Your classifying Fukushima as a minor accident? It's classified as level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the highest level possible. I agree that it is not as bad as Chernobyl, but hardly minor.

Getting enraged when interrupted probably isn't normal. Although I do the hyperfocus thing and it is pretty annoying to get interrupted. My wife knows not to call me at work. But I don't think I'm ADHD.

Read the TFA. People aren't getting upset about skin color: Quote: "In the book, Wade suggests that such genetic differences may help explain why some people live in tribal societies and some in advanced civilizations, why African-Americans are allegedly more violent than whites, and why the Chinese may be good at business."

The last thing I need when I am focused of a difficult chunk of code is Clippy popping up and breaking my focus. Some tasks are just much harder than others. I think any decent coder knows when they are struggling and increases their focus or grabs someone on their team to help. Bad coders may not, but bad coders are always bad coders, and no tools will help someone who just can't get it or just doesn't care.

The search-engine drive may contain stuff they'd rather not be public (for reasons of competition), like the software that manages all that data and the data structures it is stored in. Then there is Google Mail, which contains private emails and contacts. And I'm sure other examples.

Solar wind. Solar radiation pressure. Bits of gas and dust blowing off the comet and hitting you. EM. Lots of other stuff going on is space. "had the effects of the sun's radiation pressure on the spacecraft of the Viking program been ignored, the spacecraft would have missed Mars orbit by about 15,000 kilometers"

GP is not saying that such things aren't bad, they're saying that when you lump those things in the same category as rape and just give a statistic for the overall category that it is not very meaningful.

Followup, not dupe. The post you referenced is also referenced in the summary.

Solar flares are associated with coronal mass ejections, and CMEs cause geomagnetic storms if they hit the earth. Travel time is about 3-4 days days, but can be as little as 18 hours (as was the case in the 1859 Carrington event).

I think the mystery being referenced here is "why are they different?" not "what does the other side look like?". In which case we only have known they are different for 55 years and therefore can't have been wondering about it for longer.

I think the Perl solution is fine (not that I'm a fan of Perl syntax in general). The Java solution is fine (as you point out errors get detected at compile time). The Python solution is not: having to call "str(i)" everything I want to put an int into a string is too verbose (which makes it harder to read) and very error prone (especially when you are used to other languages, but I imagine even if Python is your only language it still is). And the fact that you don't detect the error until you hit the statement it's in (which might be rare if it is in some error handling block) is what really makes it suck. Dynamically-typed languages in general suck - try to be quick-and-dirty in upfront development time and you'll pay for it later.

As far as ternary operator reading like an English sentence: making things read like English always goes badly in programming languages, e.g. COBOL. And I find the Python example particularly vexing when trying to understand a chunk of code, because it is inverted to the logical flow; logically you execute the test first, then decide which branch to take based on the results of the test. That's the real problem, it's not the English, it's the order.

The nice thing about Pascal as a learning language was you knew it was a toy language that you wouldn't use in the real world. I fear the programmers who learn Python in school and then try to apply it to major projects in the real world. I learned lots of other academic languages in school too, there is no problem with the fact that I never used them outside that class; it taught me to pick up new languages quickly.

The whitespace sensitivity is not the thing I hate most about Python (although I hate that too). I hate that I can't build a string by doing "Foo" + i (where i is an integer) and I can't catch the error at compile time (because it's interpreted, but more because variables aren't declared to be a type); it's a "worst of both worlds" combination of weakly and strongly typed language. Also the ternary operator is a huge WTF: a if test else b . Why the hell would you put the test in the middle of the 2 possible results! And why not do it like C, Java, and just about every other popular language.

Undergrad CS lab had SGI and HP machines, and another lab had some Suns. Also 3 button mice and a scroll wheel that was a separate unit from the mouse.

The fun of making things pop-up on other people's screens on the lab. Nothing was locked down by default so unless you changed the permissions anyone could launch a process to display on your screen.

Neko was fun too.

Nuke the gay whales for Jesus