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Comment common sense (Score 1) 191

In a world I could trust, I'd just assume the courts would kindly inform the woman that she has no case. She is grieving and in pain. Her reaction is part of the fallout of the terrorist act. We should act to support her despite the fact that she wants to sue a company that is clearly not responsible. Unfortunately, I fear the courts might support her suit. If she were to succeed and have a judgement rendered against twitter, I'd be furious. I wouldn't be furious at her, I'd be furious at the judge/court. When anything traumatic happens to someone, we should aim our frustrations with their situation at them. We should aim it at those who are in a position to help and guide and fail to do so. I would never be angry at a vet with PTSD for having violent nightmares.

Comment Ok (Score 1) 303

I've never considered myself a programmer but I code. I've always looked for guidance on how to behave in the community. Without weighing in on the ethics and/or practicalities of SO insisting we do this, it seems to me a trivial/polite/useful thing to do. I, for one, will start doing this.

Comment It's their sport (Score 1) 181

Let them decide what curling means. If they want to start using a ditch digger, let them. Sport is ultimately entertainment. The people who care will collectively decide what equipment will be used. Personally, I'd be more interested in seeing what professionals could do with special brooms. Could they make the stone go backwards?

Comment Re:Smart man (Score 1) 378

Faster Than Light travel isn't necessary. You can get a crew across any finite distance in any finite amount of time while traveling SLOWER than light. The caveat is that it is the time of the crew. As you approach the speed of light, distance for you is shortened. For a photon, distance is zero. For any photon from any star that reaches your eye, the time necessary for that photon to reach your eye is zero if measured by the photon. This implies that there exists a slower than light velocity that we can propel a crew that will get that crew to where ever we need them to go with in their lifetime or shorter. However, their voyage will not be useful to us because the time their voyage takes as measured by us will be much longer. The good news is that we can easily set up generational observers here on Earth. -PiR

Comment Solved (Score 1) 465

I recently had to answer this same question for myself and my group. I reduced the problem to evaluating the trade offs of the following dimensions:
  • 1. Ease of reading/programming/maintaining by non-professional programmers.
  • 2. Accessability.
  • 3. Well supported/documented libraries.
  • 4. Quickness.

#1 reduced the field of choices (IMO) to * Matlab/Octave * R/S+ * SAS * Perl * Python * Julia
As for #2 gives preference to Python, R, Julia, Perl, or Octave (Your situation may not be as limiting).
#3 led me to many searches that all indicated that R and Python have a rich set of libraries and lots of community support.
As for #4 From Julia's website http://julialang.org/ they show nice benchmark information that indicates that Python is pretty quick.
My conclusion was that I couldn't really go wrong between R or Python. However, I chose Python because it was quicker, I like the syntax better, I like the libraries better (NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib) and is seems to play nicer with everything else. This is what worked for me and how I went about deciding.

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