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Comment Re:I can see why they ignored it for so long. (Score 2) 33

I can see why they ignored it for so long: having multiple places to put dot files for a single app is irritating.

Not nearly as irritating as having dozens of random dot subdirectories in the root of your home directory.

The first issue costs a few developers a few days of their time to fix. The second is a problem that nags millions of users for eternity.

Comment Re:No thanks. (Score 1) 31

What I typically do is leave in the no-name AAA alkaline batteries that the remote came with, and it works for a couple of years until I move on to newer gear.

Then after I've left it idle for 15 years, I'll come back and open the remote to discover that the batteries have leaked all over the inside and destroyed it.

Comment Re:Your tax dollars hard at work (Score 3, Insightful) 74

... going to corporations. One billion dollars no less. Socialize the risk, privatize the profits.

Oh stop it. This is a loan to Constellation energy to help finance the cost to restart a nuclear power plant by 2027.

Why should he stop exactly explaining the situation?

Lenders take on the risk of a default, and when the government lends money, the risk is socialized.

The loan is being made to a private, for-profit corporation, who will be able to keep any profits generated by this scheme (however unlikely that may be).

Whatever activity the loan is for is irrelevant, whether it's for cranking up a crusty old nuclear power plant, or for bailing out a Wall Street firm during a market panic.

Comment Re: Make them occasionally? (Score 1) 186

So back then, prices were incremented by more than today's quarter.

People need to consider: Rounding to a nickle isn't going to be greater than 2 cents more inaccurate than rounding to pennies. Let's say you live in a backwater state, and still only make $7.25 per hour. Each transaction could potentially cost you at most 10 seconds of extra wages. However, transactions randomly round up and down, so the average error gets reduced by the square root of the number of transactions you make. Statistically speaking, you'll gain or lose only a couple of seconds of your time per purchase. Probably less time than it took to fumble for all those pennies.

But it sucks to be poor. Without pennies, someone who makes $50k per year will gain or lose only milliseconds worth of salary per transaction on average.

"But the stores will set prices so that it always rounds up!!!!1!" -- That only works for one item at most. Savvy shoppers would strategically buy combinations of items that always round down.

Comment Re:In theory not a bad idea (Score 3, Insightful) 159

The merchants need to consider that if their competitor down the street still accepts rewards cards, the customers might just switch, and then they've just lost the whole sale. All this over a 1% extra cost to the merchant.

In the meantime, they think nothing of offering things like buy-one-get-one-free deals to lure in a few more customers.

Comment Re:Lack of Mozilla Focus (Score 4, Interesting) 69

Strangely, no one connects the many claims that garbage collected languages "eliminate a whole class of programming errors" is good with the aforementioned "typed languages eliminate a whole class of programming errors" as good also.

Almost nobody uses "untyped languages". Few of those even exist, with Forth and various assembly languages being the main examples. (C, with its type system that is as airtight as a sieve, gets an honorary mention.)

You're probably harping about dynamically typed languages. In such languages, the runtime still knows *exactly* what type every item of data has. These are not weakly typed. But what you obviously prefer are "statically typed" languages.

Static typing might statistically reduce some errors, but it certainly can't "eliminate whole classes". Consider "set_warhead_target(float latitude, float longitude)". Did the type system give you any protection from accidentally swapping the two parameters? That's really the problem that you're so worried about: accidentally using the wrong data value in the wrong place.

However, very few statically typed languages (with Rust being a notable exception) have eliminated the biggest source of type errors in computing: Null, which is a bogus placeholder that matches any pointer type (or reference type, depending on the language's nomenclature). So in many cases you have no less risk with static typing than you do with accidentally feeding a string into a Python sqrt() function. And in the case of C or C++, you can be much worse off, as in segfaults and remote exploits.

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