"You're in a maze of little functions, all alike. In the distance you hear somebody practicing throwing chairs."

And all of the functions have at least seven arguments, and one of these is a pointer to variable-length structs that have to be populated before calling the function. Another argument that always appears is an opaque pointer referring to SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES, which may be, and usually is, set to NULL becuse no-one is arsed to go through the necessary contortions of obtaining the required credentials.... stuff works anyways.

I used to just write 5-line C programs for calculating stuff. Faster than figuring out where I've misplaced the calculator this time, besides, bc chokes on floating-point numbers.

Now I've automated this but the junk-filter doesn't want to show it here.

Good for throwaway calculations

Besides those, there are certain formulae that recur (transistor biasing, 4040 frequency division, LM317 voltage regulator resistors....) so that these grew into smaller complete programs from the early start.

No, still in use, but these aren't counting. It's not like one goes chmod 000, chmod 001, chmod 002 ... . Instead there are distinct ones that recur, umask 002, umask 022, chmod 400, chmod 640, chmod 644, chmod 666, chmod 755, chmod 777, back in the day there were chmod 4755. This is disregarding all that use the chmod a+x style syntax of course.

Then there's the ancient but still serviceable kit using IEEE-488, which has documentation showing commands in octal, but just like chmod numbers, these are mostly with distinct meaning, 0137 is untalk, 044 is Listen address 4 etc.

Complex numbers on the other hand...

Teleportation device with bug reports? Lets hope, for all that is good and well, that the bugs are just software and not, for example, flies, making it into the teleportation system.

Too much unpleasant prior art for that.

As for the device featured, I definitely want some!

Free as in beer

Free as in GPL software

Free as in trade

Free as in lunch

Free as in saved ("The truth shall set you free")

Free as in nothing left to lose

Possibly more variants exist

This is not going to work, as there is no competing with free. If any news site starts requiring payments, most readers will go somewhere else that doesn't pay. Charging for access to a site that still emits advertisements is a very hard sell.

And if the news outlets all start charging at the same time, the readers will start reading (and writing) blogs instead. And perhaps even pay "tips" to those blogs they like.

The harder one tries to squeeze the more it will slip past one's fingers...

Yes, and both phosphorus and arsenic are Group V, with 5 electrons in their outer shell so they can be expected to have chemical properties that are similar. But the main material of living things, carbon, will more than likely be the same, for reasons of carbon's unique abilities to form complex compounds.

Silicon-based life with phosphor or arsenic? Apart from this sounding very much like the list of main ingreidents for N-type semiconductor material; silicon, while in Group IV like carbon, with 4 electrons io their outer shell, does not form the same complex molecules as carbon. There is silane, SiH4, analogous to methane, CH4, and silicon dioxide, SiO2, the analogy to carbon dioxide, CO2, and a handful of others, but larger molecules such as sugar or protein analogues just do not form easily from silicon, or fall apart too easily.

There are not that many other elements that possibly oould replace carbon.

I think that is IE6. Once upon a time I had a similar problem with VG's, one of the Norwegian newspapers' discussion forums. Some friendly debaters then recommended I use Opera... that fixed that particular problem. Of course, later I've found out that Firefox also retains edit-box text; now the next level of competition is seen in this webmail client that we sometimes have to use at work, when I hit the wrong key and everything goes away and no bringing it back...

Same thing happened here. It began with cartoon characters, then continued with various other names from space, mythology, and fiction. The problem with cartoon characters is that one seems to run out of them too quickly. And I don't think naming a server Marvin or Kenny ever was such a good idea either...

Somehow naming the various NAS boxes after satellites made a bit of sense too. Other objects of the heavens also will do, then watch out for the naming collision: Is it Pluto the dog or Pluto the former planet?

Based on the spam I get here, there is no big incentive to buy anything from whoever's business being advertised to begin with. To the extent there even is any kind of business there at all.

To illustrate, from looking at some recent deleted spam I make the following observations:

First of all, my penis is just the size it should be and it works the way it should, so no need for enlargments and viagra, nor, presumably, subsequently having to carry it around in a wheelbarrow.

With that taken care of, next, I don't have time to do contract negotiations with alleged attorneys claiming to represent rich deceased people whom I've never heard of, living in countries where I've never been.

Neither do I care about spending time attempting to claim a prize in lotteries where I never bought a single ticket.

I don't use Paypal in French either.

Then there are the bankers in Ghana that send me notices of their new e-mail address, with wild and wonderful and completely unrelated titles. Since all these notices are basically formatted the same way, the precipitated hypothesis is that there are a lot of bankers in Ghana, and all of them are getting yahoo.com e-mail addresses. Well, I don't need Ghanesian banking services any time soon. If I ever should, I'd deal with someone whose e-mail address had a reasonable resemblance to the name of the bank and the country the bank is operating in, not just some random attention-getter I found in the spam-box.

And that is just looking at the stuff that comes in a language I can read. Sometimes it is Chinese or Hebrew, and sometimes it is in some mysterious language that merely renders as garbage.

Point of all this, there is hardly any legitimate business or services of any kind advertising through this spam channel at all. Hence no one to boycott.

Makes me wonder why do they bother.

Expressions containing the assignment operator, like x = y + 5, might look the same as statements of algebra, but the value on the left of the assignment operator does not behave as an alias for some specific value, but as a kind of box into which the result of the calculation ends up stored. Hence we get "impossible" statements like x = x + 3, which is perfectly OK in a fair number of programming languages, but inconsistent and illegal as a statement of algebra, where one of the important rules is that any variable name always is an alias of the same value wherever it appears in each equation.

To someone who is shaky in regular algebra, this exception is mind-boggling.

The "high gain" inductive connection is a transformer itself, with the primary in the base and the secondary and batteries in the moveable part. And this kind of separable transformer makes a lot of good sense for toothbrushes, shavers, and kettles, where moisture and water is nearby. However, there is no energy transfer taking place unless the kettle or handle is sitting on its base.

Now I can't quite imagine how that "charging table" would not use some minimal amount of standby power for at least the circuitry that detects the presence of a phone or ipod or portable mp3 player or whatever.