Yeah, and a free subscription to Brazzers on it for the middle east too.

I don't think it'd make good compost as pallet wood is heavily treated with chemicals to make it flame retardant and resistant to insects, molds and humidity. If you manage to burn some (with difficulty), it burns with weird colors and smells.

If they had been monitoring all their drug and other illegal activities... why haven't they arrested them long ago ?

Also the fact that the DPRK is ready to put its cards down for a mere movie should be considered a good thing. This way we can be (somewhat more) ready against them for when the shit really hits the fans. It's not like they can repeat the same attack with as much success, and it's never guaranteed that you'll find another vector as successful.

I always wondered if Google and other huge outfits get prototype drives well ahead of the market. Those 20Tb drives have to be tested somewhere before they are introduced next year, right ?

Yeah and then what ? It's not like you can find raw material to rebuild civilization when you are suspended 20km up in the air...

I like the idea of building a gigantic monomolecular sheet at the L1 point of Venus to reflect/deflect part of the sunlight, letting Venus cool off. Below a certain temperature parts of its atmosphere start to condense, also dropping the air pressure by a significant amount. Possible terraforming in a much easier way than on Mars, hardly any high tech involved except for a sheet factory and tanks of raw material at L1.

There are plenty of tools or scripts that will rename your files according to the time the image was taken. Make sure you use some variation of YYYYMMDDHHMMSS as it's in lexicographic order when sorting. I wrote my own.

Exactly. Using the filesystem is the best and simplest method. I have images ranging 150 years and 10 Tb using this method and I can find things in a few seconds, either with the find command or by zeroing on the date. Fo old scans that aren't dated precisely you can simply use 'YYYY-event" or 'YYYYMM-event'. And it works on any OS and any media (CD, HD...) so you KNOW it'll still work when your granchildren will want to sift through your images.

Interesting post.

Since you mention it I'd like to ask a question about the pictures in the movie. I saw the movie several times but could never figure out what is seen on the picture is actually zooms on, the one with the room and (?) mirror. I'm sure it's on some FAQ somewhere but never dug into that.

'taught' not 'tought'. Long day.

Probably not. I guess it will be some emergent behavior. And teaching. LOTS of teaching. A baby isn't intelligent from birth, it takes... err... quite a while. The AI, a true AI, will show whatever way it's tought. My hope is that it won't come out of the NSA servers... But I'm not an optimist.

Here's a different way to look at it: have you ever heard of the carboniferous period ? It's the 50 million years period between the time plants invented lignin and became trees (300MY ago) and the time when microorganisms evolved a way to digest it. During this period trees that died didn't rot. They just piled up. And other trees grew on top to hundreds of meters of depths. All that accumulated carbon is still around, in the ground, in form of coal of petroleum. But it took humans barely 200 years to release a good part of it into the atmosphere. Draw your own conclusion...

One of the main reasons is that entire operating systems are written with it. When there are operating systems written from scratch in Erlang or Java or Go or whatever, then and only then we'll see C start to fade away. Until then it's here to stay. All the other reasons are secondary: ease of use (gcc test.c; ./a.out), widespread availability from tiny micro-controllers to behemoth supercomputers, low overhead, precise and full control of everything to the bit level, huge choice of well tested libraries, etc... That's why I regularly try and learn new languages but most of what I do is in C.

As to why there are more threads related to C++ on the Internet, easy, it's because C++ is a lot more complicated and complex to grok. I need as much help as I can with some of its tortured constructs and seldom used idioms. C is more straightforward (even if there are plenty of tricky things in it, which the seasoned programmers will either know how to use or steer well clear of).

Google Keep is great for that, no need to involve email.