This is a bit like Marx writing in 1848 that Communism is a specter haunting Europe. Sure, in seventy years time but in 1848 that was just posturing for shock value.

The idea that somehow that 3D printed guns are going to be a wedge issue to use against the left is fantasy. Domestically we're awash in cheap guns that are way better than anything that could be printed and would take generations to get off the street, even if we had the political will to do so which we don't. Internationally, I have two letters and two numbers which together puncture any pretense of significance for 3D guns: A-K and 4-7. There are over 100 million AK-47s and derivatives in the world -- that's one for every seventy human beings on Earth. And if you wanted to bring that number closer to parity, building more AK-47s would be far more effective.

Sure, in twenty years 3D printed firearms may become a potent transformative political force. But at present it's political theater.

My doctor told me to drink a cup of tea after a hot bath...

Well, you could ask, "Am I being detained or arrested?" and if the answer is "no", then "I do not wish to talk with you. Please carry on while I film, officer."

I understand. But you asked whether it mattered, and my point is that's a very different question than "is it likely to have made a difference."

You can't say, "this would almost certainly have made no difference, so there was in practical terms no harm done," because the whole point of football is to see improbable plays shift the tide of fortune back and forth. It may be highly improbable that Colts fans were robbed of a victory, but it's quite possible that they were robbed of a memorable play. If the standard is "no foul if it produces the expected result" is the standard, you might as well watch WWE instead of NFL.

Football isn't like most other games. Everything about it is designed to be hyper-dramatic -- histrionic even. If you have any doubts, watch a few NFL films with their martial music and moralistically thrilling tales of redemption and damnation.

It starts with the small number of games played. The average NFL player over the course of his entire career is eligible to play in one third the number of regular season games a baseball player does in a single season. So every football game is a big deal. The structure of football's post-season single elimination tournament is perfectly contrived for dramatic upsets of favorites.

Football is designed so every game to matters and that every individual play is potentially be the turning point of a season or even of a career. While it's absolutely true that subsequent play in the AFC Championshipo game suggests such a dramatic turn earlier on would have been unlikely, that's neither here nor there. It would have been unlikely in any case. The whole attraction of the sport is being there when something surprising creates a dramatic and unexpected shift in fortunes.

The important point is that the AFC championship game wasn't what it was supposed to be. That the result is probably the same as it would have been misses the point. Likewise the idea that Brady probably knew he probably didn't need to cheat has no bearing on whether he might have cheated. Pro athletes are selected for their competitiveness, not their philosophical perspective. So the only thing we can go by is evidence, circumstantial or direct.

I mean, a lot of code is only meant for one platform type. Not writing code compatible with obsolete processors is no great sin.

Fair enough. Ideally, you should include a generic version without any hackish optimizations, but it isn't strictly required if you don't think you'll ever change CPUs in the future. Either way, if you're writing code that you know is likely to break on a different architecture because of its unique characteristics, IMO, you should at least make it fail to build on any other architecture than the ones you've tested....

Depends. Is it wrapped with #if __i386__ || __x86_64__ and followed by a #else clause that contains code without the insane optimization? If so, it is elegant. If not, it is ugly.

To recognize that a line of code is an ugly hack, someone would have to first understand it, and as we all know, only Perl can parse Perl.

C developers are good enough to know when what they're doing is an ugly hack.

If PHP developers were at the same standard, every line would end with // Ugly Hack.

I think the reason PHP is #2 on the list is that the people who are still writing PHP are mostly pretty good. The ones who were awful have all moved on to Python or Ruby or whatever the scripting language of the week is these days.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that a sizable percentage of the folks who are still actively using PHP are C programmers. I use it for all my web programming because it is exceptionally easy for me as a long-time C programmer. I basically write C with dollar signs and a few other minor tweaks, and it works. Even better, if there's some piece of code that has to be blisteringly fast, I can port it from PHP to C faster than you can say sed 's/\$//sg'. Okay, it really isn't quite that trivial, but it is pretty close.

And yes, I do occasionally take advantage of being able to mix PHP and HTML, but not very often. I mostly just use it as a compile-free web programming language with better string handling and basic support for classes.

C Code EVERYWHERE has the most "ugly hacks"

C code is ugly hacks. But how else are you going to write an efficient ring buffer?

Featuring GGL (Gateless Gate Logic).

Any brand, so long as it was made more than 25 years ago or so.

My kids like to watch vintage TV shows, and in one sitcom from the early 80s there was a plot line involving a TV remote -- this was back when remotes were still an expensive novelty. I paused and pointed out the thing in question. It was huge blocky moster of metal and wood, and looked like it had been forged by Durin in the deeps of Mount Gundabad. While virtually everything they use is incomparably more sophisticated than that thing, nothing approaches the build quality; physically it's all injection-molded crap that's been designed to be discarded after two or three years and replaced.

We can thank Bill Clinton and his China trade deals for amazingly cheap consumer goods that are designed to fail after a couple of years and be impossible to repair.

You mean like one of these>?

So actually bothering to read the government's account of what it has done makes you a "leftist" then? And then telling other people what you found is "harassment"?

It must be easy to whip up that old self-righteous anger when you're so -- let's say, "semantically flexible".

The issue isn't secrecy OR expansiveness, or even both. The problem comes when you add fast track to those two.

Fast track is intended to strengthen the US negotiator's hand in trade deals. Here's how it works. By granting the President "fast track", Congress agrees to vote on the treaty exactly as negotiated by the President within sixty days, only forty-five of which the bill is in the hands of the relevant committee.

Fast track developed in the Cold War era. The idea was for situations like this. Suppose we we are discreetly negotiating with the Kingdom of Wakanda for access to their vibranium reserves. But we're worried about the Soviets getting wind of this, so we keep everything on the DL and rush like hell to get the deal through Congress before they can stick their oar in and queer the deal.

And for a relatively simple quid-pro quo type deal negotiated on the side in a bi-lateral world where you're with the commies or not, this procedure makes sense. But not for a massive, complex, multi-lateral accord that will govern the economic relations between twelve nations, and which took ten years to draft. How the hell is Congress supposed to examine something like that in forty-five days?