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Comment Re:An Odd Bird (Score 5, Interesting) 110

Authors improve with age? In my experience that's not true at all. There seems to be a range during which authors are at their optimum and even if the actual age range varies from person to person. The consistency is how the decline manifests itself.

Too many authors shift from storytelling to exposition in their later years. Instead of describing a compelling narrative into which thought provoking concepts are intertwined they get totally fixated on those themes. So you get a book full of exposition in which virtually nothing happens until the very end; it's a book full of people talking instead of doing. It seems exacerbated by sticking to the same universe but I've seen it happen with unrelated novels by the same author.

I always bring up Frank Herbert and the Dune series as a case study for this phenomenon. It's not that there aren't facets of the later books that aren't interesting, but as a novel those later novels are not as engaging as the first, even when they had the potential to be so much more. And it seems that first novel is usually the best.

Comment Re:Even worse. (Score 1) 289

Read the law? Are you crazy? Without that we can't have "blah, blah, blah... Obama is Hitler, blah, blah, blah". You might think ObamaHitler propaganda is bad, but we need it. It has electrolytes. It's what plants crave. If you pull the plug on ObamaHitle propaganda, a good chunk of the economy could collapse.

Comment Closest I came to an Easter Egg (Score 1) 290

The closest I came to an Easter Egg was putting the string "EREIAMJH" in code some place. I don't recall exactly. Perhaps it was off the end of the simple help text in a CLI app or something. There were a few times I'd stick that in code. It'd only be visible to somebody running strings on the code or something. It's very few bytes. No additional execution is involved. It's a Brazil reference in case you're wondering.

Comment Re:Oklahoma, as an example (Score 4, Informative) 143

The USA in general has more forest now then it did 100 years ago. The first industrial revolution was really hard on trees. For example, In NorCal there is a town called Guerneville. Next to the Safeway you can read a historical marker that explains it was once called "stumptown". Reason? Redwoods cut down to make railroad ties and other structures. Guerneville is now surrounded by 2nd growth redwood. It looks great, even if you know that it's not the amazing beauty that it must have been before.

Comment Re:Why would a PDP8 be expensive? (Score 1) 92

Absent interference in the market by governments and/or corporations, price is determined by supply and demand, not capability. I can't think of any rational reason for anybody to interfere with the market for PDP8s, so I'm going to assume it's a free market. Although economic theory with its neat little graphs might give one the impression that it's some kind of science, the actual shape of the supply and demand graphs (and thus the equilibrium price) are determined by emotional "ugly bags of mostly water".

Comment Re:Time (Score 1) 298

Scrolled down for this. I would add, "time and testing" and "testing" usually involves wide distribution. Yes, JPEG, PNG and Open Source compression libraries have had bugs, sometimes very serious ones. I still consider it some of the best code out there. I don't think being able to read the code matters. That's a red herring, unless you need to work on it. If everybody needs to work on it, it's too unfinished to be particularly good code. The only thing I've read in some of these libraries is the headers, and mostly the comments in there. It was literally self-documenting in comments the last time I looked at it. That's some good code.

Comment Re:End the Fed! (Score 1) 160

Not to mention that many diseases were a death sentence in 1913. Sure, health care was cheap. The doctor would take a chicken in trade; but all he had was a black bag. Appendicitis? surgical mortality was much higher. Polio? No vaccine. That's why FDR was in a wheel chair. Today? We can even cure some cancers if we catch them in time. Yeah, paying premiums sucks. I just paid mine today. Hate it; but I have no desire to go back to 1913.

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