Because you'd have to do it in realtime, or whatever passes for it when dealing with relativistic effects on this scale. Otherwise, microscopic shifts in the Earth's crust will soon change the slew rate, and then you're back to square one. But calculating the slew rate will inevitably take longer than one tick of the clock, so you can't do it in realtime either.

Though this property isn't entirely useless. For example, you could use two of these clocks to build extremely sensitive seismometers: first you would need to calculate their slew rate at rest, but then whenever that changed, you'd know that their relative position had changed. Then you'd have to calculate the new slew rate, to establish the new baseline, but the temporal resolution of such a device would depend only on how quickly you could do that.

The Bible, and even the Old Testament, paints for us a God with many sides to His personality. We see him cracking puns, playing games, quoting references, and occasionally straight-up trolling people: a far cry from the solemn graybeard that many people, believers and otherwise, like to paint Him. In some aspects, the God of the Bible isn't so different from a modern geek.

I bring this up because the verse you mention is one of the very first times that He swipes a reference, and from the serpent, no less (see Genesis 3:5). I take this to be a note of bitter sarcasm, more than anything else. He had been painted into a corner by the very system He had set up (and the work of yet another master of trolling), and the only way out was straight through. But that meant doing some things that He clearly was not happy about doing.

I don't see what a compiler's ability to do with other formats/languages has to do with a different format/language.

Ordinarily, it doesn't. But the thing is, there are two things called GCC: the GNU C compiler (which handles C) and the GNU Compiler Collection (a set of compilers which, though they share the same backend, are still separate entities).

GCC, the C compiler, cannot handle Fortran. GCC, the set of compilers, can handle it via g77 (the old compiler) or gfortran (the new one), but the C compiler can't. This is considered the traditional way of doing things.

What makes C++ different from many languages is that its maintainers insist that C++ compilers must be able to handle C code. It's not enough to have a different compiler in the set, the way GCC does: it must be doable with the C++ compiler itself, in the same application. And so g++ can do it too, because that's what the standard requires of it.

That's what makes the difference. Ordinarily, as you say, a compiler's ability to handle multiple languages shouldn't affect any of the languages in it. But C++ was defined in a way that not only makes those effects possible: it makes them mandatory.

The only Tetris movie that ever needed to be made has already been made. Any further attempts will necessarily pale in comparison.

The problem with being obvious about it is that there's a very large overlap between the populations of people who would spike someone's drink and people who turn psycho when they see drinks being tested. Without the ability to be discreet, merely performing the test puts a person in danger.

It's more discreet than using a special straw, which seems to have been the predecessor (at least in spirit) of this new method.

What you see at that link is only the last panel. The story was revealed frame-by-frame over a much longer period of time.

I do think it would be nice if xkcd made the whole thing available, but others have managed. The Wikipedia link above can point you at some of them.

This is Vine we're talking about. Wouldn't you need like six of the videos just to capture the announcer shouting "GOOOOOOOAL!!1!!!"?

What effect does the userland have on the TCP/IP stack?

Give me something that opens from the side into a nice, wide QWERTY keyboard, like LG's en-V or Octane, or Pantech's P7000. None seem to be in production at the moment, which is going to make me really sad when my current one dies.

Google has deliberately killed more technologies than Microsoft ever just let wither and die, and Mozilla has been burned by this more than once. At this point, I'd say it's quite reasonable to demand that Google provide some assurances that it's not going to flake out this time.

I don't. But if you seriously think that that's all there is to even rudimentary programming, then either you've forgotten far too much about your own learning experiences, or you're a prodigy (in which case you shouldn't be generalizing your experiences at all).

I don't have to reassure people that it takes too much time and energy. They convince themselves of that easily enough, and frankly, the widely-available evidence favors them quite strongly. If you want to convince them otherwise, you're going to have to prove to them that this is easy to pick up. Good luck with that. I certainly haven't managed, and I've come to a conclusion as to why I can't prove it: it's simply not true. Your arguments aren't very compelling either.

Actually, my next step is to claim that your two steps are already too complex. Not because people are stupid, but because these two steps require a greater investment of time and energy than most people can realistically be expected to make. The moment you mentioned taking a class, you had already failed.

You seem to imply that programming is, at its core, a relatively small set of simple and easily-grasped concepts, but I can't say I've ever found compelling evidence that this is actually the case. Could you please list these basic skills that are so easy to master? I'm afraid I have to ask for a thorough list.

I'm not interested in excluding people from programming. However, there seems to be an underlying assumption from many of the coding-for-all types that programming "should" be much easier than it currently is. I'm putting "should" in quotes here because when many people see that word, they start thinking in ideological or moral terms. That's not my intended meaning. I'm talking about the logistics of programming: specifically, the idea that we have unnecessarily heaped huge amounts of complexity on top of something that is actually quite simple.

In order to open up programming to the masses, it must necessarily be simple and easily-grasped at its core. This is not because most people are stupid, but because most people cannot afford to spend a great deal of time and energy learning the concepts behind it. As currently understood, programming requires a large investment of these things, and most programmers today, by far, are people who have made that investment.

Can that time investment be reduced? To some degree, it probably can. But there are limits to how far something can be reduced, and I'm not convinced that programming can be reduced to a degree that would bring it to the masses. My reasoning for this is that I'm not convinced that the core concepts are as simple and easily-grasped as they're often made out to be. They seem simple to me nowadays -almost second nature, in fact- but I've been programming for years, I studied for years before that, and things didn't really start to click until I was a few years into my studies. Even nowadays, I still get moments where something suddenly clicks and my skills take a noticeable leap forward. This is not a hallmark of a simple field.

I believe that most of the people who set out to "simplify programming" are not too different from me. They might have learned certain concepts at different rates, but the things that seem simple to them now did not seem so simple when they first began. This is, I propose, because they aren't simple.

I am not "elite." All I did was allocate my time a little differently, and in ways that not everyone realistically can. I don't begrudge them this, because a lot of them allocated their time in ways that I couldn't, especially not after I made my choice. I respect and appreciate the skills they have that I don't, and I don't think I'm out of line in asking for the reverse. What makes this state of affairs unacceptable?