People give bad advice, so buy my book and listen to my advice. It's different!

The U.S. government hired a Candanian company to put together a large part of Healthcare.gov. Even they don't reliably hire citizens anymore.

H.Brydon wrote:

JSOP's secret identity

JSOP doesn't need a secret identity. If JSOP wants to be someone else, he roundhouse kicks Chuck Norris and takes his identity. Oh, who am I kidding. JSOP would never kick someone when a gun would do. ;P

But Apple fanboys look at you with a disapproving glare. That's almost the same as a tax, right? It certainly taxes my patience... :~

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but who's the third

Mary Shelley? Not that I want the Frankenstein monster helping me out with that... :~

Wouldn't thank make you part of the problem, as every report you've seen you've refused to read?

Maybe it's just your interpretation of his word choice. I often set the burner on my stove to high (though on occasion I also set it too high). We live in a digital world now, so he may very well have set the bar to high by setting the bar to high. ;P

PB 369,783 wrote:

I'm none the wiser that 15 people didn't like it

As this is the internet, and CP is coming up on 10,000,000 users, I would imagine that 15 people not liking something is a given. You shouldn't really change your habits until an appreciable minority is offendend. Let's be generous and put that at 0.1%, meaning you can do as you please until you get 10,000 downvotes. :-D

My favorite delay was one I encountered regularly. I used to fly from Milwaukee to San Diego and back for work fairly regularly. On the way back, I always had the 'pleasure' of changing planes at O'Hare. Not once was the plane ready and available to take me from Chicago to Milwaukee for the last leg of my trip. Usuaully, the offer was to 'try' to get me on a flight the next afternoon. If you aren't familiar with those cities, Google directions say you can walk from O'Hare to Milwaukee airport in less than 24 hours. It always frustrated me that it took longer to fly than to walk.

It would behoove you all you stop this nonsense.

Hey! We invited Canada to the party, and we stole most of Cuba's good players. That's basically the whole world, right? ;P

Just because USians don't watch it or call it football doesn't mean that we can't let rest of the world riot over it.

You say that most bikers obey the law, but that's not the case where I live. The biking community adamantly supports Idaho stops, which apparently mean they can treat red lights as stop signs and stop signs as yield signs. This is NOT the law where I live, but the biking community swears by it, loudly and often. They openly profess to breaking the laws as written, because they don't like them. Granted, that is not unlike cars and speed limits, but it does lead to disagreements like this one about bikers in general.

Yeah, but if you read it too quickly, you might mistake it for IE6, and no one wants that.

Aww, I took too long typing my explanation, and now I just look silly. Like school all over again. :((

Okay, I'll give this a try, but it might be easier out of order.

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c) Why the need for a jacket?

Something of an American (okay, USian) tradition is what's known as the Letter Jacket. It's a jacket in the school colors (of whatever institution is being attended).

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a) got her letters?

If you participate in an official organized activity (usually sports, but some places also have academic letters for debate club and the like) you get a larger 'letter' (which may or may not be only one letter) to have sewn onto the front of the jacket.

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b) Pins?

As the jacket only has room for one letter, you also get pins for each sport (or other activity) that would earn you a letter. Sometimes, there are also pins for specific accomplishments, like not embarassing yourself too badly or actually winning something.

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d) athletic banquet but no food?

I hated this perversion of the langauge too, but I suspect they mean an end-of-season award ceremoney where the team and parents get together somewhere to celebrate the team's accomplishments and/or the end of a miserable season. Usually a good time for the kids to relax, but it tends to cost the parents extra money to sit and listen to the coach talk about stuff that doesn't matter much anymore. In my experience, the presence of food at these banquets was about 50/50. Hope that helps.

I don't WANT to, I just feel that we NEED to in order to understand these philosophical questions. Actually, a sample size of one is pretty useless. We should torture hundreds of AI, just to be sure. ;P

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Ok, well here's something to consider: an AI does not notice its death. You can make it stop updating, which it can't notice because it's not updating (from its perspective, time stopped). If you then delete its state, well.. as far as the AI is concerned, none of that ever happened, from one moment to an other it just ceased to exist.

I would argue that in the case of a sudden death, humans lack the ability to know that they're dead (from the strictly human level - if existence continues it's post-human). Now, if life is slowly failing, a human can detect and anticipate the end of life, but so could a sufficiently sophisticated AI. With the proper inputs, I think a machine could anticipate death at least as well as a human.

You should get that 3-digit number some places want, just in case. You can never be too prepared.

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some sleeping pills in the ice cream can make your afternoon quiet and relaxing again

Would those be for you, or for your eldest? :)