The latest generation of CPUs have instructions to support transactional memory.

Near future CPUs will have a SIMD instruction set taken right out of GPUs where you can conditionally execute without branching.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I haven't seen any evidence that the mechanics of the attack itself is at all noteworthy, yet we keep hearing about how this attack was unstoppable, "nasty", etc. -- not just from Sony's PR guys, but from the FBI. As if it could have targeted literally any company and caused just as unmitigated damage.

To me, a "nasty" worm is Stuxnet: it spread in a very standard innocuous way and seemed like any other worm, but ended up being highly targeted.

This Sony hack just seems like your average trojan worm leaking an admin password back to someone. The only noteworthy part of this hack is that Sony had such horrifyingly moronic security practices that one attack was able to compromise such a large and varying corpus of valuable data.

Last flight I took out of LAX, they were randomly handing out "expedited security" slips to people. Keep your shoes on, laptops can stay in bags, no x-rays or pat-downs, etc. and I was through in about 30 seconds. I even found out after I went through the metal detector that I had left keys in my pocket and my belt on.

Basically, it was like security used to be, pre-9/11. It was marvelous.