HarJIT

You and puns appear to work on the same principle as Jerry and inappropriate remarks -- what is purported to be a punishment is actually serving as an encouragement.  ;-P

/me gets out the list.  Looks at it.  Looks at Pharaoh.  Looks at list.  Breaks down and cries.

It predates PERL by a huge margin. For example, YACC1.
For something even worse, XINU2.
 
 
1 Yet Another Compiler Compiler. And it was following an already-established trend in naming.
2 Xinu Is Not Unix

The Moderator: Not pushing it. Crossing it. This is not acceptable. Please avoid it.

Once I was offered a special deal on high-end shoe inserts: three for $20. I calmly asked the guy if he had many customers who needed three.
After a moment he did a double-take and clarified: three pair.

Well, it looks like that joke has been milked for all its worth.

That's udderly ridiculous.

It does you credit that you care so much, and tried to do what's right.  Thank you, even if you didn't succeed.

Today at work, I saw a lone Brown Pelican walking on the driveway between buildings.
I drove by it in a golf cart less than three feet away, and it barely moved.
I stepped out of the cart and approached within one foot and the bird did not react until I crouched down to take a closer look.
The Pelican had a fishing hook embedded in its neck and a fishing line wrapped around one wing.
I called animal control, and they gave me the number for wildlife rescue.  But by the time I got back to where I first saw the bird, it was gone.  While I doubt it could fly well, it was probably able to get back over the fence.  Since I couldn't find the bird, I didn't make the call.
This bird was weak.  I would guess it was starving.
Every once in a while you need a tangible reminder about the dangers of carelessness.
This sea bird was dying in one of the worst ways imaginable because some somebody with a rod and reel couldn't be bothered to dispose of their tackle properly.

Alar, a fungicide once used on apples, was banned on a similar basis. They routinely test chemicals as possible carcinogens at a dosage level called "lethal dose 50" - which means that if you give that dosage to 100 laboratory animals, 50 of them will die of direct chemical overdose. It stands to reason that the other 50 will mostly be pretty sick. Now, out of those sick survivors, how many develop cancer?
With Alar, this test determined that it isn't a carcinogen. Then they did something pretty much unprecedented. They tested at "lethal dose 75" - you can figure out what that means. And at that dosage, it's a carcinogen. So it was banned.
Now the thing is, Alar was applied to the *outside* of apples, in very minute doses. You'd have to eat a few tons of apples in a short period to get even to "lethal dose 50". And that's assuming you don't wash the apples before peeling them. Washing in water will remove most of the Alar.
And the flip side is that many of the fungi that Alar keeps from growing on the apples, are themselves carcinogens - that would dramatically fail and be banned at "lethal dose 50" if they were industrial products rather than natural parasites.

I would pay good money not to see this.

This reminds me a little of my calculations after reading this page on XKCD. I worked out that if a human being ate a ton of bananas every day for a year, it would receive so large a potassium-induced radiation dose as to make death from radiation sickness a near certainty. When I informed my father of this unimaginable health hazard (he is an M.D. who has worked in clinical chemistry for decades) he rather dryly informed me that he could see other health-related problems that would make this a nonissue long before even getting near a fatal dose of radiation.
In short, my genius quite simply goes unappreciated. I am going back to work on my brilliant idea for a banana-fueled nuclear power plant now.

The horror stories of saccharin were a lie, or at best a serious misrepresentation, to begin with.
Kind of like the horror stories of birth control pills causing cancer in lab animals. (The claim was true... for one specific strain of lab animals, carefully selectively bred to have an elevated probability of developing cancer when injected with a nearly-lethal dose of the medication. You know, it's a lot easier to study cancer if you have a reliable way of getting cancers in front of you to study.)

Pandora: "Yes. Of course they should. Popcorn?"
Mall guard: "Definitely not. I'm not sure what they are doing, but even running is forbidden."
Kitty: "I want to do those hi-jinks with them!"
Rhoda's mother: "My daughter doing some hi-jinks? I'm sure you mistaken her for someone else."
Catalina's mother: "As if she would care about my opinion. Sigh."
Diane: "Rhoda and who?"
Tedd: "... I'm actually more interested about what I can learn about their spell than about possible wardrobe malfunction! What have I became?"
 

Well, I tried the method given in the Ubuntu forum.  Fail
Tried PlayOnLinux.  Major Fail
Found the "unofficial" client made by the guy that wrote the OS X "client".  Major win.  Running it on my Ubuntu laptop is about 200% faster and way more stable than on the iMac.

Eve Online, has in theory, an OS X client.  This is a lie.  They have a broken version of WINE that they use.  If I'm going to use WINE I'll freaking do it on Linux where it more or less works.  I am less than gruntled about this.

VERY old saying.

*Stares at the guy eating a hotdog and talking on the phone while driving at same time* ....................Really?
You're not getting things done faster. You're just ending your life sooner.

This reminds me of a dream I have had once or twice where I sat at the computer and was trying to moderate the forums. There was a very strange thread going on about the legality of using the CMD in the United States and of whether it counted as identity theft to switch someone's gender. (The logic was that since the person clearly no longer matched their original ID, their identity had been taken away from them.) And all of a sudden President Obama was posting in the thread requesting patience because it would take time for the courts to hash things out. Around then I decided that this couldn't be real and I felt quite relieved when I woke up.

The solution to reliability issues: get rid of the scriptwriters.
And on the software side, you'd be amazed what percentage of code is dedicated to preventing the users from screwing things up. Software would be much easier without users.

No. A flying hall monitor would interfere with the ability of the students to see the murals.

...I really hope he doesn't do what he's thinking of doing in the fifth panel.  It seems to really fly in the face of everything he is; I'm surprised he's even considering it.
Honestly, "I wish!" seems like a very Elliot thing to say...

And? I am not you. I am not particularly fond of war, genocide or dictatorships in general, and I nonetheless have spent a great deal of time studying European history from 1919 to 1945. My entire reason for learning German in the first place was so I could finally begin to unlearn my reflexive fear and hate of all things German. I do not like misogyny, racism or homo/trans/queerphobia either but I am still studying their mechanisms in an attempt to learn how to deal with them.
Your motivations are not mine. And that is absolutely fine, you have a right to them. But conversely, I have my own reasons for acting the way I do. It is that simple.

... is that to say that the spellbook defines a callback, and then registers a reference to it in the mage (for an onUpdate event or whatever)?  I guess Tedd could work out how to register his own callbacks (say, from a watch) in that case, but he might have to watch a spellbook as it is created (to see it being registered) and when a spell is being gained (to see it being invoked).  In this case (a) a cloned copy of the spellbook would remain static and not update, unless/until its callback is sepeartely registered, (b) if the spellbook is destroyed the mage may run into an unmatched dependency upon gaining a new spell (unless magic works such that the reference is also destroyed), which could be anything from silent to fatal (knowing Dan, more likely the former).
The diametric alternative, of course, would be the spellbook acting as a client, actively re-downloading the information from the mage intermittently.  An more efficient possibility is intermittently querying the timestamp and, if it's newer than the one it has stored, re-downloading the information.  These are less elegant but avoid making the spellbook a dependency of the mage (they instead make the spellbook dependant on the mage).  Also, an exact clone of the spellbook would work as is, unless the mage has some mechanism to prevent a given revision being downloaded twice, in which case it would be a race as to which spellbook gets a given update and which one does not.  If not, then the mage is essentially a queriable API, which Tedd could study by gazing at a spellbook as someone gains a new spell.
…
"the mage is essentially a queriable API" never thought I'd say that.

... is that to say that the spellbook defines a callback, and then registers a reference to it in the mage (for an onUpdate event or whatever)?  I guess Tedd could work out how to register his own callbacks (say, from a watch) in that case, but he might have to watch a spellbook as it is created (to see it being registered) and when a spell is being gained (to see it being invoked).  In this case (a) a cloned copy of the spellbook would remain static and not update, unless/until its callback is sepeartely registered, (b) if the spellbook is destroyed the mage may run into an unmatched dependency upon gaining a new spell (unless magic works such that the reference is also destroyed), which could be anything from silent to fatal (knowing Dan, more likely the former).
The diametric alternative, of course, would be the spellbook acting as a client, actively re-downloading the information from the mage intermittently.  An more efficient possibility is intermittently querying the timestamp and, if it's newer than the one it has stored, re-downloading the information.  These are less elegant but avoid making the spellbook a dependency of the mage (they instead make the spellbook dependant on the mage).  Also, an exact clone of the spellbook would work as is, unless the mage has some mechanism to prevent a given revision being downloaded twice, in which case it would be a race as to which spellbook gets a given update and which one does not.  If not, then the mage is essentially a queriable API, which Tedd could study by gazing at a spellbook as someone gains a new spell.
…
"the mage is essentially a queriable API" never thought I'd say that.