There's no shortage of people ragging on the code. "It's not C++ enough to be called C++," "there's not enough comments", "it uses C stdio.h", etc. Get over it.

This looks like the sort of program I might dash out over an afternoon (maybe two) to satisfy some intellectual curiosity. Programming as play. This isn't production code, it's fun code, written to satisfy oneself.

Is it perfect? WHO CARES! That's not important. That misses the point. If you doodle in your notepad and it brings you a smile, does anyone care it's not as good as the Mona Lisa? You sure as heck don't. And that's what this code is. A doodle. It just happens to be in simple, straightforward procedural C/C++ code.

I personally think playing with programming is important. Sure, you'll write a lot of dreck. But, you'll also learn a lot. You learn real lessons when you do write dodgy code, and the dodgy code actually bites you. You also can try new things fearlessly. After all, you're programming a toy for oneself, and you're under no deadline pressure. There's no spec you have to fulfill. You can experiment and enjoy it.

Programming as play still helps build your programming reflexes. If and when you do sit down to write professional grade software, all of that play will make the basic work of programming natural. Rather than focusing your energy on the basic details of programming, you can instead focus your energy designing maintainable code that meets the business requirements and documenting that design. Writing the code just flows naturally.

So, yeah, I'm impressed. This Sudoku solver brought a smile to my face. It's incredibly cool that the prime minister shared a code doodle with us.

Uh, no. Fiorina ran for US Senate. You're thinking of Meg Whitman, who tried to click "Buy It Now" on the California Governorship ($150 million campaign). But your confusion is understandable, since they're both from the tech sector, and they both spout buzzword-bingo gibberish.

Whitman lost to Jerry Brown, BTW, thus earning Brown the singular distinction of having to clean up the mess left by a B-grade movie actor twice.

The hardware knowledge argument has become virtually irrelevant in the EC2-world where you can spawn VM pretty much transparently

Right, we forgot, Amazon VMs are magical devices powered by hopes and dreams, rather than CPU cycles like old fashioned "computers" are.

Back here in reality cloud virtual machines are just a shitty containment mechanism that's sort of like an operating system process, only dramatically less efficient. Did you know that Google, not a company exactly famous for lacking clue, doesn't use VMs internally at all? Every internal program runs as a regular operating system process on top of a patched Linux kernel. The system is called Borg and they published a paper on it recently.

Why don't they use VMs, Amazon style? Because VMs suck. Running an entire OS inside another OS just to provide isolation is a great way to waste vast amounts of money and resources. It means sysadmins get to reuse their existing skillset instead of learning some new way of managing software, but that's about it as far as advantages are concerned.

Certainly your Amazon VM will suffer from cache line interference, limited resources, and other things that plague physical devices.

Huh. I always parsed Lemongrab as male...

Hardly. AirBnb and PayPal are both good examples of this sort of thing. PayPal got raided a lot and got sent C&D letters by various state regulators when they were rolling out across the USA. Eventually they had to sell to eBay (their primary competitor) to get enough money and political immunity to survive. There's a book about it called the PayPal Wars that goes into more detail on this.

Courts are useless here. They routinely let governments use secret definitions and secret evidence. You have no chance.

lol. This is an administration that defines the word "militant" as meaning any male that isn't a child or pensioner. "Material support for terrorism" doesn't mean anything at all, given that the last 15 years have shown governments will happily label anything they don't like as terrorism. Bear in mind the primary roadblock that prevents the UN agreeing on a definition of terrorism is western nations (i.e. America's) insistence that people who resist foreign occupation of their countries must be considered terrorists, and Arab nations insistence that they mustn't.

No they have not.

It's a radio transmitter in a can. It would take an even larger departure from known physics to make it go boom. We have a good deal of experience with radio transmitters in space.

OK, I will try to restate in my baby talk since I don't remember this correctly.

Given that you are accelerating, the appearance to you is that you are doing so linearly, and time dilation is happening to you. It could appear to you that you reach your destination in a very short time, much shorter than light would allow. To the outside observer, however, time passes at a different rate and you never achieve light speed.

I am having an equally hard time thinking of how Earth is more habitable than Mars while atomic bombs are going off or impactors are impacting. If you wait a while, sure it's more habitable than Mars. But for that moment, no.

Sounds like my algorithm.

Very very occasionally, if the description sounds interesting, I'll paste the description/requirements into Google. Most of these spamming third-party recruiters just copy-paste from public job postings, so Google can usually find the original posting on the employer's Web site.

To an outside observer. I don't think it's the same in the inertial frame.

Before we call this real, we need to put one on some object in orbit, leave it in continuous operation, and use it to raise the orbit by a measurable amount large enough that there would not be argument regarding where it came from. The Space Station would be just fine. It has power for experiments that is probably sufficient and it has a continuing problem of needing to raise its orbit.

And believe me, if this raises the orbit of the Space Station they aren't going to want to disconnect it after the experiment. We spend a tremendous amount of money to get additional Delta-V to that thing, and it comes down if we don't.

What is the average humidity on those 40/20 degree days?

Come visit my home in the Washington DC suburbs, in. say, August. After a week of 90/90 weather (90+ degrees F, 90%+ humidity) you'll be crying for AC too.