Especially resurrection spells, I've heard, take particularly long to cast...

I'll give you the one about chasing the ball, these damn things keep rolling and rolling and it can occasionally be fun if you manage to catch them before they roll into the river or the lake or whatever and before you get completely out of breath. But it may be ok if you live in a place like e.g. Nebraska that's totaly flat sans lakes and the ball will only go as far as you can kick it, which is not that far in most cases.

But climbing a tree is outright silly. The lowest branches of most trees are often out of reach and you can scatch yourself pretty badly on the way up. The small branches keep poking into your eyes or knocking on your glasses. And the foliage obscures the view so bad that the whole experience is pretty much a pain in the ass even if you finally do manage to get up. Also, how come everyone is so quick to point out that climbing trees is sooo much fun but no one mentions the fun involved in getting back down again? Exactly. Because it isn't.

This is an obvious troll, but I'll bite.

From TFA: "They're so used to the instant buzz which you can get with these games and gadgets that they find it really hard to focus on anything which isn't exciting."

So make the fucking school exciting. And no, using computers in the classroom isn't the answer. Inspiring kids to learn is a very demanding task and you can't hide your incompetence as a teacher by blaming the kids and their tablets/phones/laptops. Inability to concentrate, you say? Have you actually *seen* a kid play Unreal Tournament (or whatever it is kids play these days)? Also, in my day, D&D, Magick the Gathering and similarly complicated games would be the grand examples that your "inability to learn" statement is full of shit.

Lastly, fuck you and your sociallizing. If you don't address issues like bullying, the kids will burry their faces even deeper in their screens in an effort to get away from it all.

Indeed I should have gone with CentOS in the first place. It was a bad decision on my part, but it also turned out to be much worse than expected.

The absurd release frequency, the unnecessary changes, and the bad quality forced me to air-gap my system and freeze it in an ancient version in order to keep it running (or, better said, in order to reduce the risk of it breaking down). I stopped recommending fedora ages ago. Now that that system fulfilled its original purpose, it will be repurposed and updated with something different, probably CentOS or Mint.

Yeah, when you don't give a shit about safety (as like, beyond the regulations, which are a bare minimum for preventing you from dying *on the spot*), stuff like this tends to happen in a factory handling and/or producing chemicals. The company I work for is in the same business, but never heard of any similar incidents in my workplace.

In one of his books, he also gives credit to the guy that keeps that outdated system running.

This is really sad. I had the privilege of seeing the original Alien prop up close at a special exhibition in Frankfurt, Germany. It was a lot more than what we got a glimpse of in the movie. It had an "industrial" look and feel, quite different from the sleek Aliens in the later films. Giger experimented a lot with sexual references and the genitalia. The Alien's elongated head is a phallic reference. The alien eggs originally had a single slot on top that looked like a vulva, that he later changed into a double slot in order to make it less obvious. His work was plainly awesome and it is sad that he was not commissioned in the other films of the Alien series.

Use this link to access your account:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?...

The UI will launch in HTML mode. It is usually triggered for old browsers or slow internet connections.

Indeed, I'm a Gmail user from the very beginning and although the layout has changed significantly over the years, none of the changes was actually bad. Different, yes, but they didn't suck. Although a lot of functions were added that are IMHO rather nonsense, they are kept out of the way and the UI always remained very intuitive. Also, Gmail (besides offering a huge amount of space for no charge and a spam filter that is actually very good) launched the "search, don't sort" idea which was pretty revolutionary for web-email at the time. They seemed to come into conflict with that idea by introducing folders and "labels" but, as I said, it is very easy to ignore them.

Also, they have a very cool feature, that lets you adjust the amount of whitespace by choosing between the "comfortable", "cozy" and "compact" settings. Are you listening, Slashdot designers?

Exactly, people seem to ignore that ships may need a long time to get there, but they carry a MUCH larger load. It is like a network with high latency but also high bandwidth. Also the fuel they burn is practically useless for any other purpose.

Wow, you must be the perfect example of how a low Slashdot ID an insightful comment don't make.

If you even bothered to parse the headline, you'd have noticed that the talk is about scientists using Fortran, not OS kernel hackers, not Web programmers. Fortran is totally NOT the tool for any of the tasks you mention, just like most of the other languages just suck for parallel floating-point operation intensive applications.

But since you're an old hat, I'll take a stroll on your lawn and point out the following:

Define "friendly". I have actually seen Fortran programs that print ASCII-art-like diagrams. Sure beats having to look at GB-long tables of numerical data at runtime.

In all my years of experience (>10, so I guess I'm quite the novice in Fortran-years) I have not seen a single security exploit implemented in Fortran. It's just not the tool for the job. BTW if anyone can point out such a thing, please let me know so that I can raise my hat in the right direction. Now, as far as robustness goes, Fortran lets us input data in many creative ways, it would be a shame to take away such a... ahem... feature.

They are called ASCII files. They are pretty persistent, and they will remember settings that, more often than not, should have been long forgotten.

No need. All you need to do is unzip the folder.

This has actually been done! Check it out here:
http://specificimpulses.blogsp...

The modern Fortran versions can talk to C. Python uses Fortran libraries for math-intensive stuff. Fortran programs can number crunch across hundreds or thousands of nodes connected with InfiniBand. Network-y enough for you?

Start here: http://www.netlib.org/

And remember kids: If the old man scares you, just kick him in the nuts and run away!

You can use the library all you want in your programs (thus making use of the API), but you may not re-implement the library functions and have an identical API as the other proprietary library. You may re-implement the library functions, with the same functionality, and write an new API for it. Granted, it will probably look much like the proprietary API, but if you just copy the header files you are just asking for trouble.

A deposit slip is not copyrightable because every bank requires the same information. There is no alternative to the layout of a deposit slip. For an API of this size, however, there are numerous ways to organize all the declarations in the different header files and numerous possibilities for the names and the naming conventions of the procedures and the variables. When the developers at Sun made the decisions to write them in a certain way, they created an API that was original, but not unique: you could go and write your own library having the same functionality and your own API.

Now the developers at Google decided to copy Java's API verbatim, although they implemented the whole library from scratch. This can be due to numerous reasons:
- laziness (we should not attribute to malice stuff that can have much simpler explanations)
- haste and/or ignorance ("lemme just copy these headers here to save time, it should fall under fair use, anyway")
- malice (they wanted to have their own Java, with blackjack and hookers, that runs only on Android and screw Oracle and their show-off CEO)

I think if Google had made the slightest changes to the API so that it was not verbatim copying, it would have been much easier for them to argue that "we tried to write our own API, but it didn't work out, so as a result our API looks almost identical to Oracle's, really, we did!"

It is copyrightable if there exists more than one way for someone to enter your house. I could write an API for entering your house through the window by throwing small stones on the glass for getting your attention and sliding a message under the door if you are not there. That's a rough equivalent of yet another implementation of your house's API. Remember, it is not the idea or the act of entering the house that is under protection, but the method of doing so. So yes, since there are many alternatives available, you may also own your own procedure for entering your house.