If you saw an item that should cost $10 priced at $0.01, and you believed the listing erroneous, would you take advantage of the error to get a quick bargain? What if the item should actually cost $1000?

If so, what is your justification?

The lawers' grasp of the rules of English capitalization does not inspire confidence:

“SPE does not consent to your possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading, or making any use of the Stolen information, and to request your cooperation in destroying the Stolen Information,”

It reads like a bad fantasy novel full of Portentous Capitalization.

Well, if the Sony records had been subpoenaed, your analogy would be spot on.

You know, just because you're ignorant doesn't mean there's a conspiracy every time you're forced to learn something new.

"Polar Vortex" appears in the scientific literature decades before it became news.

Computer Science *already has* a massive gender divide. Taking the nerds who are making the topic hostile to women and forcing them into close proximity to the few remaining women is a recipe for a completely gender-based educational program.

If you're going to be anti-nerd, you're going to lose out on most of your best students. It's not mere accident that CS and nerds go together.

And of course as a nerd myself, if you're anti-nerd and consider nerds to be a problem, I'm against your programs; you're just another nerd-despising member of the mainstream, dressing your hatred up in progressive ideology.

I thought what made the original Blade Runner so powerful was the way it depicted subjective experience as both precious and ephemeral. When you reach the stage of your life when you begin to confront your mortality, you're painfully aware that the most precious things you've accumulated are memories, and how one instant those memories will be here, and the next they'll be gone forever.

I expect the sequel won't be as good as the original, simply because of regression to the mean. The original was something special, and it's simply not possible to manufacture that. In Hollywood they try, they hire the smartest, most talented, most attractive people, make them work like hell and hope for a miracle. But we all know that model doesn't produce greatness, it produces adequacy, on an operatic scale.

Still, while it's a reasonably safe bet the sequel will fall short of the original, you can't be completely sure. Lighting does sometimes strike the same place twice. I agree the plot outlined doesn't look so promising, but you never know.

I don't know, perhaps you should ask the GP poster, who posited that somehow, anybody showing enthusiasm is being "shut down by the professor" who is "cruelly rebuking them" by telling them "Let's talk about this item of common interest together after class, rather than distracting everybody in the class with topics that aren't relevant to the class."

Which actually seems like a pretty nice way of putting it, if you ask me.

Not "anybody showing enthusiasm" Specifically "guys" showing enthusiasm. Nobody but you (assuming you're the same AC) said anything about Hadoop or Erlang or any other irrelevant subject during a lecture about C; the language of the course was Python in any case.

And what the enthusiastic guys were told was "You're so passionate about the material and you're so well prepared. I'd love to continue our conversations but let's just do it one on one." This was a _stock_ answer, so obviously not a sincere invitation but rather merely a politely-phrased rebuke.

You are absolutely correct. African Americans are the ones who chose to separate from American culture. When the US Constitution was written, African Americans volunteered to be slaves and quite vociferously demanded that they were only as 2/3rds of a person.

Can always tell a knee-jerker on this issue, because they've heard of the 3/5ths compromise but they don't know which side was which. Bonus points for getting the number wrong though.

But people who follow your line of reasoning will be almost entirely those who would have acted that way anyway.

Game theorists?

If one group is going to define things as "us vs. them" and make the categories immutable, members of the other group have to play along or be at a disadvantage.

Do I unreasonably stereotype you? Then perhaps you should consider whether you do that same thing to others.

Hmm... let me consider that...... considered. No, you're just an ass.

It seems to me that if we are truly one nation of Americans, we as a nation have a collective responsibility to ensure that nobody gets left behind.

Does not follow. There's always going to be winners and losers, even if there are no racial, ethnic, or gender schisms dividing them.

If we are one nation, then the onus is upon every one of us to do all we can to help undermine the barriers that keep a group of Americans, simply through accident of birth, from achieving social parity.

Unfortunately there's a prisoners dilemma here. If one subgroup chooses not to identify with the nation but only with themselves against another subgroup, they gain an advantage. The other subgroup can neutralize this disadvantage only by reacting in kind.

So, given that white men (or more specifically cis-white-hetero-males, though for the purposes of CS Asian males are included as well) are the target of various "social justice" initiatives, and in fact are now suffering for it (note the gender disparity in college admissions), it makes sense for white men to NOT be concerned with boosting the groups who have labeled them the enemy.

Then what's a better term for "people descended from people who were natives of North and South America in AD 1491, who had their land forcibly taken from them in European invasions from 1600 through 1900?"

Losers?

Because that is all that matters right? 'Merica. And really only the East Coast of 'Merica.

Because that was the claim of various alarmist predictions about anthropogenic climate change made after Katrina. If they've made predictions about Asia, I hadn't heard them.

(For those keeping score, since 2005, the year of Katrina, the number of major hurricanes hitting the US mainland stands at zero. No doubt it will go up again at some point, and anthropogenic climate change will be blamed).

I grew up in an urban, blue collar neighborhood in the 60s; we didn't have much (any) exposure to live music. But my mom had that depression era better-yourself ethic, so she amassed a fairly complete record collection of classical "standards", and bought a pretty good component stereo to play them on. But I never saw her listen to any of them. Having these meant we were cultured people to her, but she was too busy getting things done to waste time sitting around listening to music.

I on the other hand had plenty of time, and listened to everything. When I was older I saved up my paper route money and bought a high end audio-technica cartridge, then began adding to the record collection.

When I was sixteen I got a job at the hospital which paid good money; 20 hours a week at $3.75/hr which was good money back in 1977. I took my new found wealth and bought my very first opera tickets. I remember sitting in the audience and being shocked when the music just came out of nowhere, without the preliminary low hissing and popping I associated with the start of music. But that was nothing to what followed.

The music had color, depth and dimension I'd never imagined music having. Even though by then I had a pretty good sound system, what came out of it was a washed-out echo of the real thing. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I can't describe it, except to say that if music coming off a vinyl record was a strong cup of coffee, then live music would be shooting cocaine directly into your veins.

That experienced killed my budding audiophile tendencies. To this day if I had a thousand dollars to spend on music, I'd spend it on performance tickets rather than upgrading my sound system.

As for CDs, they seem to be all over the place to me. Early on there were a lot of bad CDs because of bad engineering. Some were released with their vinyl oriented RIAA equalization intact, which is just plain dumb. People like to argue about technology, but I think recording engineering is an often overlooked factor in what comes out of your speakers. I have an MP3 album of the original cast recording of "Hair", and it sounds great over a good pair of earphones. It's not because of some kind of magical MP3 pixie dust, it's because the original recording was done so competently. If something is missing in the original master tapes, no amount of lossless encoding and copper-free speaker cables will conjure it back.