Any physical machine can be simulated on a computer, which includes a Turing machine. That doesn't mean the idea is math. In other words, the fact that X can be implemented on a computer does not imply that X is mathematics.

Because programs are used to decode/encode the name. It's the same problem with Y2K, user agent strings, and so on. When programs expect data in a certain format, such as two digits for years or a single number after a u in a version string, they don't react well when the format is changed. RTFA.

Commie!

You can't be restored if you haven't been saved.

It should be cake. Then he'd know it's not a lie.

And anyone who lives on or has a business on the seashore. And millions of farmers and others that depend on rainfall patterns to continue to supply the water they need.

So now they have switched to having just one plan that costs $50/month. That's $600/year. If they think I'm going to pay them this much they are insane. Sure, there are all these phone junkies who are on the phone all the time and are able to use a web browser on a 3" screen, but for quite a few normal people a cell phone is kept mostly for emergencies. For now I apparently can still keep using my $10/year pay-as-you go plan, but if they make me switch, I'm leaving. Where? I have no idea.

Well, how long did the Afghanistan militia hold out against the might of the Soviet military, followed by the might (not to mention "shock and awe") of the US military? Or do you think that we are pulling out because we "won"?

A slashdot friendly answer to silly magazine restrictions (annoying ad before article view):
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/14/gunsmiths-3d-print-high-capacity-ammo-clips-to-thwart-proposed-gun-laws/

Only when no one else has firearms.

Obligatory xkcd

As an Arch user, I second that. Arch is not user friendly. It does not even have an installer any more; there is just an install.txt on the installation CD and you are expected to follow the instructions manually.

The reason I use it is that it takes the least amount of effort to configure the environment the way I want it, with no extra crud floating around. With a user friendly distribution you have a hundred daemons running around doing nothing but take up RAM, the startup takes five minutes, and the UI drives you nuts. And, of course, every package has a bazillion dependencies that just must be installed, so you need ten gigs on your tiny SSD just to get the damn thing up.

If you are beginner, none of these things matter to you. You probably don't know what RAM is, and are not bothered by slow startup times. So install Ubuntu, or Mint, or whatever. Works out of the box and zero maintenance. You can thank me later.

"Man, we should totally invade Greece! That Alexander is a real sissy and needs a lesson."
"Hear, hear! Now let's drink so we can evaluate this proposal more thoroughly!"

Yes, InternAtom requires a round trip, but only a newbie would use it often. If you have a lot of atoms (and any nontrivial X11 application does), you use the XInternAtoms call, which will stream all the requests into a single round trip. You can also use libXcb and do that to all the other calls as well. With proper design you only need 3-4 roundtrips to get your app fully loaded.

That's cute, but at this time the OSS drivers in the kernel are still not suitable for doing anything serious with OpenGL. They don't even support GL3.3 and core contexts yet, which is the minimum base any new code should target. And that's even without considering performance which is still lousy, and the fact that most games that run in Wine still won't work with OSS drivers. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the effort Mesa developers are putting into these drivers, and I hope that someday they'll work, but they just aren't good enough to use yet, so for now there is no choice but to use binary drivers.