How fast can you explain to the guy about to cut off your hand that it's not going to work? Is he going to believe you?

I thought he made some interesting points: sgcollins on privacy

I agree. On large projects, my priorities lead me to write something that works first and then optimise it later if necessary. When there are other people on the project, some of them just can't help but rewrite this function or that function because they were bored and thought of a better way to implement it. This can happen regardless of where the project stands in relation to the shipping date. It's made even worse when some junior programmer does it and fails to actually tell anyone about their changes.

While there are clear-cut steps to diagnosing and fixing bugs, the hard ones are the interrupt- or thread-related bugs that only happen when you are running the release version and that magically hide whenever you make a debug build or try to add code to log information. You're pretty much left with just intuition at that point.

By this point, you're probably asking: does it play games?

No, I am asking, "Does any of this media integration work outside the U.S.?"

Google, for example, likes to go on about the wonderful features of Google Now. Being in Canada, I find that many of those features don't work, like song identification, for example. And tracking my favourite sports teams? Google Now isn't even aware that the Canadian Football League exists.

So why would I expect Xbox One's TV listings to work?

...and it was a lot of fun. I met many interesting, smart and funny people there. Then the BBC bought it and instigated this absurd censorship where anything deemed offensive by the BBC was removed, including words in non-English languages. That's right, if you posted something in a language other than English, your post got removed. The blatant censorship was so ham-fisted, I left the site a couple of weeks later and have never been back.

Oh, I wish I had mod points for you, my friend.

"I have no idea. I'll have to ask my government."

C.G.P. Grey explains why here.

He also explains the penny death process in Canada here.

C.G.P. Grey has a couple of good videos in support of getting rid of the penny here and here.

"We will continue to stay laser focused on product innovation"

That's great news, Tim. You've got some catching up to do. :)

Do you honestly think that Romney will be any better? You could pick any president that's ever been and come up with a list of bad things they've done. All presidents are human. They're not perfect. But here, let's supplement your cherry-picked actions by Obama with some of the good things he's done.

I think that all those nutjobs that predict the end of the world on such-and-such a date should be thrown in prison when their predictions *don't* come true. Look at all the lives they ruined. People quitting their job, selling their house, giving away all their money. Yet they remain free to predict again and again.

Why is it necessary for the answers to these security questions to be correct answers? I have standard outright lies as answers for my security questions, and those answers are known only to me.

The SNES had eight HDMA channels, each of which could feed data from a table into a specific display hardware register on every scan line. The first thing I programmed on the SNES was a company logo sequence that used seven HDMA channels (which you can see in the first 12 seconds of this video if you care.

When I later moved on to the GBA, I was aghast to see that the HDMA channels were gone from the hardware. To me, that was a big step down. :(

By the way, though the SNES is a 16-bit machine, it actually does 24-bit address resolution. You can test this for yourself by setting the bank register to $7F and doing an indexed load from say, $FF80,X where X > $80. It will read from bank $80 and not wrap around within bank $7F