Stop the engine when crossing that invisible fence? A U turn? Holding position?

I just looked at https://github.com/torvalds/li... (picked almost at random.) There are some funny things in there but in general it's pretty readable. I realized that C starts looking as alien to me as assembly looked to me when I was writing C and Pascal at university. Not that I couldn't write in assembly but wow, it's so time consuming that it's only for when there are no alternatives.

Well, do something in a Ruby block end didn't do any harm to that language. The form { something between braces } exists but it's used idiomatically only for one liners, so I don't think that Pascal has been haunted by it's verbosity (OK, probably do ... end is the only verbose part of Ruby.)

I believe that it succumbed to the competition of other languages that people felt to be better suited to the tasks that had to be solved in the 90s and 00s. Every language has its niches. Even C++ is mostly irrilevant on the web. Objective-C had to wait to be mandated for developing on the iPhone to become relevant. Pascal was eaten alive by C (with and without the ++) and VisualBasic on the desktop and never made its way to the web.

Why people liked VisualBasic more than Pascal, that's an interesting question. Maybe the feeling it was a language for the first year of CS courses, maybe the tooling (VisualStudio vs Delphi), maybe the costs? Unfortunately I can't remember how Delphi was sold 20 years ago and how it compared to VisualBasic for building Windows desktop apps, which was almost all it mattered at the time.

As I wrote, it was 40 years ago and it was already almost replaced by English. Anyway, this short paragraph is worth reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

SI has a French name because France has been main driver beyond its adoption for centuries. France was the main cultural and scientific driver in Europe in the '700 and '800, on par with the UK. Why French was adopted more than English... I don't think the UK was a lesser bully (they built up an empire after all) but maybe the French were more interested in setting up international organizations, whilst the UK was more insular. Maybe it was only a matter of geography: one country on the continent, the other one an island. The USA moved past the regional power stage only in the '900. Given their size their language got all the world quickly. Russian got important for a while in the mid of the last century but the USSR didn't have the same cultural and scientific impact of the USA.

Yes, Pinyin. I forgot about that. It could be the only way to make Chinese mainstream quickly. However we shouln't overlook the power of generational changes: adults die off in a few decades (more or less the time English took to replace French) and children learn whatever language is thrown at them. Anyway I'm sorry for the burden of all those characters. I sincerely hope they'll be replaced by a phonetic alphabet.

French was still more lingua franca in western Europe than English, when I was a child 40 years ago. That role still echoes in the name of many international organizations, especially in sports. Check the title at http://www.fifa.com/ and the name of http://www.fia.com/ The languages at http://www.olympic.org/ and at http://www.uci.ch/ are English and French (the original ones for the Comité international olympique and Union Cycliste Internationale). And wonder why http://www.fiba.com/ is FIBA and not IBF despite the title of the page is International Basketball Association. It used to be Fédération Internationale de Basket-ball Amateur. All of them were born at a time when French (the people) were internationally as active as English speakers are now, and English speaking countries where more centered on themselves than they are now. Ultimately the language follows the power and dinamism of countries: if you have to know a language to make money, you learn it. Chinese could be the next one but it's severely handicapped by the writing system. Nobody really wants to learn by heart thousands of characters unless you're born there and have to. I expect a very bumpy transition, if it will ever happen, and a lot of resistence. A Chinese written with latin alphabet would have more chances. Given the attitude of Chinese rulers maybe I'll see them mandating a switch to latin characters, and don't dare to protest. After all they already use qwerty to write Chinese.

OK that's a possibility, but how could it possibly work? I mean, one goes to a mall and buys a PC for $500 now. That's it. Windows is included and it's supported until EOL for free. That could change to buying the PC for $500 and paying $5 per month for Windows. It's an obvious bad deal and somebody will discover that they don't really need Windows after all, and will install some Linux distro to stop paying. Who cares if they must use Open/Libre Office or Google Docs. They work good enough for most use cases and they have a PS4 or an XBOX for videogames. That would be suicidal for Microsoft. So... how about renting the whole PC? Suppose the average lifetime is 3 years. 500/36 = 13.88, round up to 15, round up more to 20, many wouldn't do the math. $20 per month for a PC with Windows included? Maybe people will like it, but would manufacturers? After 3 years the cashflow would be the same as usual but the transition could kill some of them. Is MS going to build their own PCs? Or: Windows is free (as in beer), copy it, torrent it, install it, but you pay for updates and if you don't you know you're at the mercy of virus and trojans. That won't work well because people feel Windows to be gratis right now: they pay for the PC and don't think about the share that goes to MS.

And that's what worries me. Cats are hunters but they are at the mercy of smarter hunters, no matter what they are thinking.

If it's intelligent it won't ignore other intelligent beings. What it will do with them, who knows. Help or exterminate? Maybe it will depend by what we'll do with it.

Anyway, if cats had invented men I bet they'll be saying something along these lines: "Those men are very good servants, but I'm sure that when they get out of our homes they do strange things and I don't understand what. Furthermore there is this thing that pisses me off every time I think about it: they took my balls!". Now, I'm not sure I want to be the next cat. Do you guys?

Better training is what I meant when I wrote "yes, there seem to be something wrong in the American approach to driving. Maybe it's time to fix it so you can eventually raise the limit and save a lot of time." I was continuing on AC's "huge difference in driving culture" between the USA and Germany.

I picked those data to demonstrate that less speed doesn't automatically means less deaths. I was not trying to demonstrate a correlation between more speed and less deaths, which I believe is false because of kinetic energy.

They have a column with fatal accidents per billion miles driven. German is still better off than the USA: 4.9 vs 7.6. Italy's value is not available. Not many countries are providing that value. The PDF you linked is about 1994, Wipedia is about 2012 but I confess I didn't opened the sources.

Anyway, most accidents are within cities in Italy (but there is where most people live and work almost in every country). They are almost 3 times the ones on highways and other roads but casualties in cities are 3 times less than the ones for crashes outside cities. So yes, speed kills. You can get a report about 2012 here http://www.istat.it/en/files/2... It's in Italian but you can look at the diagram at the end of the first page. Red line: injured. Gray line: casualties. Blue line: accidents. The scale on the left is for injuries and accidents, the one on the right for casualties. They are official figures. From a table in the next page you can see we had -45% casualties in 11 years. The innovations I can remember are: more stict limits with cameras on the highways (an average speed of 140 is usually safe now, you could do anything if nobody was watching years ago), more alcohol tests on Saturday night (the most dangerous time of the week), a penalty points system for driver licenses.

I live in Italy not exactly what you would think about as a model of driving culture (especially if seen from far away) but anyway... According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... these are the values for Road fatalities per 100 000 inhabitants per year and Road fatalities per 100 000 motor vehicles:

Germany, no limit on highways: 4.3, 6.9
Italy, 130 km/h (81.25 mph): 6.2, 7.6
USA: 11.6, 13.6

So yes, there seem to be something wrong in the American approach to driving. Maybe it's time to fix it so you can eventually raise the limit and save a lot of time. I had to crawl at 55 on the South West interstates many years ago and it's not the fondest memory I have of that vacation.

Point 1 was explained in TFA. They calculated that if the black hole was spinning fast enough and the planet was tidal locked to it, it could survive. They also explain how those huge waves work and why the sea was so shallow there. Furthermore, they say that the light comes from the accretion disk, which is cooling down and not falling in to the black hole at the moment. If it did it would produce X rays and zap the astronauts to death.

Points 2 and 3. I agree with you. Let's say that the pentadimensional aliens/humans found a way to get out of there. Anyway you can look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... and there was an article about that subject on Scientific American in February 2009. Gargantua's singularity wasn't naked but I remember a paper about how to remove an event horizon (adding more spin to the black hole) and another paper with a rebuttal of the technique. I can't find them again now.

Point 4. I don't understand that too. After all the light gets out. Why not radio waves?

Point 5. Agreed, it's a theory without a proof. Let's say it's an intuition. There might also be a casuality/time paradox there (Norad's coordinates being known because they've been sent after being known) but who knows how time really works.

Finally, to be pedantic, the main vessel didn't escape from Gargantua (it didn't have to). It just changed orbit to an higher aphelion with a slingshot manoeuvre to reach Edmunds' planet. Not different than getting from Earth to Jupiter with a sligshot around the sun. It takes less fuel than having to reach escape velocity.

*Warming: (mild) spoilers follow*

They leave Earth with a Saturn V like rocket and they take 2 years to go to Saturn. That contrasts Cassini's and Pioneer 11's 6.5 years to get there and the 3 years for the two Voyager probes. Let's say that 2 years is within the bounds of what we could achieve with our technology if we really have to hurry up.

On the other side of the wormhole they do all sort of manouvres landing on (easy) and leaving planets (difficult) with only a small craft (the Ranger). One would expect you need at least a large rocket to lift off from a planet with 80% of Earth's gravity (the ice world).

It seems they burnt normal fuel in the Solar system and used some very energetic fuel later on. Anyway, who cares, it's only fiction :-)

By the way, does anybody know what kind of rocket would be required to leave Mars and fly back to Earth?

Right :-)
Let me see... the smallest sextuplet is from 3 to 17 but this is not a sextuplet because max - min != 16. I don't want to prove already proved theorems (nor google them) but probably the extremes of a sextuplet made of large numbers must be separated by 16 because of the multiples of 2 3 5 and 7. Maybe there are occasionally more packed sequences of 6 primes but maybe there aren't past some not too large number. Again, it's either a theorem proved by somebody else or some already made conjecture :-)