You can do this electronically, by having an electronic display saying "NEXT CUSTOMER GO TO COUNTER {x: Integer}" (and an audio version for blind people). You add a button to each counter, and the staff member presses it with enough time for the customer he's currently dealing with to finish (just as he's counting the change or once the credit card has been approved, as he's bagging etc.) This basically pops a new customer off the queue, and by the time the customer arrives at the counter (i.e. the object has loaded into memory), the staff member is ready to do the next transaction. This works pretty well so long as the quantity of items the customer is buying isn't high.

(That's it: if the programming thing stops being profitable, I'm going into retail planning. Heh.)

Except for public transport, where it is every-man-for-himself and passive-aggressive behaviour all day, every day, everywhere. I can't remember the last time I saw a queue at a bus stop in London for instance.

Good christ, I've seen too many people arguing about how noisy they are in the "quiet carriage" on trains.

My favourite bit of public rudeness was on a commuter train out of Cannon Street, the terminal in the City, London's financial district. Lots of bankers, businessmen etc. I was on said train and two men are sitting opposite one another. I know from experience that this seat in the carriage has a large box of emergency equipment under the seat, so your feet always end up going forward under the table. If you've got long legs and big feet, your feet end up protruding quite far under the table because you can't pull them back towards you very easily. This was evidently happening. The man opposite shouted "EXCUSE ME SIR, ARE YOU A HOMOSEXUAL OR SOMETHING?" The rest of the carriage -- myself included -- tried very, very hard not to burst into giggles.

Passport control is an interesting one. Perhaps it's because I'm a UK citizen and I'm biased, but UK passport control always seemed slightly better organised than US in terms of queuing. At LHR Terminal 3, they just have one massive queue for UK/EU passport holders and one massive queue for foreign passport holders, then have a cluster of agents at the end, all close together.

In SFO and BOS, they have a queue for US and a queue for foreign, then they have fan-out queues for each agent. As you say, this is bad queuing theory.

The strange thing is that even though the LHR queue is usually enormous, it seems to get processed extremely quickly. Perhaps it's just subjective and my brain is playing tricks on me (the combination of spending 6-10 hours in a tin box, followed by the feeling that "London! Home!" etc.), but it would be interesting to see how this works comparatively between UK and US.

I wonder whether the bottlenecks that get built into airport (and international trains like Eurostar) terminals are deliberately built-in or planned around. I mean, there may be a bottleneck at passport control in order to make sure that people go through customs at a steady speed, or to provide an opportunity for CCTV operators to keep an eye on the queue to see if anyone is acting oddly.

Or, as when I last flew to Boston, so some idiot can dance around, making a nuisance of himself and swear at the TSA/ICE guys, while the polite group of Brits stand in line with a mixture of embarrassment (at someone being a dick in public) and fear (that an armed TSA/ICE guy or cop is going to shoot the dude when he does something unpredictable: 'cos, you know, we've seen Westerns and cop shows).

"That's why they won't let you buy a data-capable phone without the data service."

http://expansys.com/ does. If you've got loads of money: iPhones/iPads, Android, Palm, Blackberry, Nokia etc.

Oh, wait, you mean in the US where you've got weird old network technologies (CDMA), lack of effective regulation and bizarre pricing (pay to get a text message? Who thought that up?!)

In most EU countries you can buy unlocked phones, and if you've got a phone on a contract, once the contract's minimum term is up, you can call the operator to get it unlocked or you can get your phone unlocked in the many quasi-legal unlocking shops. This is so widespread that loads of networks (all in the UK, for instance) offer SIM-only contracts.

(Personally, I have an unlocked Sony-Ericsson phone I won in a hacking contest. And I use a MiFi for data so I can use my laptop, iPod touch and various other gadgets. Both are pay as you go: 1Gb of data for £10, 3Gb for £15, 7Gb for £25 - lasts for 30 days.)

I post this only because so many "oh my, isn't mobile so fucked up" rants are tied specifically to US-specific things.

If redirecting NXDOMAIN to partnered search results pages and killing a bunch of anti-spam scripts and endorsing ridiculously stupid shit like .eco, .xxx, .jobs and .tel happen wasn't enough for ICANN to have "blown it", complying with a Department of Homeland Security request to remove a bunch of domains that contained material that infringes copyright should be the nail in the coffin for the useless stuffed shirts at ICANN.

ICANN is really a perfect example of where a bunch of wise-beard Unix hacker types could do a better job than the corporate whores currently doing it could. Or better yet, a proper distributed alternative to DNS.

Well, some C# programmers are starting to use F#. Making it open source is quite useful as F# programmers can now produce code that can run on non-Windows platforms using Mono.

Easy solution: get TheTrainline app from the App Store. It's free and pretty good.

Not to mention the various magic codes you had to enter for specific computers. You know, if you had an Acorn you had to put in these lines, and if you had a BBC or a VIC-20 you put in these lines. All just poking stuff into memory, of course.

This taught me an important lesson in computing: the great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from. Good experience for eventually learning SQL.

And these days, it isn't so necessary with the various bridges that exist between good scripting languages (Python and Ruby) and both Cocoa and OSA - namely, PyObjC, MacRuby, RubyOSA etc. - and plenty of command-line interfaces to various bits of the OS. Indeed, if you use an OSA bridge in Ruby, you have a much more powerful way AppleScript because you can combine code from the Ruby stdlib, Unix command line tools, abstracted C libraries (and inlined C) and the AppleScript interfaces. If you want to use a Java library, you wrap the OSA bridge stuff in a class and FFI out to it from JRuby. You get so much more, and you get to write it in a syntax that doesn't drive you completely batshit insane.

You also get a much better development experience: irb or ipython plus your favourite editor (vim, emacs, textmate etc.) beats the pants off the damn AppleScript script editor. Who in their right mind thought that not being able to save a file unless it compiled was a sensible idea? With irb, you can interactively examine your objects. Bash lines into the shell and see what happens. Much more useful than Script Editor which basically gives you an edit-compile-run cycle.

AppleScript is one of those things I wish Apple would replace. Now they are pursuing App Stores and iOS though, I don't hold out much hope that they'll deprecate AppleScript and encourage people to use Ruby instead. The idea that normal people are going to suddenly learn AppleScript because it has a "friendly" syntax is laughable.

You forgot filter. That's also important.

Map -> filter -> fold is a pretty natural progression, and I've wasted countless hours (nay, weeks) of my life writing map/filter/fold code in dysfunctional langauges before discovering how much less I have to write in functional languages.

Once you start using higher-order functions, you reach the point where you can't tolerate them not being there.

+1 on GNU Smalltalk. I like the idea of Smalltalk, but the whole "visual VM" thing is such bullshit and is a case of the Smalltalk guys buying into their own hype too much. It may have been cool many years ago, but these days it just feels like this weird anachronism when you load it up, and it just sits there completely different from the rest of the OS...

GNU Smalltalk, on the other hand, is billed as "Smalltalk for those who can type". And it is really very nice.

(Alternatively, try Ruby. It's like Smalltalk + Perl + Lisp + lots of libraries.)

Arguably the UK has the same issue as they've also had a first past the post system in voting system that has lasted longer than the US system and are actually talking about trying out STV or a watered down version of prop rep.

The details are: under the coalition agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, we will be able to vote on whether we want to move to 'Alternative Vote' (aka Instant Runoff Voting) - details are here http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=55

Politically, the Liberal Democrats and Labour are planning to campaign for it while the Conservatives are going to allow for the referendum vote but campaign against it.

There's huge political interests at stake: for the Liberal Democrats (as our traditional third party) and other third parties, they'll benefit from not being passed over in a tactical vote situation where people who would rather have the Liberals but vote Labour to keep the Conservatives (or BNP and other far-right parties) out. For Labour, electoral reform will probably come with boundary changes that will benefit them by creating more urban constituencies likely to vote for Labour. Under most AV predictions, the Conservatives will lose seats under AV, so naturally they oppose it.

It'll certainly be interesting to see whether the political parties manage to keep up the pretense that their stances aren't self-serving...

If you really need a joke (indeed, an old throwaway joke I set as my sig years ago) explained, here it is: it is a joke at the expense of pompous douchebags who think that they get moral brownie points by piously pointing out that they slow down in populated areas and around schools, as if obeying the Highway Code and common fucking sense makes them better people.

Driving at an appropriate speed so as to not hit children who might unexpectedly jump out in the road isn't some great act of virtue, it is a basic requirement of both the law and common sense. Pointing out that you are doing as some great and worthy deed ("I slow down around children!") what is required by law is worthy of contempt and ridicule. One good way of doing this is by reversing their sentiment so as to show the essential pointlessness of expressing it (just as one might respond to someone proclaiming that grass is green with the sarcastic remark "ah, for all this time, I thought it was red. Thanks for telling me."). The riposte then casts doubt on their motives for saying it.

As you seem to believe - on the basis of a .sig file on a Slashdot comment - that I actually go around driving recklessly in the presence of children (I don't even have a car, I commute by train), would you be interested in purchasing a time-share in my flat in downtown Atlantis?

Yeah, well, in as much as no other paper really has that status, it is the closest to it.

Surely, the FT over the Times for financial news and info?