jlgreco

"Some context: Common Lisp did not exist (the effort was just getting underway). MIT Scheme did not exist. Scheme was a couple of AI Lab tech reports and a master's thesis. We're talking the tiniest seed crystal imaginable, here. There was immense experience in the lisp community on optimising compiled implementations of dynamically-scoped languages -- this, to such an extent, that it was a widely held opinion at the time that "lexical scope is interesting, theoretically, but it's inefficient to implement; dynamic scope is the fast choice." I'm not kidding. To name two examples, I heard this, on different occasions, from Richard Stallman (designer & implementor of emacs lisp) and Richard Fateman (prof. at Berkeley, and the principal force behind franz lisp, undoubtedly the most important lisp implementation built in the early Vax era -- important because it was delivered and it worked). I asked RMS when he was implementing emacs lisp why it was dynamically scoped and his exact reply was that lexical scope was too inefficient. So my point here is that even to people who were experts in the area of lisp implementation, in 1982 (and for years afterward, actually), Scheme was a radical, not-at-all-accepted notion. And outside the Lisp/AI community... well, languages with GC were definitely not acceptable. (Contrast with the perl & Java era in which we live. It is no exaggeration, thanks to perl, to say in 2001 that billions of dollars of services have been rolled out to the world on top of GC'd languages.)"

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html

(emphasis not my own)

That whole page is a good read, particularly if you are a fan of Shivers' writing style.

I do agree that pre-commit isn't the best choice though. I prefer update hooks; I find they are simpler to write and easier to read.

Being a braggart seems fundamentally incompatible with "not bragging", for years on end, about your greatest accomplishment (and barring the possibility that SN is somebody very famous, say, Putin, it is almost certain that bitcoin is the most famous thing that SN has done). Not in a "Scottish, but doesn't wear a kilt" way, but in a "Scottish, but does not live and was not born in Scotland" kind of way.

In Washington it will still be a few more months, since anything sold recreationaly needs to be grown explicitly for recreational use, and that process cannot start until the permits are issued (I believe they have until the end of this year before they are required by law to start issuing permits to grow (or sell)).

fwiw, Leafly seems a bit easier to use than this site.

The sort of access to source code that is being expected here is really no more than the sort of access that you can get to Windows code. It really is not an unreasonable expectation.

Is it preferable for a newspaper to report on a new medical study and publish Yet Another(tm) "Researchers at [University] find cure to cancer" story, or, is it better for the newspaper to refrain from talking about the medical paper entirely?

Personally, I have to go with the later. Given the choice between botched reporting and no reporting, I'll go with no reporting. It is better to be uninformed than misinformed. It is easier to correct 'uninformed' and the state of 'uninformed' is easier for self-aware people to recognize in themselves.

Consider the fallout caused by the media botching the reporting of the FTL neutrino anomaly. People lost their jobs because reporters could not be arsed to do theirs.

I'll repeat what I've said elsewhere in this dicussion:

"Insane laws in one place do not make laws in another place any less insane. If we universalized your attitude towards criticism, then only those blessed to live in utopias would have the privilege of leveling complaints at other systems."

Americans do get to criticize the French government. Americans get to criticize the American government. French get to criticize the French government. French get to criticize the American government. Zimbabweans get to criticize the Portuguese government. The Portuguese get to criticize the the Swiss government.

Everybody gets to criticize any government they please, no matter what government happens to lay stake to the place that they live. It is absurd to think otherwise.

Also I'll need to get a pickup truck.

Insane laws in one place do not make laws in another place any less insane. If we universalized your attitude towards criticism, then only those blessed to live in utopias would have the privilege of leveling complaints at other systems.

Can a French person say "The president is illiterate.", as Americans have often said about their president? Could they say "The idiotic president keeps on making up words."? Harsh criticism is naturally insulting.

It is an example of nothing of the sort, since that scenario never happened. That hypothetical scenario was dreamed up to justify the arrest of a war/draft protester for what was plainly political speech.

These days I just use zsh and mplayer though. Apparently all of my use-cases sum up to "play one or more albums, perhaps shuffling them first". I've given Clementine a shot, and it is quite like Amarok use to be, but now it all seems like clutter.

So while you might normally have:

  ... ACGATTACGATACG ....
  ---|--------------|---
       |
       useful protein

  ... ACGATTACGATACG TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC ...
  ---|--------------|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|---
       |                |
       useful protein   pointless proteins

So each time you get whacked by a gamma ray, you spin a die and see what it hits. Maybe it hits a naturally occurring sequence like 'ACGATTACGATACG' and maybe you get cancer. Or maybe it hits one of those artificially inserted TACC segments that is designed to usually break in such a way that the cell is killed. Add more and more TACC segments and you become less and less efficient, but the odds get stacked more in your favor the more you add.

It would kind of be the "electric fence" approach to arresting unintended behavior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Fence).

I suspect actually pulling this off isn't something that is doable in the foreseeable future, since it would require being able to make strong statements of the nature "This segment of DNA should have no effect", and similar, but it makes sense in my head at least ;)

Just to derail the conspiracy train, when I try other searches of the same type, such as "oldest bar in philadephia", I get no ads as well. I would not expect ads for a search that unique.

I think you are dead on with the power consumption point though. The human body uses something around 100 watts or so right? (That might just be how much they put off in waste heat, I'm not really sure... but in the neighborhood of a few hundred watts I guess) You would need to put out way more than that in gamma rays to power the person, taking into account waste at various stages. I suspect you'd cook a human before you managed to power one.