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Comment Re:Conditioned Much? (Score 2) 83

I thought the difference between drone and RC planes was the ability to fly them out of line of site - drones have cameras and give the pilot some form of first-person view as they are flying. At least that's how I've always thought of the difference...

Comment Fun bit of computing history there (Score 2) 438

This type of thing has a pretty honourable history. Back in the day, there was actually a (small?) subculture of enthusiasts who experimented with one-line or two-line basic programs (I'm sure this was the case with other platforms/languages as well). Similar to the whole demogroup scene I guess - a way of experimenting and showing off. Each line number of a basic program was limited to I think 256 characters. It could have as many statements (separated by colons) as desired. Some folks would go so far as to 'poke' machine code instructions and then jmp/execute that machine code, but I think that was frowned upon a bit as that seemed a bit like cheating... :) There were contests and so on, and popular magazines like 'Nibble' would regularly publish these mini-programs which thousands of us would type into our computers. In doing so many of us became fascinated by what was possible, even if it promoted a rather unhealthy obfuscated code style... Naturally today with almost unlimited computing resources available to every programmer, this isn't amazing at all. But back then, this sort of thing _was_ pretty amazing - even if this isn't a particularly shining example of it. Some folks were able to generate real, playable games, or amazing visual animation effects in less than 500 bytes of source. It makes me want to drag out the old Apple II emulator and play around! Man, I wish I hadn't sold that old doorstop apple II... :)

Comment Re:I think I may leap at this .. (Score 1) 72

my printer (lexmark) is capable of (partly) pushing out a page to wait for drying, and then pulling it back in again to continue printing. I've seen it do this for doing double-sided printing, but it seems likely that it would be able to do multiple passes on the same sheet without any external alignment measures.

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