I'm not sure that I completely agree - I listen to music on the way into work, and I've never even once found myself in a position when lack of audio clues put me in any danger.

As long as you use regular earbuds, and not the in-ear-silicon things that block out noise, then you'll be fine.

I do agree about audiobooks though, albeit for a different reason. You'll never be able to concentrate on them properly because you'll regularly have to concentrate too much on avoiding the idiot drivers. You'll just end up missing whole pages.

[Also rode to work for 15 years...]

Don't worry. They will.

Yes you do - the tail lights of the car in front of you are a pretty integral part of driving (I would hope).

If there's one thing we can agree on about icon design, it's that no-one agrees about it....

A couple of years ago when I flew through the US everyone had an e-reader. The last time I flew, which was late last year, everyone had paper books. I notice that the bookstores in US airports still seem to be going strong - Amazon is still selling books hand over fist.

Sure, e-readers are great for storing millions of books (that you can't lend to your friends... dang it), but they just suck.

I don't believe that's true. Quite a few people down a bottle of spirits and pass out and never wake up. It's probably next to impossible to kill yourself with beer purely through the acute toxicity of alcohol, but the same is not true of (say) vodka.

It's normally kids without sufficient experience to understand that although it's physically possible to drink an entire bottle of vodka in a few minutes, it's quite likely to end your life. The LD50 of ethanol translates to a little under half a litre of vodka (or gin, or whatever). That's not very much.

But that doesn't matter.

I know e e cumming's work well - possibly my favourite poet - and I can't help but think that he has earned his specific usage of capitalisation through his (often rather underrated) work. Can't speak about k.d lang, but this made me smile.

I don't think that circletimessquare has earned his pissyness though - though he doubtless believes that he has.

You've got to admit though, you *are* pretty pissy about it.

Also: Conformation does not mean conformity. I assume that you don't care about what the words you're using actually mean, preferring instead to rant (in lower case) about how we all know perfectly well what you mean, and shouldn't worry about what a mere dictionary has to say about the matter.

You know, for someone who says that they're relaxing, you really are awfully uptight.

Great name, Samsung. Nice work.

Though true, there are some languages that lend themselves to compilation more than others. Anything with an 'eval' statement, for instance, doesn't lend itself to compilation.

It should be though. If V8 compiles the javascript to machine code, why isn't it fast? I know it isn't, because it's an order of magnitude slower than the equivalent code written in C, and I think a fifth of the speed of code written in Go (from memory...). What's the deal?

Still marginally less entertaining though.

That's great that you always have access to your editor-of-choice.

Sometimes one has to use whatever command-line editor happens to be lying around, nano or vi or whatever. Sometimes (yes.. I know...) you might be on Windows trying to use notepad. Notepad++ isn't much better in this respect.

The problem with python is that your code can look fine in any of these editors, but not actually be fine. If I can't find simple syntax errors in code just by looking at it, then there is a problem with the language.

Also, it's not less to type in a syntax-aware editor (in a non-syntax aware editor, python is much worse).

In C: it's "{ \n <code> }" to type a new block
In Python it's ": \n <code> \b" to type a new block.

Oh ok, I see what you mean. Yes, you could use the zeroth element to store the length, but now you're presumably going to do bounds checking on every access (or what's the length for?), which is even more expensive. Also, storing the length at element zero is problematic if the array is large and the width of the array elements are too narrow to represent it.

Or you could just waste the space, which seems to be a pretty weird approach.

I don't know - it does seem to me that 1-based array indexing is just ever so slightly more difficult and ever so slightly less efficient and far far less common. So, why?

It is if both the array and the index arrive as variables - so that the compiler doesn't know what they're going to be. In that case you do have an extra instruction to perform.