As a simple example, some games use a log of actions in order to store their save files; they replay the actions in order to reconstruct the state of the game. Even if those actions involve floating-point computations, the saves are still typically reproducible given the same executable (given that these games are normally written to avoid the use of uninitialized memory, and the like). If a processor starts handling floating-point differently, suddenly everyone's save files will be broken.

GPUs used to take mathematical shortcuts all the time. More recently, though, with the scientific community starting to use GPU clusters for computation, the main GPU manufacturers have been adding mathematically precise circuitry (and may well use it by default, on the basis that there's no point in having both an accurate and an inaccurate codepath).

You can set a karma modifier for foes and for friends; if you set your foes to have -6 karma, then they're going to be at -1 forever to your view and thus not show up. I know there's at least one Slashdot user who sets their friends to +1 karma, and their foes to +6 so as to not mod them up by mistake, which strikes me as a pretty backwards way of doing things.

One situation I was wondering about for that problem was the use of Japanese/Chinese/Korean marks/overrides, the same way that there are LTR and RTL overrides. Choice of language for a particular ideograph seems to be much the same as choice of direction for an inherently undirectional character (you're interpreting the character differently depending on context). This also has the advantage of being pretty much backwards compatible.

I have mod points right now, so I just checked the interface. There's a link "Moderate" on the bottom of each post. If you click on it, it takes you to the home page, for some reason. If you have enough restraint to hover it without clicking on it, it pops up a menu of the various moderation possibilities, and you can (presumably) click on one to moderate the post.

Posts still appear to have moderation values, and there's a link you can click on to choose a threshold (and thus filter by score), but it's very very small (to the right of the "All", "Informative", etc., line, and a few pixels large).

Conclusion: All the moderation functionality does appear to still exist, but the UI is terrible.

I have also observed some missing functionality (permalink to comment, comment without specifying a title, comment as Anonymous Coward without logging out). This comment was sent from Beta for research purposes, but I think I'm going to go back to Classic for actual browsing.

"==" is normally used for value or reference equality, and that's an "is-a" relationship. You'd want something like instanceof (that's Java, but many other languages have equivalents).

It may be better to realize that rewriting it in Python will prevent this whole class of problems and a bunch of others, and is the way to go.

It's well known among programmer circles that rewriting a program in a different language in order to work around bugs you don't understand just tends to make things worse. Such may be the same with patent laws.

Normally journals claim copyright on the published version of the paper, after it's been edited and typeset by the journal, and don't mind academics sharing the original "preprint" version that was edited and typeset by the original author. (They don't have any reasonable copyright claim on the preprints anyway.) Sending takedowns on preprints is unusual enough to make the news, which is why it's on Slashdot now.

The journal also doesn't pay the academics for their papers; journals work like distributors in the retail market, i.e. their purpose is to make the papers more widely available / discoverable / searchable, in addition to reviewing them to ensure appropriateness and quality (although it's arguable that this is actually a useful function of the journal, given that they don't pay the reviewers either).

Incidentally, my papers have been published in multiple conference proceedings, and I didn't sign a contract for any of them. I assume the contract exists, but the papers were all coauthored, and I think the journals only sought a contract with one of the authors. If this is indeed the case, it makes the situation even more complex.

I currently develop on a laptop with a little under 3GB main memory (and around as much swap). I haven't really noticed memory pressure. (Probably because while I'm programming, I tend not to have much open other than terminals and text editors; maybe a separate window for documentation.) I have more memory pressure when I'm web-browsing (like I am now), rather than developing. (The two activities are mutually exclusive for me; I can't concentrate on programming when I have Slashdot to distract me.)

I'm not convinced that it necessarily means the hardware will be particularly Linux-suited. I bought a Linux (Ubuntu) laptop from Dell a while back (this was in the era of Ubuntu Feisty, I think?). It came with a manual for getting started on Windows, and had a Windows key on the keyboard (which the installed version of Ubuntu happily interpreted as Super, as it usually does). It didn't particularly feel like anything other than a standard Windows Dell laptop that someone had installed Ubuntu on prior to shipping. (Also, the touchpad didn't work, except for a few minutes a few weeks after I obtained it; I suspect that might have been a hardware issue rather than drivers, though. I got used to doing without it.)

If you want a "this cannot happen" with core dump in C, just use abort(). Unless its behaviour is specifically overriden, it's specified to exit the program as unsuccessful termination by the C standards (e.g. 7.22.4.1p2 of C11), and to core dump by POSIX (about as portable as you can get where core dumps are concerned; in straight C, they might not necessarily exist). It also has the benefit of being pretty short, and not undefined behaviour at all.

Of course, that doesn't work in the kernel, but then neither would the other methods you suggested.

You can do that in Windows 8 too, right-click the very bottom-left corner of the screen. (The main problem with that is that it's basically impossible to discover until someone tells you about it.)

It's worse than that. In general, there's nothing stopping anyone sending an email from any address they like; the From: address is simply written onto the email by the sender, much the same way as there's nothing preventing someone sending physical mail writing any return address they like on the envelope. Of course, this makes it kind-of easy to spam, so various methods have sprung up over the years for people to validate the From: address on an email, but there's no universal method that will work for every email you might ever receive.

In general, you should never trust the From: address on an email for any purpose whatsoever other than determining who the sender wants you to think they are.

It's best known for working in some old, buggy FORTRAN situations. Nowadays, it's legal INTERCAL too, albeit mostly to be perverse (and in some compilers, you may have to alias the constant to a variable to be able to assign to it without the compiler complaining).

In gcc, you can do -Werror=parentheses if you want to make this an error rather than a warning.