Indeed, recursion is just looping with a stack. When you need a stack, recurse. Otherwise, loop. Contrary to TFS, there is clear reasoning behind a competent programmer's choice. The viewpoint of this being a capricious choice made at the "preference" of the programmer suggests that the submitter doesn't understand the vast differences in the internal impelementations of various languages.

Freedom to speak, yes. Freedom to shout at all hours of the night, impinging your neighbors' health and peace of mind, no.

Just in the same way that you have the freedom to write what you want... but only on things you own. You can't just scratch "Obama is a Muslin Satinist" on your neighbor's car and claim "free speech".

The submitter is collecting magic cards, and cataloging them for resale. Sounds "for profit" to me... and not like that fact is hidden.

The submitter is actually handling meatspace items. RTFS: price checking, grading, sorting, etc.

I'm tempted to agree with this. Automatic updates are largely a good thing. Assuming the patches are good. Assuming that you have control over when they're applied. Assuming they don't brick your car overnight, while charging, while driving. Assuming your car isn't bundled with spyware now that it's always-on. Assuming that your car will even move if it can't connect to the internet (I'm looking at you, Sony).

Jesus fuck, who thinks that this crank is worthy of an interview? Classified information is purely a product of the government. They can't just classify information produced by citizens (citation: the first fucking ammendment, you dumbass crank). Case in point: it looks like D-Wave is getting close to beating out classical computing on some problems, and "the government" is... a customer. And apparently not storming their offices in jackboots to shut them down.

Simple. They patch your OS with a rootkit. They can make information flow over the lines, so long as it isn't airgapped. And an airgap is only so useful, as stuxnet shows.

It's common knowledge that every object ever made has a weak point. A point where even the lightest feather touch causes the entire thing to fall to pieces. Ninjas train den mak, the skill of identifying that point on a live human. Naturally, engineers are highly aware of this. If a den mak master should see even a rough sketch of this aircraft carrier, they could locate the point. Then, a sniper could literally explode any aircraft in the world with a feather-filled hollow point round.

Don't you know anything about modern warfare? Geez. Nerds these days.

It works pretty well for the cops, too. (though the main character in the article barely escaped, his peers did not) Bottom line: the government is above the law. Where there are laws that say otherwise, the government reinterprets them.

They found a pair of primes that differ by two bits. If you find two billion-digit primes that differ by two bits, you'll get the same system of equations. And once you find those, you can claim that a quantum computer has factored their product. Ooooh, maaaaagic. Quaaaaaantum maaaaaagic. It sounds even more magical if you say that you're solving infinitely many biprime factorizations, but I suspect that proving such a claim is at least as hard as the prime gap conjecture.

The authors then go on to say that the D-Wave machine has 512 qubits. This is true. But those qubits are nothing like fully connected, so their insinuation that arbitrary systems of 512 variables are solvable is totally ludicrous. Assuming Moore's law works out for D-Wave for a while, we might see that... but it'll be years.

Until 1987, doctors didn't anaesthetize babies for surgery on the logic that "babies don't feel pain". In fact, they do. Yikes.

No no, the presence of a brass gear is all that is necessary to make something steampunk. The Antikythera mechanism is just as steampunk as a rolex watch or a hat with a gear hot-glued to it, which are much more steampunk than a steam locomotive since they produce way too much torque to transmit through brass years. Don't you know anything?

You missed the point.
Entirely.
As for snark, check the mirror.

you suck at haiku
four lines is too many
do you even count syllables?

What makes "the greatest system" depends entirely on what "great" means. If it means "fitting into 500 bytes" or "1ms boot time", etc., then flexibility might be the very last thing that you want.

I've intentionally let the world pass me by, and spent my career learning how to optimize for time & space in several proven stable languages, rather than learn every new widget and buzzword. The drawback is that I'm a little slow when it comes to new tech. But the new shit is way easier to learn than what I've been torturing myself with over the years, and "youngsters" won't catch up to my skill without a decade of practice. And I've never had trouble landing a job.