alricb

30 ms·

271.
by alricb 12y ago
Well, it depends on whether you're looking at what Hitler & co. wanted versus what actually happened. In the alternate reality the Nazi leadership lived in, they could have made peace with Britain and restored the sea trade vital t
272.
by alricb 12y ago
Well, it's probable that, Hitler being Hitler, his plan wouldn't have worked in reality. So long as Britain controlled the sea, a "super-Germany" would have been at a serious disadvantage relative to the historical US, w
273.
by alricb 12y ago
> The vast landscape in between Berlin and Moscow would become Germany’s equivalent of the American west, filled with German homesteaders living comfortably on land and labor appropriated from conquered peoples—a nightmare parody of the
274.
by alricb 12y ago
In the middle ages, peasant rebellions were dealt with by massacring the insurgents. The problem was that assembling a force to deal with a group could take a while, during which the poor had the run of the town. Smaller armed groups could
275.
by alricb 12y ago
The French Navy after the Revolution was a shadow of its former self; most of its aristocratic officers had deserted. Since the country was in a state of almost-constant land war after 1792, a real rebuilding of the navy could never be a pr
276.
by alricb 12y ago
> Jonathon Riley served in Bosnia and Iraq, where he was the general officer commanding British forces. A British officer who doesn't think highly of Napoleon? This is my surprised face. > This is implicit in Karl von Clausewitz’
277.
by alricb 12y ago
Wouldn't the decline of groups have more to do with a decline of the "scene" they operated in? "Scenes" were primarily prestige-based, and security work has been profesionalized, with hackers working in the legitima
278.
by alricb 12y ago
I thought this was going to be about exposing trotskyist fronts (lots of trotskyists in Montreal student politics). Bit disappointed. It does remind me of what 1970s maoists write about their experience.
279.
by alricb 12y ago
Well, you also need a box that's adapted to the speaker, otherwise it won't make much sound.
280.
by alricb 12y ago
In a way, with this, each bullet is like a miniature percussion cap musket. Ammunition robustness isn't only important for plastic guns: witness the explosion of an 1895 Lee Navy, where the use of relatively thin .30-40 brass (since or
281.
by alricb 12y ago
Actually, if what you want is to avoid heat loss, reducing the number and area of windows is a pretty good strategy. Simpler (picture) windows are also easier to secure than complex ones that can be forced open. It's the same with roof
282.
by alricb 12y ago
Or that you're in a location where GPS reception is difficult, like a city core, like eLoran proponents would likely remind you. Unfortunately, I think the ship sailed when the US decided to decommission its chain. Another weakness of
283.
by alricb 12y ago
Yes, but they're about as bad for representing base 12 numbers, so it evens out.
284.
by alricb 12y ago
TIL: Prestige Elite [1] might not be the best font out there for programming. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_Elite
285.
by alricb 12y ago
Is it me, or have all the ells (the letter L) been replaced by ones (the digit 1) in the PDF? Edit: It's me. It's just a font with sloping serifs, which is what confused me.
286.
by alricb 12y ago
That just deals with the variation in length of the texts, not the effect of translation quality or other possible problems with the experiment, like written -> spoken conversion.
287.
by alricb 12y ago
> When speaking, english usually has more syllables per unit time than mandarin, so english has the highest spoken information density of any language. Of the seven languages in the study, using 20 specific short texts, that were origina
288.
by alricb 12y ago
As long as it took for radar to become the main targeting mechanism, so that fooling rangefinders became obsolete.
289.
by alricb 12y ago
Well, they did think about making metric base-12, but in the hurry of the revolution, they left that out. It WOULD be more useful with base 12. However, the nice water/gravity correpondence is really nice in practice (1 kg = ~ the mass
290.
by alricb 12y ago
Sometimes, the vast majority of people are just wrong. Look at people building McMansions with complicated roof lines, useless "bump-outs" and other crap details, when any thinking building professional knows this is wrong.
291.
by alricb 12y ago
Keys on paper? If you're going to go through that kind of trouble, at least use golden metal plates, Book of Mormon-style.
292.
by alricb 12y ago
Another use of vector graphics is in older aircraft displays, where the writing and lines would be rendered that way, sometimes with raster scanning for the artificial horizon.
293.
by alricb 12y ago
The main reason this allows you to build an AR-style rifle is that US firearms law focuses on receivers (per U.S.C. Section 921(a)(3), which are in many cases quite easy to manufacture. For instance, many Kalashnikov receivers are made of s
294.
by alricb 12y ago
Indeed! That's why the latest release version of Guile has a compressed source that takes only 7.2 MB (gzipped).
295.
by alricb 12y ago
Re: extending vs. embedding, it depends on whether your main app is written in Lua, with C bindings (extending), or in C, with the C code calling the Lua interpreter (embedding). See for instance this Python guide: https://docs.p
296.
by alricb 12y ago
Re: EBNF and C code, here's the parser for Lua 5.2: http://www.lua.org/source/5.2/lparser.c.html
297.
by alricb 12y ago
Another reason the Vikings were successful was that in many places they attacked polities that were momentarily weak. They might not have won in Nantes if Charles the Bald hadn't been busy fighting a civil war against other members of
298.
by alricb 12y ago
Do they use 277 V AC in Europe? Or do they stick with 240 V?
299.
by alricb 12y ago
Things do advance, but they're a lot less spectacular, sometimes because we're running into hard physical limitations. Supersonic flight, for instance: it's just super difficult to make it economically feasible. But subsonic
300.
by alricb 12y ago
From the article: "It led to Oberon, a language derived from Modula-2 by eliminating less essential features (like subrange and enumeration types) in addition to features known to be unsafe (like type transfer functions and variant rec

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