dded

Commercial EDA tools almost all use Tcl. (Cadence's Skill is a notable exception.)

Except this time Clippy's serving ads.

And my documents/presentations/spreadsheets are going to be cross-referenced with Linked-In? Sounds like a mechanism to put me one click away from accidentally sending sensitive info to someone working for a competitor.

Nothing about this sounds "delightful" to me. It sounds intrusive and risky.

Or even other things in granular form, like salt. (As in "corned beef".)

It was part of DEC culture, not US culture.

Great news unless you are living in a village near the tigers.

This fear that people have of nearby predators is, in fact, a real problem with conservation efforts to preserve those predators. David Quammen addresses this aspect of conservation in his book "Monster of God". He believes the fear of predators is more deep-seated in our psyche than most other fears.

I suspect your 100-250 number is high (perhaps way high?) but it only takes one in a village where everyone knows everyone to ratchet-up fear. If a neighbor kid were taken by a bear, I'd sure want the authorities to do something about that bear.

How close to full-spectrum are those new "daylight" LED bulbs?

It certainly is the trend here in New England, where winters are reasonably harsh. And the new outdoor malls aren't very walkable, either. They're separate stores, or sometimes chunks of stores, that you almost have to drive between. With an Olive Garden or an Applebee's in the middle of the parking lot.

and, strangely, a Sears that just hasn't moved yet

I believe Sears owns most of its real estate, so maybe moving isn't so easy.

Going by wikipedia stats (us population of 131 million, 420000 wwii deaths), and assuming 3 years for heavy US troop involvement in the war (say mid-1942 to mid-1945), it looks like war would have accounted for about 107 deaths per 100,000 people for those years.

I don't know why this is so hard nowadays. I administered a large VMS system in the 80s, and we regularly changed usernames (and email names, which were the same thing in those days) for women who requested it. Contrary to another replier, I never received a request to change someone's username to something inappropriate.

How often do these machines need spare parts? And how much power do they consume to operate?

To your point (3), perhaps it is reasonable to bring a lifetime's supply of vitamin supplements for four people. But with an artificial lamp you would have to worry about bulbs burning out (how many would you need?), and the lamps would consume a significant part of what would have to be a limited power supply in the colony.

To your point (4), that there may exist an even more difficult problem does not mean that building a Mars vehicle is "not especially technically challenging." The author explicitly cites the three recent malfunctions with rocket launches, and the older Apollo, Soyuz, and Shuttle programs all had their difficulties too. Building a Mars vehicle is surely challenging.

iWork only runs on Apple's hw, but I didn't think you needed to buy _new_ hw. I believe you only need to update to Mavericks (or Yosemite).

Similar to how we Americans put foreign words in italics, no? Does that look aesthetically irritating to others?

It's not like after calling Dell and not getting an answer [...], you say "Oh, fuck it - I'm going to do gardening instead".

Perhaps not, but it influences the answer to your next question:

Instead the major determinant is how good is your last laptop - is it good enough?

The more effort it takes to buy a new computer (given that I already have one), the less likely I am to buy one. Eventually customers get to the point of need, and buy. But sales could probably be noticeably higher if the purchase experience were straight-forward. In addition to the need-based sales, there'd be want-based sales.

There were (quite capable) desktop calculators, but just barely (1968): http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp9100.htm

But color TV had been widely available for about a decade. In fact, I watched the 1969 moon landings on my parents 1961 color Zenith. (They had rotary phone well into the 80s, however.)

We had rain throughout the winter

Snow would have been better. Rain fill the reservoirs, and then the excess must be spilled off. Snow sits in the mountains forming a huge natural reservoir, and the more gradual melt can be used more efficiently.

The latest issue of National Geographic has a map showing meat calories consumed per-capita for various countries and regions around the world. The US is high, but more-or-less right on par (or a little under) with many other places: Brazil, western Europe, northern Europe, Australia, and China[1]. Some countries are considerably higher, including Argentina and Finland.

This is, indeed, a global phenomenon, not a US one.

[1] China is interesting in that the meat calories consumed is high, but the amount (in weight?) of meat consumed is less. This due to the consumed meat being largely high-fat-content pork.

ssh and tmux won't work? big effin deal

So when I want to ssh into a remote machine, I don't use your new program, unless you've also written an ssh replacement. If I want virtual screens, I don't use your new program, unless you've also written a tmux (or screen) replacement. Et cetera.

Your new terminal program is useless till you've replaced or updated "all" the programs that depend on traditional terminal behavior. And "all", in this case, is reasonably close to being literal. If you get 80% of what I need, it's not enough. And the last 20% will likely differ from person to person.

And I'll need to replace my keyboard, too?

I totally don't buy that you're not being tongue-in-cheek.

Is this a hard problem for kernel devs to solve? Or could it be as simple as using a timeout when the kernel's OOM killer is disabled? That is, when a cgroup is at the limit, the kernel waits for some finite amount of time and then starts killing things itself. Or would this cause other problems?

(I understand that this is not very common these days but I still do work on remote X on a daily basis)

It's probably more common than you think. We also use it.

No doubt immersion is the way to go.

But it still seems to me that countries where students learn foreign languages successfully at a high rate start those students before they're 12. My two years of high school was a waste, as you said yours was. But Germans (and Dutch, and Norwegians, etc.) have much better success in their schools, and they all start before the age 14 that's common for starting here in the US (though that's starting to change).

"if you start at a young enough age"

My understanding is that less than 12 is a good definition of young enough. (Although, ironically in the context of this discussion, my google-fu is too weak this morning to find the reference that convinced me of this. :)

In any case, a distant 2 years of high-school German coupled with 6 months of effort last year (pretty nearly an hour a day) was not enough to give me the skill to even read a children's book in German. For some of us, learning a language is hard.

I'm not part of the Ada world, so I don't actually know, but I thought the important Ada compiler(s) were also proprietary.

I have no reason to doubt that you're there. But trust me, we're not all there. There's no way an office of our size could go through the paper we do without printers and copiers (unless we were all flat-out copy typists). This has been true wherever I've worked.

IANAL, etc., but I believe there's lot's of good legal precedent around the legitimacy of FAX, and a lot of doubt and uncertainty about other electronic transfers of documents. So FAX is the safe choice.

Does the default PDF reader allow you to print yet?

Is "RCD" British for what we call "GFI" (Ground Fault Interrupt) in the US?

10% of American households [...] buy electric tea kettles

No way. I've never seen an electric tea kettle. Tea kettles, sure; but not electric ones. I don't believe anywhere near 10% of US households have one.

We've got plenty of bread machines, waffle irons, electric skillets, toaster ovens, crock pots, and every possible variety of coffee maker, espresso machines, rice cookers, etc. So we're not adverse to electric appliances.

Myself, I've got a stovetop kettle that I never use. If I want tea, I heat water in the microwave.

The first schematic editor I ever used displayed with Regis graphics [1] on a VT125 terminal. But it only used a small subset of Regis. One escape sequence would put the terminal in a mode that mapped the 8th-bit set bytes to a bunch of arc- and line-segment glyphs that were entirely sufficient to display a circuit schematic. (And the 8th-bit clear bytes retained their ASCII encodings for labels.)

Drawing with these characters was very similar to these ascii drawings: one byte gave you a piece of a line (or an arc), and you built a grid of them. The schematic editor took a simple here's-the-grid-coordinate-of-an-element representation of the schematic, adjusted the offsets of the glyphs of that element, and built-up the grid of bytes to send to the terminal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS