No. I use emacs. She uses vi. Who cares? If you share code, and use the same git repository, then a common indentation style is important. Using the same editor is not. The only thing we argue about is which editor the kids will learn.

No. The point is to get fewer lewd or undesirable responses, not fewer responses overall. Neither the summary nor TFA claims that only, or even mostly, the "bad" responses were reduced, and there is no reason that I can see why that should be true. In fact, it seems to me that the best guys can afford to be the most choosy, and would be the least likely to click on a profile with no photo. If you really want to just reduce the number of messages, with no regard for quality, then just delete every other message that you receive before reading them. That would achieve the same result.

Bars never worked for me. I don't drink, and I am not interested in desparate drunks. Match.com was great. I met many women, and had a date (or two) almost every weekend for six months. I already knew that my future wife's goal was marriage and kids before I even clicked on her link. We exchanged a few emails, chatted on the phone, and then met two days later. Everything clicked. The only real question was whether we had compatible indentation styles. On the second date, she had her laptop with her, so I asked to see a code sample and take a look at her ~/.indent.pro. Her code was perfect BSD style, like a snippet from from the FreeBSD kernel. We were married eight months later.

When I used match.com, I got a response rate of about 30%. So maybe the problem is with you, not the women.

Here are a few tips:

1. Send an individualized response. Mention a few things from her personal profile, and compliment her on something specific.
2. Include a picture of yourself next to a nice car, or house, dressed well. Men are "shallow" about looks, women are "shallow" about money.
3. Mention that you like dogs and/or horses.

That doesn't work, because the women don't want to look "easy". They want the man to do the work.

But existing dating websites already offer the option of hiding your picture, so this adds nothing new. The problem is that hiding your picture results in far fewer messages, by a factor of eight. I met my wife through match.com (now married for 12 years, with two kids). I never messaged any women that didn't display their pictures. In addition to issues of chemistry/attractiveness, photoless people are more likely to be married or in other relationships.

It only worked well the first time. There were spin-offs from the race to the moon. There were no significant spin-offs from the shuttle or the ISS. By sucking dollars and engineers out of the rest of the economy, they likely did more harm than good.

There is no reason to believe that a Mars mission will require new non-space technology that wouldn't be developed anyway. Certainly not a trillion dollars worth, which is the low range estimate of what such a mission would cost.

That will change nothing. Democrats will be less likely to acquire IDs, even if they are free, and will be more likely to lose them. Democrats just tend to be more screwed up dysfunctional people. But that is no reason to deny them their right to vote.

The reason is that laws should address actual problems, and there is no evidence that individual voter fraud is a problem.

Except that people at the bottom of the economic ladder, which are disproportionately minorities, are much less likely to have a valid ID. They are also much more likely to vote Democratic rather than Republican. Politicians are well aware of this, so voter ID laws are passed with Republican votes, and volunteer ballot monitors checking for compliance are nearly 100% Republican. In a theoretical perfect world, voter ID laws would not be racist. In reality they are.

Indeed. I live in the SF Bay Area. A 4.5 is enough to wake you up if you are a light sleeper, but will not cause damage to anything.

People riding on buses are not also driving cars at the same time. I am not making that up.

The lowest projected cost of CHSR is $58 BILLION dollars. No one believes that number, and even the most fervent CHSR advocates have now admitted it was a lowball estimate. But for the sake of argument, lets use it. The plan is to run 100 trains with a capacity of 1000 passengers each. $58B/100,000 = $580,000 per seat.

You are wrong by a factor of ten. Buses are standard products sold in competitive markets. Passenger trains are custom designed and sold to governments where cost is not an important consideration.

No. Because the highways ALREADY EXIST, and the buses displace cars, so no additional capacity is needed.

Even if you accept the lowest of the projected costs for California high speed rail project, the cost is over $500,000 PER SEAT. Show me a bus that costs that much.

The government subsidizes it.

Not true at all. It is the government keeping Amtrak afloat. Support for Amtrak is surprising broad. Democrats support it because they like big government, and especially like trains. Republicans support it because service to sparsely populated red states would be the first thing cut if the subsidies were reduced.

It seems to me that they would have been developed even sooner if we had spent more on scientific research and less on rocket fuel. Instead of spending X dollars on Y to get Z as a side effect, why not spend a lot less than X dollars directly on Z?

No. That is the "bullshit" number made up by politicians. No one actually believes that, since that number is from 2012, and even the politicians are no longer sticking by it.

The best way to estimate the cost, is to issue bonds that pay on a sliding scale, with a normal payout if the projected cost is met, more if the cost is under, and less it there is a cost overrun. Then see how much people investing THEIR OWN MONEY would be willing to pay for those bonds. Of course this will not happen for California high speed rail, or any other boondoggle, because the market would expose the real costs.

Breaking news: The system is really broken. Pouring another few trillion into it won't fix it. It will make it more broken.

Yes. That is about right. Moving people by train is about as efficient as moving two people in a car. That is why trains make some sense for local commuting, since most people commute one-person-per-vehicle. But they make less sense for long distance travel, where people mostly don't drive alone. But in either case, a bus is generally even better than the train, with much less up-front cost, and is more flexible when commuting patterns change.