I believe you're confusing Vogons with wizards. Too much pipeweed, Gandalf?

So the net effect is that the fuel company that screwed up the instructions is out the ~$4.3m in markup they could have made selling the fuel to H211 as a private company, sounds like a complete non-issue to me, if you screw up the paperwork and lose out on potential income too bad. Why this is any kind of an investigation is beyond me, the government is out $0, they got free use of the plane over 200 times, and they got rental income for hanger space that most likely would have been empty if H211's plane wasn't parked there. In fact the government is out money for the audit (or out auditor time which is the same thing since I'm sure there's plenty of actual waste or malfeasance they could have been uncovering).

All a smith needs is coal, steel or iron, wind, and water. The only tool he would have a hard time building himself would be the anvil, those are usually cast. The forge isn't all that hard to construct (maybe the fan or bellows) and all the other tools are trivial to make.

The only real cost is steel and fuel unless you have your own mine.

I took a blacksmithing workshop in college and one of the things the 74 year old instructor stressed most was that a blacksmith who doesn't make his own tools isn't much of a blacksmith. He taught us how to make all sorts of tools.

Who makes hammers and tongs? The blacksmith. Who writes compilers? Programmers. Maybe I'm getting old but a programmer who can't write a compiler or interpreter isn't much of a programmer (I wrote an interpreter once, years ago).

Through her window she is in a private place. This is just taking a picture of what someone is wearing in public.

The ethical difference? The woman is choosing to wear the skirt knowing full well that people can see up them, not every moment but certainly many many times through the course of a day. So she's choosing to make what is under the skirt visible in public. Anything someone wears, displays, or does in public is fair game for photographing or making a video of under the law.

Not as long as police can freely invade your privacy and record you and photograph you when you are in public. It has been well established, by police, that you do not have an expectation of privacy in public.

These clothes are chosen because they are sexy. They are sexy BECAUSE in certain moments and with certain movements you can see down the blouse and up the skirt and everyone knows it so choosing to wear these clothes is choosing to let random strangers catch a glimpse. People are allowed to photograph you in public, wearing whatever you've chosen to wear and doing whatever you've chosen to do in public.

If you don't want someone to see down your blouse, don't wear a blouse people can see down. If you don't want someone to see up your skirt, wear a long skirt or don't wear a skirt. Granted people seeing this in person is something you can change tomorrow by not wearing these things and the photos you can't change your mind on. But we shouldn't be passing laws for no other purpose than to allow people to have fewer consequences when they make immodest wardrobe choices.

A law that blanket prevented photographing and recording people in public without explicit consent. That would be something I could get behind. Copyright being jointly shared on all images and video between the person making the photo/video and the people in them. That would be something I could get behind. Another law trying to define when you are and aren't entitled to privacy, spelling out certain circumstances and conditions. No thanks. The laws protecting individuals and preserving their personal rights should be broad, strongly worded, and strongly protected in our courts. It's the exceptions that should be narrow and specific.

Incorrect, though the numbers are close, see Table IV.C.1-6 a, the weighted industry average puts cars .001 HP/lb ahead of light trucks.

A thick layer of ordinary charcoal and sand followed by a boil works just fine for purifying water even if it's not space efficient. It's a survival 101 tactic.

Your advice is a good one for subjects of a possible exposé or smear campaign, however, out of hand dismissing journalists as people without integrity is not in the best interests of an informed public and (probably) in many cases unwarranted.

When I was a university professor, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked for an interview about what it's like to be single and a new faculty (ha!). I agreed to an interview and, on several occasions, said that I wanted to say a few things "off the record" about the behavior of colleagues and the spouses of colleagues (ahem). Some of what I said off the record was juicy and I told my interviewer those things to contextualize my "on the record" remarks.

The article was published, my female colleague who was written up got a couple of marriage proposals, and everything attributed to me was on the up and up.

I know not all journalists adhere to a code of ethics, but I believe that many do. Clamming up when a story needs to get out may protect you, but one needn't be suspicious form the get go.

By adding extra useless variables, as I originally pointed out. And introducing a sea of "&&"s. I guess at least it looks more like a bowl of pretzels than a dish of spaghetti.

In a language like C++, unless there's a "try" block within the function, they are exactly the same as a "return" as far as that function is concerned, and can be invoked from the same places. I don't see why you think that that's acceptable if return isn't.

If you look at the FAQs for the Go language, the designers explain why they think exceptions suck in general, and why they largely replaced them with multiple return values. So not everyone shares your enthusiasm for exceptions, which are really just a kind of "return" statement on steroids.

Interesting, though I have to wonder if Macho Springs/First Solar isn't receiving some type of subsidy that allows it to reach that price.

It's the current installed cost of utility scale solar.

Bullshit, utility scale solar is down to $.11/kWhr as of Q4 2013 (down from $.21 in 2010 when the DoE started SunShot) which is less than double the $.056/kWhr total cost for new natural gas plants.

It's for the same reason that the murder rate inside Disney World is very low.

I called it spaghetti because the resulting mass of brackets looks just like a big steaming dish of spaghetti, and the extraneous control statements are almost as annoying as gotos to more than a single "error" label.

Some are, some not so much. Many situations call for a long list of sequential checks, which can be cleanly and clearly coded as a bunch of if .... return statements. If you put each case in a function you still have the following problems:
- If you do it the obvious way, you still need a deeply nested if-then chain. You haven't solved the problem.
- If you put each check within a function and daisy-chain them, you get creepy action-at-a-distance. It's not clear to the reader that you made a whole bunch of functions that should only be called from one place, and that they must be daisy chained.

You seem hung up on definitions. If you narrowly define structured code as code that lacks return, break, continue and exception statements (which can all be used to break out of your "structured" sandbox), then plenty of people would argue with it in 2014.

The main problem with early exits is using them in C. But C is such an unsafe language in general, that's really the least of your worries. Other languages provide nice features like automatic destructors and "with" statements that make early exits perfectly reasonable.

Yeah, force people to write a big pile of nested bracket spaghetti and manually back their way out of every case. Make them introduce a bunch of otherwise useless flag variables and extra conditional statements to keep track of it all.

The best part of it all: When all that extra obfuscation causes bugs, it would be harder to pin the root cause on a simplistic generalization like "goto === bad".