"Plenty of cat owners will happily tell you their felines are capable of responding to their own names, but the scientific jury remains ambivalent on the matter."

I bet the dog researchers are far more enthusiastic about their research results.

I know it's annoying, but it's quite likely that the person who linked to it did not know it was region locked. I know that in many cases I would have no way of knowing and no reliable way to test if it was.

I think that for many people learning to code would be a very useful thing, and I'd encourage people to at least become familiar with the process of making and deploying software, but it shouldn't be a requirement and it's hardly necessary for everyone to do so.

I view it much the way as I view learning carpentry, how an internal combustion engine works, and how to grow vegetables. These are all good things for folks to be basically familiar with, but we can't all learn everything, and for many people, not learning to code won't negatively impact their lives.

True, but we don't know over what time interval the "stolen package" videos were made. After all, Rober stated that the build occurred over six months or so. Given that, leaving the package out for a month or two in some neighborhoods resulting in a handful of thefts seems plausible to me.

Statement from NASA spokesman Mark Watney, "Now you tell me. If I had known this earlier, I might not have lost my eyebrows."

Of course you take three hours to look at an NDA ... if you're billing by the hour.

No matter what, I bet the human attorneys were *much* better at double billing their time than the AI. Come on, AI researchers, gotta work on the hard stuff as well!

If you're in the US you can still subscribe to Netflix's DVD service. Yeah, it's a pain in that you're gate limited by the USPS, and you have to plan ahead, but it's the only non-pirated service that still gives you access to basically everything.

Agreed, but treating your employees no worse that Walmart is not exactly a ring endorsement of social consciousness.

The Iliad is awesome. Which translation are you reading? My favorite is still Lattimore, but I'm sitting on the translation by Mitchell and just haven't gotten around to giving it a shot yet.

True story. A company was having problems with its development team. I was brought in to manage the team, to get things straightened out and act as a bridge between the developers and management. One of the folks on the management team asked me if I could recommend any books on the issues that address why they were having such problems with software development. I said there are a bunch, but start with the best, "Mythical Man Month". A few days later I asked him if he had bought it and started reading it. He said he looked at it, but it was really old so he didn't bother with it. He asked if there were more recent books I could recommend. I said, "Yes, but none of them are as good. Trust me, give this one a chance and we can talk about it's applicability to our situation." Again, a few days later we talked, and he decided he wasn't going to bother getting and reading it. I said, "Let me get this straight, you hired me for my insights into the software development process. You've seen me improve things around here. You asked me, presumably because you recognize I have some expertise in the field, what you should read, I told you, and you decided to go with your instincts on this matter over my judgment, is that correct?" To this day I have not received an answer to this question.

This is similar to the question I've been asking: Are there any happy Oracle customers? My (limited) research suggests that the vast majority of Oracle customers have one of three characteristics: (1) They don't know any better, (2) They have more money than time/expertise for converting, (3) They're locked in.

Are there other reasons? Is there anyone who would choose to do a new implementation using Oracle these days? For all I know there may be a lot of people who would, but I've never knowingly met any of them.

So, the folks, some of whom have managed to have stable societies for decades to hundreds of years are laughable, but the folks with zero track record who are rejecting what we've already learned are the ones who are going to have everything work better?

I suppose it's possible, but I don't understand why someone would think this is the way to bet.

"So we should go back to RTF? Or heaven forbid... back to plain text?"

Yes, or rather, there are some of us never left plain text email, including using fixed width fonts and 80 column lines. If you send me HTML-only email, there's a really good chance I'll never bother to read it. I haven't been informed of a situation where in retrospect I have come to regret this policy.

I'm no Luddite, but not every "advancement" is an improvement.

Are the errors random, or are they consistent? That is, can we just run strands through enough times to get the error rates down to acceptable levels?