Have you seen Brando in Oklahoma!?

I live in San Diego, some of the time, and similar results were posted here, too. The increase in rear-end collisions from people slamming on the brakes negates any benefit from reduced T-bones.

San Diego also reduced yellow light times, sometimes to below the legal limit, in order to boost revenue.

A judge looked at the program in 2001, said, "That's bullshit", and banned it for a year, and then the government finally ended it on its own in 2013.

It's a common problem in the programming field to make a virtue out of overgeneralization, even when it conflicts with other virtues, such as ease of use or security. What actual benefit do you get from allowing the inclusion of control characters in filenames? How does that benefit compare with the amount of pain and extra effort involved in dealing with those filenames?

The other thing is that "fixing the tools" is a complete non-starter. You're talking about "fixing" a large subset -- possibly even a majority -- of programs on Unix systems, in a way that will be incompatible with existing tools. The elegance of putting some minor restrictions on filenames into the filesystem is that it works with virtually all existing user-level software, with no changes to that software required.

Back in the early 90s I had the opportunity of participating on a paleontological expedition to the badlands of Montana. The soil was built up over hundreds of millions of years and flooding cut through the soft soil leaving a stratigraphy that is dramatic and easy to read. You can even see the Chicxulub ejecta, a chocolate brown horizontal line about the width of your hand.

Now whole dinosaur skeletons are a rare find. You can spend a whole season tramping through the badlands and never find two bones that go together. But individual bones are more common, and bone fragments are more common still, and experts can often identify the group of dinosaurs or even the species of dinosaur a bone fragment came from, often a surprisingly small fragment of bone.

What we were doing was assembling a database of species found by layer, which in turn maps to era. What the PI was finding was a shift towards species with anatomical adaptations to deal with heat. His opinion was that there was already a climate driven adaptive stress on the dinosaur population, which turned the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact into a knock-out blow.

So the idea that there was more going on than an asteroid impact is hardly new. People were thinking that way twenty years ago.

One thing every thoughtful fan of the mystery story knows is that in real life, motivation tells you very little about who done what. That's because *most* people, when faced with a problem, don't even consider murder. Murderers are not typical people.

The same goes for hackers. When companies first started putting Internet connections back in the 90s in I would explain that they need to start taking steps to secure their networks, and almost without exception the response was "Why? Why would anyone be interested in hacking *us*?" And I had to explain that the Internet was accessible to *everyone*, including people whose motivations and ways of thinking would make no sense to them.

Motivation may have limited use in perhaps identifying some possible suspects, but it's not probative of anything. You can't rule anyone out or in based on what you think their motivations are or should be. The only way to know that somebody has done something is by following the chain of evidence that leads to some concrete action they've taken.

But now that they denied involvement, I suspect they may be.

I don't know which distro, I just know my friend griped about me sending him links to sites that use Flash because they frequently crashed Firefox. Heh

Yes, if you substitute one belief for another you greatly change the outcome of the extrapolation. "I beleive AI will never exist so that won't happen." Thanks for supporting my point that this sort of extrapolation is not science.

Well, there's two reasons why 3D printing makes sense. One is prototyping. You might need to make a half dozen different prototypes that are pretty similar to each other before you find one that really works. The second is replacement. You may need to replace these things on a regular basis. Replacing them is just a matter of sending a file to a printer -- no craft skill needed at all.

Hand crafting something like this falls within the scope of my tinkering abilities. I've worked with fiberglass and epoxy and wood. But it's not for everyone and if someone had to *pay* me to make something like this it would probably cost a thousand dollars a pair.

Something like this would seem to fall into the sweet spot for 3D printing: something you need more than one of, but not *thousands* of identical copies.

That was a dozen years ago. He can't self-publish *now* because he has a contract with Springer.

The artist workstations at Sony Imageworks are Linux.

<troll>Ah, Windows... the gift that keeps on giving.</troll>

Seriously, though... this is pretty ugly. It checks back every five minutes for each machine. You would think that Sony IT would notice that network traffic (or, say, the fact that all of their Windows desktops started listening on port 443). The moral of this story is run an IDS, scan your network, and pay attention to it all! :(

I have a friend who was a medical entomologist and journal editor before he retired. I ran into him while I was browsing a book table at a conference, and mentioned that I'd like to buy one of the medical entomology textbooks but the $250 price tag was a bit steep.

"Just wait," he said. "I'm about to change that. I'm writing a new textbook that will be a lot cheaper. I want students and public health departments to be able to afford a solid medical entomology reference."

When his book came out the publisher set the priced at $500. It was twice as expensive any of its competitors. Now something like this is never going to sell like a basic calculus book, but it has a considerably larger market than you'd think. His idea was that it would find its way into the syllabus in medical, veterinary and public health schools; and that hospitals and public health agencies would buy copies for their libraries. But his strategy to make that happen by making the book affordable and sell in (relatively) high numbers; the publisher had other plans.

So don't blame authors for high textbook prices. It's publishers who set the price.

Roughly, not exactly. Pegging the price of a battery switch to the price of gas really wouldn't make any sense, although it might make sense to make it based on the cost of electricity in the area, assuming that that varies.

Shutting down air traffic after 9/11 had a measurable impact on weather over CONUS from the lack of contrails in the sky. It isn't unfathomable that ships can also have a measurable level of impact.