niklasl

There is no complaining on this page though. He just seems excited that code from NetBSD has been that widely deployed,

> The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try.

That is bound to fail because it would be a wild goose chase, there are a thousand variables, and the temptation is strong to try to isolate the ones that lies close to one's own ideological prejudices and ignore the rest, Note for example the focus on equality here and not on the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe. If you dig up the statistics you can see how little Finland's pupils are enjoying school, more akin to Japan than the rest of Western Europe, but the results are better than the rest of Europe (which certainly doesn't lag Finland in equality).

I'm from Sweden and I don't find much to object to there.

In Europe there are no global companies based on web technology, no Google, no Facebook, no Amazon. Previous tech booms have left little to show for it, I guess ARM is the shining example.

Some old companies have been pretty nimble and have been ccompetitive in new technology, like Ericsson and Nokia. But the landscape is utterly different from the US, and it is not for the better, there seem to be a glass ceiling for startups.

As long as Europe is so pathetic in tech, we don't deserve better than to read self-congratulatory stuff like that. Maybe it will even spur some competitive instinct...

Intel is most certainly not using AMD's architecture, they are using AMD's instruction set, yes, but they internals have nothing to do with AMD's designs. The Core series was an evolution of the Pentium M which was based on the Pentium III architecture.

As a Swede, I can tell you we don't give a flying fuck about Assange and neither does the prime minister. If he had just come here and had his trial, he would have had about 95% chance of being acquitted (the courts being rather more cautious on sexual matters than the prosecutors here) and could go back to doing what he does.

As for the secret trials and disappearing thing. Sweden has such a good reputation on freedom that Wikileaks wanted to relocate here before Assange got into trouble. He's certainly no worse off here than in the UK.

It is roughly correct, different neurons propagate signals at different speeds but it is in the ballpark. However, the brain is massively parallel so the slow clock is not evidence for it precomputing stuff.

The only thing that would be more soul destroying than having a dull job would be having a dull job that you knew was just easily automated busywork that you were allowed to keep as a favor.

Doing a major intervention in the economy to protect jobs by injecting inefficiency seems rather misguided. If you are going to mess around that much, why not do it by creaming off a bit of the surplus and use it to encourage people to have more leisure time instead? Play beats work most of time, and with creative people, play can create more work.

There is no stdcall/ccall distinction on 64-bit Windows, there is only one ABI convention that sadly uses a different set of registers for parameter passing than Linux. Only the first four parameters uses registers, the rest is passed on the stack.

For anybody that is interested in executable formats and how they are created and used, the manuscript of the book "Linkers & Loaders" by John Levine is available for free (http://norfs.sourceforge.net/linkers_and_loaders.pdf).

Clojure - because Common Lisp is getting really long in the tooth now.

As trolls do not make any products they are immune to any other parties' patents, you can't keep them from enforcing their patents by holding other patents, and their patents doesn't become less valid by the existence of other patents. On the other hand, these kinds of patents can be useful to stifle uppity competitors like Android.

OSX has a MacOS user interface bolted on top of NeXTStep, and underneath it all there is a BSD/Mach hybrid kernel.

Pictures 1 and 2 are equivalent. See chapter 18 in Misner, Thorne, Wheeler. We can't distinguish a universe where space is bent by mass from one with flat space-time that has a massless spin-2 particle (a graviton). The flat space-time in the latter case would be unobservable in principle.

"This would not have happened 100 years ago when the top tax bracket was ~90%."

Not to be too pedantic, but 100 years ago was a great time to be a millionaire, the highest tax brackets were inconsequential, the tax for the top bracket of $500,000 was 7%. Rockefeller didn't have too much tax planning to worry about.

The high brackets came with the depression and later WWII.

And if you're stuck in the Microsoft ecosystem there is DOS on Dope: http://secretgeek.net/dod_intro.asp

I have to quibble with Google having a lot of goodwill to burn. They withdrew any kind of usable search API a long time ago, considering Google's preeminence in search that is rather insular and not helpful for finding novel ways to build on search. They provided a translation API only to decide that it was too popular and pulling the rug out from under a lot of people who has built stuff on it.