In my city, you have to keep the sidewalk clear of ice. You can get a $100 penalty for not doing it. It's rarely enforced unless they're trying to lay pressure on an absentee landlord, or if you live in a wealthier area.

Anyway, if somebody slipped and hurt themselves because I didn't maintain my sidewalk, I would totally get slapped with a $100 fine. The city wouldn't pursue it further because that's all I've done wrong. On the other hand, the person who slipped could sue me for medical bills, etc.

In this case, it seems that he got a typical penalty for distracted driving. Probably closer to the maximum, given the circumstances, but I'm not sure. He'll still end up paying the injured couple more directly in a different court.

Don't you understand why? If you watch a youtube video with a song in it, you're depriving the artist of money for their work. It's just like cutting off the hands that played the instrument. But in today's society, these rights are held by corporations which are made up of thousands of people. That's thousands and thousands of hands that you cut off on purpose. Of course there's a higher penalty than smashing off two legs accidentally!

That was a penalty, not compensation. They're still sorting that bit out.

And tons here: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.20.html

At least one pic here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17156036

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.

The real hipsters are into bluray. They were into it when everybody else wasn't even over it yet.

How long until we have the emotional equivalent of autotune?

Sometimes just the one would be nice.

If it's cheaper to the government, then it's also less profitable for the prison. I think that roboguards would lead to a reversal of that trend, and therefore not catch on in the US.

Also, you can still shank a robot, you just need a sharper toothbrush. Maybe something made out of robot parts.

What you say is what she is now claiming to have meant, after the whole of Italy has been laughing at her. Unfortunately for her, and for us all Italians, there is no possible denying, what was written in the press release literally and unequivocally means "tunnel between CERN and Gran Sasso, across which the experiment took place".

There is no possible misinterpretation, and the phrase literally means "To the construction of the tunnel between CERN and the Gran Sasso laboratories". No cultural context, definition or whatever. "Tunnel" is a commonly used word in Italian, with the exact same meaning - an approximately horizontal hole in the ground.

Worse than that, if any gets loose it could have a range of up to a kilometer!