There's one guy who is constantly begging on the New Jersey Transit trains in Penn Station NYC, he claims he just needs a few bucks for a ticket to get home (common scam actually, this guy is just more regular than most). Of course he's full of shit, as another guy on my car proved by offering him a ticket to where he wanted to go, and when he refused it, lit into him about how he was a pathetic loser who was making his race look bad.

Then there's the "Why Lie, I Need a Beer" guy also in Penn Station NYC. Though I think he's actually not homeless at all but a cop of some sort, he seems a bit too healthy.

And the bunches who fake some sort of deformity. They seem to have shifts worked out; maybe there's an organization who controls it. Anyway, they get in their contorted positions and hold out a cup or a sign or whatever. Then when their shift is up, they straighten up, pick up their stuff, and go.

I grew up in the 60's, all parents behaved like that (and worse), also teachers could smack you around if you looked at them in the wrong way. In grade 5 a five foot - zero female teacher whacked me so hard she broke a yard long blackboard ruler over my backside, in front of the class. This was in semi-rural Australia but "Spare the rod, spoil the child" was a universal truth in western society, everyday 1960's discipline was clearly child abuse by today's standards but I'm not aggrieved by it, it was just something everyone accepted as a "fact of life". Sticking with the old ways is the very definition of "conservative", blind faith that "the old way is always the best way" is just nostalgia playing tricks on your mind.

Disclaimer: I have 3 grandkids, 5 and under, I was an average, imperfect parent but I rarely smacked my kids when the were growing up. My youngest daughter is a better parent than I ever was, which is the way it should be. :)

I'm 55, I played my first video game of arcade Pong in 1970 and still play video games regularly today. It's not injury that reduces performance, it's age. My 25yr old self had less fat, more muscle, faster reflexes, a steadier hand, sharper eyesight, better hearing, etc, etc. Consequently my younger me was faster (but not nesissarily better) at just about everything. Age related injury is responsible for things like the fact I'm no longer able to kneel on a hard floor.

If you don't like C++ (and who does?) or C, what DO you suggest as a systems programming language?

Rule 1: If it runs under a VM, it's out
Rule 2: If it requires a garbage collector, it's out.
Rule 3: COBOL and FORTRAN are out too.

Yes, those statistics are nonsense for these purposes. They include foreign language speakers (1st generation immigrants) as well as people who are illiterate in all languages. They're probably not fine-grained enough to separate your crackheads and tweakers from the rest of the population. And of course including black population as an input means you'll see it as an output.

They should just leave the state and move to more friendly locations in which this is not a problem.

Just set up an Omni Consumer Products division and take over Detroit.

It's scary how much "cowboy configuration" there is out there, and yet in the programming world, "cowboy coding" is frowned upon.

Oh yeah, it's frowned on. Every senior developer will sternly tell you that "cowboy coding" is a terrible idea, then they will saddle up their horse and ride away.

Sophisticated and knowledgeable eyes don't go trawling trough code looking for bugs, they test the functionality of the binary. They only turn to the code to explain/fix what they have found.

Hind sight is always 20/20, nuclear is NOT the answer, neither are wind or solar, in fact no technology can replace coal by itself but they are perfectly capable of doing it in combination. The US has turned to gas in a big way, that's not the answer either, it is a small improvement on emissions but the extraction methods may be poisoning the groundwater. IMO "the answer" is a well managed "net metering" grid with a diverse range of (locally tuned) generation methods in a "polluter pays" market.

Note that the "base load" argument from the coal industry (and some nuclear zealots) is utter nonsense aimed a people's ignorance, coal has always relied on other technologies to keep the lights on. The demand curve of a city is not flat, to match it coal requires hydro to store energy when the plant exceeds demand, and fast switching gas turbines to compensate when "stored hydro + base load" is not enough. Also a coal plant will be down for 2 months a year for maintenance, meaning to get the full output of 6 plants you need to build and operate 7. Solar has a fantastic advantage in summer since air-conditioning is the drain, not much good in winter when the air conditioner goes into reverse.

Many people will be able to see all this clearly manifest itself in their electricity bill as peak/off-peak rates.

Citation needed.

Quote from the link - "It is notable that the U.S. death rates for coal are so much lower than for China, strictly a result of regulation and the Clean Air Act (Scott et al., 2005). It is also notable that the Clean Air Act is one of the most life-saving pieces of legislation ever adopted by any country in history. Still, about 10,000 die from coal use in the U.S. each year, and another thousand from natural gas. Hydro is dominated by a few rare large dam failures like Banqiao in China in 1976 which killed about 171,000 people. Workers still regularly fall off wind turbines during maintenance but since relatively little electricity production comes from wind, the totals deaths are small. Nuclear has the lowest deathprint, even with the worst-case Chernobyl numbers and Fukushima projections..."

The claims themselves come from a single medical paper published in the late 90's that was eventually proven beyond reasonable doubt to have been a deliberate fraud. The reason for the fraud was to promote a competing vaccine by sowing doubt in the saftey of the existing vaccine formula. Jenny IS the (minor, soft porn) celebrity whoring her intelectual honesty for attention and profit.

Not really, I'm a grandfather of three, I was taught english in primary school using a "do what you want" method similar to that described in TFA. I was sent straight to the "English for dummies" class in HS where they still failed miserably to teach me the difference between an noun and a verb. It was not until I applied for a university place at age 29 that I realised just how bad my english was, since that time I have improved dramatically. How? - Spell and grammar checkers, and the need to write a lot more than I did before going to university. Having said that, old habits die hard and I still sometimes conflate their/they're, your/you're, its/it's, etc. IMO kids who are taught with this method will be educationally handicapped and may not even realise they have a handicap until they are well into adulthood.

As soon as I wake in the morning my bones remind me I'm well past the half way mark.

Are we ever going to get an "oopsie, so sorry" from all the environmentalists who squashed the US nuclear power industry?

No, they and their heirs are too busy trying to keep wind and solar and geothermal energy down in the US. They'd like to stop oil, gas, and coal too, but those guys seem to have bought a better quality of politician. Shivering in the dark is the way they'd like us to live, if we live at all.

At that point, we can start imposing a much higher standard of driver education and much harsher penalties, and it will be what it should be -- simple revocation of the privilege of driving -- rather than an act that can potentially be financially ruinous far out of proportion to the offense.

If revocation of a drivers license couldn't be financially ruinous far out of proportion to the offense, it wouldn't be nearly so popular among the law-n-order crwoed.