Write it up in a Blog!

It doesn't have to be more of a dump of the 'history' with the non-working lines removed - but it's incredibly helpful to people Googling around.

What's more, having your 'log file' on the Internet is an instant back-up (and did I mention that you'd be helping a ton of other people out there too?)

Tax lawyers are the professional crackers of the tax legal code.

So are you saying it's better to wait for calculus? Maybe not bother trying?

Most students don't ever understand algebra either ('do the same to both sides' is IMHO not real understanding). But getting exposure early means that people at least have a framework in which they can fill in the 'sophisticated' blanks. YMMV.

Maybe you tried this before you installed Windows out of frustration, but did you know that you can (most often than not) move a window around by holding down Alt while clicking & dragging? [ I've also been frustrated by screen-size dialogues not ensuring they fit on the current screen... ]

So : if HAL is turing-complete it can solve exactly the same set of problems as any machine it designs. Fair enough. But that's not so much a limitation of the potential of machines, more a limitation in the decidability of the problems. Humans wouldn't be able to decide them either : the problems simply cannot be reduced to true or false via any sequence of valid operations.

But this is no argument against the possibility of creating AI. Our limitation there is (seems to me to be) more a problem of knowing what we really want the machine to actually 'do'. We don't have a firm enough grasp of what Intelligence is to answer the question by producing the actual machine. But I don't see any reason why it should be permanently out of our grasp, since a pair humans can already produce offspring that are more intelligent than either parent - it's just that we don't know what we're doing yet.

I was there on a summer holiday job : at a small Cambridge company called Perihelion.

Oddly enough, when the company went bust, I was one of the few people who knew and/or cared what was in the physical building - and bought quite a few of the assets ("box of components #6") from the receiver/liquidator. I still have some transputers lying around (a friend and I managed to sell off a bunch of transputer modules over the course of the summer).

And I still have the old Perihelion sign... Those were the days.

Even non-core contributors have a 75% chance of getting their changes accepted - and my guess is that the probability is even higher if the changes make sense...

And rather than being a story about 'scarcity of resources', isn't it more one of Wikipedia approaching perfection?

Many of the Microsoft-supporting trolls I've seen recently have this 'weekly upgrading due to exploits' meme.

What are patch-Tuesdays, but the Microsoft version of the same thing?

Remember to get married on a day that everyone else remembers.

My anniversary is July 5th : The day after Independence Day. Not a coincidence. (FWIW, we both liked the idea).

You'd be surprised how tech-literate musicians that use Digital Audio Workstations are. A few years ago I went to an demo event for a DAW package, and half of the discussion was about hyperthreading and LII caches...

It's not like musicians want to know the low-level details, but they do need to know whether they can run 10 reverbs in real-time : and would prefer 30, 50 ,... effects. Their demands on hardware are insatiable - and it has to be rock-solid.

Maybe you were just pointing to the 'bundled for average guitar joe' thing.

But if you're talking Line6 products, I was surprised to find kernel drivers available for my UX1 (which I was about to sell on ebay after switching to a pure Linux environment).

Of course, the company won't notice that the Linux driver effort effectively won them a sale (because my second-hand unit wasn't on ebay to be bought by the Windows user that would have bought it in the place of the new unit...)

Kernel driver writers for odd hardware are pretty heroic IMHO.

As a legal immigrant in the States, I can state that (although I'm paying just as much tax as anyone else) : I have no vote, no free healthcare and no constitutional rights (let alone a TV show).

But then you're obviously a troll, aren't you?

I'm surprised that you don't mention that M$ is an MS-Basic thing : A string variable called 'M$'.

It seems very fitting to me. Micro$oft is obviously a point of view, but M$ is a quick identifier (kind of like $user can be easily understood too).

And also that when the Queen says 'I', she pronounces it 'We' : As in the "Royal We" (a traditional started by Queen Victoria AFAIR).