overdunk

But for christ's sake, I hope these god damned engines can handle an amount of coin-sized pebbles or gravel swept up into the intake by fortuitous air currents.

I won't argue with you. I'm not quoting hard statistics, it's just a turn of phrase, given the context.

This neglects the porn-as-spectacle aspect of entertainment value extracted by viewers of pornography.

But "large number" is a poorly defined qualifier.

10,000 individuals interested in an odd combination of diaper play involving amputees could be considered a "large number" (more than you might expect) but is handily dwarfed by three quarters of a billion vanilla viewers looking for consensual sex in the missionary position.

Meanwhile, gore and racism searches do not, a sociopathic Nazi, make. How does one learn about reality, without investigating it?

Everyone gets curious about how genitals manage to escape the undercarriage of a 450 lb. individual, just to understand how they manage to wipe after completing a bowel movement. The best source of insight into that kind of curiosity is satisfied by locating and viewing fetish pornography.

I'd say this is the new alcoholism, except ordinary people who would have trivial access to alcohol no matter how regulated, would not be able to refine opiates into the doses these new drugs provide.

There are people out there who know these pills are a destructive force, and make them available in the same large volume anyway.

Is this sarcasm?

It's pretty nice not having a phone at all, and checking on the internet maybe once a day or less.

Probably accurate. And based on the quip from the article where the original nickname for the game was "Sonic's Ass" the rest falls into place.

Basically, I remember the main character kind of just hovering in place, and performing slow levitating jumps, while the scenery flies by.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK-h4M4Aetg

Looks like my memory is halfway correct, since I forgot about the side-scrolling levels, which I thought were from one of the follow-up sequels, and not the original game.

Ugh, the music and sound effects. Still horrible.

Wikipedia isn't camel-cased.

Crash Bandicoot had repellent level design.

Placing it next to Super Nintendo's Super Mario World is like placing catfood on the same table as Thankgiving dinner.

Believe me, I suffered through more than 15 minutes of the game.

  Snips is an AI

  a AI

Jargonification always feels like job security by obscurity. In other words, not actually job security, but a contrivance thereof.

I'd argue against the use of LOL for any writing that involves an exchange of money, at any level, reader, author, publisher, printer, paywall, et c.

But with regard to trivia, such as The Sokal Hoax, it is always, always, always the job of the journalist to inform the reader. This is true for acronyms, units of measurement, coincidental circumstances and more.

If someone writes an article about the JFK assassination, they should be explaining JFK's initials, events surrounding the cuban missile crisis, the MLK assassination, Jack Ruby's mob ties, LBJ's rivalry, Bobby Kennedy's assassination, Ted Kennedy's car accident, the grains of the bullet used, what the unit of measurement known as the grain measures for a bullet, even what a knoll is.

The journalist should capture as much information as needed to convey all relevant information to tell a complete story. A bad journalist leave details out, and expects the reader to "just know everything."

You are correct, sir. And thinking about OP's statement a little more, maybe staying off the road is a good idea in the sense that a two minute eclipse can distract drivers on the road.

But in general, unless you happen to glance at the sun in your field of view during the eclipse, it's all the darkness of passing clouds for most of the country.

Are traffic accidents statistically affected by proximity to a total eclipse of the sun?

  90% of the US lives within an 8hr drive of totality, so traffic will be horrible

August 21st is a Monday afternoon, so how many employed Americans are going to ask for the day off, to drive 8 hours, with a 200mm telephoto lens or telescope?

If totality is the size of several counties, and lasts even ten minutes, how many people will be on the road within an hour of the event? Lunchtime (or even all day long) traffic is probably nothing even terrible in 40 out of 50 states. In totality states, traffic won't even compare to a sporting event.

Uh, "plain text" is not a pair of words that I would use to describe "structured data" at all. I don't even know what someone would intend to mean in such a situation.

If someone told me they needed me to parse a "plain text" file, to me it sounds like they'd want me to provide some statistics on an unstructured text blob.

Free form text does have properties, such as byte length, character count, word count, line count, sentence count, paragraph count, and so on. Most of which is simply variations on whitespace delimiters.

But an individual plain text file... all on its own? Could be a shell script? Could be a newspaper clipping? Could be a dictionary file? Could be an array of XYZ vertices, edges and faces? Could be all of the above, and an email signature at the end?

Someone tells me: "here have this plain text object," and I presume it is a monolithic blob of ASCII, if I'm lucky, and maybe it's War and Peace or Moby Dick expressed in emoji if I'm not.