It's a romantic notion, but strikes me as not really in the spirit of science. If I knew someone was going to explore this awesome thing I discovered, I would much rather have them use every bit of available weight to further that discovery.

I don't think it's quite as simple as you think. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding, but UTF-32 is too when you consider grapheme clusters.

When you extract characters and and determine length, are you only talking about code points (not very useful) or are you taking into consideration combining characters to account for actual visible glyphs that most people would consider to be a character?

The overwhelming majority of apps are only doing trivial operations -- string concatenation and shuffling bits to some API to display text. For these apps, choice of encoding really does not matter. NetHack is very likely in this category.

Anything more and you'll have to deal with variable-length data for both UTF-8 and UTF-32. So it doesn't really matter. Choose whichever uses less storage space.

UTF-8, while originally only defined to 31 bits and now defined to 21 bits, actually has room to trivially extend up to 43 bits. One could say it's more future-proof than UTF-32. Not that it really matters -- we're only using 17 bits right now so I doubt we'll ever get past 21. Maybe when we encounter intelligent alien life.

>If you want to talk about science, then show me a tested climate model that has been subjected to an empirical test of its validity. It isn't that hard guys. We have a lot of very accurate historical data. Feed in past climate data and see if your climate model can predict the past or the present accurately. The first model that can do that which isn't just a collection of plug variables is something worth taking seriously.

What? No.

You have it completely backwards. All serious models are trained on and tested using historical data. If they can't even predict the past, what use are they?

But - here's the key point - predicting the past is *worthless* other than as a sanity check. As Garrison Cottrell told me, predicting the past is easy (even trivial). It's predicting the future that is hard.

The only way to really know for sure if a model works is to test it moving forward. And the IPCC doesn't have a great track record at that.

>STL sucks, I still have to do single character input and output from files, so much for getline BS

Gah, I/O in C++ is so horrible. In just the last month I've come across the following:

1) No platform independent way to do non-blocking I/O.

2) No iostream-compatible way of doing dup() or dup2(). You can change the buffers on iostreams, but this is not the same thing.

3) Just how shitty iostreams are at processing input files in a fault tolerant manner. On any major project, I always seem to just drop down to reading files one character at a time.

>Also, some problems can't be done in parallel, but we won't know how many can until we start trying....and then try for a few decades.

Right, but there's also a grey area between completely serializable and embarassingly parallel, in which methods like this will allow scaling algorithms up from "a few" computation nodes to "many", with the optimal numbers depending on the specific algorithms.

The biggest problems are still the same ones that existed when I got my Master's over a decade ago. Language support for parallelism isn't very good (I personally used MPI, which was awkwardly bolted on top of C++), it requires a certain amount of specialized knowledge to write parallel code that doesn't break or deadlock your machine (and writing optimized code is a bit more advanced than that), and library calls aren't all threadsafe. On the plus side, a lot of frameworks and libraries are now multithreaded by default, which nicely isolates the problems of parallel computing away from people who haven't been trained in it, and gives the benefits of parallel computing with only the downside of having to use a framework. =)

There are a few types I see doing this.

You'll always have those insane people who think Vinyl has better quality than CDs or FLAC... but I imagine they are a pretty small group.

You've got people who're after the experience -- maybe a more personal feel to having a big physical system that needs more interaction. Again I imagine this is larger than the first group, but still relatively small.

And finally you've got hipsters, who'll do anything just because nobody else is doing it. Very suspicious that vinyl's popularity starts to grow with a strong correlation to this group's size.

Ungar's idea (http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/6/ask-for-forgiveness-programming-or-how-well-program-1000-cor.html) is a good one, but it's also not new. My Master's is in CS/high performance computing, and I wrote about it back around the turn of the millenium. It's often much better to have asymptotically or probabilistically correct code rather than perfectly correct code when perfectly correct code requires barriers or other synchronizing mechanisms, which are the bane of all things parallel.

In a lot of solvers that iterate over a massive array, only small changes are made at one time. So what if you execute out of turn and update your temperature field before a -.001C change comes in from a neighboring node? You're going to be close anyway? The next few iterations will smooth out those errors, and you'll be able to get far more work done in a far more scalable fashion than if you maintain rigor where it is not exactly needed.

So many people are panning this movie. Have you guys posting negative comments actually seen it, or are you just reacting to the press?

I mean, I get it -- there's bound to be some sort of automatic counter-culture response to defend against the massive amount of press talking about how controversial and important it is.

Yes, it's a little controversial to target an actual country and an actual leader so directly. But you know what, their message while embellished for comedic effect isn't really far off base. I think the world could use some more of this controversy, and there's nothing saying this type of thing needs to be in dry journalistic form.

As far as the movie itself goes --- it's a Seth Rogan bromance dick joke movie. It really doesn't bring anything new to the table. It's not his best movie, but it's by no means bad. It's fun and entertained me the whole way through.

>The 5 largest movie theater chains refused to show the movie out of fear, not Sony. Why can't anyone understand this?

Here's a response from an owner of a small cinema, named George RR Martin:
grrm.livejournal.com/397388.html

It's not like he's throwing bills into a fire. That money goes back into the economy which is good for everybody, and its recipients are still free to spend it on whatever good deeds they want.