That's true (mostly; if you've bought a plane ticket in the last 5 years, there's a good chance that functional code priced your fare.)

Are you from bizarro world? You can say a lot of bad things about Lisp, but "limited paradigms" is not one of them (unless you've got extremely specific criteria or don't like parenthesis.)

I'll give you that one, functional programming is hard to grok.

C's going to win on I/O and other low level stuff, but modern Lisp compilers can produce some pretty efficient code.

With all the disadvantages accounted for, there's still a reason some people use functional languages. There are a bunch of things you can do that are near impossible otherwise.

They should have used Errol Flynn, or even Russell Crowe. Hell, Cary Elwes was a better Robin Hood than Costner.

Prince of Thieves has to be the only Robin Hood story where you're kind of rooting for the sheriff of Notingham.

I can see you've played linky spoony before!

I was going to accuse you of just being a cheap bastard, but I thought about it, and I'm just as bad in a slightly different way.

If I can't download/stream a thing legally, I'll usually get the torrent. I really don't care what it costs (within reason).

It's annoying when I want to give a company money for their content, and they don't let me do it.

Not paying attention to WoW would be dumb, but it's like they just copied it exactly and decided to tweak a few things.

Judging from some of the videos, combat consists of standing a couple of feet in front of a guy and repeatedly shooting him in the face until he's dead.

Maybe that's a bit lame in sword/sorcery games too, but for some reason it seems to really stick out more in this case (and I guess all gun based MMOs).

I'd rather play T'Rain

Is that like in the movie Tron? "You're under arrest, basic windowing function."

They're trying to help you think more creatively! All three of those products - combined with a motor or electromagnet of some type - could provide the functionality you're looking for with extra Rube Goldbergy style. :)

On topic: That video was pretty bad. What was the point of saying their projects don't involve "LED lights" and capacitors? And then the phrase "maker and DIY consumer" seemed really awkward/wrong. The request for feedback seemed like it was going in the right direction until they made us limit our request to three products. I don't know if I'll need germanium diodes or opto-isolators or tantalum capacitors ahead of time. The whole point of radio shack is that you can go there and overpay to grab that random part when you need it.

From the Aeyron website "Operational duration: up to 25 minutes."

In practice it's probably a lot less than that.

I'm not sure that their scenario of detecting a dork dressed up like a spy stealing my Hyundai has me sold on the concept.

In all fairness, Nintendo and MS never made any attempt to allow that type of thing.

There should be a regulation that any audio/video capture device integrated into a computer can be disabled with a foolproof manual interlock. I'm thinking maybe a little cover that slides in front of the camera; I'm not sure how to do the equivalent with the mic.

Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but I live in constant fear that my laptop is watching me... trying to figure out how to sap and impurify my precious bodily fluids.

Does that only apply if you're destroying a village to save it? or maybe if you're in a war with Eastasia or Eurasia?

Always good to see Emacs getting some screen time.

I'm reminded of the line from The Social Network "It's definitely necessary to break out emacs and modify that perl script." Anyone who's done screen scraping could totally relate to that sequence (PHP and redirects ... I'll come back to that one) but I imagine even regular people can subconsciously detect the difference between realistic computer stuff and "I'm going to virtualize an inverse Java applet to localize the virus!"

That's clever introducing an error that will be identifiable when someone reposts your +4 comment on the next article about plagiarism.

Does anybody even use PERL anymore? It seems like kind of a scarecrow argument. I think /. used to use it back in the day, but it's much better since they switched to Javascript.

Assembly's used all the time for embedded systems.

No compiler's going to generate code as compact as a good programmer. That can be important when there's only a handful of KB for firmware. Performance is less of an issue these days, but if you're clever you can still shave off a few cycles. I don't think we've quite reached the 'John Henry' point yet in terms of optimization.

I even know a few weirdos who find it easier to write and/or read than C.