new to Slashdot.

Apologists on this sight?

Sad!

Can "the public" find out how the guy was treated whose Corolla was smashed by a tire falling off a United B-777 departing LAX?

Did the insurance carrier for United take the liberty of declaring the car a "total loss" and make the dude/dudette a low-ball offer for the retail value of the car before being smashed, less the "salvage" value from the scrap yard?

Or did they make a good-will offer of a new-car replacement owing to the notoriety of a tire falling off a jet? Or is their position that if you cheap-out and park in an airport "surface lot", you assume the risk of damage by stuff falling from jets? Like this Canadian musician dude?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There is a practical, utilitarian reason to have a model train layout.

After spending the entire day receiving criticism from your spouse, disrespect from your children, rudeness on the commute and taking guff at work, one can spend some time in the basement, flip a switch and turn a knob to make an electrically powered model train go around a circle of track.

It is the only thing over which you have had any control over, and the feeling is glorious.

to see Mom and Dad once a year and to attend Cousin Fran's wedding this summer in Phoenix when it is 108 deg-F outside.

Nerds rely on low airline ticket prices.

Blocking this merger insures that travel on the carriers offering the most misery at least stays cheap.

Actually, what you describe is very German. I know. My ancestry is from the intersection of German and Slavic culture.

Slavic culture is rather slap-dash. That is why there is an air leak in the first place.

Maybe we were studying the beliefs of the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter, but there was some description of Hell as being "down below."

I chimed in, "Really? I thought Heaven and Hell were next to each other separated by a retaining wall."

Teacher replies, "Where did you get that idea?"

I could have replied, "from the Bible. In fact, we talked about the Gospel parable of Lazarus and the rich man in class, where literary sources outside the Bible call him 'Dives." On passing from this life, the rich man found himself in a place of torment where the suffering from thirst was immense, and saw Lazarus, after his passing from neglect of the rich man not even offering him crumbs from his table, in the bosom of the Biblical patriarch Abraham on the "other side" of an uncrossable divide."

Instead, I said this was from the "Yellow Joke Book" that my Mom gave to me and my sibs. There is a retaining wall separating Heaven and Hell, and St Peter calls the Devil over, "There is a crack in the retaining wall, and the crack is on your side on your property. You need to repair this." The Devil responds, "Oh, yeah, make me!" to which St Peter replies, "OK then, I will have to sue you."

Young and innocent of the adult world where nothing good comes of interactions with attorneys, I went on to give a deadpan delivery of, "So sue me. But where are you going to find a lawyer?"

Teacher almost fell on the floor laughing.

Doesn't the HOA for the ISS make them do the repairs?

How about malloc everything on startup, never free, and everything is a global?

Hey, that is how I avoid the performance hit of garbage collection in Java.

I'll be here all week. tip your waiter and try the veal.

OK, I "get" C being dangerous.

The sense I get about Ada is that it has soooo many features piled on to make it safe that no one using it fully understands the language? How does that help?

Rust, on the other hand, seems like the time I was going to learn Esperanto as a carefully curated spoken language that we could standardize on.

I looked into that and said, what they hey, if we are going to go that route, why don't I just learn more French?

I mean why don't we program in Java? Hasn't garbage collection efficiency been solved by advances in Computer Science? Couldn't it be compiled to LLVM for cross-language compatibility?

The US Government already promoted use of a "safe" programming language (OK, OK,. it's French in origin, but still).

Why are they reinventing the wheel and nagging the adoption of Rust?

Removed the semi colons and curly braces?

Well right! It used to be you couldn't do a code review without confusing the control flow over some curly braces that weren't indented properly.

The libraries?

Right again. I don't know how we ever got anything done without the libraries.

The Legions of inexperienced coders?

Well, everyone know you can drive costs down by hiring coders at low wages. That goes without saying.

That's the problem, right there!

This raises some deep philosophical questions, like the arguments the ancient Greeks had about the artifact in Athens known to be Theseus' Boat? Some Greeks argued that all of the maintenance and upgrades so they could sail it every year in a commerative celebration meant that it was no longer the boat used by Theseus to rescue the young Athenians from being sacrificed by the Minoan tyrant.

OK, Android Java uses both a different bytecode and a different VM? I guess "real" Java is based on a common bytecode, although there is no one-true-JVM. You could argue that OpenJDK is Oracle JDK in reality, that Oracle is offering paid-for and free versions, but doesn't IBM offer their own JVM?

I would think that Android Java has a different standard library, but in the Wikipedia article on Kotlin, there is mention that the VM on Android supports portions of the Java standard library to make that work.

And Kotlin is not restricted to Android, but everywhere else but Android it uses a proper Java JVM.

But if Java usage in Android is sparse, I suppose this barely budges the TIOBE ranking for Java?

And does Kotlin, let alone Dart and its flutter framework show up even as a pimple on the backside of the TIOBE ranking?

I mean, who knew?