Their reading lists had a large amount of overlap before. I think these jerks don't realize how precarious the situation of Science Fiction literary genre is... As it is most breakout authors are accidentally sponsored by Scientology, and major publishing houses will not take a chance on anything but space opera, someone with 150,000 blog and twitter readers, or licensed adaptations.

everything stupid and petty we do as a community puts another nail into that coffin. Having our most prestigious award turned into a poor downtrodden straight white male protest is a freaking deathblow.

Central Office / Remote Terminal

It is just a fancy way of saying that their routers at the end of the street are full.

I moved into nice apartments in Westlake Village, California. Called Verizon, had them hook up DSL. It was fast and worked well... for 12 hours.
My service was shut off.

I called and they said "Service is not available in your area.

I told them I had service yesterday, and they confirmed that I did, but that it was a mistake, and service was not available.

We went around and around, I finally gave up after 2 hours on the phone, vowing to sign up with someone else. No other service available, and since I was at the bottom of a valley, EVEN SATELLITE was not available.

After a few more days of phone calls and escalations, I finally straight up asked them "Is the CO/RT full and you didn't realize it until you hooked me up?" they admitted that yes it was.

I made a deal with my neighbor, bought her network equipment and paid her phone bill every month just for letting me use her wifi.

THEN to add insult to injury, I got a contract cancellation fee bill from Verizon in the mail, because I terminated my contract for DSL before a year was up.

Apple watch's medical features are a handy excuse to self-justify buying it... I am fine with it, I justified buying a PS3 for myself back in the day by saying "heck, I needed a blu-ray player anyway."

But we all know it is suspension of disbelief, and no serious consideration.

Go to the solar city website... I'll wait.

Ok now that you are back you probably know how solarcity works right? No? Weird because you'd think it is pretty simple.

Here is how it works, once you TALK TO THEM ON THE PHONE they will send you "do not disclose" paperwork that amounts to: You pay to install solar cells on your roof, then you pay to keep them clear of tree branches etc, then you buy electricity from the solar cells at slightly higher than municipal power rates, then you buy the rest of your power from the municipality or other provider at the normal price. Then they uninstall them 20 years later for free.

100% of tax credits go to Solar City.

I really don't understand why you would do this over green mountain or some other "renewable at a slightly higher price to make you feel better" kind of place. SolarCity is a complete rip, offering all of the disadvantages of a grid-tied solar install, with none of the advantages. For my particular area, the more power their solar cells would generate, the higher my electric bill would be.

woosh

I hate how much the McDonalds lawsuit is used to debase the legal system as frivolous "jackpot justice"

Her jury award was 2.7 million. The judge reduced it to 640k, but the parties settled rather than appealing more, presumably for less than 640k. The coffee WAS way too hot. 40 degrees (f) above industry standard, so hot it could cause 3rd degree burns in 2 seconds.

This case is trotted out as an example of how the little guy keeps the poor multi-billion dollar corporations at bay using frivolous lawsuits, when really it should be an example of how even when everyone agrees on the facts, even when the law is on the little guy's side, the corporation will bend them over and at the very least get more positive publicity than their piddly settlement money could possibly buy.

This is the story of how McDonalds nearly killed a woman, she sued begrudgingly because she couldn't afford her medical bills, she won, and somehow McDonalds is the victim.

Car analog - Is Hyundai better than Honda because they have better warranties? NO, of course not.

Excellent customer service when a failure occurs is worse than no failure occurring. A LOT worse.

They probably inserted the story in MySQL at the same time they inserted the reference to the parent company. There was a race condition and the reference to Dice was dropped. Shame they didn't use Postgresql, the objectIds representing the slashdot/dice relationship would never change and it would be never be lost in the name of speed.

People hate Valve's customer service, sure, but across my 5 accounts (including my kids accounts) I have never had a reason to need support on Steam. I have bought 3 EA games in the last decade and have had to contact EA support 4 times. They were helpful each time. But which company gave me better customer service? The one that made a system where I don't need support at all, or the one that forced me to TALK ON THE PHONE like some sort of oxcart driver in order to unfuck my Sim City singleplayer online game.

Customer service scores are great and all, but if I never need support at all, that ranks much higher on my hierarchy of ratings.

+1 he will be missed.
“And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.”

Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

Yeah, leading edge aids treatments, body building doping, and "anti-aging" treatments would be revolutionized by such a finding 50 years ago.

It also presupposes that languages like TI-Basic can't be used for things like functional programming, imperative programming, or even object oriented programming, they absolutely can - sort of.

TI basic has a few huge limitations, but most programming paradigms can work in even incredibly limited platforms
you can overcome limitations with any number of structures

limitation - there are only 27 variables in the namespace and they are all global.
functional programming - all of your functions have to be stateless, so those global variables don't get stomped
or
Imperative programming - globally synchronized state across all functions

limitation - almost no data structures beyond arrays and strings
Object Oriented programming - store complex data in bitmaps stored as images or math functions, wrapped in getters/setters that handle decoding/encoding

Honestly the pure, simple, highly constrained world of TI-Basic did more to help me grow as a programmer than my first 3 years of college. In college I mostly gained the vocabulary to describe the concepts I thought I invented while farting around with my TI-83 in high school math class.

Pretty much every company ever has already solved this problem with polycom (or similar) conferencing phones(ranging from a few hundred dollars on up)
http://www.polycom.com/product...

Also conference phone numbers like Webex at all so lots of people can call in, if you need that sort of thing.

This is not a new or unsolvable problem, this is "standard office gear" since the 1990s.

the ocean is about 0.023% of the earth's total mass.

Even if we captured ALL of it, we would be hard pressed to make any real difference in earth's rotation.