And what if there are no fires for 3 years? Who pays to maintain the fire station? "Pay when you need us" is simply not a workable model.

No it doesn't. Unix time is defined as UTC seconds since 1970-1-1 00:00. But UTC seconds didn't exist since 1972. And Unix time has exactly 86400 seconds in a day. No matter what. Even though UTC doesn't.

So an implementation has to determine which "Unix time" to follow: UTC seconds, or 86400 seconds (essentially TAI). And different implementations choose differently.

Please. RMS has no problems staying for free under an MIT license, either.

And do you know why that was titled "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" and not "Letter from my Bedroom"? Because MLK, Jr. was arrested and held as, essentially, a political prisoner. If the OP wants to take the risk of being held as a political prisoner in communist China, then more power to him. But...I don't think it would be a good experience if his actual goal is to search Google for 3 weeks.

You know, Rugby is also called Football.

Well, I'm not saying I WAS trolling. I was arguing completely intellectually honestly. But I could see why someone might misinterpret.

In fairness, I think they did it because I've disagreed with multiple people on this story. I guess it's almost vaguely trollish, but I think they just disliked my argument.

Sure. But you shouldn't be able to explain Photoshop or vi to a 5 year old, either. Nobody would deny that they have UIs.

They ARE the users of the piece of code that Google has released. And Google has every reason to want to make their code understandable, usable, and clear. I believe that in this case they have done so, but to claim that application programmers aren't "users" of library code is just bizarre and illogical. The only interface to this code is the API. The only users of that API are the application programmers. UI != GUI.

No, an API certainly IS a UI. It is the INTERFACE that the USER of a product will USE to INTERFACE with the product. Usability is very, very important in API design.

This simply isn't correct. An API is the very epitome of a UI. When a company releases code to their customer, that they intend for their customer to USE, that customer is the User. And the interface to that code, the API, is the User Interface. It must be designed well, and must be usable. That said, I agree with the general idea that this particular API is well designed.

ALL of it is user facing. That's the very point of an API. The user is the developer.

This is a very, very important concept. As I said in my other post, this is a good API, a usable API. But so many APIs aren't usable. API usability should ALWAYS be considered when releasing a public library/service.

API stands for Application Programming Interface is not supposed to be user-friendly. It's supposed to be developer-friendly.

This is terribly, terribly wrong. Developers ARE users. API usability is a huge field that needs to be addressed.

That said, I don't see anything that bad about this API. Seems similar to Amazon's.

That's part of it. Also, it was the first half of a double header between two teams that were out of contention to play in the World Series in the last week of the season. Both teams wanted to get out of there and go home.

On top of that, batters tended to swing more at pitches back then, and umpires still called the high strike.

Most seasons, even today, have a few games right around the 2 hour mark, with commercials and slower players and more patient hitters. Remember that 51 minutes is the record, not the standard back then.