> Now it (worldwide population) is growing by millions a day.
400k/day. But gettin there..
No. Not even close. At that rate, we would be adding a billion people every 6.8 years.
Actual numbers (2011 data): Adding 360k per day, subtracting 151.6k per day, for a net increase of 208.4k per day.
Anyone who knows anything about compression knows that universal lossless compression is impossible to always do, because if such an algorithm existed, you could run it repeatedly on a data source until you were down to a single bit. And uncompresing a single bit that could be literally anything is problematic.
Actually, anyone who knows anything about compression knows that universal lossless compression is always possible to do. Sometimes you get good compression, sometimes you get shitty compression, and sometimes you get 0% compression. Note that 0% compression is still compression — it's just a degenerate case.
You are right, of course, that you can't repeatedly compress something down to a single bit — there is always a point of diminishing returns. But just because you can't compress something down to a single bit doesn't mean that no universal lossless compression algorithm exists. For example, f(x) = x is a universal lossless compression algorithm. It's a shitty algorithm, but it is lossless and it does compress.
Less than 50 musicians in history have [...]
Fewer than.
it's worth being skeptical whenever someone's argument involves their not being able to comprehend the magnificence of their own creation (it's a form of argument from ignorance).
Not really. Not if they're using a genetic hillclimbing approach with neural networks, mutation, and evolution. Chances are, you'll never have any hope of understanding what evolves in that case. That's normal, and nothing to be skeptical about. And that would be a great way to win Core Wars.
(which you can solve by running away to living in outer space,)
Oh, sure. Because nothing can kill you in outer space.
C-x M-c M-butterfly.
The best way to program for sure.
Madame butterfly?
You can fill your car in 5 minutes and go another 600KM. You can battery swap a Model S in 90 seconds and go another 500KM. Or you can wait 20 minutes and get a supercharge that will get you 250KM for zero cost.
Seems like the electric car not only meets your expectations, but rather exceeds them.
In theory. I mean, there are more than 100,000 gas stations in the United States, compared to how many Tesla supercharging/swapping stations?
Don't get me wrong; I think electric is here to stay and will win out in the long run... but to say it meets or exceeds expectations of convenience is not right.
Well at least Chewbacca NEVER EVER stepped on poo.
If he did, he would find the person who left it there and pull their arms out of their sockets.
One thing has to be said for C#, as much as I am a subscriber to the "If C is Play-Doh, and C++ is Lego - C# is Duplo" philosophy, it does allow to get results fast without having to use a ton of libraries that in the end weigh you down more than C# would.
So in other words, C# gets results fast without having to weigh you down more than itself would?
It would be hard to make a programming language slower than Java, even if you tried.
1996 called and wants its Java insult book back.
A couple of questions come to mind. "How does one backup?", and "If I need to make a U-Turn, how can I?"
You can't backup. Backup is a noun. Back up is a verb. The question is: "How does one back up?"
Wow, so it's trying to use [2] as an array index inside @$spi . .
Is it converting [2] into "REF(ARRAY)" or somesuch, and then converting that to an integer and using that as the index?
My Perl interpreter (5.12) chokes on that code...
$ perl -e 'my $s = [5,6]; my $i = [2]; $s->[$i] = 7'
Modification of non-creatable array value attempted, subscript -1283427544 at -e line 1.
...but it gives an interesting hit with the negative giant subscript index.
What version of Perl are you using that chews up 30 seconds of CPU time?
egrep -n '^[a-z].*\(' $ | sort -t':' +2.0
