This is an article about subs that launch airplanes. Fucking airplanes! We're talking about something that's on the same level as a gun that shoots swords instead of bullets. This sort of thing can cause nerdgasms.

It gets even worse than 4chan in the dark corners of anonymous networks.

Heh, maybe the aXXo people should start signing their releases. Of course, if they ever go to trial it can bite them in the ass, like the wet bandit sink thing in Home Alone.

And full-fledged threading! I don't know how a group of people can have a useful online conversation without it.

This sounds a bit like Berry's paradox: "Some natural numbers, like 2, are interesting. Some natural numbers, like 255610679 (I think), are not interesting. Consider the set of uninteresting natural numbers. If this set were nonempty, it would contain a smallest element s. But then s, would have the interesting property of being the smallest uninteresting number. This is a contradiction. So the set of uninteresting natural numbers must be empty."

So perhaps by the same logic there are no non-notable languages. Go! is notable merely because it's not notable.

We've had decentralized tracking for years now, based on the Kademila distributed hash table. As long as the .torrent creator didn't turn on the private flag DRM, this system works really well, and I think it tends to provide an even richer set of peers from which to choose.

We also have OpenBittorrent which is a tracker that has no idea what it's tracking, putting it in a safer legal position than trackers have normally been in. Any torrent can use that if they wish.

The legal bottleneck is in distributing the .torrent files themselves. This involves more than just distribution, too. You want to have user feedback to weed out malicious or fake torrents. You want to have up-to-date seeder/leacher information. This is the weak spot in BitTorrent right now. That's what makes TPB and Mininova and the like so important.

That's how The Little Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong) became the most widely printed book in the world. "The book's phenomenal popularity may be due to the fact that it was essentially an unofficial requirement for every Chinese citizen to own, to read, and to carry it at all times during the later half of Mao's rule, especially during the Cultural Revolution."

You're doing it wrong. (The GC does all that for you.) The only reason you would write a destructor is when the object is tied to an external resource that the GC doesn't manage, and you still wouldn't call the destructor directly.

"The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet." Find the bottlenecks later and rewrite them in C or something low level.

Garbage collection (or its cousin, reference counting) is what turns a 5 hour programming task into a 1 hour programming task.

I use Lynx for the occasion when a program has an http configuration which is binded only to the loopback device, and I want to give it a quick check over ssh.

Graphics cards are complex beasts whose drivers sit in the kernel where they could make mistakes. X has had it's various information leaks due to its complexity (keystroke leaking, etc). You know how when the Vista UAC pops up the screen does that blink? That's to deal with stuff like API driven clicks from real ones, operating at a different driver permission level or something. When installing a Firefox extension you have to wait for that 3 second pause so you can't accidentally strike enter for it, partly to mitigate problems with flawed windowing systems. The list goes on and on.

Graphics add a lot of complexity to the system, and increased system complexity introduces a lot of inevitable security and stability problems.

It's useful for the same reasons we have an <img> tag instead of <embed> for images.

You've got it all backwards, which explains your misunderstanding.

Speaking from the US standpoint, that's not at all what the constitution says. After a limited time their works are supposed to be free to the world, regardless of the author's wishes. Copyright is only a temporary incentive granted by the public to the author in order to encourage more works to be made. It's not to give authors some kind of moral right over their work. That concept doesn't exist in US copyright.

The public domain has been stolen, because most of the works under copyright today belong in it. If we had reasonable copyright laws the public domain would be orders of magnitude larger than it is now. That's theft of public domain.

If the public is no longer receiving more benefit from copyright than its cost of civil liberties, as is the case with current copyright, then it is no longer aligned with its intention as laid out by the constitution. It's plain wrong. So for now many of us will ignore it.

So that's why I didn't buy it, I torrented it. :-)

How about that copyright is fundamentally immoral and unconstitutional (i.e. "limited times")? So not only is breaking copyright law not morally wrong, but I'd say it's even our duty as citizens to violate copyright as an act of civil disobedience.

Copyright mostly exists merely because of government corruption (Mickey Mouse protection act, etc). The public domain was stolen from the public. That's why I see no reason to obey it. Breaking the law isn't and cannot be morally wrong.

Oh man, I can definitely see that. It's all slow and parallel in the traffic circle, so accidents aren't dangerous. But at the same time people turn into complete idiots in traffic circles, weaving between lanes like there is only one, cutting across other drivers (like exiting directly from the inner circle across a lane, or not exiting the outer circle when it ends), and not signaling anything. I go through one twice every day and I have to actively avoid other driver's mistakes on a weekly basis.