Viewing profile — TheMiller

Washtenaw is certainly an affluent county, but not that rich. I live in another part of the county and used to work in Mauch's part of it; it's by no means mostly millionaires. I t…

A minor correction: West was bought by Thomson (no "p"), which later merged with Reuters to become Thomson Reuters.

Well, I still use some UML diagrams fairly often. Not so much for permanent or comprehensive system documentation, but to help me think through specific features or behaviors, and …

I do get it. I've been using it for several months, and I run into problems fairly often. Nothing wrong with the implementation, AFAICT, but it takes a fair amount of thought to as…

I think this is a mischaracterization. The relational model which motivated relational DMBSs is based on predicate logic. Mappings to graphs are obvious, but are not the organizing…

> UBI is cargo cult finance. It's a broken mental model that will kill the system. Such dismissiveness is unwarranted. There's a lot of intriguing research on the topic that indica…

I second the recommendation for TheOldReader. It's where I eventually ended up after Google Reader's demise.

At least, it's not the normal case in the U.S. We call that a "holding tank", not a septic tank.

The rural township that I live in is considering the possibility of providing municipal broadband; hence my interest in this report. From a security point of view, I am skeptical a…

Discover had a service like this more than a decade ago, which I used quite a bit. But they shut it down after a few years.

It's no more of a "technicality" than the fact that some people happened to be born within the somewhat arbitrary borders of a particular nation, through no effort of their own, an…

Actually, in that scenario, the campfire is more likely to be a health threat to asthmatic members of the public (about 7% in the U.S.) than the cigar!

> It was created by people who had no experience in databases and are learning as they go[4]. As they started adding things that are essential for database they realized it's not t…

SpiderOak. When I decided I wanted auto-syncing cloud storage, I chose them exactly because of the temp file issue. I ended up also liking their security policies and pricing quite…

I agree with many of the recommendations here, but am surprised to see no mention so far of "the three B's": Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and Ben Bova. All excellent hard science fi…

"... but those other states' property taxes rise with the value of the houses every year, ..." In Michigan, it's a bit more complex. The assessor calculates a State Equalized Value…

I'll second the recommendation for The Culture series, and add "A Fire Upon The Deep" by Vernor Vinge.

I just find it utterly fascinating that these discussions on the merits of (Common) Lisp still draw 100 comments within such a short time. This has been going on for decades, in ma…

I believe that this convention is borrowed from Common Lisp. I always thought of it more as a way to highlight importance. Three semicolons for block comments outside of top-level …

Actually, I can remember at least one commonly used alternative name from my time in a German-speaking country. The term "Pfund" (literally, pound) was frequently used to refer to …