Clearly you are not a pro at English and should not be giving tips. 'Afternoon' means, quite literally, after noon. Evening is usually taken as roughly from 6pm to ~10-11pm. Those living further north in the arctic circle still have a morning, afternoon and evening even if the sun does not rise at all.

If you 'road' your train then wearing down your third rail is not really an issue...the screaming pedestrians and motorists trying to get our of your way might be a bigger problem though.

For those of us up in Canada or Northern Europe you need to mount the pannels on a vehicle which heads a long way south or west trailing a cable if they are going to be pointing at the sun in the late afternoon since the sun sets here around 15:30-16:00 this time of year. Simply pivoting or pointing west is just not going to cut it.

Possibly because it often isn't coding in real C++. In ATLAS, and particle physics in general, we use this awful data analysis package called ROOT which is about the worst example of C++ code you can possibly imagine (although it has significantly improved over the years). This package uses a C++ interpreter so that you can write C++ scripts. Sadly this interpreter cannot implement the full set of C++ so major bits of functionality are missing like virtual functions so it's hard to really call this C++.

Unfortunately, while there are many issues with ROOT, it is incredibly fast at I/O and has lots of features which do what we need (if you can navigate past the bugs, memory leaks and dodgy documentation). One way to do help with this is to use the Python interface so many of us use the Python interface as a shield from the full horror of ROOT. The other alternative is to write compiled C++ code which gives you the complete C++ functionality but still leaves you with the minefield of linking to ROOT. To give an example of how bad this can be a few years ago they had a bug which made you code dependent on the comments i.e. by adding a comment line the code generated a duplicate symbol error when linked. After a day of tracking this down to a pre-processor macro I was told by the root development team that they already knew about this bug but could not fix it...that was also the day I switched to using the Python interface!

Agreed but they had better not make any mistakes and accuse someone who does not subsequently get convicted. While it is hard to see how someone arrested for drunk driving would be not convicted they do have a history of mistakes like this. A few years ago they busted an online child pornography ring and then went around and named people whose credit cards were used without stopping to think that some of those cards were stolen and used fraudulently.

I'm all in favour of doing what we can to stop drunk driving but deliberately naming and shaming people before they have a conviction is dangerous at best and just plain wrong if those people are not found guilty.

Clearly you have never done experimental physics. Not only are there plenty of 'back of the envelope' calculations that would take far longer to input into a CAS system than to solve but we also use notation that I've no clue how to put into a CAS system. For example in the Standard Model Lagrangian I have 'vectors' to represent spin and colour. These are written into the same term as a multiplication and yet each colour vector must only multiply with colour matrices and other colour vectors. This is achieved by the summation convention but I've never seen a CAS system that supports this properly in a way that is simple enough for 'everyday' calculations.

We've already had to have that conversation with our 10 year old son. The Engineering faculty of our local university runs a Raspberry Pi programming course...but only for girls. My wife contacted them to ask about programs for our son. The super enthusiastic airhead who responded suggested that they had lots of programs for boys but really it boils down to a few places in a summer program and even then much of that program is for girls only. My wife got as far as asking them how their blatant sexism was consistent with the Alberta Human Rights act but got a typical email full of PR but empty of content. In the EU such practice would actually be illegal under gender discrimination laws in Alberta it is less clear since they have this get-out clause 'unless there is a justifiable reason'.

So we had to explain that there were no programs for him because he is a boy which he had a really hard time understanding because he has always been taught that sexism is wrong. Since actions speak louder than words this has undermined the lesson that he had learnt and I've already heard him once tease his older sister that she shouldn't use computers until she has had the 'special lessons for girls'! So as a scheme to eradicate sexism this is an epic way to shoot yourself in the foot. Even simple logic tells you that you cannot eradicate sexism while actually practicing it!

Really? Wow. You do all your exams on computer? None of them are handwritten, not even the maths and physics exams?

Fair point but there is one type of writing where typing is really terrible: mathematical notation. It is far, far faster for me to do calculations on paper with a pen than it is to use a computer. If I want it to look neat then writing LaTeX is a clear winner but typing expressions into LaTeX is a lot slower than just jotting them down. So for working things out paper and pen is so far the best there is even in the 21st century.

I agree that fresh is better than frozen but, most importantly, not being American, the option I wanted was: I prefer my turkey....at Christmas.

Not entirely - it tells you the number of write cycles each cell has: 5*365=1,825 cycles. You then just have to hope that the load leveller knows what it is doing because a single file like a mailbox could easily exceed that in a day if the writes were always to the same location on the disk.

Well a C90 tape had a 90 minute length and, depending on you computer the data was written at 1200 baud (BBC Model B) to ~1500 baud for a ZX spectrum. Unfortunately there was some overhead so lets say this was 20% (guesstimate). This would give a tape capacity of 90x60x(1200/8)x0.8=648000 bytes or ~633 kB. Some people used to use C120s which would get you an extra 33% but those tapes were thinner and more likely to break or suffer degradation in sound quality which meant you lost your program. With a Spectrum and a C120 you'd might be pushing the dizzying heights of a whole MB on tape.

The premise that this is the only rational approach is wrong though. Suppose you lived in a town where the only way to keep armed militants off the streets was to have those streets patrolled by robots programmed to shoot anyone carrying a gun? If you stay away from the robots you will be going into areas far more dangerous where the likelihood of getting short by some extremist is higher than the likelihood of getting shot by a malfunctioning robot.

If the alternative to the robot is something even more likely to result in serious harm or death then it is entirely rational not to run away from them.

Alpha particles are actually the most dangerous form of radiation because they are the most highly ionizing and so they cause the most damage to cells. While this also makes them the easiest to shield (even a fair amount of air will stop them) their danger lies from either direct skin contact or from consuming something contaminated by them.

Indeed, in these kinds of class action lawsuits, there is only one big winner, and that is the lawyers who are litigating it.

I'm all for class action lawsuits in principle; companies that do things that are bad for soceity should face some sort of consequences for their actions, and people who were inconvenienced or harmed by the actions of companies should have some sort of recompence. In practice, however, usually what happens is that the people nominally benefitting get just a few dollars (probably not worth the paperwork of making it happen), the charge to the company is perhaps not trivial, but an easily absorbed cost of doing business, and it's a bonanza for the lawyers involved. The rewards system encourages litigous behavior for the sake of litigation, not good behavior on the part of companies nor does it provide any real recompense for people harmed.