So you check the answer and, if it's wrong, try again until it isn't.

The probabilistic correctness isn't an issue except in toy problems, especially as you could in the limit just repeat the operation until the chance of it going wrong is less than the chance of the operator going wrong.

Once the expected future time cost of a spammer exceeds a human lifetime, it becomes possible to consider killing him.

This guy costs probably several hundred lifetimes a year.

Any questions?

By that logic there's no difference to swimming in shark-infested and jellyfish-infested waters - you could die in either one, so who cares that the sharks are roughly a thousand times less likely to attack you?

(I wanted to make an analogy with some kind of *safe* waters, but.. um... today's internet. Shark-infested it is.)

As people keep saying, you *may* use this optional standard.. as a replacement for an older standard where startup is *even slower*.

Odd how that goes.

Are you quite sure that's actually Chrome? Slashdot's javascript does rather suck.

This would be why we use extents rather than pure bitmaps, these days.

Don't remind me. I still have nightmares of trying to implement rename() for a distributed filesystem.

Do you think this is a good or a bad thing? Why?

You don't need a data plan to use android market; it works fine on wifi. Just saying. ;)

Though using an android without that is really missing the point. A pay-as-you-go data plan isn't that expensive, is it?

And on the japanese side:

Recettear
Ever17
Touhou

Ireland is supposed to have shitty internet connections (thanks mainly to the incumbent, Eircom) - so nowadays, I'm sitting on a fiber-optic 30/3 line.

Which is still terrible compared to what I had in Norway a month ago, but I can live with it. ..what was my point? ...oh yeah. Schadenfreude.

Hardly. Quantum mechanics isn't non-deterministic at all; that's a common misconception. I won't go into the details here; you can read this if you want the details.

No, it's ridiculously lucrative behaviour.

You think Telstra would actually *do* that?

What does their history show?

And peak oil? That was a few years back, though thanks to the financial crisis it hasn't had much effect on oil prices yet.

Oh boy, will this be fun.