But it's not. The language specification sets semi-deterministic rules for how the code must be converted to machine code. In this case the compiler was overstepping those bounds and generating machine code inconsistent with the source code and translation rules. Very inconsistent actually, given that the compiler was also ignoring the flags that imposed more stringent requirements on the translation than those in the language specification itself.

Indeed.
GPLv666: Stallman is dead and all your code now belongs to Microsoft.

Only for the 1% of your code that is the largest bottleneck, and even then a good modern compiler fed high-level source written with compiler optimizations in mind can often generate machine code that's as good or better than competent hand-coded ASM, due in part to the fact that it need not care about readability, maintainability, etc. Meanwhile assembly requires considerably more developer time to maintain than high-level source.

Good rule of thumb: stay away from assembly unless you've already:
- had a profiler pinpoint the code as a bottleneck area
- written the code with an eye towards being particularly compiler-optimzation friendly
- analyzed the compiler output and found significant bottlenecks that could be optimized away by hand, and aren't caused by sub-par input source
It's a pretty rare chunk of code that can make it past all three filters to be potentially worth rewriting in assembly. And those filters don't even consider the significant maintainability losses you typically get by introducing assembly.

Perhaps, but I'm less convinced of the orthogonality of aggressiveness and managing the contributions of geeks with large egos.

So, he should cater to the personalities of the people that might theoretically contribute in the future, rather than to the personalities of those who have proven themselves by contributing for years or decades? Doesn't sound particularly effective to me. Perhaps it might be worth considering if the community were suffering from a shortage of contributors, but as far as I'm aware that hasn't been the case in decades.

Meanwhile, my sense is that Linus mostly only pulls out the abusive language in the face of gross incompetence - such as situations like this where major bugs make it into the release versions of critical infrastructure.

Not to mention if chemical weapons were a casus belli, just about every country in the world would be a legitimate target.

Exactly. Like marijuana and copyright infringement for foreign policy.

Your government (I assume you are American) does provide foreign aid to Israel. It also supplies money and/or arms to a lot more unsavory countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Sure, feel free to criticize Israel, but don't be hypocritical about it.

Can you quote me the part where I was being hypocritical? Can you show me where I said that I supported our funding of Egypt or Saudi Arabia? Or are you just trying to falsely discredit me because you don't like my opinion?

Israel's not very efficient at committing genocide. Boko Haram in Nigeria has killed far more people. ISIS in Syria too. Etc.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a minor regional territorial conflict. But because of huge anti-Israel sentiment among UN members, combined with a healthy does of Islamic racism, this minor conflict that could have been settled years ago is kept festering because the Islamic bloc at the UN sees it as a useful tool to weaken Israel. It's pure cynical geopolitics fueled by Islamic fascism.

Not for me. For me, the problem is that my government arms Israel. I accept that many nations handle their regional bood-debt feuds with more bloodshed. It's stupid and self-propagating, but fine, go ahead, if that's your thing. But if you blow my paycheck on your cock-waving bullets, you become subject to my judgment of your actions.

The question though is whether they're instructing the compiler to *optimize* for each target platform, or if the only difference is the drivers, etc. included for the different hardware.

round != perfectly circular, and the Earth is a hell of a lot rounder than any circle you can draw by hand.

And if you're a pedant going with the mathematical definition of circle, then there isn't much at all in the universe that qualifies. Planetary orbits are probably about the closest approximations there are to a "perfect" ellipse, and the gravitational pertubations of other planets make sure they're far from perfect.

Hello,

It might help. You could probably start by contacting the reporter who wrote the article, or the hospitals at which the surgeries were performed to ask for more information.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

The Americas were pretty ecologically lush when the Europeans first arrived, despite being pretty thoroughly settled for 5-10,000 years at that point. In fact the population was so dense that the journals of early European explorers report that the smoke from their cook fires was visible for a week before the land itself came into view. Now, a scarce 500 years later, the vast hardwood forests have been exterminated and the great plains have expanded from the Mississippi all the way to the Appalachians and are gradually turning into desert.

There's something to be said for actually paying attention to the ecosystem around you and considering the long-term consequences of your actions. from Wikipedia

We might have been better off if we had incorporated a bit more of their constitution into our own.

I imagine it's closer to "Invasive species are a danger to the entire ecosystem, including, eventually, themselves." When dealing with such the usual solutions are extermination (generally ineffective), or introducing a predator capable of keeping them in check without further destabilizing the ecosystem. Assuming we wish to do neither, nor suffer global ecosystem collapse, it would behoove us to start learning to co-exist with our ecosystem rather than strip-mining it.

And it's not like that is some sort of knee-jerk hippie "let's all live in mud huts" bullshit. As one example consider the gradually increasing numbers of oceanic "wildlife preserves" where all fishing and other destructive exploitation is banned - Not only does the protected area begin returning to pre-exploitation lushness, but so do the surrounding waters. Fishing yields around the protected zone reverse the global trend and begin to increase dramatically, greatly benefiting even the fishermen who were initially opposed to banning fishing in the richest waters. Given half a chance nature can be extremely bountiful, we just need to give the ecosystems a chance to stay healthy rather than maximizing short-term profits at the expense of long-term desertification.

Very true. A few years ago I was tutoring at a community college and actually met a man who didn't realize the Earth went around the sun. At first I assumed he was pulling my leg, how could an American in this day an age not know that?!? But he was fascinated by the idea, and we had a long conversation about the basics of orbital mechanics and how they shape tides, the seasons, etc.