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embolalia's comments

embolalia | 11 years ago

Well, we're already saying the second part.

embolalia | 11 years ago

Washington is actually a much better example of an organic-ish area, in terms of street grain. This is pretty ironic, given that the City of Washington (originally just one part of the District of Columbia) was totally planned.

embolalia | 11 years ago

"For Life" is in the same way that SCOTUS justices have an appointment "for life". It just means they can't be fired or deposed, not that they can only leave in a box.

embolalia | 11 years ago

I'm 23 and have had my caffeine. It's neither your age nor your decaffeineity that makes this seem wooden.

embolalia | 11 years ago

Counter-counterpoint: all of your counterpoints exist or have equivalents in every other form of communication. You swap unicode (which is nearly universally agreed on) for H.264/Theora/VP8 and AAC/Vorbis/Opus, and you still have to deal with collation and translation/language (which, without transcription to text first, is pretty hard).

embolalia | 11 years ago | on: New Tube for London

I don't know about how TFL will do it, but WMATA in Washington, DC did and will employ the same number of people under automatic operation as it does under manual operation. They were mostly just there to watch for problems and open the doors, but they were still employed (which should make the union happy).

Interestingly, the crash that made WMATA stop automatic operation[1] would not have been avoided by manual operation. The operator would've seen the same suggested speed that the train did, and wouldn't have been able to stop any sooner.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_tra...

embolalia | 11 years ago

Grown men? You could've just said "adults". You're making an implication you don't want to, I hope, and one which needlessly maligns a whole group of people. That's the same thing pekk was responding to, albeit less explicit. Nobody likes reading "your demographic, specifically, is horrible." Saying it is unproductive and damages the speaker's credibility as someone with politesse - a particularly bad thing in this conversation, given its topic. It is entirely possible to call out ashattery without resorting to prejudice.

embolalia | 11 years ago

I've been completely unable to get it to recognize an inverted interrobang (⸘) with no luck, though. Still, very very cool.

EDIT: Tried one more time and got it as the 9th suggestion.

embolalia | 11 years ago

My old ThinkPad is near the end of its life (the screen is falling off…) and needs to be replaced. There's absolutely nothing out there that looks like a decent replacement, though. Worse yet, I also like not to have a separate numberpad on a laptop (it makes the keyboard feel imbalanced, because it's even more off-center than usual) and finding that on anything with a remotely usable screen size is damn near impossible.

embolalia | 11 years ago

I haven't looked too deep in that sub, but maybe there are some going on that just don't make the front page? There are some weird ones occasionally, mostly people who've had some sort of surgery or health problem, from what I've seen. But really, can we just focus on Rampart?

embolalia | 11 years ago | on: Reddit

> increase the level of quality of content and discussion across the board.

Would this mean I couldn't launch this unintended pun into a long thread of puns that eventually winds up at "I did Nazi that coming"?

embolalia | 11 years ago

Not sure where you get that they're ignoring it. TFA says nothing of taxes, and that burden falls on the buyer anyway. Unless you're saying that the IRS's guidelines mean it can't be used to buy things for some reason, which is just not true at all.

embolalia | 11 years ago

The issue is that plenty of people come in spouting complete nonsense that they "know" about their health, and they're usually wrong. It creates a default reaction. Imagine someone coming in and saying they can't send emails more than 500 miles. If you'd never heard [that story][1] before, you'd probably think they were being ridiculous. They may be absolutely right, but it sounds so different from what you know that you default to saying "Email really doesn't work that way, generally." It doesn't help that you're used to people coming in and saying that a virus put porn in their browser history.

[1]: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

embolalia | 11 years ago | on: DistroWatch QA: Distributions not adopting systemd

> I quite like [Upstart] versus SysV init scripts.

Have you tried systemd service files yet? They're quite nice to work with. I haven't written Upstart's equivalent, so I only know what those are like second-hand, but I imagine if ease of creating a service is a major factor you'll be pleasantly surprised by systemd.

embolalia | 11 years ago

NYC Subway fares are always $2.50. Really, as confusing fares go, this is nothing compared to DC's Metro. At the top of the machine, above the head of anyone who can actually fit in the train, there's a massive listing of fares to each other station in the system (on and off peak, which are different). In order to fill your card perfectly, you need to know exactly which stations you'll be using and when. Granted, most tourists will be traveling within the distances that get the minimum fare, and off-peak, so they could just go by that minimum fare. There's just no actual indication of that fact.

Oh, and if you want a plastic RFID card rather than magnetic paper that will fall apart within 3 trips, you need to spend $10 for $8 of fare. (EDIT: And another commenter mentioned something I'd forgotten: those paper farecards also come with a $1 surcharge per trip.)

embolalia | 11 years ago

It kept infuriatingly moving to the next item before I could finish reading. Proves the point, I suppose.

embolalia | 11 years ago

And Atlassian, sort of. When they feel like it. BB uses Markdown, but most of their other stuff is something else entirely.

embolalia | 11 years ago

The way to remember it is just that you're parenthesizing the URL. Naturally, you might write it "look at this thing (http://example.com)" - in Markdown, you do the same, but with brackets to indicate where you want the link to show up. "look at [this thing](http://example.com)"

I don't buy for a second that <a href="http://example.com">this thing</a> is more intuitive than that, even if you disagree about the specific brackets used.

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