They can talk to me about animal cruelty when they no longer hold the record for most animals killed in a shelter.

I don't know why everyone is confused about this, but this isn't "unique symbols." The palm pilot input method was innovative because it solved two problems with handwriting recognition. The first problem was that there was nowhere near enough processing power to run a real handwriting recognition algorithm (which existed at the time). The second was that because you are writing each letter in the same space, there is less information to work with. Without character spacing, you have no idea whether a stroke is part of the current glyph or the beginning of a new one. They solved both problems the same way: by making each character a single continuous path, and the direction/order matters. That makes the recognition easier, and it knows when you are done with a character because you lift the stylus.

The downside is that you have to invest quite a bit to learn how to do it. It's frustrating to have to learn how to do something you already know how to do: write.

This is more sophisticated. There is quite a bit of variation in the way people write letters, and without the prescribed continuous glyph, a lot of ambiguity.

Give them some credit. This isn't just a rehash of Graffiti. It's real handwriting recognition. I think that's impressive for such a small device. Not as limited as the palm pilot for sure, but still a very limited machine. It may be an incremental improvement, but that's what innovation is, literally, distinct from invention.

Without ASLR, return to x exploits are trivial for all x. All that is needed is the address of a function (or any code -- it doesn't have to be the 'official' entry point of a function) that does something useful to the attacker, and a way to clobber the stack.

This doesn't really have anything to do with libc, except that it is a rich source of well known addresses (without ASLR). So what in the hell are you talking about?

That's a lot of languages and platforms. Know what they all have in common? I'll give you a hint; it starts with C.

You're both wrong/right. In order to supplant Objective-C, Swift would have to play well with the bazillion lines of Objective-C, and coexist with it for possibly a very long time. On the other hand, even if Apple "could not be more clear" that swift is built to supplant Objective-C, that doesn't mean it will succeed, and doesn't mean Apple won't change their mind. It's a gamble and they certainly know it. They keep that to themselves in order to encourage you to drink the cool-aid.

See also: Microsoft and .NET

If only there were some way to simulate physical systems like that. Where will they find the computing power? Plus the software probably costs a fortune.

RAM generally is, and address space always is.

"essence of life" is an interesting choice of words. Here, read this.

Here's a few choice quotes:

Life is not one of the great scientific unknowns. Live and dead mice are not indistinguishable. No one today expects microbes to spontaneously come into being. Creating life from scratch is a technical problem, not a theoretical one. If stating so is pedantic then so be it.

Let me say this another way.. How are you so sure it's dead?

Pulse?

How quaint. When I need to know something, my computer travels back in time and alters history so that I always knew it.

If all of your measurements are the same, you're either not very good at taking measurements, or you're not very good at killing mice.

You better let the Nobel people know to get his prize ready, because he's right. Entropy is unlikely to decrease in a closed system. But it can.

I suppose it's going to be a while before we run out of alpha emitters. So the Wikipedia page is wrong then, when it says Helium is a finite resource. Last time I trust Wikipedia (yeah right:).

You said it slowly dissipates into space. That means the rate it leaves the atmosphere is low, so the rate it is replenished is low, and that's the limiting extraction rate.

According to this (that didn't take long), the rate Helium leaves the atmosphere is 50g/s, or 3e5 cm^3/s. The National Helium Reserve is 1e9 m^3. So, extracting all of the Helium from the atmosphere before it escapes, it would take 1e9 m^3 / (3e5 cm^3/s), or over 100 years to replace the reserves.

But extracting all of it is hopelessly unrealistic. I don't know, but it seems even 1% would be ambitious. So now we're looking at tens of thousands of years.

So either the national reserve is ridiculously large, or removing it from the atmosphere is not going to be a solution to the shortage. Right? Or am I missing something (else)?