Boyce Rensberger, your erstwhile editor at the Washington Post, said this a year ago in the comments section of this article:

What's your response?

I think that you're out of touch. Sure, plenty of people TiVo their drama programs or just download them. But tens of millions of Americans schedule their Sundays around their team's football game and their weeknights around basketball, baseball, hockey, and soccer. Live sports are still a multi-billion dollar industry and will be for at least several more decades.

Counter-intuitively, and contrary to the label "Adjust [Visual Effects] for best performance", turning off animations on Windows Vista and above will make your system slower because it disables hardware acceleration.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnew...

Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel is available online for free.

Strunk & White were "grammatical incompetents," and The Elements of Style is considered by linguists to be a pretty awful book.

Oops. The study was blinded, not double blinded.

Read an account about it here:http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20121/13039/

First of all, the violinists were able to tell the difference between old and new violins.

It was a double blind study about which violin the violinists preferred to play. And since musicians that play the same instrument have different ideas of what kind of sound they prefer, it should not be a surprise that some preferred newer models. Of course, no two violins are created equal, and some Stradivariuses sound better than others. There were some constraints to the study, however. The older violins are worth several million of dollars and they were loaned on the condition that they could not be tuned.

This story isn't bullshit, and might make for mildly interesting cocktail party chat, but it isn't really newsworthy.

This probably does qualify as bullshit, and it was only was only added because the author thought the story itself isn't strong enough to stand without it. Tech writers have to fill quotas. The problem with this peroration isn't just that it's stupid and wrong—it is—the problem is that it gives people the wrong expectations for what AI can do. AI has already had significant payoffs. The Dynamic Analysis and Planning Tool (DART), an "intelligent agent" (a dirty word after the AI winter) written in Common Lisp and used by the U.S military was introduced in 1991 and by 1995 had saved enough money to pay for all of the money DARPA has spent on AI in the previous thirty years.

I suspect that if they made a map of which tipples are popular in red counties and which are popular in blue counties the results would be similar, even if they ignored the political affiliations of individual voters.

Grey Goose was invented in the 1990s as a "luxury drink" for the young (insecure enough to think that buying "premium" or "luxury" drinks is classy) and nightclub market. The biggest cities have the trendiest nightclubs, and the biggest cities almost always vote Democrat, so this isn't really a surprise.

Lots of young people don't vote in the US. Older and wealthier people, who are the most likely to vote, prefer wine; this explains this "fascinating" revelation.

Thanks, but I know what SHA-2 is. I also know that there was so much concern that SHA-2 would be broken that SHA-3 was created. My joke was that the NSA might have broken SHA-2 (they haven't) and that's why they were encouraging us to use it.

This was published in 2007. My joke was about the general uneasiness in the community about SHA-2, even if it hasn't been broken yet. Unfortunately, it seems that the members of \. who responded to me were too thick to understand this. You could have just pointed out that SHA-2 hasn't been broken yet. Instead you evinced your lack of ability to make clever insults.

If you use the word "dolt" in conversation in a non-facetious manner it means that you're either a horribly self-conscious member of the middle class who is afraid of appearing "unprofessional", or a dummkopf who hasn't learned that using "dolt" is a shibboleth of immaturity. If you're going to call someone a motherfucker, as any other confident fellow with an iota of social intelligence would, please do it at the outset. Your prose will have a more even tone and you won't be downmodded for flaimbaiting.

SHA-2? Was that sentence edited by an NSA intern?

What about Srinivasa Ramanujan?

Story title should be:

and the summary should be: