He basically summed up the problem. You canâ(TM)t complain about PC culture because youâ(TM)ll be lumped in with Xists.

That whole "pedestrians have the right of way" thing should take care of that. I was in Zurich earlier this year, and the thing that surprised me the most as a pedestrian is how much the cars stop for you. At unsignaled crosswalks, and even at random places on the street that would be considered jaywalking, if I were to stand at the curb and look like I might want to cross, without fail traffic would stop for me. If I *didn't* cross, and motioned for them to pass (as is the norm in L.A.), they would either stay stopped and insist I cross, or give me a confused, slightly irritated look.

Debt is how much you owe, like how much your credit card balance is.
Deficit is how much you're borrowing/losing/hemorrhaging in a given time, like how much your credit card balance increases in a year.
Cutting the deficit by 1 trillion dollars would save TEN TRILLION DOLLARS in ten years.

I guess, technically, the summary could be valid if we're talking about a ten-year budget, but the national budget is something that's settled upon on an annual basis. Cutting the deficit by "an average of 100 billion dollars per year" would be more accurate.

Hey, at least they're trying! Five years to 2015 and we have no flying cars, no hoverboards, no 3D billboards where the shark attacks passersby. HP is doing their part in making 2015 less of a disappointment.

In other news, the Business Software Alliance has proposed new standards on compassionate treatment in animal shelters with a clause forbidding use of pirated software in their administration.

Seriously, what business does an organization that claims to be for animal rights have sticking its nose in software development?

I hardly see how they could be considered off-duty when they're out and about looking for violators.

...email has fonts?

But that's just the case with corn. There's been so much of it, and it's so darn cheap to grow, that people figured "well, crap, we have all this corn, let's figure out something else to do with it!" and thus the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup, and of using corn as the primary feed for a bunch of animals that had previously eaten grasses and such. Hell, I recall hearing they're feeding corn to FISH now.

Maybe looking for a Streisand boost...??

Bet that'll be fun when the system goes down for whatever reason. It's enough of a fustercluck when ONE major government system goes on the fritz... here, they'd all go down together!

Having competed in a handful of collegiate programming contests about 10 years ago, the CPU time limit was never even a passing concern. Granted, we were coding in C++, but even in Python, any solution that hits the CPU limit on these contests is quite likely an unnecessarily complex algorithm. I always considered the CPU limit to be a safeguard against programs with infinite loops or REALLY slow solutions, so that the teams wouldn't claim "no, really, it works!" and drag the contest on for hours insisting that the right answer will reveal itself shortly. If your solution works, but has complexity of O(n!), I'd have a hard time calling it acceptable.

If one of our entries was rejected due to exceeding the CPU limit, it was always due to a problem in our logic that the sample data hadn't triggered, but that the actual test data had.

If being put in a room by myself with hours of Mozart was a punishment, my teacher's pet self would quite likely have started causing problems.

I wonder if, to counter that, they would have the same consequence be a punishment to one kid and a reward to another.