It's not a question of whether or not it can be handled. Of course it can be handled, you just take the thing out of the water every x hours and repair/clean/repaint/whatever it. The question is, what's the value of 'x', and what's the associated cost, and at what point does that prevent the whole enterprise from being uneconomical?

"they"

"ghetto"

"white neighbourhoods"

And they say Racism isn't rife in America. It's certainly pretty evident in comments like this one.

They don't sound all that Turing Complete. Examples?

while(1);

I don't think pre-empting an infinite loop counts as 'halting' in this context.

In trivial cases yes. In the general case no (of course).

Only by running it for that long, which is kind of cheating.

The proof may be contrived, but that doesn't make the result any less true. The point is that correctness cannot be proven for software by software. It is provably impossible to write bug-finding software that finds all bugs - even if one could describe to the bug-finder what the program is supposed to do.

Turing machines are contrived too - no-one ever builds a Turing machine to actually do anything, we use real computers instead. But Turing showed that all algorithms are homeomorphic to some Turing machine, and that all results that apply to Turing machines also apply to all other classical computers.

Hence the halting problem is important in that it places fundamental limits on what can and cannot be computed.

Thanks - looks like you've slashdotted them though :)

Citation needed on that one I'm afraid. First I've heard of it.

Damn right.

Reading your comments reminds me of why I come to slashdot in the first place, so firstly - thank you

Secondly; I'm a huge fan of chocolate - I mean, who isn't - and I want to know which brand of chocolate I ought to be buying. Living in NZ means I'm probably not going to be a customer of yours, so what do you suggest? Cadbury's? Whittakers? Green & Black's? Someone else that I've not heard of?

Have you done this? Is it really possible? We await more detailed instructions.

Enlighten us. What is the reason?

How is this stupid? Seems pretty sensible to me, Linux vs. Window notwithstanding.

In what way?

How so? Seems to work fine at my Kids primary school and intermediate school.

That's right, children should not be taught to use the single most important innovation in communication and content creation to be invented since the pencil and paper.

Oh. Wait.

No. There is no reason to believe that smaller shakes are warnings. None whatsoever. That there was a subsequent deadly earthquake is a terrible tragedy, but it does not change the fact that small shakes are not a predictor of large earthquakes.

If those families had left l'Aquila, then one presumes that they would have returned at some point. If a large earthquake had not occurred by that point, but did shortly thereafter, would the scientists still be at fault?

Actually, upon re-reading your reply, I'm not sure what you were actually arguing.