You're welcome. Nether is it mine. Nor is it my second language.
Buorre Beaivi!

Save cycles and don't use the g option when not needed. With sed not being my first scripting language, I propose: /^w/s/carri/a caree/1 ;)

Ah. You mean my sister-in-law. Yeah, she could have modeled for a carrier.

The very best engineers, programmers and wizards are not school taught - they are autodidact.
To the point that many have a CS education, that is only pro-forma so they fulfill employment requirements.

Anyone who takes CS to learn CS is already behind. If you actually learned something you didn't already know, you probably didn't have much of an interest or a knack in the first place.

To get more [insert favorite minority] into STEM/CS, the members of [insert favorite minority] have to take an interest in it. Schools can't teach you the drive and curiosity that makes you worth keeping as an employee. They can only teach you what you can pick up in a fraction of the time by reading and playing around.

To expect to be a successful engineer because your parents sent you to UCB is as silly as expecting to be a successful musician because you took music classes. Without an inner drive and interest, it won't do much good.
And the problem is that women in general don't take a personal interest in maths, science, engineering or similar. That has to come first.

I'm not too sure. Are there, for example, any Braille readers for iOS, like there is for both Windows and Linux? Or haptic mice? How about something as simple as bitmap fonts at large sizes instead of scalable fonts?
How about text-to-speech or speech recognition in other languages than the most common ones?
Or on-screen keyboards that understand more than one language at a time?

I'd say that Apple's accessibility support is superb as long as you belong to the 80% most common group. But their support of the remaining 20% is abysmal compared to the competition. The one-shoe-fits-all principle doesn't work well. With accessibility, it's better to add something that sucks but can be used than to nix it because it's not good enough. And that's unfortunately what Apple does.

You do know what a coffee shop is for?

We see things through rose tinted glasses.
When we use a language where "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo" is a valid sentence, you got to wonder.

English, as She is Spoken, also has a low information density, in part due to the vowel falloff. Most languages have far more vowels, and distinguish I and Y sounds, and O and deep O sounds, and also allow stress on more than one syllable, or intonation distinguishing between words.

In writing, well, I think English is losing because of IMspeak. We're degenerating into a written language that's more ambiguous than precise. Punctuation is being replaced by the universal punctuation symbol "lol", case is disappearing, and abbreviations (sorry, I mean "abbrevs") are more and more used, quite often incorrectly. I'm just waiting for newspapers to pick up with articles like"us sk8 ftw lol us >> finl& lol".

But as long as Hollywood can churn out movies, English, or at least the American version, will still be strong around the world.

"Don't let businesses run homeless people off who are trying to get out of the cold"

Damn right. Screw those bourguois minimum wage kids trying to make it through school cleaning vomit and filth out of bathrooms by people who view the coffee shop where they warmed up as the enemy!

Can't reason with crazy.

"while they step over the clinging-desperately-to-life 'problem' all around them."

The *most* pathetic looking and in-your-face are conmen and criminals. Giving money is a transaction where they sell you a show where you can feel like you've done something good. In reality, you've just encouraged a beggar who fought for that premium corner.

Many of the people with real problems are quieter, and some of them don't even live on the streets. But hey, entitlement comes with believing that being on the street gives you some kind of credibility.

Mental illness is the real problem, and for those who can't fit into the mold of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression or schizophrenia, defiantly homeless should be considered a mental illness. It's certainly not making you or the people around you happy.

Few countries are equipped to deal with mental illness, so people live hard and die on the streets, and that's horrible.

"PHP is a bit so-so. It does its job, but doesn't really offer anything new or innovative language wise"

Prior to PHP, people were writing CGIs. Language-wise doesn't really matter, there was no interpreted inline-C-for HTML html preprocessor without smashable stacks by default.

Coming from the embedded world and C/C++, I think you're forgetting how much discipline you need to write in C or C++. Most people can't do it without a serious learning curve coming from PHP or Javascript.

Because it's an endorsement of superstition, and sets precedents.

I partially agree. A positive impact on the future we don't get to see is a reason to live our lives well. Along with sowing our oats. But remembering me? I'd rather they spent the time on pursuing worthwhile endeavors, because no matter what people think of me, I won't know it, and it won't make a grain of difference.
Some cultures have a taboo against speaking of the dead, and I can't say I've read anything about that causing problems.

When an autonomous car fails to obey a police officer waving it to the side or waving it on, that's the day when autonomous cars start dying.

I expect the first police protests to be there within days, and the first fatal shooting of people in an autonomous car to be within weeks.

But the final nail in the coffin will be when a senator is stuck in traffic and misses an important flight or meeting, and discover that the reason was an autonomous car that stopped for a shoe[*] and refused to drive over it or cross the double yellow line to get around it.

[*]: It's almost always the left shoe. But it could be a teapot.

Early voting can be changed up to election day. Just because you forced me to send in a vote for your kook, doesn't mean that my vote really will be for your kook - unless you keep me captive until election day, I can change it.

And it still is, especially now with "e-voting". Abusive husbands forcing their wives and grown-up children to vote, for example.
Back in the old days, the worst a redneck could do was say "You did vote for Goldwater as I told you, right?" Now he can force his wife's vote to go to Jeb Bush. What a progress.

I'm from New York. Nobody in New York call diesel gas you stupid moron.

you stupid moron.

Die in a fire moron.

It would be easy to get that fire started if you poured on a little diesel gas first

It's funny to read this thread in a New York accent.

No, just that they had emotions and honoured their dead.

Emotions are very useful, but doesn't require ascribing special properties to remains.

But I fail to see what value honouring dead has. Honouring their work would presumably lead to more progress, but honouring individuals who don't exist anymore and are never coming back, including parts of their dead bodies?
I cannot see any reason for this other than a religious superstition that there is something after death.