Mr Burns: "This man is costing my health plan five thousand dollars a day. I demand that he die with dignity!"

Missing option: Stained glass windows. I can do very nice electronic soldering, but it's whether you can solder 1" wide lead came with a 250 watt Hexacon iron with a 5/8" tip that separates the men from the boys. Hexacon makes bigger ones. I think they're for soldering together battleships or something. Recent accomplishment: Rebuilding all the leaded glass windows in the Yale University Art Gallery.

I wholeheartedly second the recommendation of "Tales Of Pirx The Pilot." Terrific short stories with a lot of humor. This would be the book I'd hand to a young person who had never read any science fiction before.

Yes, this is an ongoing problem, and it is what made Python the more popular solution. Perl is easy to write, but harder to write well -- the whole point of the language is that it is rich and expressive, without a lot of imposed structure. People who write Perl as they learn tend to write crappy, unmaintainable Perl. The result is that most students' first experience with Perl is of crappy, unmaintainable spaghetti-Perl. Those students often grow up to become Perl-haters.

Python is more novice-friendly but harder to to be expressive in for experts, so grizzled longhairs (like me) tend to scoff at it.

That sort of pattern happened before: there was a time when Pascal attracted a lot of mindshare and people scoffed at the woolier "C". Entire OSes were written in Pascal (gasp). But in the long run people migrated back to C and (when it was invented) C++, because, well, Pascal is easy to learn but it sucks for experts.

There are lots of solutions for getting one's work done. PDL is superior for some tasks, Python/NumPy is arguably superior for others (like learning). I wish people would get over it and code, instead of tribal hating. But that is what people, well, do.

Oddly enough, PDL has more "computing power" than NumPy, in the sense that its threading engine works faster and it is less of a memory hog. It is also older than NumPy, having been first written in the late 1990s.

At any rate, whatever meaningful socialism there was in Hitler or in Nazism was wiped out ... during the Night of the Long Knives.

Whatever meaningful socialism there was in _______ was wiped out during ________

1) the USSR / Stalin's purges
2) communist China / Mao's purges
3) Cuba / Castro's purges

and on and on.

Socialism / Communism isn't a way of running a society. It is a method used to disrupt and destroy a society. The nuances and differences between socialism, communism and Progressivism are as meaningless as the nuances and differences between the effects of different types of nuclear weapons on a city. Socialism, Communism and Progressivism are a means to achieving totalitarianism, no more, no less.

With the exception that BAL is still in use today. If you do systems programming on IBM mainframes for any amount of time, You. Will. Learn. BAL.
 

I used Windows 2000 until a few weeks ago. Rock stable. Ran everything I wanted. I just recently built up a new system (Phenom II X6 1100T / 8GB / SSD) to replace my Athlon XP 2000 system and bit the bullet and put Windows 7 on it. I got a 12 year run out of Windows 2000. Not too shabby.
 

Heh. A DJ friend has a set of turntable mats with the slogan on them:

"Copyright infringement is your best entertainment value"

Says it all right there,

The worst I ever had to deal with was an IBM RS/6000 Model F50 with a lot of SCSI cards. This was in 1998. Boot time was upwards of 30 minutes. It did these incredibly long self-tests of every card in the system. IBM didn't seem to understand that spending 5-10 minutes self-testing a SCSI card wasn't acceptable when there were a half dozen or more of those cards in the system ...

That system really messed with us. I'd come in at midnight to take the system down, and if there was any problem that required multiple boot attempts, I would be stressing about getting the system back up by 8AM. Nothing like being blasted by industrial strength air conditioning at 5AM watching the little LED numbers change over and over again. Once the system got up and running it was pretty fast (for the time), but oh my god the boot times.

Go feel the air blowing through the outside-part of your air conditioner or the air blowing out of your refrigerator vent in the back or on the bottom.. It's warmer than the air that went in.. That's where the heat is going. Air conditioners and refrigerators separate hot from cold, they don't generate cold only. They actually make more heat than they make cold. The difference is equal to the energy in the electricity used to run the air conditioner or refrigerator.

It seems from the article that the H2 and O2 come off opposite sides of the device, making it trivially easy to isolate the two gasses. This is a very important detail that is not exactly clear from the article. It's important because you can safely store H2, and O2, but not the two mixed together.

It seems to me like this would be a good candidate for grid storage. Say you had a solar farm with both conventional solar cells and this new technology. When the sun shines, the regular solar cells both provide the product energy from the power plant, and also operate pumps that pressurize the hydrogen and oxygen coming off of the new cells. At night and when clouds come overhead, the system switches to fuel cells to burn the stored hydrogen and oxgen, regenerating the water in the process, and keeping the power plant producing electricity through the night. Thus, you overcome the biggest problem with solar power plants -- their intermittancy. Such a power plant, properly designed, should be able to produce continual power effectively indefinitely, barring extremely long periods of overcast weather. The "nighttime" capacity of the power plant would be a function of the size of the hydrogen tanks you could store on site -- and I believe that pressurized gas tanks scale upwards very cheaply and easily. As a bonus, the water in the system would be continually contained and recycled, making the system attractive for use in arid places like deserts where solar is most profitable.

Hopefully it will turn out to be cheap in practice and can be used this way.

I'm amused at the apparently clueless people on eBay bidding against each other for film that can no longer be processed. There are several examples of multiple bids on auctions for unexposed film ending tomorrow.

Ditto. I worked for a university at the time. We upgraded every last speck of software in our IBM 370 mainframe facility in the months leading up to Y2K as IBM went through the operating system with a fine tooth comb sending out bug fixes, and we found and killed dozens of minor bugs in our local software in the months leading up to Y2K running a second level OS with the date pushed forward. Then Y2K happened, and the worst thing that happened was that an old mail program that was only used by old timers started showing people's new mail at the wrong end of the list. And everyone sort of felt like it was a big non-event and kind of made fun of it. It's no coincidence that that era was a high water mark for IT jobs.