I remember an amusing one: user reported a print re-run registration page failing on a few particular orders among thousands during the history of the (subcontracted) application. I found the common factor to be that all failing orders were for 142 copies. It turns out that the handling code for some absurd reason assigned page*count/(amount-142) to the total_page_count (or whatever), and overwrote it with the proper "amount * page_count" in the next line*. The rest of the code worked fine for all positive integers in the relevant range, and it was of course not caught by the unit testing for invalid input. I tracked down the guy who checked in that particular piece of code years later, he had no idea why he originally put it there.

* Yeah, it was done on a budget, the subcontractor obviously didn't have code reviews. I know there are many ways in which the bug could have been avoided. The application is still in production and works well.

I live in a cold climate, and am replacing incandescents with LEDs as they fail. We don't heat our home with electricity (we have very cheap central heating covering our local community), so the heating aspect of incandescents is not important.

The reason why I started is that I have about 15 ceiling spots, of which one or another gave out literally every week. I started replacing them as necessary with LEDs, which don't fail, and even at the very high prices we pay for them in Europe they have paid themselves off already. I'm also happy with the quality of the emitted light which has a warm tone, and we do save a bit of power. I'm replacing them in other lamps as well, with good results. It's a no-brainer, really.

I agree with you on disabling traction control, but you are mistaken if you think that spinning helps you on slippery snow. I have lots of experience driving both front and rear wheel drive cars on snow. If it's slippery, and you start spinning uphill and don't recover before losing too much speed you're pretty much bound to back down and try again. So you avoid spinning as far as possible. In fact, a sure sign you're a (technically) bad driver is if you push down on the pedal when you start spinning, you'll lose speed and eventually stop. Mind you, there are plenty of drivers who don't get this and just frantically increase the revs when they start slipping, and it's very annoying being behind them when that happens so you have to back down as well.

The same goes if you get stuck. If you spin you'll just dig yourself down deeper, without getting anywhere. You have to keep from spinning, creep carefully along, and employ a rocking motion by using the clutch in a periodic manner to boost yourself out if you can't advance*.

You achieve all this by carefully coordinating revs and clutch**, while using "the seats of your pants" (feel) to gauge traction. When I learnt to drive (in a place with lots of gradients, and lots of snow) there was no traction control, and the first one I tried years afterwards really sucked. My favourite example is the 2 km, 12 degrees uphill section of road going to the family cabin, it's really a challenge during winter without dragging out the snow chains [which of course is a cop-out thing to do :)]. It's only very modern traction controls that can even get close to climbing the hills that I can do manually.

* I've also driven quite a bit in mud when living in South America. Mud is different, in some kinds of mud you can get a boost from a controlled wheelspin at the right moment. Very wet organic mud still behaves pretty much like deep snow, though. That was not what you were talking about, however.

** Good luck doing any of this in an automatic. I've driven a newish Mercedes which supposedly had a very advanced automatic transmission / traction control on really slippery snow-covered ice, and it still sucked bowling balls through garden hoses (maybe a bit less than other automatics, but I avoid them as far as possible). I could probably outperform its traction in a stick shift with my eyes quite literally closed.

I have never heard anyone call ebooks "virtual" books. To distinguish most people use paper book and ebook. As for why you chose the term "real", I already addressed that above.

As for the scrollbar, I'm quite capable of parsing it if necessary. Normally you'll prefer to use the ToC, bookmarks or search to find stuff you read earlier in an ebook. Those features are handier to manage than a forest of small coloured bookmark-tapes (what is the proper name for those in English?) or "I'm looking for something that I remember to be about a third and a bit more into the book" IMO. The tactile feedback you mention is really just a workaround for the inherent lack of advanced lookup features in a paper book, but it IS handy for those who are not able to efficiently use the corresponding ebook in a proper reading application.

The clincher is, of course, that the hundreds of ebooks are available on your phone which you always carry anyway (or maybe your tablet), while a single paper reference book is maybe 0.5 kg that you're not likely to just have around wherever you go, much less your entire bookcase.

PS ebooks are no less "real" than paper books. Calling paper books real as opposed to ebooks (which are... what? Imaginary?) is just an abuse of language to elicit an subconscious emotional response, like the "real men buy real diamonds" campaign from DeBeers. The content is what's important in a book :)

I have read many thousands of pbooks and 505 ebooks in my life. I find that the E-Ink display on my reader is slightly different from paper, but equally easy to read. Nothing painfully obvious about it at all for my part. Add in the convenience and it's a no-brainer. YMMV.

And even most PC demos today are coded in high-level languages like C++. The guys writing space-constrained demos (64K and less) will turn to assembly. But on the PC you generally can't beat the compiler performance-wise, and in the few cases where you might have squeezed out a couple of percents better performance your time will be better spent polishing your effects.

Source: I discussed this with one of the coders in Andromeda, who has experience both from the Amiga and PC scene.

My brother got his licence in Nebraska, and it was ridiculously easy. It was in no way stringent enough to judge if you were actually able to drive on public roads in his opinion. I'm from Norway, and we have a strict practical test lasting one hour, during which you can only make two non-serious mistakes (like switching on your turn signal a bit late) and still pass. Forget your turn signal altogether and you fail, no matter how well you drove otherwise. This is a good thing.

About restricted licences: In Norway you get an "automatic" licence if you do the practical test in an automatic, and you're not allowed to drive a manual. Most people who take the test on an automatic do it because they're not physically able to drive a manual due to disabilities.

In my experience stick shifts are few and far between in the US. My brother was an exchange student in Nebraska. We both knew how to drive manuals (they were certainly the most common option in Norway in the nineties, and are probably still in the majority), and when I visited him many of the locals were impressed by that fact, as generally only classic muscle-car owners knew how to use a stick. Putting someone who has only driven an automatic behind the wheel of a manual is asking for trouble, though, if you ask me it makes perfect sense to restrict those people to automatics :)

I don't live in the US, but I find it strange that the fact that *more than zero* NSA agents has actually done this is not bothering you. All that power, readily accessible to people with severe lacks in the integrity department; I would say that spying on your SO in this way indicates a major personality flaw. Remember that these people control more information about their fellow citizens than any other institution in the history of mankind.

From your posting history I gather that arguing with you is fruitless, so I won't try to do that, but I am left to wonder about you personally. Assuming for the moment that you're not actually connected to the NSA*: why is it so important to you to convince yourself and others that there is "nothing to see here, move along, move along"? Most people all over the world are bothered by government strangers having this kind of detailed knowledge about everything you do, and in other countries we generally try to curb their ability to do so. There is no reason to believe that this information isn't used for purposes other than fighting terrorism, in fact the contrary has been proven. The NSA have been shown to lie about nearly everything they do to everyone, including the legislators who are supposed to have some oversight, don't you find this worrying in the slightest?

I realise this post can be construed as an ad hominem, but I am really curious about what motivates you to employ such extreme contortions of reasoning necessary to convince yourself that these people are trustworthy, when they have proved conclusively, time and time again, that they are anything but.

* I don't believe that you are, mostly because if you were astroturfing Slashdot on behalf of the government you would have been spectacularly bad at your job. Come to think of it, if you're trolling, you are better than most trolls :)

Neal Stephenson already provided one (page 3) in 1999, which kinda reminded me of your statement:

"In The Beginning was the Command Line" is a bit dated now, but it is an amusing read nonetheless.

I like your reasoning, I think I would have enjoyed conversing with you over a beer :)

True, and they don't care. The statistics is what matters to insurance companies. We had an interesting exchange in my country, initiated by an 18-year old male driver (18 is the limit at which you can get a driver's licence here). He was outraged that he had to pay a higher premium than his female friends for his car insurance, and claimed it was gender-based discrimination. Some journalists jumped on the bandwagon, but the whole discussion died down quickly, presumably after some editors actually talked to some insurance guys/gals. Insurance companies don't "discriminate" in the illegal sense based on your gender or other aspects to your demographics, but they do base your premium on how much they've had to pay out to groups with similar demographics as your own. This is generally accepted (if you're a 60-year-old grandmother who has never had a car accident it's understandable that you won't want to pay for the reckless behaviour of the 18-year-old male drivers whose brains haven't yet developed their risk-inhibiting parts).

Another example is my life/disability insurance compared to my fiancee's. Her life insurance (in case of death, not sure if this is the correct term in English) is about half of mine, while my disability insurance is half of hers. Apparently this is because guys in their thirties have a higher chance of dying if they do injure themselves, while a far higher percentage of women are disabled. The insurance companies don't give a fuck why this happens, but they observe the different risks, and charge their premiums accordingly.

TL;DR: nothing to see here, insurance companies still base their premiums on risk analysis as they have done for at least 300 years. Move on.

I initially wrote this reply to another post, but only noticed that he was trolling right before submitting. I think my experiences through the years could be useful for a budget-conscious gamer building his own rig, so instead of deleting it I leave it here. Here are a few points to consider:

• * Buy quality wear parts, mid-range performance parts, upgrade only what you need for a new iteration. I have done this for 15 years, and have always been able to play the latest games at decent settings. My upgrade costs have been pretty stable at around $800 on average every two to three years (running on three years with my current rig, upgrading these days), giving me solid performance for less than $300/year. The quality brand 600W PSU I got five years ago, for instance, will still be present in my new rig, and maybe even the next one after that as long as it's cable compatible with new components.
• * Don't pay the huge premium on the latest GPU/CPU, you can get mid-range alternatives with 80% of the performance at 1/2 the price. Check out CPU and GPU charts (sort by rank), or actual game performance reviews to find good alternatives. No current game *needs* an i7 or a GTX 7XX video card to get great fps at high settings on a single 1920x1200 monitor. The ROI drops off in a ridiculous rate if you go for the newest hardware. It won't even pay off significantly in performance, see the next point.
• * Realise that all games are made to run very well on computers far below high-end. At the end of my 2.5-ish year upgrade cycle I might lose out on some minor eye-candy in the latest games. I also get to laugh at the tools who post in forums with comparison screenshots discussing whether the shiny they were able to turn on and run at 90 FPS with their two new $1019 video cards is even *visible in comparison screenshots*. Seriously.
• * Don't be stupid about what you really need. A 512GB SSD, for instance, is completely ridiculous in a budget gaming rig. A 120GB or even a 90GB one (as I have in my current rig and will keep for the next iteration) will hold a couple of OS'es and the 3-4 games you currently play. Just use mklink (or Steam Mover, which automates this for any game or application, not just Steam ones) to swap them in from your humongous bulk storage spinning drive. It will not degrade your gaming experience at all. If you pay a huge premium to avoid a three-minute coffee break every two weeks to shift in a new game that's your choice, but don't complain about it :)

• * Spend a few dollars more to get a mainboard with an automatic overclocking analyzer along with a a $30 aftermarket silent CPU cooler. I've never bothered to overclock manually, but if the computer does the work for me, I'll take the 10-30% stable CPU performance increase you can get "for free". A $40 premium for this feature and a cooler is *a lot* cheaper than actually buying a chip specced from the factory for those increased speeds. Even my current el-cheapo ASRock board did this three years ago.

• * Open up your case and clean your computer thoroughly once in a while. Remove all dust from air channels in cooling ribs and the video card. This one might be obvious, but very few people actually do it. The computer will run cooler, be more quiet and last longer.

I completely agree with you about brand name components. After two bad experiences with a relatively cheap video card and a mainboard from unknown manufacturers I only buy brands myself (including EVGA for video cards and ASRock for mainboards).

Yes, it does take a bit of research. No, you don't really have to spend more than a couple of hours on it if you don't want to.

Ok, I'll bite again. Firstly, I'm not a lady :)

As long as you don't actually address any of my arguments, this exchange is not even discussion. It is merely arguments from me and demagoguery from you. For instance, how the media portrays "most christians" is utterly irrelevant to this discussion, neonmonk's initial post very clearly singles out the people responsible for the school debacles in Texas. So do I in my initial reply from you. You try to divert the subject of the discussion to something else.

I didn't miss the point that you made under those false premises in your second post either, you don't like the term "christian fundamentalists" because it carries negative connotations. It certainly does carry negative connotations, for very good reasons, all of which has absolutely nothing to do with suicide bombers. So, to be kind (this has absolutely nothing to do with our discussion, but you brought it in), please be specific: is the term "fundamentalist christians" incorrect in the context of people advocating creationism in schools? Why? (from previous experience you'll probably avoid to address this point if you reply).

Which alternative term do you propose that has the same meaning as "christian fundamentalists"? You have already stated that this term gives an overly negative impression of christian fundamentalists (for lack of a better term, awaiting your reply). So, provide a single term which covers the same definition. (You'll avoid this point as well)

From what I can tell it is actually a reasonably precise term. I explained why I deemed it legitimate in my first post, and you carefully avoided to address that in either of your follow-up posts (you will fail to address these as well in an eventual reply). Your reply to neonmonk was, after all, what sparked off my initial reply. Here, I'll quote it in full:

In that post you correctly implied that all christians are not fundamentalists. It doesn't have any relevance to neonmonk's post, which blames fundamentalists for pushing creationism in American public schools.

The reason why I find our discussion uninteresting at this point is that you weasel out of addressing any points in my previous posts. You complain that mainstream media is treating you unfairly, which I'm by no means convinced that they are. That you feel that the term is stigmatising, or that you feel that it doesn't apply to you in particular, is irrelevant as long as it is a precisely defined term which does, in fact, include the people in TFA. So, focus on answering the points I assert that you'll fail to address above, and we might have an interesting discussion.

Did you read the post you replied to? Those advocating creationism in schools *are* christian fundamentalists by virtue of their beliefs. I agree that most people who consider themselves christians are not fundamentalists, but they are irrelevant to this particular issue.

While I appreciate the irony of your us-vs-them stance, I don't know why you dragged suicide bombers into this. Most people know the difference between them and christian fundamentalists. The term itself is still not incorrectly applied, I notice that you avoid that point.

This discussion is neither fruitful nor interesting (Fundamentalists Don't Like Being Called Fundamentalists, Film at Eleven). I probably won't reply to any further posts in this thread.