 related post.

2 hours later…
3:54 PM
OK, I think I'm running out of random gravatars. Everyday I see more structure :) One of these days I'll get the TeX logo in it.
2

user19161
4:38 PM
@N3buchadnezzar What do you mean by crash?

user19161
@N3buchadnezzar The good thing about TL is that if your install goes through halfway you can resume where it stopped and not have to start all over. Just run the install-tl command again.

user19161
@RyanReich I still like xypic for its concise syntax. For a commutative diagram, the pgf code is 3 times as long as the xypic one.

@JasperLoy It's true, but (well written) it can be parsed as prose. xypic may as well be xii-pic for a complex diagram.

user19161
@RyanReich Also pstricks has better support for 3D than pgf, so I think pgf is the loser to me here. :-)

@JasperLoy Poor Till Tantau, just can't get a break on this forum :)

5:15 PM
@DavidCarlisle I'll bet Word has had twice as many programmers working on it as LaTeX has.

user19161
@RyanReich Hmm, but TL has over 2000 packages!

@JasperLoy My point was that it's not like Word was some easy-breezy piece of code and LaTeX is a Herculean effort. Both are Herculean. (There will be no argument here as to which managed to clean the Augean stables, though)

user19161
@RyanReich Hmm OK. Actually I confess that I think Word is very good. I imagine the day where everyone will switch from LaTeX to word. It is not a bad idea actually.

@JasperLoy You say this in the safety of an empty chat room :)
I should hope that it's good, though. It really makes me sad to think that thirty years of development by the world's foremost software company would produce something bad.

@PauloCereda: Have you ever experienced this:
5

user19161
5:25 PM
@RyanReich I know LaTeX may have better spacing and the various packages make drawing special things easier, but seriously, Word is very powerful too and I was thinking if the LaTeX authors could just write macros for Word instead the same things could be accomplished.

user19161
@Werner Oh I experience this quite often on another site. :-)

@JasperLoy That's epic... almost like a formal request to double click.

user19161
@Werner Oh sorry, I just realized the "just now" just now. :-)

user19161
I think I have not come across this in that case!

7:15 PM
@Werner He sees this box every day ;-)

@MarcoDaniel Hardly: in the best circumstances it's "vote again in 20 hours". ;-)

7:39 PM
@MarcoDaniel Sure. I was just amused by the "vote again just now" part. Perhaps a mild eagerness on my part, most certainly echoed by Paulo!

1 hour later…
8:42 PM
@Werner, @egreg: whose idea was it to pad \colorbox by fboxsep:-)

@DavidCarlisle I have some suspects. :)

@DavidCarlisle He he... will keep looking.

@DavidCarlisle The idea of a wiiiiiide tilde is really terrible.

@egreg well true but the mathtime one looks interesting. better than my flat one. even the light version of mt isn't in the tl2012 I just got yesterday is that licensing issues?

@DavidCarlisle Yes, there are licensing problems. I don't know precisely, but the license of the light version is definitely not free.

8:53 PM
@egreg I had the full set once but they are probably on floppy disks somewhere but I don't know where and I haven't a floppy disk reader

@DavidCarlisle Ask Lance for a replacement.

@egreg so I can generate documents with wide tildes in and send them to you in the post?

@DavidCarlisle This could be considered harassing. :)

@egreg Free as in money, not as in speech, I think

3
A new \stretch primitive.
2

@percusse looks more like \skipping to me

@DavidCarlisle with talented people making the rope oscillate in the second fundamental.

@percusse Kill it with fire.
I liked the Catalan number question. Since it is labeled as very easy.

9:23 PM
should we really be adding such signs to the question rather than in comments? It seems belittling to new users to me. (just asking here for opinions rather than adding more comments to that question)

@PauloCereda I've never heard this expression and neither had Cristina. It must be pretty local.

@Werner Every day. :)

@DavidCarlisle I'm minded to roll this one back

@JosephWright I would do that. I agree with David (and you too, I think.)

@AlanMunn OK, done

9:33 PM
@AlanMunn +1

@JosephWright thanks

@AlanMunn I thought so. :) I think it's more common in the central west region (maybe from Pantanal) and also in the countryside areas of the southeast region. When the cowboy needs to cross his cattle across a river full of piranhas, he chooses the oldest or a sick ox to go ahead. While piranhas attack and devour the old ox, the others make the crossing safely.
The expression is used to denote one who submits or is subjected to a sacrifice to get someone rid of a difficulty or guilt.

@JosephWright I somehow missed the meta question this was based on, but I really think we should leave the editorializing about best practices to the answers and not edit questions to reflect that editorializing at all. Or just leave a comment saying "This isn't a good idea". If there's a better practice, someone will likely post an answer which will get plenty of votes.

In the academic context, we use this expression when we deliberately put errors in our text to give something to the reviewers. :D

10:14 PM
@PauloCereda Ha, that's pretty funny. Reviewer bait.

@PauloCereda in case you thought we'd forgotten
8
I chose the font especially for you

11:02 PM
@AlanMunn Thank you for the edit.

@percusse You're welcome. I think that question is also really helpful (and not just because I have an answer there.)
@percusse Nice gravatar today, BTW.

@AlanMunn Just wanted to pop in and say that I agree about not flagging questions with the "that's ugly" picture (tex.stackexchange.com/questions/63545/…) Whether or not we want to react to questions that will likely result in typographically inferior results in a standardized way would still be up for discussion on meta, I guess.

@doncherry I don't think there should be any standard way. Also, in some cases people are simply required to do awful things (anyone who's had to write a thesis at a US university can attest to that) and it's really unhelpful to be told that you simply shouldn't do what your requirements tell you to do. (Of course sometimes you can fight and win: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/41?m=5337996#5337996).Main Title Water Pollution Abatement Program: Assessment of Federal and State Enforcement Efforts. (Report to the Congress).
The Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1956, as amended expresses the intent of the Congress that the states have primary responsibility for the abatement, control, and prevention of water pollution. The Federal role under the act is essentially to back up the States, that is, to initiate enforcement action when a state fails to act or when a state requests such action. This review is concerned primarily with the effectiveness of federal and state enforcement activities in ensuring that polluters constructed waste treatment facilities needed to attain the water quality standards established by the States and approved by the Federal Government. In general the review covers activities during the period 1957 through February 1971.This is the website for the UCSB course ME / ECE 179P “Introduction to Robotics: Planning and Kinematics”, Fall 2014.
Motion planning and kinematics topics with an emphasis on geometric reasoning, programming and matrix computations. Motion planning: configuration spaces, sensor-based planning, decomposition and sampling methods, and advanced planning algorithms. Kinematics: reference frames, rotations and displacements, kinematic motion models.
Eng 3 and either ME 17 or ECE 130C (concurrent enrollment is allowed).
Knowledge of basic concepts in matrix theory (matrix multiplication, traces, determinants, eigenvalues), differential equations, and familiarity with MATLAB programming.
Time: Wednesday December 17, 2014 from 7:30 - 10:30pm.
Week