bbanyc

18 ms·

151.
by bbanyc 10y ago
Nicholas Brown Jr., for whom the university was named, was an abolitionist.
152.
by bbanyc 10y ago
What an appropriate name for software that hides a signal in the noise. Nothing can be heard over a vuvuzela. For those who didn't watch the 2010 world cup, or have blocked out the memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
153.
by bbanyc 10y ago
Some states (e.g., Indiana) have grids similar to the Interstate and US routes. Others have different systems: in Florida the first digit tells you roughly where in the state it is, from 1xx routes in the Panhandle to 9xx routes around Miam
154.
by bbanyc 10y ago
When Exxon (formerly Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard Oil of New York) merged, some wags commented that the old trust was coming back together, and Rockefeller would be proud. It wasn't the whole thing, though -
155.
by bbanyc 10y ago
Nitpicking: If you look at the very early versions of the Unix manuals, before even /lib was invented, there was a notion that /bin was the "system" (section 1) and /usr/bin was "user software" (secti
156.
by bbanyc 11y ago
The pre-2001 airport security apparatus did a good job of keeping guns off planes, eliminating the most common hijacking scenario. Almost everything since then has been increased hassle for diminishing returns, with the most effective impro
157.
by bbanyc 11y ago
Both sides in this case were utterly contemptible. I would have found that Gawker invaded Hogan's privacy and awarded Hogan one dollar in damages, leaving everyone unhappy but the lawyers. Invasion of privacy, despite its questionable
158.
by bbanyc 11y ago
That commission isn't just advisory like many (most?) UN bodies. It holds full power to schedule and deschedule controlled substances under the major drug treaties, and member nations (which include practically every country) are oblig
159.
by bbanyc 11y ago
The NYT crossword has a steep difficulty curve increasing over each week. It took me a few years of regular solving before I could consistently finish a Saturday puzzle. If people are only seeing the NYT puzzles on weekends, no wonder they
160.
by bbanyc 11y ago
Trial by combat was only abolished in England in 1819, after the much-publicized case of Ashford v Thornton in which the defendant successfully called for it. (No combat took place - the plaintiff withdrew rather than fight the much larger
161.
by bbanyc 11y ago
"Throw it over the wall" isn't the half of it. Last year, when a major snowstorm was forecast to hit NYC, Cuomo announced that the subways would be shutting down - without notifying or consulting the MTA or city government. T
162.
by bbanyc 11y ago
According to http://www.dhs.gov/real-id-enforcement-brief most states are noncompliant and have received extensions to their deadlines to comply, including 7 of the 10 largest.
163.
by bbanyc 11y ago
I can't imagine this actually happening. REAL ID has been extremely unpopular from the start and the deadline has been repeatedly pushed back since most states are unwilling to comply. Expect another last-minute delay if there's s
164.
by bbanyc 11y ago
New York's state constitution bans all unauthorized gambling and restricts the types of authorized gambling to (1) the state lottery, (2) parimutuel betting on horse races, (3) bingo and raffles by charitable organizations, and (4) no
165.
by bbanyc 11y ago
CentOS has always been RHEL without the trademarks, they'd have followed Red Hat to systemd regardless.
166.
by bbanyc 11y ago
What about initrd? Most of those use busybox and it's now "recommended" to start systemd there. (Granted, I don't see why anyone would run busybox's syslog - the only component affected by this change - in an initrd
167.
by bbanyc 11y ago
It actually started as a wrapper around Young's much earlier DES implementation, written as a drop-in replacement for Solaris's DES tools which were unavailable outside the US because of export restrictions. I know this because I&
168.
by bbanyc 11y ago
This says as much about capitalism as it does about aviation.
169.
by bbanyc 11y ago
MAME emulates CPUs. DICE emulates games without CPUs. MAME has a rudimentary version of Pong, but doesn't support Breakout or other games of its generation.
170.
by bbanyc 11y ago
I've heard a theory that commercial aviation as a whole has always been unprofitable. Look at how many airlines have gone bankrupt since deregulation in the US and the removal of flag-carrier subsidies in Europe. Boeing and Airbus are
171.
by bbanyc 11y ago
If you're a sufficiently advanced Unix purist (aka a Plan 9 user), the Bourne shell is a violation of Unix principles. Contrast the v6 shell, where this construct is impossible because there are no functions. Now that's do-one-thi
172.
by bbanyc 11y ago
I couldn't help but think of Eleanor Rigby. "All the lonely people, where do they all belong?"
173.
by bbanyc 11y ago
This was (is?) a step in compiling Emacs. Compile the C code into an uninitialized binary of the Lisp interpreter, start the interpreter, load in a bunch of Lisp code, dump core, then undump the core into /usr/bin/emacs.
174.
by bbanyc 11y ago
I figured the break would be between desktop/server and mobile/embedded - you have behemoths driving the development of each (Red Hat and Google respectively) that don't always see eye to eye.
175.
by bbanyc 11y ago
The 14th Amendment has been held to apply the First Amendment against the states. And even in the likely event that incorporation gets overturned, most state constitutions have their own establishment clauses.
176.
by bbanyc 11y ago
In New York, there's case law that ULC ministers don't meet the statutory qualifications for a marriage officiant, and therefore marriages in New York before ULC ministers are invalid. But the case in point involved a marriage out
177.
by bbanyc 11y ago
Having dealt with APL in the past, I've always been a bit skeptical of the "Blub Paradox" and other forms of Lisp triumphalism. APL is clearly far more powerful that any other language in some respects and far more limited in
178.
by bbanyc 11y ago
To the point, the rest of the discussion here revolves around init scripts and the filesystem hierarchy, which are the only parts of LSB that anyone actually used. (And they're sticking around in Debian, at least for now.) In theory LS
179.
by bbanyc 11y ago
The impression I get is that the main point of LSB was to combat FUD from commercial Unix vendors about Linux being fragmented and nonstandardized and lacking binary compatibility. Once Linux supplanted Solaris in the corporate world this a
180.
by bbanyc 11y ago
I remember buying the camel book ten years ago, and there was a slim Perl 6 volume next to it - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007379.do I imagine its relevance to the Perl 6 that was announced today is next to

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