If that resolution is correct then you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 150dpi display and a 300dpi display at 2 feet but I certainly can. I'm not sure the 0.3-0.4 arc-minute figure I quoted in my other reply is really typical but I think most people's vision is better than 1 arc-minute.

That is too low. See, e.g. this, which states that the resolvable pixel size is about 0.3-0.4 arc-minutes. Using 0.4 means that at 9 feet any 16:9 1080p screen larger than 28" has resolvable pixels. A 4k screen could be as large as 55" before the pixels are resolvable.

Well for a start he's a bond manager. The great minds of our world create, discover, invent. They don't manage bonds. The fact that he is not seeking out the sorts of intellectual challenges that Musk is, IMHO, evidence that he's not as smart as Musk. Regardless of the business success of Musk's companies, they've managed to solve engineering problems that no one else seems to have done. But, of course, that's irrelevant because he may well have more knowledge/experience/wisdom in the area he's giving advice. I think he could well be right in saying that the battery tech is the real point of difference for Tesla and that they should focus on that exclusively. But I suspect that Musk feels that if he doesn't prove there is a market then other car manufacturers will not take it seriously.

I'm pretty sure it's been there since iMessage was first released.

You'd have a point if they were developing for a phone/tablet. But they weren't, so how does that example counter my position?

The post I replied to claimed you couldn't write *any* software for iOS without a dev subscription. That's false. Of course there are limitations with HTML5, just as there are limitations with any platform. I contend that the limitations are unlikely to be an issue for 95% of people who want to develop something for their phone/tablet but won't pay $100 per year to do it.

True, but for software you're writing for yourself that's probably not a big problem. The poster I replied to claimed you couldn't write and run software on your iOS device without paying the developer subscription. That's simply false, I've done it myself.

You can write anything you like in HTML5 and run it. In fact many "real" apps are just wrappers for a webkit widget running an HTML5 application.

You try to make that sound trivial, but content consumption is what 90% of people use computers for 90% of the time outside of their jobs.

The Wikipedia article doesn't actually support the claim that no one else could make Coke though. A competitor could by from the Stepan Company just as Coca-cola does. If Coca-Cola don't have an alternative source then they wouldn't even be able to apply pressure to stop Stepan from selling to a competitor.

Do postal service employees work for free? No. They pay taxes on the income that USPS pays them. Even if USPS doesn't generate a profit (and therefore doesn't pay an tax on its profit), it's still generating economic activity which is taxed. No different to any other company that is not making a profit.

It's clearly satire. You're wrong on this.

The whole point behind Literate Programming is that you can't read non-literate code as literature, and Knuth believes being able to read code as literature makes it easier to understand. If you could read any sort of code as literature then why would we need literate programming? So given that virtual all code in existence is non-literate it's pretty obvious that trying to promote code reading as literature reading is not going to work that well. The point of this article is that the author tried it both ways (code reading groups reading code as literature and treating it as an investigation) and found the investigative approach worked better. He's not expressing an opinion or proposing a hypothesis, he's simply reporting what worked and what did not.

Evidence? Did you RTFA? I've just given you a one line synopsis, if you want evidence you'll find it there.

We're not talking about Knuth's book. We're talking about the article, which you apparently didn't bother to read. In it Knuth provides an anecdote that supports the author's contention. Please, go and RTFA.

Knuth (and many others) think code should be more like literature, but to successfully create a code reading culture you must acknowledge that in practice examining most code is not at all like reading literature and instead needs to be approached more like a scientific investigation. Knuth actually provided an anecdote that reinforces this point so I very much doubt he disagrees with it.