I will say that while SAS has some really great point-and-click analysis tools...I would venture to guess that most experienced SAS are doing as much "command line programming" as they would have to do in R.

My company uses a ton of SAS and I can count on one hand the number of times I have went to look at someone else's work and found that they were using the GUI stuff. Pretty much everyone just writes .sas programs; most people use EG as an IDE, but those programs could all be run just as well in batch mode from the AIX command line.

Yeah, I think a lot of people in here forget that there are some things that SAS is really freaking good at. SAS isn't some beastly mess that big corporations are saddled with and can't escape from (like say SAP)...it is a fairly well designed piece of software with a bunch of programmers actively working to make it better (very happy programmers if you trust the frequent ratings of SAS as one of the best companies to work for). It is fairly expensive on the enterprise level, but a lot of companies out there think that it is totally worth it. Of course...I'm kind of cheap and more technically inclined...if I were starting a new company, I would use R or Python for everything and just keep a couple of desktop SAS licenses just in case.

Yes, most of its programming syntax is designed in a way that makes sense if you processing punch-cards, but once you understand that, the language is fairly logical and simple. The fact that it was designed for punch cards is the main reason why it doesn't stumble into dataset size limits (unlike memory-based software like R or STATA do), although it can lead to slowdowns from being I/O bound.

And yes, sometimes I wish I could define functions rather than trying to hack repeated code through the Macro language.

And no, the standard graphics/output is not are pretty as it can be from R (ggplot2 is quite nice), but with a little work, you can make quite nice charts in SAS.

But, despite all of that, it really is quite a nice system with absolutely excellent documentation and support. I never touch the extra GUI stuff, but the people who keep suggesting RStudio clearly don't know what they are talking about. The level of analysis that you can do in SAS Enterprise Guide is insane. EG is not just an IDE for the programming language, it is a GUI with a full analysis suite available through point and click. It is like making charts in excel except you can do complex statistical procedures over millions of observations--and unlike excel, once you have gone through the point-and-click exercise, it gives you all of the code in case you want to tweak it or run it on something else. Sure, the code can be a bit funny, but nowhere near as bad as what came out of an old WYSIWYG HTML editor. Again, I never use it myself, but for a neophyte...they can get started doing real work while still learning how to code (remember, a lot of SAS programmers come to the language already knowing the statistics, but having to learn the language).

Remember when you could build your own airplane, or build your own car, or maybe your own radio set? Well I don't, but you could. Heck, people built their own computers for the longest time (some still do).

But the nature of just about everything is it gets more and more complicated until it's much easier to just get something prebuilt than it is to do it yourself and those who choose to do it themselves are doing it either as a hobby or because of their employer.

I've been writing code for 20 years though I've primarily been a sys admin. There are things that are much more difficult but many of the tools I used in the early 90s (bash for example, or C) are still around and follow much of the same rules as now.

Considering how many doctors used to inoculate for smallpox, a lot. There's probably envelopes containing spores in old collections. Hope they're dead.

Android 4.x devices like the Nexus 7 don't have a dedicated menu button. And in this copy of Google Maps, there's no "tricolon" button where the overflow menu is supposed to be.

https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/6054498?p=maps_android_tips_tricks&hl=en&rd=2

The first thing that came up on my phone for this? "Popular tip: View maps offline." I got to it from within Maps by opening the menu off to the left side and hitting "Tips and Tricks" down at the bottom.

(This was on a Moto X running Android 4.4. YMMV.)

Well...during peak hours, Uber X will go into surge pricing and cost far more than a taxi anyways.

Usually when there is surge pricing, I just use Uber to hail a normal taxi (in cities where this is possible). With a normal taxi, you pay a small fee to Uber, but otherwise the rate is straight-meter. Of course, that still won't help if literally every taxi is full, but it gets you better odds than simply standing on a single street corner and waving your hand.

It was more expensive than a taxi in NYC?

Every other city I have used it in, UberX was at a fair discount to a regular taxi...after all, why would you hop a ride in some random person's car (whom you will have to provide with directions because they don't know the city) if it costs more than an actual taxi service? The only thing more expensive was the black car (limo) service.

Except for the ones that go off about teh gheys as they point to Leviticus.

My local grocery store has a drop box for old cell phones and I have seen them in many other places (and at one point, I received some prepaid mailing envelopes for old phones). Supposedly they refurbish them and send them to Africa or give them to the elderly or abused women who may need to make use of the still-functional 911 features. Although, I question how useful this actually is...who is going to keep a 911-only phone charged and ready at all times? If you aren't actually using it for calls, and aren't used to having a mobile phone, that thing will just be dead in times of need. About the only situations where I can see it being useful is storing it powered-off and attached to a charger in a car or as a "secret" phone for a domestic abuse victim (can pull it out if your abuser takes away your real phone and monitors the land-line).

Yeah. That flag pretty much no longer flies over the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Last time I went into a court house, I was required to remove my belt. Somehow, the US made it through a foreign invasion, a Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and absolutely massive social upheaval without requiring people to remove clothing to enter into courts of law. But a few jackasses drive airplanes into some buildings and it's goodbye liberty, hello 'safety'. This 100% safe nonsense is destroying the Republic. We are less safe than ever and we have done it to ourselves. Government is the problem with our security, not to the solution to it

Yup, gets even worse in the city where there is an unwritten rule that the left turn cars get their shot to go when the light goes yellow/red. Obviously the cars that are actually pulled into the intersection should go or they will block traffic...but on intersections with no dedicated turn signal, the signal change is the only chance any car gets to turn during the cycle in busy traffic and thus (at least in Chicago) there is a tacit allowance for a couple of extra cars to complete the turn without fear of a ticket (usually 2-3 cars in each direction--the one in the intersection, the one part-way in, and the car behind them if everybody moves fast).

Of course, if people driving straight blow through the yellow and start of the red, then the turners have no time, and even those that were already in the intersection end up not being able to complete their turns until the other lights have already turned green.

Dedicated turn signals would alleviate the problem...but in pedestrian areas, they just produce new problems. Almost every time I go to lunch, I pass an intersection where there is a dedicated left turn and a lot of tourists--there is a Don't Walk sign, but often pedestrians start walking as soon as the traffic lights change (anticipating the Walk sign, not realizing there will be a turn signal)...leading to the turning cars not being able to clear the intersection and slamming on their horns. Then some of the pedestrians decide to stop in the intersection and give the cars the finger (some of them realize that they were wrong and hurry out of the way). Then the traffic lights change for the straight traffic, and oncoming cars start honking at the turning cars who are now blocking traffic...and the Walk sign turns on, so more pedestrians start walking and blocking the turning cars from being able to go...BAM! Gridlock.

That's not duress. That's just a contract.

It is literally saying, if you don't agree to this contract, you don't get the things that this contract says you get. It is like the guy at subway saying "If you don't give me $5, you can't have that sandwich". It's not duress until you say you don't really want the sandwich and the guy says "And if you don't want to buy the sandwich, I am going to beat your face in"

Duress is something that is not part of the contract that is being used to force you to sign the contract. The judge isn't going to uphold a contract that says "we won't kill you if you have signed this"...but they might uphold a contract that omits the death threat if you can't provide any proof of the threat. Some none-violent duress might be if your wife also worked for the company and they said "If you don't sign this, not only will you not get the job, but we are going to fire your wife"

One of my favorite bits of "Long Way Round" (documentary where Ewan McGregor and a friend ride motorcycles around the world) is when their cameraman fails to pass the motorcycle license test. The guy is already a pretty experienced rider and has a swiss license but they find out right before he leaves for the trip that he needs a UK license for some reason (reciprocity?).

He takes the first appointment that they can get...and fails for some tiny mistake. There is a wait-time after failing the test, so he actually has to start the trip late because of some tiny, tiny infraction (my recollection is that he didn't turn is head quite far enough to check if a corner was clear).

That would never happen in the US. I knew plenty of people in high school who hit the cones while parallel parking and still passed (probably explains all of the asshats I see in the city whose parallel parking technique involves damaging other people's expensive property). You should not be able to pass a driving test in which you made physical contact with something that is representative of another car.

In the state where I got my first license, you had to wait 1 week before testing again. You didn't have to actually practice or have any additional instruction...you just had to show up again.

A lot of kids would schedule their test at the nearby facility...and make an appointment for a week later at a testing facility that was further away but known for being easier (didn't have any one-way streets on the test...). If you fail, you just go take an easier test a week later and hope you pass.

Not sure what happened after the second time....but I don't think there were ever additional education requirements.