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Comment Re:As someone who works in tech support... (Score 2) 202

We have homo sapiens that design firmware for avionics systems, and we have homo sapiens who throw spears at metal birds. Same species, the only difference is culture.

Do not be so fast to judge the capabilities of neanderthal DNA based on the trinkets they left behind. The accomplishments of humans is due to language and learning, specifically learning of invention from the brightest 0.001%; we are still the same species as we were thousands of years ago.

Comment Re:Party "Animal" (Score 1) 202

Neanderthal brains were big if not bigger than ours, so they were potentially pretty smart. However, they may have been relatively anti-social.

The most successful humans were probably those who used trade to get the resources their area lacked...

Hypothesis: The most successful humans were those that were able to raise an army and slaughter those individualistic free-thinking neanderthals. Evidence: recorded human history.

Comment Re:Bill Gates? Brilliant mind? (Score 1) 449

They bought MS-DOS and re-sold it to IBM, six years after being in business. Their main product, which Gates wrote and was incredibly involved with, was Basic. They started in the right place, by moving to Albuquerque where the 1975 Altair was made and putting their Basic on it, along with every other microcomputer for a decade. He is a smart person and master code monkey; maybe the next challenge in Gates vs Magnus Carlsen will be an 8086 assembly coding competition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Comment Re:Turn the question in the right direction (Score 1) 432

The Vista+ driver break for everything you use (I have a printer, scanner, several joysticks, etc that are hosed in post-XP OSs) was solely to lock down your computer so you can't use it. The driver model was changed for DRM, HDCP, Macromedia etc, so that video and sound is encrypted all the way from media to screen and speakers. New drivers required for everything; we wouldn't want you recording digital sound that we don't allow...

Comment Re:Whitespace, again (Score 1) 432

>>> Just use tabs.

How about no. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces

Four spaces are the specified indentation method. Tabs should be used solely to remain consistent with code that is already indented with tabs. Most Python IDEs will turn a tab into four spaces, and even block indent multiple selected rows with spaces with the press of tab. Dealing with legacy tab code by unknowledgeable devs is a pain, it is much easier to run autopep8 and check in a 100% space diff then deal with editing that code.

Python 3 disallows mixing the use of tabs and spaces for indentation.

Python 2 code indented with a mixture of tabs and spaces should be converted to using spaces exclusively.

Comment Re:Who would believe it? (Score 2) 457

I noticed the decline about three years ago, which was about the peak of user interaction. That was probably the point of max data, when you could use it to look up just about any classmate or former co-worker you were curious about and see pictures of their kids and where they were going to be. Then people stopped being stupid, more and more profiles became private or friends-only, facebook started requiring a login to even see content on their site, real names were required and dubious names autodeleted (including mine), and people started cancelling accounts. Then there was a movie. RIP The Facebook, you hardly knew me.

Comment 42.8GB ZIP (Score 5, Informative) 193

Unfortunately, the only format they released the ROMs in is one huge ZIP file. Even the torrent, where torrent software might have allowed picking-and-choosing individual ROM files, is only the ridiculous 42.8GB ZIP.

I'm still looking for a list of files, but for that size, it might be EVERY MAME ROM in the MAME database of over 7000 ROMS.

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