when I grow up, I wanna talk like you.

um... humanity advances because kids get to use the answers the parents already have. our entire culture exists because we learned how to talk and trasmit answers to various questions from one to the other. I pity the kid if he's not patient enough to learn what has already been done.

yes, but in "the sound and the fury" Benjy's story is the easiest to understand.

regarding (a): fat is a good way of storing energy. I'm not sure if I understood my highschool chemistry teacher right, but he said storing energy in fat is better than current rechargeable battery technology (note that this was around ten years ago, so it may not be true now).

it's realtime. it says in the article that the wingspan is around 2 meters. and the whole thing weighs around 500 grams. so it's only natural that it will move slow (think sea gulls, as opposed to the smaller doves). at some point in the video you can see people in a corner walking behind it, that's where I got my sense of scale initially.

ok, got it now. thanks for the clarification.
I realized I used the wrong word: replace "doubling" with "dubbing". I think. let me explain, to be sure: right now I would only be able to watch french speaking channels, where everything is dubbed in french. In a few months I'm probably moving to another country where everything is dubbed.
I prefer subtitles, no matter what the original language is.

have you heard of ctypes? write the number crunching stuff in C, and then make the OO stuff in Python. but keep in mind that in Python there is a (large) constant cost to calling any function, so you should try to call as little Python functions as possible. see my above comments (repplies to "C'mon Python users tell us why") if you're interested: I generate C code, then compile and run it through Python.

I did it once, and I got a huge C file. I didn't even have the patience to go through it, but I saw that a lot of stuff was defined that I didn't actually need. and it was for something relatively trivial. I decided it's safer to write my own C code, at least I can read the C source if there's a problem. and it's mostly just generating a couple of formulas using sympy, and then plugging them into a C template (that I write explicitely as strings in the Python file).
Cython might be good when you try to translate a large piece of Python into C, but that's not what I'm trying to do. for me, running time for the Python script is negligible when compared to the running time of the generated executable, and I'm pretty certain that if I use Cython, overall efficiency will go down.

I haven't had a TV for 3 years, and I live in Europe. I doubt we're gonna get one soon, because we're moving to another country that doubles everything on TV and we hate that. so I never learned about the digital TV stuff.
but you say that n people watching a show means n times the content is transfered over the network (so I understand that the data is separately transfered for each user). with analog TV, the station sent out a signal, and that was it. ok, sometimes the signal is strengthened along the way, but if n people watched a show "1 bandwidth" was consumed. and that is funny, because the old technology was much more efficient.
did I misunderstand?

well, for now I've only done it for stuff where the C source is tiny (using gcc), and compiling doesn't take that long. anyway, I'm talking about cases where you can't really compare the running time (> 2 minutes) to the compiling time (1 second); and for serious work only the running time will increase. in practice the time cost for dressing everything in Python (and using sympy to generate formulas in the C source) is more important (but still negligible next to the time spent running the C generated executable).
however, it is true that for one particular problem I'm already compiling a C library (it's for computing certain classes of polynomials, so I generate individual libraries for individual classes if they're not already there), and then I'm loading it with cdll from ctypes. it's a general enough class of functions that it's worth the trouble to do it. it's also relevant that the functions themselves take a number and return another number, whereas it might be more efficient to run external code when I need to generate a large amount of (binary) data.
in terms of what serious programmers do, you have to realize that, when it comes to physical sciences (I'm a physicist myself), programming abilities can be (and usually are) very limited.

I cheat. I write python code that writes its own plain C code, compiles it then executes it. this way, I work once to write a C template, that I then reuse through a high level language. and when I combine the advantages of python (sympy for instance) with the speed of C, I get stuff that is ridiculously faster than what I did before. in the sense that I don't work a lot to write it, and I don't wait around a lot for it to actually run afterwards.
working with numerical simulations, I'm allowed to cheat this way...

kind of offtopic, but I have to laugh at this. do you realize how stupid it is that TV is eating internet bandwidth? a few years ago I could leave the TV on 24/7, just like the radio, and nobody cared. but now, I would be impacting the infrastructure...

they should probably forbid the use of ssh too, as otherwise people could ssh into a foreign machine that does have access to the torrent sites.
in the end, I think their best option is to simply shoot everybody who has a computer. that way, they can't infringe copyright. right? oh, and those with tape recorders too. and the ones with pens and paper. and the ones with good memory.

you make a good point. the zynga people are, in practice, printing money. the difference is that they built an "infrastructure" where people have fun after they give zynga real money. this guy did not have a contribution to the infrastructure, but he was still taking real money from the people having fun (or planning on doing it).
I can't honestly say who is the bad guy here. to put it bluntly, I can't say if either of them has a hint of "good guy" in them.

"folding" refers to bending, not making one dimension go away. nice idea though. kind of reminds me of the ansible stuff from Children of the Mind.