vikingerik

Just Wikipedia. It cites two studies that found values of 8-13 mg and 3-32 mg per decaf cup, compared to regular which is 95-200. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination

FYI since many people don't know: Decaf isn't zero, it can still be several percentage points. In the US decaf is supposed to be under 3% of regular coffee but it's not commonly tested or enforced, so many types of decaf can be quite a bit higher. Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup.

One other thing to compare is business and health regulations. Compliance with that is certainly more involved and costly today than in 1940 and would account for part of the price.

The Zocchi d100 isn't face-symmetric and thus isn't a fair die. It's as close as he could get. It's really effectively a golf ball with 100 dimples, but they aren't and can't be arranged perfectly symmetrically.

Any even number dX can be made as a fair die as a bipyramid or trapezohedron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapezohedron These would be the only fair face-symmetric d100s. The standard d10 is this, and you sometimes see a d14 or d18 or something like that constructed this way. It becomes impractical with very thin faces past 20 or so. An odd-numbered fair die is also possible by using one twice as big and duplicating the numbers (like 1-5 twice on a d10.)

Of course this is comparing to one data point that is an outlier. If people are choosing to pay $3 in today's dollars for it, that means that in 2010 McDonald's was underpricing that item relative to its market value. Presumably deliberately as a promotion. Compare across everything you buy and compare like-to-like if you want to judge its accuracy.

This ticker's current speed is faster than that, though. It's going about 1e-9 dollar per second. That comes to about $0.03 per year, which as a fraction of the current base of $0.50, comes to 6% inflation per year.

I don't know how that speed was determined. Either it's using a linear decrease since 2000 (which isn't correct, the inverse of exponential inflation would be logarithmic decay, not linear), or it's weighting by recency for the high inflation since 2020 (which may continue, or may not.)

I have the Twin Galaxies world record on the Dreamcast version, at $114k total score, so yes :)

Not really. Jupiter alone is good enough. Its huge mass accounts for almost all of the gain you get from any such slingshot. Launch windows from Jupiter to anywhere occur every 12 years. Voyager's alignment was captivating, but realistically if it hadn't happened, we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions instead.

Yes, easily. The alignment doesn't really matter for that. Almost all your speed gain comes from just Jupiter. Saturn is 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity, so your gain from Saturn is only 20% of what you can get from Jupiter (and also your potential gain is limited by a minimum approach distance greater than the rings, or you'd hit them.) And the ice giants are slower and smaller yet; Voyager barely gained from Uranus and actually slowed from Neptune since it wasn't routed to gain speed there.

New Horizons achieved 80% of Voyager's velocity with just Jupiter, and it wasn't really trying to optimize for speed, it approached Jupiter only to 10 million km (over 100x greater than the planet's radius.) A probe dedicated to a fast slingshot past Jupiter could easily overtake Voyager. We haven't had any need to try, unless one of the missions to specifically study the heliopause-interstellar area happens. It would still take a while to catch up to Voyager's head start, but it's doable.

The alignment for Voyager was captivating, but it really wasn't as important as people typically think. Jupiter alone can get you anywhere and launch windows for it come every 12 years. If the four-planet alignment hadn't happened then, realistically we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions.

I don't remember the source but I also like this quote: Before we worry about terraforming Mars, maybe first we should stop Venusforming Terra.

Not just you: the Tom Swift novels reboot in the 1990s had Tom once bragging about "the latest seven-eighty-six processor."

That was heuristics. It looked for the text "more" or "next" or "->" within an anchor tag. Sometimes it would be fooled if a forum thread or other link had a title containing one of those words.

PNG can be lossy before the lossless step. You can take areas of near-matching pixel values and make them actually match, to work better with PNG's near neighbor compression. There are a few encoders that can do that.

Right, but that's not something a linter could know.

Zero shouldn't be an exception there. If f had been set from something like f = a - b, then you're in the same situation where f might be almost but not exactly zero.

The linter wouldn't know where f came from, so it should flag all floating point equality cases, and have some way that you can annotate it for "yeah this one is okay."

The cost effectiveness is the intimidation and chilling effects on a wider population, when that can be achieved with a small number of actual goons.

If you're complaining about the prices, remember how capitalism works. The price is set by buyers, not sellers. That's the invisible hand, the seller will set the price to what buyers show they will pay. If you're unhappy about $500 for a Millennium Falcon or whatever, your beef is not with the company for accepting that when people choose to pay it, it's with those other buyers for paying that much.

As the other replies are saying, it's mostly brand power. If your complaint is that $500 for a Falcon is monopolistic because there's no competition because nobody else can legally sell Falcons, the monopoly is really with Star Wars not Lego, they're just delegating it to Lego. You're always free to find your cheapest source of bricks perhaps from other manufacturers and build your own equivalent.

As for stickers and apps and the other stuff... yeah that's the enshittification that also always accompanies capitalism. It's lamentable but it only changes if enough customers vote no with their wallets.

One workaround is to buy a computer monitor and use that instead. Most of those are still pretty dumb HDMI or USB terminals that you can plug any signal source into. They don't come in huge sizes like TVs (although search "digital signage" for some options), and you'll need a dedicated sound speaker system, but this route could be an option.

Regarding Excel's weird warts... Microsoft knows all about them but they're stuck with it for backwards compatibility. The business world has a billion Excel scripts and macros done by barely technical users that all inadvertently depend on the details of things like the scrolling and clipboard behavior. Trying to improve that would break all of that. Same as all the weirdness in JavaScript, Microsoft has to just call it a feature and live with it.

This is almost exactly what I do. Keep my wrists in line with the forearms, such that they're angled relative to the keyboard. So the home keys aren't ASDF, it's more like QWEF and HUIO. (Although it's more like the home position is in the crevices between those and the keys just below.) I've always done this just naturally and have never had any problems with typing stress or fatigue in 40 years.

As others are saying, the * is meant as a wildcard, not as censorship. It's meant to also cover the likes of Linux or Xenix etc, although there isn't actually any other name that would strictly fit the pattern of "UN*X".

For the "14 days ago" one - post timestamps get updated when a post gets re-submitted or boosted by the moderators. It would have actually been there from 44 days ago even if it's now saying it was more recent.

Right, cubing scales up much more readily than juggling. Although I've found the bigger cubes aren't quite so impressive because you can't do them as fast. I take 10-15 minutes for the 5x5x5, and by then any observer has lost interest.

But yeah, some people will be impressed just because it's bigger. They always say that it must be super hard. My stock reply: "It's like a jigsaw puzzle. Is 1000 piece harder than 500? Not really harder, it's just more of the same thing." Sometimes that gets a blank look, sometimes that induces enlightenment.

My favorite cuboid variant is a 3x3x4. That blows people's minds when they see it's not symmetric, and they handle it and realize that it can't do certain turns (the long axes have to be 180° not 90°), but in fact that limitation makes it easier and I can solve it almost as fast as a 3x3x3.

Rubik's cubing is another. Most people here with enough logical aptitude to be programmers could probably learn a beginner method in a day or two. I'll pick up a cube anywhere I see one scrambled, solve it in a couple minutes, and then the last flourish is to leave it in the checkerboard pattern.

I also juggle, and the result of the combination is that approximately every single person on Facebook has posted to me the video about solving cubes while juggling them...

Likely the office was getting a kickback from the supplier for writing that prescription. This is shockingly common in the US. A straight cash payment is prohibited, but it's easy to work around that legally and provide equipment or "compensate" some other expense.

The competitive market would take care of that. The employer that most wants your services will offer the X+Y, and competition will induce others to do the same. (No, the job market isn't perfectly liquid, but in principle that's what would happen.)

Taxes paid by your employer are indeed paid by you. If your salary is X and the company is paying Y worth of payroll tax, then they're really paying X+Y for your services, which would all be salary going to you if not for the payroll tax.

I'd guess a 6-sided mirror would be too big. The mirror needs a certain width for its reflection range to span across the viewport, and so a hexagon of that side length would be too big, particularly considering both eyes (the hexagons would have to overlap across the center line.)

Another problem would be that 60º between sides is too little angular separation. When the current frame approaches the right edge of your vision field, the next side of the mirror is already in position to be reflecting the LEDs into the left side of the vision field.

A 2-sided rotating mirror might work, but that's more complicated to manufacture and mount, such that I'd guess they found the back-and-forth simpler. Or else they found that rotating mirrors would impose a torque on the whole device and that wasn't workable. You could rotate the two mirrors in opposite directions, but that would mean the viewports are scanning in opposite directions (one right-to-left), and I don't know what that would do for the perceptions of 3d and persistence-of-vision.

Self checkout is fine, if the happy path works. If everything scans once and doesn't accidentally scan a second time, if everything scans at the price you thought it was posted for, if you don't have any controlled substances requiring approval, if the weight sensor doesn't freak out incorrectly or from putting your bags on it, if it accepts any coupons you have, if it accepts and processes your payment method correctly.

If everything goes fine, self checkout is fine. But the exception handling process for any of those is thoroughly aggravating, as you wait and try to get the attention of the one overworked attendant dealing with a dozen of these machines constantly throwing exceptions, as the computer screams at you for whatever it thought you were doing wrong.

Parsec still rocks hard. I got good enough to roll over the score on it: http://dos486.com/misc/parsec.jpg