So apparently some crybaby "libertarian" modded this down for exercising free speech?

Municipal elections are what most politicians use to launch their careers for state and federal offices. They're generally pretty cheap, so ambitious wannabes use them to build name recognition. Then when they run for those more powerful positions, the donors and voters say "oh yeah, that guy" and give them money/votes. It's how the moral-majority types took over the Republican Party in the 1980s, and it's how the libertea-baggers are trying to take it over from them today. So in that sense, local elections are very important. (To say nothing of the fact that the matters decided by local government have a greater impact on the day-to-day lives of people than those made at the state or federal level.)

Perhaps, but any such exploration and the resulting tools have to beat the baseline of a decent text editor, a decent version control system, a decent scripting language, and starting to write code within a minute of deciding the project is ready to begin.

For a long-running project with many developers and other contributors performing repetitive or error-prone tasks, maybe it will be worth investigating, selecting and adopting some external tools to automate some of that work, at some stage in the project when you know where the pain points are. But if your development team aren't newbies, they will be perfectly capable of building their code manually at first, they will surely already know their universal Big Three tools very well, and importantly, they will just code up any basic automation on the fly as the project grows and the needs become apparent.

IME, that turns out to be a surprisingly tough standard to beat. I've seen many, many projects get bogged down in their own infrastructure because they felt they should use some type of tool and forced themselves to do it, not because they necessarily needed that tool or found it useful in practice. Of course good tools can be useful, and of course sometimes it is better to bring in help from outside the project rather than being too NIH about everything, but it's important to stay focussed on the goal and not to forget that tools are only means to an end.

Visual Studio/Xcode casts Summon Spirits.
Spirit appears.
Spirit appears.
Spirit appears.
Spirit attacks Real Programmers.
Real Programmers attempt to save against arrogance... and fail.
Real Programmers have been frozen in time.

CPU workloads tend to be something that so long as you've a bit of fast cache, memory speed isn't that important. That cache buffer is enough to get you extremely high performance. Not the case with GPU workloads. They are very memory bound. If you look at high end GPUs they have stupid amounts of RAM bandwidth compared to CPUs.

Well, if you try and do both on one chip, you are gonna need fast RAM if you want it to work well.

I think you might have some of this the wrong way around. The British Empire had institutionalised racism and concentration camps in its colonies long before the Nazis existed.

I still have paperbacks with prices printed on the covers of a dollar or less... but I'm getting pretty old. Books back then were more the size of Nobots than today's books. Of course, back then a gallon of gasoline was under fifty cents and a six pack of beer was about a dollar.

These days, judging by what I've seen, new paperbacks range from $6 to $10, so $7 doesn't seem too out of line.

The library here has a book sale every year, and I picked up a huge writer's guide for two bucks. Its copyright date was 1978 and it was completely obsolete. Along with talking about typewriters and carbon paper and estimating the number of words, it stated that publishers would rather publish two 40,000 word books than one 80,000 word book. When Twain was asked how many words should be in a book he said "as many as it takes to tell the story, and no more."

How times have changed!

I think it's important to remember that the court ruling that started all this did not say that anyone should be able to require information to be removed just because they didn't like it. The outcome relates to information that is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive". Also, it was explicitly stated that such determinations would need to be made on a case-by-case basis, balancing the individual's private life against the public interest.

In other words, what the ruling actually said, as distinct from the hype around it in the media or the frequent misrepresentations in on-line debates since then, isn't a million miles from the kinds of issues you raised there.

Most often, it's the people who either need A Cause to get elected, or want to use a particular mob cry to funnel money to businesses in their constituency and get kickbacks (sorry, campaign contributions). The old hereditary House of Lords (before they abolished most of them and stuffed the house with Labour cronies followed by Tory cronies) had the advantage that, aside from a few issues like inheritance tax and fox hunting, the members didn't really have much of a vested interest in anything. If you watched the debates, the contrast between the two houses was astonishing. The Commons was full of people trying to score points against the other party, the Lords was almost empty, but those there were having an intelligent debate on the issues in the legislation.

I think it's unfair to characterise UKIP as racist. Racism is an opinion, and opinions lead to policies. As such, it has no place in the UKIP agenda.

Really, the only way of fixing this is to have time-outs for politicians. If you propose something completely obnoxious, then you just have to go and sit in a corner and have no part in legislative discussions for the next year.

OpenVMS has run on Itanium since Itanium was launched. This isn't a port to a new OS, it's just updating the existing support for the newer chips.

The x86 port story is quite funny though. The 80386 launched with four protection rings specifically to make porting VMS from VAX easy. DEC never did the port (or, if they did, never released it publicly) and instead designed their own chip, the Alpha as the successor to the VAX. The Alpha just had two protection rings, which required a little bit of restructuring of the VMS design. Now, x86-64 has only two protection rings (unless you count HVM and SMC modes as rings), and is being considered as a porting target for VMS...

The authors don't pay ACM to host it and generally do retain copyright.

Are you really that obtuse? A marketplace that someone is saying is large is significantly smaller than a single company that sells products in that market. Your argument is equivalent to saying 'this big shop has a huge profit and sells thousands of products!' and then mocking people who point out that there are individual suppliers of single products in that shop that have an order of magnitude higher profit nationwide than the total profit from all sales in the shop.

They have. They just haven't bragged about it and tried to start a business.