Not always. His yacht was hideous!

Casinos make every effort to enhance this delusion. When you win, the lights flash and the bells ring. When you lose, you lose in silence. In a large casino, you can hear the sounds of someone winning almost constantly.

No, more harshly. If it is part of his nature, then he will be less responsive to rehabilitation, and more likely to be recidivist, so the only alternative is to lock-em-up.

That depends on how good they were at self-teaching. If you just dive in and start coding, there will be plenty of holes because you don't learn the theory behind the code. But if, in addition to the coding, you also read a few CS textbooks from cover to cover, you will be fine.

My experience is that many self-taught programmers lack understanding of theoretical things like finite automata, data normalization, complexity theory, program correctness, data structure design, etc. But it is much easier to teach that stuff to a bright kid, than it is to get productive programming out of someone that went to college for four years without learning it.

Some studies have been done. However, I found none that even considered Helvetica as one of the options. So far I have seen no data to support the assertion that Helvetica is "most readable" or "most legible".

A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts
What Size and Type of Font Should I Use on My Website?
Another Comparison of Popular Online Fonts

I haven't installed Yosemite yet, but Mavericks runs just fine on a 2007 MacBook.

What? Google already uses a huge directory of "stop words" - words or phrases that should not be indexed. What is required is that they can create such stop words per link (article). Maybe they are not done with that yet, but it could certainly work that way.

The goal is not to suppress articles, the goal is to protect individuals right to privacy. Google does not control the article, and they should not remove all links (associations) to articles. But they can and should respect individuals right to privacy. So when an association is outdated, irrelevant or misleading they should - upon request - remove the association - not the article, not all the other links to the article.

And yes - that includes the right to delete associations between your name and a possible crime you committed 30 years ago. Most modern judicial systems (US the notable exception) recognize that when you've done your time you have "paid" your debt to society - and should have a chance to start over. If youthful stupidities will follow you your entire live you will *never* get a chance to prove that you have corrected yourself.

And this is NOT just for criminals. Controversies, your participation in demonstrations, debates, political parties, deliberate smear campaigns etc. all have the potential to seriously inhibit your chances with future employers.

Was the article removed in its entirety, or was the *association* between the name and the article removed.

Of course Google should not remove the entire article. That was never what the law said. If they did so, it was just another blatant attempt at manipulating opinions of journalists in the hope that journalists reporting will start sway public opinion.

If it was just the *link* between a commentator name and the article that was removed, i.e. you would still find the article through googling words from the content of the article, then what is BBSs problem?

Google is blatantly trying to manipulate public opinion through journalists. They are deliberately misinterpreting the law to create an impression of draconian consequences.

Thanks for explaining why those billionaires are so dumb.

Exactly. Sure, companies like Google have made a few hundred billion dollars with targeted ads, but, hey, what do they know?

It's amazing how quickly that happens. I work in an industry where we have a very cyclical business climate, so we have frequent layoffs. It usually keeps the engineering staff pretty top-notch. We haven't had a down cycle since the 2008 crash, so the cruft has certainly built up. I can only imagine what happens at a place like Google where the only turnover is people quitting!

I feel the need to plug the Pandas module for Python. It does a lot of R-like operations on huge datasets. It takes care of time-series alignment and has many other nicey-nices. Basically almost everything you think you need to invent to manipulate your dataset is probably already implemented in Pandas.

Or a gigantic application, like Photoshop or MATLAB, that sits in your "Applications" folder. Have you guys never heard of the term "killer app"??? Am I that old?

I think "app" came naturally to long-time Mac people, since there has long been an "Applications" folder which a lot of (most?) people just called the "Apps" folder. This lingo followed the jump to mobile on the iPhone and Windows people were introduced to the term for the first time. MATLAB has long been an "app" for Mac folks.

It was a segue between the claim that we need to do things "smartly", and the inane Pollyanna gibberish that followed.