nyan

The site formerly known as Twitter would be more respectable these days if it were a porn site.

I was right about Yellow: he's a chaotic-evil mad scientist in a law-and-order suit.

Well, if they devolve into civil war, they immediately become less of a nuisance to everyone else. Unless it spills across the border or the side with control of the nuclear arsenal is nihilistic enough to make use of it.

When you order something, do you express where you want it sent in coordinates or as an address? You can't assume that the device's coordinates at the time the order is made correspond to where the order is supposed to be sent, even if the device gives coordinates. Plus, they're either not precise enough (could encompass the yard of the house next door, or just the snowbank at the edge of the property) or too precise ("drop this in the center of the roof because that's where the coordinates are"). You'd need software capable of parsing building layouts well enough to figure out where the main entryway is and leave the parcel there, or you'd have to require that people interested in receiving deliveries by drone put a beacon where they want the drone to drop stuff.

Beacons are the simplest solution, but they immediately put Amazon in a position where most people won't care enough to set them up.

The drone's only as good as its software, the map it's using, and the address data it's given. All of which were created by fallible humans.

Ain't it fun having turtles all the way down?

That's because Perl doesn't do operator overloading in general. Even the equality operator is different for strings (eq instead of ==). As a language, it may look pretty weird and lack some modern features, but the underlying design is surprisingly intelligent and consistent in many ways.

Well, whether or not your asylum application gets processed and approved is at the whim of the government, not the applicant. From what I understand, the process is slow and rigidly bureacratic and can take more than a year to complete even if they don't make you start over because you missed a ticky-box on some form or other.

I admit I haven't read the bill and it's possible it gives some leeway for claims in process . . . but I would bet not.

The only thing in that area that I can think of that might fall under the heading "zoo" was a small petting zoo that I vaguely remember as fronting on Hwy 11 in the general area of the Tri-Town many years ago. I doubt they had any big cats. Certainly they wouldn't have been able to afford enough of them to get a breeding population from any escapees.

Melanistic cougars I might believe, or escaped animals from a lot further south.

That's still help text, even if it isn't very helpful. I was installing to an older laptop recently that had no help for most BIOS options at all, plus I found a forum post on the manufacturer's website indicating that even they had no documentation for those settings. (Naturally, it was made by HP.)

Oh, it's Harper again. What comes out of his mouth these days is only marginally more congruent with reality then what comes out of Trump's.

Well, that was quite the plot-development-packed episode . . . and now everyone's plans seem to have gone up in smoke.

This is based on a light novel series. If they're doing the typical 1 volume = 4 episodes, episode 9 is derived from the beginning of volume 3, so not an entirely ridiculous place for a new character introduction.