acallan

Why wasn't this part of his due diligence before contractually obligating himself to purchase Twitter?

My position is that the moderation and content policies ("community guidelines") that private companies and individuals have is also a form of expression. For example, this explains the legality of op/ed pages of newspapers publishing the viewpoints which they choose to, and omitting others. You could sue Fox News or Twitter for censoring or omitting your viewpoint, but this case would not and, in my opinion, should not, be successful.

> What about slander and libel laws or laws about claims made in advertisements?

Yep — here we're getting into Prior Restraint. It's both against the law to restrain free speech such as lies, but as you rightly point out, this speech can have other legal consequences.

> there could be stronger laws against media which contains objectively provable lies

this is a clear violation of the First Amendment, which makes it legal to publish lies.

There is simply no meaningful legal distinction between the two in this context. See https://twitter.com/badsec230takes

Imagine a scenario where Twitter and Facebook lose their ability to unconditionally moderate the content of their platforms. Presumably they would need to check with government censors first? Again, I understand how annoying moderation can be! I just don't understand the alternative and I do not see how this alternative is not a huge violation of the First Amendment — this would precisely be the government telling private companies what they can and cannot publish.

Do you have any examples of Twitter arresting or imprisoning people for speech, or acquiescing to government censorship? Perhaps you are instead to moderating their private platform and enforcing community guidelines? I understand the latter can be annoying, but it is a mistake to conflate the two, as free speech is something very special and important and in the US is in fact codified into the Bill of Rights.

TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.

Pat was a "boy wonder" at Intel and could do no wrong — until Larrabee. I was working at Intel at the time and remember always assuming that Pat would someday be CEO. His departure came as such a shock to a lot of us, as does his return.

He might have what it takes to turn Intel around.

A soft core is a CPU that is programmed into an FPGA instead of a "regular" core that is made of discrete components.

If refurbishers were able to bypass the activation lock, what would the point of an activation lock be in the first place? This is perhaps one of the most important use cases, and it's a good sign that iFixit is complaining about it.

Calories and can be converted to Joules. The amount of energy to run a computer (a human computer or a physical one) is interesting to me personally, as is comparing the amount of extra calories (and thus, extra emissions) it costs me to ride my bike 20 miles to work vs. driving a gasoline car.

Actually, Silverthorne (the first Atom CPU) added MOVBE.

Incidentally, Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett quoted in this article was just named CEO of Ford.

Relevant

http://video.newyorker.com/watch/exclusive-clip-of-le-cafe-d...

Indeed. And the big news is that the paper is available today.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03547v1

Why was 64-bit Firefox for Windows so late to release?

I recall learning that the important part of the optimization phase for Itanium was based on runtime performance analysis, not just static optimizations.

Honest question: like what technology? Is there an area of technology that is relatively patent-free?

Cycling. I'm in a club and ride with a group of 20+ people, 4-5 times a week. Most weeks I get at least 150 miles in. I like it for a variety of reasons: it's fun to go fast; it's individual yet also a group activity; there's lots to learn; the mechanical and design aspects of modern cycling are really cool; and it makes me feel great.

As a nerd, I love analyzing my rides. I collect data on the power I deliver to the pedal, my heart rate, and precise GPS data. Everything connects to your phone or cyclocomputer via Bluetooth/ANT+. Services like Strava make it easy to compare your performance to those that you rode with and others that have ridden the same segments. It's just fun!

What do you mean by the "real QuickSort"? The professor who taught me Haskell at UT used to work on Burroughs LISP machines and wasn't too concerned with caches, memory, or the like. Again, Haskell can be viewed as a language for computation. From this perspective, the one-liner is pure beauty.

Each list comprehension is O(n). O(n)+O(n)=O(n). Each iteration will roughly bisect the list, resulting in roughly log(n) iterations. Thus the one-liner is O(n*log(n)).

Haskell says nothing about how lists are implemented, so with respect to "true"ness (I'm not really sure what this means), we can cannot generalize. A sufficiently optimized Haskell compiler implemented in silicon would have the liberty of using the memory in-place.

In tests and homework, we would implement the one-liner quicksort with paper and pencil, much like a math test. In a pencil implementation of that Haskell, it is n log(n). Each line on the paper represented one level of recursion.

Implementing it on silicon requires the trade-offs you mention. But silicon is just an implementation left to the reader...

EDIT: I guess where I'm coming from, Haskell was used in the context of the Theory of Computation, not real-world implementation details and the like.

Like a lot of UT Computer Science, the implementation is a detail left for the reader. The semantics of the language make the one-liner n*log(n)--that's the takeaway.

Indeed, my first CS class in 1999 at UT was in Haskell. Wow! What a change it was from high school AP Computer Science in Texas, which was (in those days) C++.

Seeing QuickSort in just one line was what hit it home.

I remember thinking at the time that this was really incredible, but that Haskell had no future. This was at the time of Hugs 98, although I remember hearing about GHC. I'm glad to be wrong about this.

The author is incorrect in the section about memory fences. x86 has strong memory ordering [1], which means that writes always appear in program order with respect to other cores. Use a memory fence to guarantee that reads and writes are memory bus visible.

The example that the author gives does not apply to x86.

[1]There are memory types that do not have strong memory ordering, and if you use non-temporal instructions for streaming SIMD, SFENCE/LFENCE/MFENCE are useful.

I attended an RMS speech at the University of Texas many years ago. I recall him heckling students leaving in the middle of his speech. Instead of presuming that they had somewhere to be--an exam, a study session, etc., he called them out and made it look like they don't support free software.

Precisely. The latency of some of the more aggressive power states exceeds the resolution of most OS tick timers, so they are often aborted for no good reason. So, as I'm typing this reply, in-between keystrokes, voltage to the CPU can be killed (not just clock-gated).

Jonathon Swift's "Gulliver's Travels", a satire of 18th century England, included in it a long-running bloody war between two religious sects that started over the correct way to eat a soft-boiled egg: the big end, or the little end.

For those not familiar with the history of England, the tome of Western literature (and the genre of satire), or soft-boiled eggs, I've gotten some confused looks when trying to explain this origin. Plus, it doesn't really add anything at all to the understand of endianness in the computer hardware sense.

It's even worse trying to explain Gulliver's Travels (and the origin of Endianness) to engineers that do know it in the data-storage sense.

Did you try '.intel_syntax'? I've had some success with it, but it clearly needs some code contributions.