Monads monads monads monads monads from Haskell.

Or "workflows" in F#. Related to, I think, "generators" in Scala?

Roughly (and I'm going to make up some C++/Java style syntax here), you write something like this:

workflow someExpressionMaybeAnObject
{
        int x = someassignment;
        some statement;
        someotherstatement;
}

At the end of each line, you check the return value for errors, and use the handlers defined by the object up top, which could short-circuit the rest of evaluation.

These are actually a lot more general than error handling. For example, they generalize Python-style list comprehensions when used in a certain way.

In Haskell-land, there's a lot of interesting math about how they work, but you don't need it for error handling.

Moral: Learn a wider variety of languages!

English isn't particularly more fault-tolerant than other languages. All languages are fault tolerant. It's why things like noun-verb agreement exist: they provide redundancy and error detection and correction.

English is so dominant on the Internet because England conquered the world and the US is enormously influential.

Yes it does. The two formulations are equivalent, and, in fact the time-to-check answer one is much more commonly used because it is much easier to reason about.

Mithril totally is aluminum., Light, strong, shiny and more valuable than gold until the modern age.

This is less true of web ads, but a lot of print ads and billboards are very well designed and definitely enrich the visual environment.

When I was 10, I was making elaborate 3D models in a modeler called Form-Z, and, while I like to think I'm pretty smart, I don't think that it was that hard. Kids from like 8 to 12 have an incredible ability to hyperconcentrate on cool things like that.

When I was five, I was using a mouse to make drawings in KidPix. I don't think it is that unreasonable to expect a four year old to have a lot of fun with blender. And you are vastly underestimating them if you think they can't use a mouse.

It's only *finitely* improbable...

I imagine there is a pretty good market for New York to Europe or Japan in half an hour for 100K. High level executives in multinational corporations with emergencies to fix would probably be willing to pay for this all the time.

Re: temperature, Wired article says "minus 24 degrees to 10 degrees above zero Fahrenheit" would be expected, except that it is almost certainly tidally locked, so one side is boiling with the other freezing. There would be a temperate zone in the middle.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/real-habitable-exoplanet/

Apparently this one was easier to find because the star was a red dwarf. This means that, because it is not as bright as the Sun, the habitable zone is much closer in and so the gravitational force between the star and the planet was larger. Moreover, the red dwarf is much less massive than the Sun. Together these two facts mean that the star wiggles a lot more do to gravitational effects than an Earthlike planet would cause a Sunlike star to, and so it was easier to find. Aliens on this planet trying to find planets around the Sun with the same techniques would be able find only Saturn and Jupiter.

So says my science writer friend.

This is indeed Twelve Angry Men.

Eh, idunno. I think Revenge of the Sith is at least as good as Return of the Jedi. Purists may burn me alive, I guess.

I didn't see this elsewhere in the comments.

Here is a link to the paper off of Dr. Deolalikar's official website at HP. It appears to be rather slow, but is loading eventually.

I'm a guy, sitting in an office in front of a computer in the middle of the night, in a tiedye tee-shirt and blue jeans I bought at goddamn Target, and even I know that clothing quality can scale linearly with price easily up to $400 for a dress.

The problem with that is that operations per second on a multicore machine does not mean the same thing as on a single core machine. If I increase the number of cores, the number of operations per second goes up, but your programs won't run any faster unless the programmer wrote really good threaded code. Which he or she didn't, because that's hard. On the other hand, if I increase the clock speed, the number of operations per second goes up, and your program also runs faster.

Of course, commodity processors stopped getting faster clock speeds in 2003, while Moore's law keeps marching, so now the added complexity goes into more cores, which is useless for many applications.

(FLOPS is used as a metric by the scientific computing community, which tends to deal with large, well structured problems which can be easily distributed across thousands of machines, and which use floating point arithmetic. It's a useful metric there, but it's not really useful for commodity machines.)