gngeal

30 ms·

271.
by gngeal 13y ago
Yes, that is why whenever you invent something independently you're fucked because of this nasty thing called "the patent system" that essentially guarantees that most things you create already belong to someone else.
272.
by gngeal 13y ago
Oh My. What a question.
273.
by gngeal 13y ago
"The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components are those that aren’t there." -- Gordon Bell
274.
by gngeal 13y ago
That's precisely why I said that this is no false dichotomy here. False dichotomy is something completely different. False dichotomies are things like "if you're not with us, you're against us", or "The new res
275.
by gngeal 13y ago
That's not a false dichotomy. That's an appeal to worse problems.
276.
by gngeal 13y ago
The language is amazing. And as a side benefit, you can read Old Norse sagas with very little effort if you learn it!
277.
by gngeal 13y ago
I means that when you're a scrooge and decide not to attract people to fill positions that you need by offering them some monetary incentive, you have to spend even more money on bombs and spare parts that fall in the wrong places.
278.
by gngeal 13y ago
Which is precisely the thing that is incompatible with Western democracy. Of would you like to amend the First Amendment?
279.
by gngeal 13y ago
The creators of Angry Birds would probably be aware if their software were an NSA-grade surveillance system rather than a cartoon physics game. The question is: do they use a compiler written for the NSA by Ken Thompson?
280.
by gngeal 13y ago
but don't you remember the huge political battle over Obamacare? Well, I do, but only very vaguely; after all, it took place thousands of kilometers from where I happen to live and it's not like we don't have enough of our
281.
by gngeal 13y ago
Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? Well, that feels sort of disingenuous. From the POV of a scheming politician in power, harmless gestures would certainly seem much le
282.
by gngeal 13y ago
I'm reasonably certain that archive.org must be using some differential encoding of pages. Otherwise the archiving process would waste a lot of space. They're just not making it visible. EDIT: Also: http://www.changedetection.com
283.
by gngeal 13y ago
Not unless he had a TARDIS at his disposal. I mean, skip lists were discovered in 1989, and by that time, the Oberon compiler had already existed for a few years. I don't recall the source now (I'd have to dig for it) but I believe that the
284.
by gngeal 13y ago
Except that the Henry V in question was a German guy. :) "The Holy Roman Empire", despite its name, was initially a Frankish and then a purely German institution, comprising a lot of the lands of Central Europe (plus a bit of Western Europe
285.
by gngeal 13y ago
I'd say that "somehow not ready for marriage" DOES include material reasons. If most marriages didn't happen early because of this, that still makes early marriages quite unusual for most contemporary people. That was the point I was tryi
286.
by gngeal 13y ago
this number may have been roughly accurate for Britain/ Northwest Europe, but not for the Mediterranean I admit that I have significant holes in knowledge regading the "Middle Ages in the Mediterranean" region of space-time. I am biased t
287.
by gngeal 13y ago
Citation needed. Of course, here you are: "Historians have demonstrated that peasants married at significantly later ages than aristocrats. Whereas members of the nobility usually married between age 14 and age 20, peasants probably marr
288.
by gngeal 13y ago
A bit on the creepy side for someone on the other side of 20 to date For some people, perhaps. Individuals differ, I've met a few 16yo girls who were very much adult, as far as their intellect, personality and temperament were concerned
289.
by gngeal 13y ago
Age of consent is one thing, but "the idea that people under 18 are somehow not ready for marriage" certainly IS old. Just FYI, the median age for a bride on her first wedding was somewhere around 22-23 in the Middle Ages.
290.
by gngeal 13y ago
I’d love someday to hear a young coder tell a story about someone they idolized like, “There was this guy I worked with who once optimized a complicated red- black tree getting 300% performance boost. I was baffled and ask, ‘How’d you do t
291.
by gngeal 13y ago
Well, you might want to do that if you were building a colinux-style paravirtualized system on top of the Windows kernel.
292.
by gngeal 13y ago
"The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline. Even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they
293.
by gngeal 13y ago
The LiSP book only describes self-hosting implementations while in Forth it's heresy to implement it in anything else than Forth or assembly. Well, perhaps Java implementations are excused for not being implemented in terms of themselves. :
294.
by gngeal 13y ago
Are you sure? From where I stand, it looks as though andrewvc and betterunix were both talking about compilers rather than interpreters, while dysoco didn't specify either, so I inferred that the compiler topic still stood.
295.
by gngeal 13y ago
Really? I'd say that a Forth compiler in Forth is going to be somewhat smaller than a Brainfuck compiler in Brainfuck.
296.
by gngeal 13y ago
but politically and culturally the line gets a little blurry Politically and culturally, it's in Europe. Greek Orthodoxy and Greek-derived scripts are something you find in Europe since the Middle Ages.
297.
by gngeal 13y ago
that pictures excite people and draw them in, keep them around They may also excite them because doing pictures the "traditional" way (PHP/GD, GDI, even Cairo) feels like using stone age tools, while combinator libraries (such as Alex Shi
298.
by gngeal 13y ago
Well, yes, but the individual GNU tools are to a large degree independent. I'm not an insider, but to me it seemed that the kernel development effort really pushed the limits in the area of distributed development of a single large code bas
299.
by gngeal 13y ago
I agree with you. Linux is possibly a bad example, there's nothing special about writing it. Are you sure about it? Wasn't it one of the first really large software projects with the distributed development model? (Were there any predeces
300.
by gngeal 13y ago
Decades of research in numerous fields were required before the Apollo missions could happen. Actually, it was less than one decade of research post-Kennedy's-announcement, and a lot of groundwork had already been laid by then. The whol

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