Given that he said that he believes it will take 40 hours, because he's done it, I think it's safe to interpret that to mean that it took him roughly 40 hours (or one work-week). It might have taken 30 or 50 hours.

Wasting an entire week on bureaucracy is not that inconceivable. Between finding out what forms to submit, who to talk to to GET those forms, negotiating their lunch breaks or vacations, getting notarized copies of other things, or handling other similar "You must X before you Y, but x and y are only available at these times" constraints can make 30-40 minutes of Actual Work take much longer in real-world time, especially when it's YOUR responsibility to babysit the process to ensure that anything gets done.

This is the key. I happily carry a badge at work because it helps me to more conveniently secure access to our company's private areas. It's easier than a set of keys. My company doesn't use it as a way to measure attendance, as they care that we _get things done_, so I don't care about the privacy implications -- after all, they can tell when I'm here with a keylogger or my commits into source control.

You oversimplfy. Saying "It's water!" to desert-dwellers is like dismissing a submariner's concerns about air.

Salt water is useless for drinking and irrigation, and in a desert (southern California), nearly all the water has to be imported. Southern California gets most of it from the Colorado river and Northern California, and tensions are rising with the people living in northern Cali or Arizona as we take more and more of their water.

Yes, "economic" reasons. It costs money to make aqueducts, money to buy the water from Arizona (though not enough, apparently?), money to run desalination plants. The latter would be awesome, as then we could just slurp up the ocean water that we are next to, but at this point it seems to be cheaper to import the water. (I seem to recall there being some shady price issues around that, but it's been eight or ten years since I read much about it.)

So, we need to avoid coffee to avoid going blind, or drink it regularly so that we don't get Alzheimer's?

It probably has a lot of time spent on it that TV shows normally do not have. Having a friend who works on daily film, they do a ton of work; I'd hate to think what FX guys have to do as well.

It was extremely cool, but having to actually scroll all over, combined with a small scrollable window, made my hands hurt enough that I eventually gave up. I'm very thankful for the (multiple) people that repackaged it as a zoomable map.

I recall reading that people, when given a range of options, tend to pick a middle one. So, they didn't take the minimum, and likely didn't take the maximum. They might even have simply averaged the two fenceposts.

One could always get a standing desk, and then also have an office chair which is tall enough to sit at the stand-up desk. This is how I do it at work, and rather like it.

You might not want to talk to it, but there are a lot of lonely older people who wouldn't mind having a companion cube to talk WITH, not simply to. Heck, I think they already have those in Japan. Couple that with the ability of a robot to act as a liason for an elderly, disabled, blind, or deaf person, and you have a robot which could be a pretty meaningful mediator in a person's life.

Imagine if deaf people had legally-protected translator robots (so that they could sign to it, and it would translate to you, to the grocery store clerk, or to a sales drone at Best Buy), or if elderly people could send one out (in their autonomous car) to do their grocery shopping. Sure, it's not feasible now, but it seems like it could be something that would have a pretty viable market.

I've always preferred spelling it "grey"; I suspect that it's related to my heavy reading of Tolkein in my youth. Given the proportion of nerds here on Slashdot, I'd not be surprised if others were doing the same.

Yep -- I saw that one first, in fact. I just meant that I didn't understand why there'd be a color balanced one (until I read the comment below about geologists -- great point!).

The thing is, If I were on Mars, the colors wouldn't look like they look here anyway -- because of the lighting that you mentioned. I'd rather see what it would look like on an alien world in its native lighting conditions, not rebalanced to look like it had our light conditions.

Exactly. It sounds like a really big deal at first, but in practice (and believe me, I am still new to Python) it no longer seems like a big deal. There's so much other good, expressive stuff in well-written python that minor annoyances are less critical, and the "whitespace rules" end up being no different than having an agreed-upon coding style (KNR, etc) in your organization. To be fair, this is likely because I happen to work with a codebase of what looks like very neatly written Python, and also prefer 4-space indentation. Moreover, from what I've read recently, 4-spaces is less important than _consistent_ indentation. (I'll have to double check, but I think it would work with 2-space indents too, if you preferred.)

Perhaps this is natural to poker culture, but to an outsider I can't help but think that your friends are jerks. :-) Perhaps you weren't playing with friends, which might make it more excusable, but it still seems unnecessarily harsh to say "no, those chips stay" when someone says, "ah, crap, I meant to throw in these instead." (Assuming you caught the mistake when you did it, that is.) Pretty much everyone I'd consider playing cards (or other games) with would notice the outlier and say something like, "Did you mean to bet $100 when the pot's at two dollars?", on the assumption that it was a fumble.

Bloody hell -- double pasting what I meant to edit. I'm very sorry about that. Short version:

- I use whitespace conventions to read code more easily, so enforcing one is no different from using Emacs or Eclipse to autoformat everything. I find Python code indentation very similar to Lisp-y indentation.
- I miss Perl's easy regex integration.
- I miss being able to write one-liners on the command line, or toy implementations in the REPL. In practice, I nearly never need to do this.
- List comprehensions (and dict comprehensions) are the bees' knees.

Give Python a shot if you have been avoiding it because "enforced whitespace is lame". It's easier to get over than you think.