Where I have a choice, I write dates using a format that produces "12-Feb-2009" as nobody (not even computers) misunderstands that. Failing that, ISO 8601 because it sorts properly without teaching that particular bit of software about time.

They didn't lay cable to every door; Virgin have never sought to provide a universal service. But they did lay cable to mine, and my service is now good enough that the bottleneck is often elsewhere (e.g., at the web server end). Life is sometimes rather good...

As long as you accept that some people are going to say "fuck that shit" and do something else. If you've got a bunch of very bright people, they might decide that there is a better priority thing to work on together than any goal you might try to impose. If they do this, you've won as cool and/or necessary stuff will be done. They're probably right about the prioritization, especially if multiple people agree on it, and you've got no chance of changing their mind by waving prizes about or shouting at them or whatever motivational technique you prefer. (Heck, you probably couldn't do it even if you were out-and-out employing them.)

So... How come you weren't one of the 3 competent programmers who took off so that you could hear the accusations? Or was management so incompetent that they let the accusations be heard outside the company (a good way to end up with a lawsuit, so demonstrating even more thoroughly the incompetence of management)?

Except that many companies are also not paying dividends either, so there's no tax paid there either. The more you look at the detail of this, the crosser you will feel. I advise stopping before you cause yourself heart trouble...

I'd have thought that, with a name like that, anti-zombie techniques would be more effective. Let's be careful with which type of undead we are killing here!

Because that's what corporations bought with their "campaign contributions".

To be fair, there are some businesses that simply could not work at all — any kind of deposit-taking institution, such as a credit union or bank, even if not operated by Wall Street — if every piece of money that crosses the doors was taxed as income. Furthermore, there is a general benefit with having companies generally economically active rather than leaving money sitting there doing nothing: taxing net income after allowable outgoings is reasonable. The real problem is that someone found a way (well, several ways) to make income that should be taxed be actually untaxed, and a number of corporations have been using these tricks on a colossal scale. When tax income is generally well up, that's not seen by governments as too big a problem, but when tax income is down, the order comes down from on high to make sure that those who should owe actually pay up. The screaming as the true bills start to be charged will be very loud and shrill indeed.

Ordinary citizens aren't allowed to claim only net income because that would make overall tax income too low; a majority of people have net incomes so low that the taxes levied would be more expensive to collect than what would be earned. It would also make it far easier for the rich to dodge taxes, given that avoidance techniques are now well advanced. (Right now, they have to do games with corporations and loans and tricks like that.) I fear that the net result of all this pain going to be an increased tendency to extremism and an elevated chance of revolution: those are factors that are so random that who knows who'll come out on top?

Also, in reference to the UK, there's a stronger separation between people and companies than in the US; the tax system differentiates so that personal taxes aren't done using the same set of rules at all as companies are taxed under. This greatly reduces the amount of annoyance experienced by individual citizens, since all the rules aimed at complex business arrangements are only experienced by those who are actually running a business: people still grumble about how high taxes are (of course!) but not nearly so much about the complexity.

It's suitable for use in microelectronics as part of the electrical bonding of chips to their packaging. That means it has real intrinsic value: you can make something with it. It's also not reactive with the body, and so suitable for use in certain types of prosthetics (e.g., teeth) and quite pretty, and so suitable for making adornments and other decorations. Yep, definite intrinsic value there.

Which isn't to say that its current market value is comprised in the majority by its intrinsic value. It's also used as a repository of wealth, which is mostly not related to intrinsic value (heck, silicon dioxide of specified purity could be used for that too; gold's use there is merely conventional) and also for speculation purposes because of that repository use, and that speculation is virtually entirely unconnected to the intrinsic value. Just because gold has some intrinsic value, unlike a fiat currency where value is entirely driven by agreement, it doesn't mean that holding gold bought at a specific price is a good idea. It is not guaranteed to be inflation-proof, and certainly not so when in the throes of an investment bubble.

The operation itself is guaranteed to give you a number that is coprime with the initial set. However, if you were to believe that there were a finite set of prime numbers and were then to use that finite set as the input into the coprime generator, you'd get something that is coprime with "all" prime numbers, which would therefore consequently show that there must be at least one prime number that is not in that set, and establish the result as a candidate for the missing prime. (If you previously believed that there are no prime numbers, the product-over-set-and-add-one operation produces 2.) The assumption that must have been false, given that everything else is a basic mathematical or logical operation, is that there is a finite set of prime numbers; there must be an infinite number of primes.

But TFA wasn't talking about this. It was talking about the number of pairs of primes where the difference between the pair is 2, and that's a very non-trivial property.

They simply don't need to solve that problem in North Carolina yet. There's millions of other potential customers elsewhere. Once they're big enough, they can deal with NC in any way that makes sense (e.g., by delegating the problem to someone who focuses on providing whatever level of support is required in that area) but that doesn't mean that they need to do it right now. And you know what? They won't deal with this right now.

I think you'll find that people are far more prepared to travel to purchase an expensive car than they are to get a crate of beer and a bottle of wine for the weekend. (Assuming someone who is actively interested in purchasing both and who has the financial means to do so. Tesla aren't selling cars to street bums.)

No, it won't because we won't be modeling objects as large as cells at the atomic level. Instead, we will use lots of coupled coarser models, saving the finer ones for parts where "interesting" things are happening (e.g., at membrane interfaces). People are already doing this sort of thing, but at a very coarse scale and with only very limited numbers of fine simulations.

Of course, I happen to think that the really interesting things happen when you scale up to modeling a whole tissue, or a whole organ, or even a whole system. That's where you stand a chance of going from academic pussyfooting around to something useful to ordinary people.

To read it? Yeah, with your background if it takes you more than a few days, you're slacking. Being able to write it, and write it well... that takes longer. In particular, learning the associated tooling and common libraries can take a lot of work.

FWIW, there are other OO languages that are considerably more different than that trio (those three have a pretty clear historical relationship to each other, and so share a lot of assumptions). For example, being able to subclass the class of classes makes you reconsider how lots of OO patterns that you think you know work.

But there's no reason in principle why a single professor should give tutorials to the entire year, especially at undergraduate level where there are often multiple people in a large department who can teach the same course module. (Lectures can scale up much larger than tutorials do, but the skills for giving a lecture aren't the same as those for running a laboratory session or giving a tutorial.)

There have been vulnerabilities in PNG and JPG image format handlers in the past, so yes, there has definitely been the potential to have images do bad things. (Arguably none would be as bad as using some of the ones relating to goatse, but that's a different kind of problem.) If you hear of problems in fundamental media type handlers, for goodness sake make sure you're up to date with your security patches!

I don't know if there were any exploits of those problems in the wild though.