Hedgehogs here in NZ are a lot cockier than they were 30 years ago. They used to roll up into a ball when frightened (e.g., caught in headlights), but now they'll likely run away instead.

I also see them less as roadkill. I expect this is explained partly by smaller populations, due to loss of habitat, roadkill, disease, etc, but also behavioural change seems to be a factor.

This isn't science, just my anecdotal observation. If anyone has citations, please share.

Yup, that's the use case that gives you gorilla arm - vertical screen in front of you.

I suspect the claim that touchscreens on notebook give you gorilla arm are either fabrications or a genuine misunderstanding.

I doubt there's a big fundamental difference between touching a notebook screen and using a tablet, at least in terms of where the screen is. A lot of people prop their tablets up in a similar position to a notebook screen anyway.

One concern I do have is that the notebook needs to absorb the torque of a firm prod near the top of the screen. Having to be gentle in order to avoid tipping the notebook would lead to extra muscle strain.

At first glance this means the hinge needs to be extra stiff (and/or lockable), and the notebook base needs to be extra heavy (and/or anchored). Aside from the touchscreen consideration, these are all bad design for a notebook. A foldout back support, like on a photo frame, might be better.

Powergen Italia could've done with a strategic hyphen insertion too.

Intelligently designed, and that it had better fucking behave itself or watch out!

s/Bugs Bunny/Eric Carle/

I started out serious, but posted ironic.

I honestly thought that 'free software' was both 'as in beer' (distribution charges aside) and 'as in speech'. That makes it a brand new sense of the word, not yet in any dictionary - 'free' as in 'free software'.

But then a quick fact check revealed that 'free software' is just 'as in speech', and not 'as in beer'.

Sigh... maybe there really is no such thing as 'free software'. As in 'lunch'.

The silly thing is that having a default value of NULL and having no default value (effectively defaulting the default value to NULL) commonly aren't the same thing.

It's just the sort of nasty little corner case that breeds bugs. Like when many years ago Sybase's bulk loader entered random data when inserting NULL into a column with a default of NULL, and ruined our week. With no default, it would've worked fine.

Not ambiguous really... you say 'free software', it's clear from context that by 'free' you mean 'free as in software'.

I'm shocked that humans aren't considered apes.

And dictionary flies like a... DUCK!

WOOSH!

HTTPS content can be cached in the browser, and why not?

You can expect to lose proxy caching though.

(Unless your corporate proxy is kind enough to decrypt your traffic and then cache it...)

Agreed, I looked into 'cleaning up beating' in my dissertation and found that Sethares' book Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale had the design space pretty well covered.

IIRC the only suggestion I added was doctoring the sound spectrum to remove beating right where it occurs, which works regardless of the choice of scale and timbre.

For the current discussion, the takeaway from the book is that excessive beating/roughness, excessive dissonance, and perceived unpleasantness really are the same thing.

This explains why:

• Otherwise pleasant music sounds terrible when played on bells
• Gamelan is listenable despite its scale not corresponding to harmonic intervals
• Pianos are tuned slightly 'off' (stretched tuning) to compensate for the string vibration modes being slightly inharmonic

I don't see how the view espoused in TFR explains the above phenomena. A better explanation of their study results is perhaps that abnormal test subjects are sometimes, well y'know, abnormal.

I hate DST because it's a huge pain in the cloaca to write software that accounts for it correctly. Even if you get your bits right, you may be sitting on a pile of vendor bugs that mess up your assumptions. And it can be difficult going on impossible to test.

It's like a mini-Y2K that happens twice a year.

And every time some government messes with the rules, it's like a REAL Y2K, but at short notice.

One of the smartest strategies for dealing with DST is to pretend it doesn't exist, and instead shut everything down for the dreaded 'extra hour'. But even that's only a partial solution.

Put the aforementioned time machine to good use, and tell that to the Spanish Empire...

Maybe the salespeople can dumb it down with a car analogy...

You've got your petrols, and you've got your diesels. They look the same on the outside, but inside they've got different engines. Anyway, the important thing to remember is, fill 'er up with the wrong stuff and yer fucked.