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Comment Re:Cue the pissing contest (Score 1) 110

Again, the Flyer was powered with a gasoline engine IIRC. A powered heavier-than-air machine is an "airplane", not a "glider". It doesn't matter if it requires ground-based infrastructure to launch. So yes, they invented the first airplane that could do figures of eight.

As for Joe Sixpack, he's a moron who probably also believes the Earth is 6500 years old and that Sarah Palin would be a good President even though she thinks Africa is a country (or, he's a moron who thinks Barack Obama is a great President who's going to keep his union job secure). What he thinks about who invented the first airplane is irrelevant to anyone with an education.

Comment Re:Thread != Process (Score 1) 278

There are many approaches that are MOSTLY the same effect, but not quite. The nice thing about using actual separate processes is that a nasty memory corruption bug only kills the one process. With threads, one scribbling on memory can easily take them all out. The drawback is that it's a bit harder to share a lot of state (though there are many options for that).

Comment Re:At the risk of starting a flame war (Score 2, Insightful) 193

People often say that the control key combinations are difficult in Emacs, but this is only so if 1) you don't touch-type and 2) your keyboard is older than 20 years. On a modern (=post 90s) keyboard, there are two control keys and two alt keys, one for each hand.

Here's how you should type a typical Emacs chordal command: use both hands. For example, M-x is typed by pressing the x with the left hand, and the ALT with the right hand. This is touch typing 101. (Similarly, you would type a capital letter by pressing the letter with the nearest hand, and pressing shift with the other hand.)

You can still reprogram your keyboard, and you can change the key combinations in your .emacs if you prefer something else, but if you think about it a little, all the commands you're likely to need can be typed comfortably if you use both hands simultaneously.

Comment Re:It depends... (Score 1) 6

As for "non-standard" development tools, I do hope those have gone through the proper channels for purchasing (if necessary) and the licenses have been studied by your lawyers. Nothing like being forced to release your internal application code due to a GPL violation from an over-exuberant developer who can't read a license before he clicks "Accept" on the installer.

Personally I wouldn't be so concerned about that if you're using Eclipse, NetBeans, or something relatively mainstream, but the legal department would probably have a fit.

IANAL.

Comment Re:Nothing but praise here (Score 1) 223

I haven't used anything other than mozilla/firefox in so long, I couldn't really say. But my guess would be that since the issue that I come across seems to be related to getting a network response from the ad server. I'm not a browser guru, so I simply install adblock plus, import my block list, and forget about it.

Comment Re:Why did he not succeed ? (Score 1) 809

Mod Parent Up! The terrorists have yet again managed to make every (air) travelling American's life even more miserable. And killed off landmark-announcing, one of the few remaining holdover practices from when air travel was glamorous. Not being able to have your laptop out for the last hour will go over real well with the business crowd. I keep hoping at some point their tactic will become counterproductive, and the sheeple might decide they'd rather fly hassle-free with a 0.01% chance of terrorist activity than uncomfortably with a 0.005% chance. So far, not the case. Perhaps if this drives enough people to the train, Amtrak funding will improve?

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