was the norm (until Windows 95 came along and called it a feature).

It's not just a virus. It's a retrovirus.

*ducks*