For the needs of a modern VM, Python would be a step back from Java. To jit a language efficiently, you want to have as much information about the programs as you can get, particularly static types. Python as a dynamically typed language is about as hard to jit as Javascript is-- we're only just beginning to see adaptive compilation systems (i.e., composed baseline/optimising-compilers or composed interpreter/compilers) for that.

Python has its niche, but it's not "a platform for competing on equal terms with native-code apps for iOS".

You could pick a different statically typed language (e.g. something based on Modula-3 or Eiffel), but even if you provide a re-engineering tool to translate from the old code to the new code, you are going to alienate many of your coders, especially inexperienced ones who have trouble seeing beyond syntax. And those are in the majority, in my experience.

...that most other countries made: don't let the transportation companies keep the rail networks. (At least) one company for the rails, and as many for the trains as are willing to invest-- the same way cable/DSL should be handled. Unless you want Amtrak to become the Comcast of transportation, of course.

That being said, I've commuted by rail in Germany, and I've travelled through much of Europe and parts of Japan that way, and it beats all other forms of transportation I have tried. Based on that, I'd consider a 10% increase in federal taxes to finance European-level public transportation to be a good deal.

On second thought, someone else could re-encode as jpeg. So you may want to resize and perhaps blur a little. Either way I don't see why this wouldn't be trivial to defeat.

...just make sure you save as png, not jpeg.

From reading the article, I don't think that this is intended as a replacement for deb/rpm or tarballs with configuration scripts. (If it is, it is a very bad idea.)

The tool constructs a reduced dynamic I/O trace of a single program run to determine file dependencies, then packages these. This is great if you're benchmarking deterministic programs on different hardware, and useful for quickly migrating your code onto a bigger machine when a paper deadline is around the corner.

But again, the files it picks are based on a dynamic trace. If you run `cat foo.txt', then `foo.txt' will be part of the trace. If you run it on apache, all the apache modules that apache wound up loading will be part of the trace, but no others. So it's not very general-purpose. Still useful, in the right situation.

I've found that switching for C/C++/Java to SML with its wide-ish pattern matching constructs works fairly well on a wider-screen desktop. I don't think anyone with a `normal' display can read any of the code I write like that (my EMACS can display 314 characters horizontally now), but I'm in CS research, so chances are that nobody ever will.

More seriously, I second and third your complaint. There are laptops with rotatable displays out there, but those generally don't allow you to use the keyboard after rotation due to physical limitations (plus, they have crappy resolutions because they also try to be touchscreens for some reason). Lenovo's concept system with a detachable display plus keyboard sounds the most promising to me as far as future technologies go that might resolve this issue.

Hi,

    after some quick googling around, it seems that the relevant numbers are as follows:

- One hour of programming in the US usually contains 15 minutes of commercials.
- Commercials time is worth about 4 cents per minute per viewer.

    So the price of not getting ads should be around 60 cents per episode of most television
shows. YMMV, but IMO that's a lot less than the opportunity cost for wasting my attention
on ads, even ignoring the cost of a television set.

While we're modifying physics, may I submit feature requests for anti-gravity and faster-than-light travel, please?

Also, do they have a public bug tracker up yet? I think I found a division-by-zero bug involving a cat and butter, but I'm having trouble reproducing it (as I am running out of band-aids.)

As for writing the paper, here's my favourite set of slides on this topic:

SPJ's `How to write a research paper'

Yes, SPJ works at Microsoft Research these days, since they sponsor his primary pet project (the Glasgow Haskell Compiler), but he has been extremely successful before and after going there. I've done enough writing to basically agree with him-- there are variations here and there when it comes to structuring the paper, but his main points are very sensible and good.

Sorry, forgot about the HTML. p is <= 1, I meant.

Also, the downside of this approach is that the government doesn't benefit from attacking these practices directly, which decreases the motivation from enacting it.

That's insufficient. Let's say that the probability of getting caught is p. p is = 1. Now, the average cost for unethical behaviour is the same as the profits of this unethical behaviour times p. Hence, it is rational to remain unethical: you can only win.

Ideally, the penalties for such behaviour would be in a different category than profits, i.e., not money: jail time for executives who made this decision, forced donation of part of their company to a randomly selected competitor, forced public-domain-making of all of their patents. None of these are things that they can easily pass on to the consumer as cost, and they may in fact all be beneficial for the market.

Well, there is some work going on towards a distributed social networking protocol.

Personally what I'd want would be something that involves all personal data being encrypted on the server side according to a private key that only the user has, with shared sub-information being encryped with shared sub-keys. Thus, even if the distributed social networking server is compromised, private data will remain (largely) private. Some more thought needs to be put into ensuring that it's not easy to infer the presence of shared keys, or otherwise even the encrypted data would allow an attacker to infer part of the structure of the acquaintance graph (which can then be used to infer other information).

I pretty much stopped watching TV in 2002, when I moved to the US. Not only were the ads unbearable, but the shows I cared about were never on at the time I wanted to watch them.

At this point, I use various online services (sadly reliant on Flash) to watch the shows I want to watch. Unfortunately, many of them still contain ads-- I'd happily pay the providers to not interrupt their shows with that nonsense. Alas, certain shows (such as the new Doctor Who series) are not accessible in that fashion, so I will have to wait many months until they are released on DVD.

Of course, Doctor Who is available on (probably illegal) bittorrent, but I don't consider that an option (since I can't buy a UK TV licence, which I would be willing to do for that purpose.) I've e-mailed BBC America asking specifically to buy a licence to download their shows: `I give you money, you don't sure me for bittorrenting your stuff.' (Yes, it sounds a bit like protection money.) Unfortunately they never got back to me.

I find it unlikely that content providers have not realised the demand by people like me. I've heard rumours that iTunes sells TV shows these days; could it be that the majority of people are flocking to these proprietary platforms, preventing a truly open solution from manifesting?

The OSDI deadline is in August; plenty of time to implement this, write it up, and get a publication at a top research conference out of it!

According to a report in a major German newspaper (FAZ), there will be launches from at least Berlin and Frankfurt and some other German airports, but not in all directions.