Ban on tobacco products.

Yeah, let's make cigarettes cool again!

I think that after every 3rd wave of Missile Command (what a disgustingly irresponsible creation!!), the game should require that the player's parents check to make sure the player isn't getting depressed by the prospect of nuclear war.

And in Asteroids, after any ship destruction due to collision with an asteroid, the game should require parental attestation that the player isn't starting to develop symptoms of petraphobia.

In both cases, if the parents aren't available (e.g. dead because the player is in their 80s) I suppose a Notary Public or a AMA-certified doctor would be a good-enough replacement.

We have learned so much since the early days of computer games, and it's better to be safe than sorry. (But don't fuck with Joust! I want to be able to play without having to call my mom every time the Lava Troll touches my mount's legs inappropriately.)

Sunday I was in Austin and saw a Waymo being put on a tow truck at an intersection, and a cop car with flashing lights behind it. I doubt this was a drill, and I had gone through the intersection an hour before, so I guess it actually broke down there. Welcome to the future!

IMHO, Perl's biggest problem was that Larry didn't know how to say "no" to every crazy idea he saw.

My pet misfeature is "long statement that does something UNLESS condition". Yes, let's reverse the flow of cause and effect of the traditional "if" statement, what could possibly go wrong when someone tries to read your code?

Also protip: use HTML <p> to insert paragraph breaks on /.

2006 is the Freshmen college class. 2008 isn't for 2 more years.

The decline started before the crash

I haven't read the text of this Swiss law, but if it's anything like USA's, UK's, or EU's laws, then it regulates "providers" and/or "carriers," not software applications themselves.

If you are sending already-made ciphertext through a regulated service, the service won't be in trouble. But if the service offers to encrypt for you, then they will be in trouble.

It just occurred to me that the now-common conflation between web apps and local apps (to a lot of phone users, these two things look the same) matters.

Maybe ASF just likes whiskey.

White oak has more tyloses and a tighter grain structure than other oak varieties, which cause its barrels to be more waterproof. It chars better. And it generally wins most taste tests. It's just perfect for barrel aging.

Save your red oaks for furniture.

As crap as AI is shaping up to be, it still seems to be not much worse than a call center in India. This adds a second front in that war.

One time back in the '10s I called Apple for something at about 5PM Austin time. It got answered by someone in Ireland. My mind was blown, both because I think Apple had recently opened a call center in Austin, and because that meant it was almost midnight at the call center.

Anyhow, it's about time they figured out a way to "tariff" off-shored non-manufacturing jobs.

Is Amazon fitting the bill for higher insurance rates?

This question surprised me.

Before we tackle the unlikely possibility that this raises insurance rates, your question makes me realize there's another question you might want to try to answer first:

Who do you think currently pays for the insurance on Amazon's vehicles?

And another: do you think that by Amazon making the choice to deploy an additional piece of driver hardware, the insurance-premium-paying party in the above question, would change?

If you want tap water to taste better, get a reverse osmosis filter installed under your kitchen sink. That filters out stuff using the water mains pressure, and ejects water into the drain with the crap that was filtered out (meaning it's now got twice as much crap in it). Then it keeps a gallon or so in a low-pressure storage tank for dispensing later. It has no taste, same as distilled water, and is still drinkable even when 35C warm. Try that with regular tap water.

Also it filters out all the biological stuff, so if you put it into an old half-gallon juice bottle, you don't get nasty mildew stuff growing under the lid.

Which ones? Every one is different. I absolutely hate saccharine, but I love aspartame (which has a before taste, not an after taste), and it's been in common use for three decades now. But I don't like the sweeteners used in "zero" drinks as much (which is aspartame plus other stuff). There were cyclamates which were good, but got unfairly banned in the 1970s and still are. Also, "sugar" is uncommon in the US because it has been tarriffed to hell for decades to prop up both the sugar and corn lobbies in favor of HFCS, which is not good for you.

Treating them as all the same is quite unscientific, you have to know which ones are which instead of just turning your brain off and listening to media narratives intended to scare you for ratings. Even simply assuming that you're getting sucrose sugar in non-diet drinks is wrong.

My parents would drink 1980's Diet Pepsi, which used saccharine. It was absolutely completely awful. Too bad I was just a little too late to experience cyclamates, which were unfairly banned, and still are. But I happen to love the taste of aspartame, so that's why I drink diet sodas, especially when the alternative is HFCS. And it's just two amino acids, so not likely to ever be a real problem, aside from the few people who already had trouble with one of those amino acids.

University of Southampton? Meanwhile, I've seen many pics of UK takeaway pizza boxes full of fried everything, something I've never seen in the US.

As for the temps, it's not global warming that's why every summer here is 35C+, it's because much of Texas is at the same latitude as Cairo.

Yeah, like that.