contulluipeste

Basically, it's Bjarne Stroustrup reciting the history of C++, mentioning the principles on which the language stood both back then and now, and also the (technical and social) problems that occurred both back then and now.

1. It is indeed disrespectful to consciously "taking up other people’s time" (the Chinese way) without their consent.

2. The real world works asynchronously. Either if you are a jerk having no regard for other people's time, or you are a very punctual person getting out of your way to be on time for others (by coming earlier), there is wasted time to be expected. One can prepare for that and act like a functioning piece in a loosely coupled system, or to just blame others.

"It starts out as fun, a game in pre-school, but then..."

For some of us (like me a few other subjects that I remember) the conforming game was never fun. To force someone to wake up and then to sync to an activity program, and then to sleep some programmed hours, and so on... it was necessary maybe, but I never recall it to be felt as "fun".

Actually, nowadays a system of ground stations and high altitudes atmospheric floating balloons can be made to serve the very same purpose. The ground stations would serve for triangulation of balloon's position and those at their turn could serve the rest of the service-consumer base. As a bonus, the balloons would be obviously more manageable compared to satellites, the cost of taking them into operation would be of course much lower (no more atmospheric pollution), and be disposed cleanly without causing the problem discussed in the article.

To have Python 2 and 3, and then CPython and PyPy and all kind of other similar flavors of the same thing is not really in line with `there should be only one obvious way to do it' don't you think? Do we see something that needs to be fixed in there?

The British Government had DMs, that's what they sold trying to keep their currency at fixed rate. You say they should have kept Deutschmarks to sell them later for what? For depreciated sterling pounds? It doesn't make sense, the only thing that a government has plenty of is its own currency. Governments are "rich" in their own printed stamps, the challenge is to keep those stamps valuable. That's what the British Government was trying to do.

"The treasuries are denominated in dollars: If China decided to dump all the treasuries on the market at once (driving US interest rates through the roof, and the price of the T's down), the US gov't would just buy it's debt back for pennies on the dollar."

Buy with what? With more printed dollars? When someone so large as China starts dumping cheap U.S. bonds (dollars) on the wild pulling down currency's value, it won't be the only acting player. Nobody wishes to loose value by holding to a rapidly depreciating currency, so expect a shopping spree all over the world. It all comes down to faith. Small players can't trigger such big events, but China could. It won't matter that U.S. debt problem gets solved if its currency looses monopoly.

As I see it, the western legal system which relies on written analytical laws appears indeed as an "alternative", but western judges do for example make use of judicial precedents too. This system is based on a set of principles that have just a lesser use in western legal system.

Aside from the law of nature, I remarked the use of precedents as a co-basis for juridical mediation. Although this is something used all over the world outside Somalia (on a secondary role and usually only in an informal manner), its interesting to know it to work somewhere in real-life as a primary law principle.

That ideology was just a tool to prop up a system of occupation. What really happened behind all that was an ongoing russification all over the Soviet Union, effects of which make themselves visible in an outstanding manner today in Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Latvia, and other countries. Yeah, it was pretty that red color from outside, but living under it was a nightmare (unless you were reaaally stupid, in which case the system took care of you).

Giving it all up was just the "equalizing" part. Being incriminated, prosecuted and sentenced for having employed in some way other people's work was the real face of the system.

The idea of Ukraine independent of Russia is new. It's pretty safe to say that the entire infrastructure in that country was built under Moscow's supervision. It was inconceivable to even think about a plan of defense against an invasion from Russia.

At least for C++ native development, a development tool comparison with Visual Studio is just misplaced. Alex Ionescu, a ReactOS NT kernel developer, in one question at a Montreal conference last year was asked about the operating system's attained level of compatibility for applications in general and about Visual Studio in particular. His answer was that Visual Studio will be the last piece, as it so intricately fused into the OS internals. It would be insane to pretend to be able to compete (in every aspect) against something like Visual Studio which can use undocumented resources not available to anyone but to Microsoft's own toy!

It never stops to amaze me - what does have Europe that other places don't?

...anyway, I'm just glad and thankful to be born in Europe!

"Novena is a 1.2GHz, Freescale quad-core ARM architecture computer"

That's a disappointing choice! Why not something more like LEON or OpenRISC?

Windows 98 is not NT.

http://devin.com/ ?

But it was informing enough for others (like me) less informed than you. Actually I knew about faster perception of time on insects and probably many other sparse details, but this article does its share to provide information in an accessible an attractive way. Give it credit for that (along with your criticism).

I'm surprised to find out that human vision is among the sharpest. I didn't knew humans outperform over other animals with something else other than brain and long-distance running.

Interesting. Reading about tetrachromatic birds and infrared-vision snakes couldn't help but wonder if there is an animal out there with ability to (naturally) sense the whole spectrum. Mantis Shrimp has however, a bee-like compound eye and I guess it suffers from the same resolution-penalty.

Your second paragraph said it. The brilliant men don't slave for others, they have their own thing to find or follow.

The composability of vi/vim is not only its power, but its weakness. It's like a non-redundant language in which (almost) everything can be validly interpreted leaving no room for error detection. In vim nearly everything can be interpreted as a command and executed (sometimes even without strong visual feedback to be noticed) which means a lot of rope for mistakes. And mistakes human do. And for (such imperfect) humans editors are.

Any arguments along with the down-vote?

I don't get this "punishment more primitive than torture" nuance. It may be inconvenient (for people born somewhere outside U.K. to loose an inherited citizenship), but isn't a stretch to call that a "punishment"?

It's interested to disagree exactly with what you agree and otherwise:

- "What problem does it solve?" It gives you freedom, true freedom! You send to whomever you wish and freely receive from anyone anytime from everywhere! No red tape involved, no fiscal infrastructure needed, no political settings getting in your way, no many other bigger-than-you problems. Freedom!

-"What backs it other than speculation?" (I'm sorry that I have to sound redundant, but...) Freedom! Anyone wishing to use a free currency will opt for it or something similar.

- "Many bad actors in the market with little regulation." Well, I admit that the other side of the coin named "freedom" is anarchy. It scares you and you seek shelter from the wild west land of virtual currencies, but other see opportunities in there and are willing to take necessary risks.

-"Consumer unfriendly: the average «man on the street» can't secure his wallet file and even many technically sharp people have been ripped off." The friendliness is an engineering problem, and the perception is a psychological one. Both can be addressed just like so many other like it. The average Joe just doesn't think now that the inflation or other aspects of fiat-currency is ripping him off, because the work in this regard was done.

-"Extreme volatility and lack of liquidity make it a poor store of value or unit of record, two things that are extremely important in a currency." After the MtGox exit the market is actually unusually stable! And the depth of the market only gets deeper and with it - the stability of it's price relative to other currencies.

You say you see potential with micropayments, but in the current setting, the "dust" transactions are penalized with transfer fees. According to http://bitcoinfees.com/ if the amount is lower than 0.01 Bitcoin an amount of 0.0001 Bitcoin is perceived. At the current price (~630 USD/Bitcoin) the penalty limit is $6,3 and if Bitcoin's price will go up so will this limit. If the Bitcoin will rise 10 times, that 0.0001 Bitcoin fee will be 63 USD cents which means that even if a Bitcoin is fungible up to eight subunit decimals, it will count only for fine-division of large numbers, not micro-payments.

So you may be skeptical regarding the Bitcoin, but IMHO - for the wrong reasons.

That's how the current estimation of the universe age was made (only it was about the background space temperature of about 4 Kelvin). This time, by measuring magnetic waves they seek to find a (even slight) difference in expanding directions.

/not-a-scientist-either