Try reinforced concrete using proper rebar, ICF forms, and a concrete roof deck. 95% of tornadoes are ET3 or below... and reinforced concrete (roof and all) plus Florida-code missile-rated impact-glass windows will make it through those with barely a scratch. EF4 & 5 are monsters... but even in "tornado alley", they're exceptionally rare.

If Kansas had Dade County building codes, most tornadoes would barely make a dent (in neighborhoods built to Dade County standards) instead of destroying neighborhoods wholesale.

And yes, my own house (in South Florida) is reinforced concrete & has suspended concrete slabs for the roof & second floor. I practice what I preach :-)

Most American "brick" houses are just wood with veneer brick and construction adhesive.

Correction: it was the Tories, under Heath, who shut down the UK's space program in 1971. (*blush*)

Labour was also the party that shut down, dismembered, and destroyed Britain's manned space program.

I think it depends on the computer platform you were using back then. In Amiga-land circa 1987, there were basically two languages that mattered: 680x0 Assembly, and C (not ++). Other languages obviously *existed* (AmigaBASIC, ABasiC, TrueBasic, GFA Basic, Modula-2, ARexx, etc), but as a practical matter, if you wanted to write software OTHER Amiga owners could run without themselves owning a copy of the language, your choices were basically Assembly & C. Good stuff was written in assembly, shitty stuff and/or lame "productivity" apps were written in C.

I'm sure a big part of it was the relative newness & immaturity of C compilers (of that era) themselves (basically, Lattice C & Aztec C), but circa 1987-90, Amiga C-written stuff really, truly *was* a lot worse than assembly-written stuff.

People today have no idea just how far compilers like gcc have come, and how good they are *now* at optimizing code compared to the early days. Back around, 1988, you'd write & compile something in C, it would crash, and you'd spend hours just trying to figure out whether it crashed because *you* did something wrong, the compiler did something wrong, or AmigaDOS/Intuition had a bug (all 3 of which were equally-plausible, often jointly).

I think there's still a few metro areas with a UHF station that hasn't officially vacated channels 38 to 51 yet, and T-mobile can't start using 600mhz in that area until the last paperwork & certification related to the incumbent UHF channel's relocation is done. AFAIK, the actual move is done, but the paperwork is still in progress.

> Am I missing anything?

Every Jetbrains IDE, including IntelliJ and Android Studio?

Eclipse? Netbeans?

But you do kind of have a point. Afaik, there's nothing that's quite on the level of Visual Studio for doing the UI work for Gnome & KDE apps... at least, not with the kind of seamless integration between VS & dotNet Framework. Everything I've seen for Gnome & KDE is decoupled from the main IDE & lacks VS's polish. Loose coupling is good for maximizing interoperability, but poor at seamless, polished, plug & play "just works" integration.

Have you ever noticed that the police *always* have one "crisis" drug to whip up hysteria over and claim it's the root of all evil?

* I'm just old enough to remember the old school films about "angel dust" (by that point, old & scratched, and shown because the teacher had diarrhea that day & someone had to come up with an excuse to let a teacher's aide babysit the class for a half hour or so). Nobody, including police, ever saw it in real life.

* Around the time the public started to loudly question whether "angel dust" was even real, crack arrived

* About a decade later, the police whipped up hysteria about "bath salts" (flakka?). Admittedly, they managed to blame them for the face-eating guy in Miami... but despite their best efforts, they couldn't find a way to prove his dealer was a middle-aged white guy wearing a yellow raincoat driving a white van.

Now, of course, fentanyl is the root of all evil. Until something new & trendy comes along for the police to whip up hysteria over.

Or, more likely, any music in it was only licensed for something like 10-20 years, so as the expiration approaches, the music's copyright holder will act like it's pure gold & demand some unreasonable amount to re-license it. So, the show's owner will have to either replace or remove the music, or pull it entirely... usually, the latter.

Differing license terms for film/video and music licensed for use in them is a serious problem that shouldn't exist, but does.

(ugh, accidentally grazed submit button. Goddamn it, Slashdot, can phone browsers *please* have "preview, then submit 'for real' instead of going straight to fsck'ing submit?")

To get Kotlin to use its optimized 'for' implementation when iterating integers on Android (so it secretly implements a real mutable counter instead of Kotlin's official insanity that will cause Android garbage-collection to murder your performance), you have to code it one specific way, follow certain rules that aren't particularly easy to find documented, and risk having that optimization taken away in a future version because the larger Kotlin org *vehemently* disapproves of the optimization's very *existence*, even though Android devices running Oreo & Pie are an ongoing scourge (due to lacking generational GC) that will haunt us for years to come.

Well, aside from the fact that Kotlin's stupid equivalent of a for-next loop instantiates a list of immutable integer objects & iterates through them. Android Kotlin literally had to hack around that language "feature" to be actually *usable* on Android, because Android's garbage collection pre-Lollipop (when Android finally got to have generational GC) & Oreo + Pie (when Google took generational GC away) will absolutely *destroy* you if you try using throw-away ephemeral objects that way.

And even then, to make Kotlin use a more traditional for-next implementation, yol

The line between "habitat" and "culture" is fuzzy. Would a pizzly raised by a polar bear mother learn to hunt on the ice? Would a pizzly with a grizzly bear mother & extended family learn to hibernate (esp. the preparation part)?

Even with ligers, the lines get blurred. How much of a tiger's love for swimming due to being taught to swim by their mother, and how much of a lion's fear of drowning is due to never being taught to swim? The answer is, cultural knowledge matters a lot. Lion cubs raised from birth in a zoo by a tiger foster family eventually learn to swim just fine, but get traumatized as the introvert in a family of extroverts. Tiger cubs raised from birth in a zoo by a lion foster family don't quite understand their siblings' fear of water, constantly egg them on to do dangerous things, and risk drowning as a cub because their mother won't go in to save them if they get in trouble.

Ditto, for motherhood. Motherhood isn't an instinct. Tigers & lions who get raised alone by humans without ever meeting another tiger, then get artificially inseminated or raped, don't magically become loving mothers. 9 times out of 10, they'll kill the cubs at birth. The remainder run away in terror, leaving the cub behind. Motherhood is a skill that needs to be learned & passed along. Even if the instinctive maternal bonding part eventually kicks in, without role models & cultural knowledge, the mother is likely to do something that seems (to her) like a good idea at the time, but isn't, and have her child die. Once those links get severed, they're incredibly hard to re-establish.

This is a major issue among zoo managers. For years, zoos raised big cats as human-fed bottle babies, then were shocked to discover that 2nd & 3rd-generation big cats were largely incapable of raising their own cubs. They'd literally push them aside when they tried to nurse & roar for the army of zookeepers to come feed them, because they didn't particularly enjoy getting their chapped & sore nipples chewed on & knew that a small army of eager hooman servants were standing by to do the job for them anyway.

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Interesting trivia: a "big cat" raised by humans from birth as a plus-sized housecat ultimately behaves in a manner that's indistinguishable from a housecat. The real difference between a "housecat" (raised in a loving, attentive home as a de-facto child) and a tiger raised in the same conditions is... if a hooman pisses them off or scares them, they can effectively fight back with overwhelming & potentially-deadly force, while a 15lb housecat has to settle for inflicting nasty laceration wounds and sulking.

The interesting thing, though, isn't the fact that big cats raised in pampered, stress-free luxury act like housecats... it's the fact that housecats behave like BIG cats. Most true small wildcats are painfully neurotic about their dual status as predators AND prey, and have amygdalas that are bigger & more reactive than their housecat peers. Big cats & housecats generally have smaller & less-active amygdalas. The fact that housecats tend to have the mellow, fearless personalities of big cats is precisely what distinguishes them from small wildcats.

Now, amygdala development *itself* is influenced by childhood experiences. A wild big cat is extraordinarily dangerous, regardless of its amygdala size at birth. A second-generation feral housecat will learn to fear almost any larger creature. The difference is, with housecats, "small amygdala" was an evolutionary advantage that enabled them to domesticate humans by being our cute & lovable companions. For small wildcats, it's an evolutionary disadvantage that makes them more likely to die young.

For big cats, amygdala size is still kind of random, because it doesn't consistently affect their survival rate. For captive/companion tigers, small amygdala is a massive evolutionary advantage that gets them bred to produce more friendly, mellow big cats. It might also be an evolutionary advantage that increases their willingness to take risks that ultimately work in their favor, and makes them less likely to be hunted & killed in places like India by enabling them to pull off the same trick their housecat cousins did thousands of years ago -- bond with & gain human allies, and forge a mutually-advantageous relationship.

Argh, accidentally hit submit.

(continued) any kind of surgical sterilization, and would have lost its AZA accreditation if it allowed the female to get pregnant. So, instead, it cruelly kept them separated for most of their lives.

Lions & tigers are distinct (though semi-compatible), but jaguars & leopards are just different "races" of "panther"... leopards in the eastern hemisphere, jaguars in the western hemisphere. Put a male & female jaguar & leopard of appropriate breeding age together, and within months you'll have a 100% healthy litter of jaguleps or leguars that pretty much look like the average of their parents.

So, why do you never SEE jaguleps or leguars in zoos? Because a zoo that allows it to happen will keep it a secret, and quietly kill (oops, I mean, "euthanize") the cubs at birth to avoid getting sanctioned by organizations like the AZA & its international counterparts. Eugenics & racial purity are still aggressively embraced & enforced by zoos.

There's a sad story online somewhere about a zoo with one leopard & one jaguar that kept them separated by two fences for almost 15 years (to ensure they couldn't mate) until the female finally hit menopause, then they allowed them to finally live together & the two were inseparable for the rest of their lives. The zoo's excuse was that it was prohibited from doing

That's the thing, though. The gridlock that gets created by everyone running out the door at 5 lasts SO long, it doesn't even start to thin out until 8pm or later. It becomes basically impossible to go home, eat, then go shopping somewhere that closes at 9.

With DST, you can stick around until traffic thins out a little around 6:30, be home by 7:30, and heading to the mall in relatively light traffic at 8pm.

After DST ends, even if you worked from home that day, there's still so much persistent gridlock for hours after 5, you'd have to leave for the mall by 7:30 just to fight the tail end of the 5pm gridlock and end up with ~45 minutes before the mall closes.

The sudden end of DST is a major contributing factor. If sunset just slowly creeps up, people who tend to stay late keep staying late, even as it gets earlier & earlier. It's the sudden hour-shock that triggers people who'd otherwise stay late to run for the door at 5 with the rest of their coworkers.

As standard time & nominal-winter (in Miami, "winter" is kind of like the sunspot min/max... you don't know for sure it started or ended until a few weeks later) grinds on, the situation improves slightly... but the first 1-3 weeks after DST ends are pure commuting hell in Miami.

In contrast, commuting during the week after DST begins is almost like the week between Christmas & New Year's Day, when people suddenly feel no urgency to bolt home the moment the clock strikes 5 & traffic spreads itself back out again.