JeremyStein

If their only other option is to pull themselves together and get a job, then I suppose that's true. It seems unlikely.

Don't use this as an excuse to do nothing. Be smart, but be compassionate.

Thank you OP (kennethologist) for fixing the title of this article. The nymag title is "JCPenney Permanently Cuts All Prices by 40 Percent" which is certainly not true. Copy editor Bill Walsh writes:

The company meant "permanent" in the sense of regular prices as opposed to sale prices. It’s lowering regular prices and cutting back on sales in a strategy that may or may not work. If the strategy doesn’t work, the company has every right to change course -- and if it does, a bunch of news outlets will be revealed as big, fat liars.

Bill goes on to criticize lazy journalists who just write what they're told: http://theslot.blogspot.com/2012/01/penney-want-cracker.html

That wasn't a quote from the article; it was a quote from the wikipedia page.

The author gives his email address at the end.

Funny how articles about computer-generated prose are never computer-generated.

rsnapshot. It uses rsync to be fast. It creates directories with full snapshots of my backed-up files and uses hard-links to avoid duplicating files that haven't changed.

If you're using Firefox, try Lazarus: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6984/

Be creative! How about Facebook only exports proxied @facebook.com email addresses?

How did they know how much money to transfer if it was stored on the lost card?

This is often quoted, but I suspect it's no longer true. When I referred him to an online article last year, he immediately replied about it. I bet he has access to a web browser when needed.

Ah, I love the ending! Aren't credit cards great? They actually believe their customers when you tell them you didn't get something.

Thanks for the link to the video. I had imagined it acting like expanding polyurethane foam. I see it looks more like mush, which doesn't seem as dangerous.

What happens if you swallow a dozen of these?

Whenever I read about bypassing real estate agents, I wish there were some good statistics instead of just anecdotes. You might think you saved money by doing it yourself, but could an agent have gotten you a better deal?

For an anecdote opposing the article, our neighbor sold her house during the boom and reluctantly used an agent. There was a bidding war on the house and it sold for 15% more than her asking price. I doubt that would have happened without the agent.

Actually, the main reason for putting the important parts first is to give the newspaper editor flexibility for fitting stories onto the page. The end of a story can be left off if there's not enough room.

More importantly, you need to go through the string to determine where the nth character is. You can't jump to a character by index.

Please don't write "begs the question" when you mean "raises the question". http://begthequestion.info/

"It's a TAX on the YOUNG to care for the OLD."

<sarcasm> Yeah! Who do those old people think they are, getting all weak and sickly!? </sarcasm>

Most of the western world believes that society should be taxed to provide health care for everyone. Like education, welfare, and social security, it's something we all pay for to live in a moral, civilized society. Thank God Ayn Rand doesn't run the universe and the government forces you and me to pay for Grandpa's medication.

I don't buy it. It's all anecdotal. Is there a statistical correlation between the cat remaining with a person for more than X minutes and the person dying within Y days? My bet is that staff predictions have a better track record.

> What is the pure copper supposed to help?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-end_audio_cables

James Randi will give a million dollars to anyone who can tell the difference.

> electrons would be coming from a long ways

I know it was a joke, but electrons don't really move with alternating current.

It's not a matter of skipping Starbucks, buying clothes from a department store, and having a "staycation". When you're paying $3000/mo for your mortgage, $1000/mo on school tuition, $800/mo on your car lease, etc. you can't cut your expenses without making major changes. And, if you expect to get a job in the next few months, it doesn't make sense to move to a bad neighborhood, transfer to public school, and buy a used car.

Somebody asked me today how to write a script that would find all phrases (1 or more sequential words) in a text that appear more than once.

Bah. You're right. I meant ptr == 0 was changed to !ptr.

Are you assuming that talkingtiki agrees with tjpick?

Then you weren't writing that code in C.

!ptr is bad.

I worked with a C programmer who changed all occurrences of "ptr != 0" to "!ptr". The program stopped working. In Windows, a null pointer is not 0. The C idiom "ptr != 0" compiles correctly, but when you try to get clever with "!ptr", you were in trouble. The expression would evaluate to false on a null pointer. (At least with the version of Visual C++ we were using back then.)

OK, how did someone notice that?

I use ezgram.com. Same idea, same price.

Listen to college lectures in the Great Courses series. Your library probably has some. http://www.teach12.com/

No practical use?! Why, it's practically a requirement for IOCCC entries. :)