Wait! ... amongst the things they managed to combine were such elements as action, a compelling story and ... i'll come in again.

Neither article (OP or this response) seem to support the assertions made in the posts.

Also, is "amount of radiation" a good metric for harm done? Seems like that leaves out a lot of factors that would affect the real world impact.

One thing that seems clear is that (even ignoring climate change) fossil fuels cause a lot more deaths than nuclear.

I'm surprised it took this long for someone to say that. The people who will exploit your system and extract something valuable from it can afford those experts.

Even in that vision of the distant future, human intervention was required to make it work completely.

The type of real GOFAI implied by "Computer Teacher" is probably the most valuable tech on the list, but it seems like it's a lot harder to do than the rest. The fact that our best "human simulations" are basically Eliza with a few hard-coded gags is kind of depressing.

That's one of my favorite things about music. Nobody can explain it. People throw around some bullshit hypotheses, but in reality we just don't know.

It's hard to accept, but digital now means "on a hard drive" or something. CDs and DVDs aren't considered digital. I bought a blu-ray a while ago and it actually said on the box "Includes bonus digital copy!"

It's maddening, but sometimes I find it best to just accept these things. It's not as bad as the whole hacker == criminal thing.

AKG K271s are quite good. More expensive than $50, but OP did ask for opinions on other price points.

Excellent. Wear them for an extended period and when you take them off it's shocking how noisy the world is.

Not flat, but very pleasant sounding. Bass isn't hyped, and highs get a subtle emphasis.

They're comfortable to wear for hours, and the cable's detachable/replaceable, so the vast majority of failures can be remedied.

Emacs is awesome, but there are some things that more modern IDEs do that are nice. In Eclipse you can get a list of all calls to a function from the spot where it's defined. I haven't been able to find a way to do that with Emacs. etags works great for jumping to the function definition, but not the other way around.

That's not enough to convert me to a pointy/clicky bloated thing for coding just yet, but at some point, it seems like there will be enough features like that that Emacs - even with a lot of customization - just won't be viable.

If I did move to another editor, at least it would be nice to bring the good parts of Emacs along.

Agreed. Mass media is optimized for getting you to watch/buy the thing, not to like it. They get the same payoff regardless of whether you passively tolerate their production or really love it. Firefly's a good example. It didn't take off, but the people that liked it really got into it. I imagine they would have funded season 2 easily if it was on Kickstarter. Maybe the fact that they're not directly responsible to anyone will lead to trouble, but I'm hoping my donation to the Wasteland project will result in a true Fallout 3.

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."