I believe the correct answer would have been:

The code may be open source, but my grading isn't. It's more akin to absolute monarchy, if you recall.

So, the temperature in the lake increased by 1 Coulomb. Whoa nelly, that's ... actually not a lot. Or anything really.

That said, it is curious that Slashdot (and probably also "folio.ca" from the article links) support Ç and Ç — (and even the emdash!) but not the humble degree symbol.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But I guess it's at least still a bit better than the lake rising by 1c. That would end ugly.
- https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

I know your reply was all in jest.

However, it did make the think of these:
  - (Stephen Fry on Language) http://www.stephenfry.com/2008.../
  - (TLDR Stephen Fry on Language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Here's to hoping those sacriliciously cromulent links embiggen someone's horizon, if'n'when they stumble over them at some future date.

Not to a buddhist. After all, remember the saying:

In short: Forever is a big word to toss around by small minds. What's so bad about just saying: "Pretty frickin' long"? :-)

Read these, they might be illuminating:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_Islam
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_in_Islam

Sure, the specifics of both are viewed through a quite different lens, but the myth, history and basic teachings are all there.

Being an atheist, I have no stake in either of the many sides -- but at least I try to pay attention to what is and is not in the various beliefs, lest I not just be believed a fool, but let my words prove it. :D

One of the "much too early for its time" ideas of WebOS was precisely its dependency on JavaScript/CSS/HTML for application development.

Writing a UI with it was (and is) fine ... but having to write your entire application in JavaScript -- this glorious idea alone caused otherwise decent hardware to be about as powerful as a 286* as soon as you needed to push some heavier math operations (say, for de-/compression).

For the first year of WebOS's lifecycle, only a select few developers were permitted to write native applications. Everyone else had to use Mojo -- which restricted you to JS/CSS/HTML.

It also made interacting with the screen beyond the level of HTML virtually impossible. I should know, I created an eBook reader that was downloaded over 100k times. And let me tell you: It was a gruelling task!

Even once WebOS allowed native C/C++, the call overhead between the HTML UI and the C/C++ backend was so ludicrously high (>20ms per callback) that it was close to useless, unless you abandoned the UI framework entirely and wrote everything from scratch and in OpenGL.

That fact alone was already enough to doom the platform to obsolescence.

[*] - Of course, that was before the Google V8 engine hit the market and before asm.js and node.js were available, but still... even nowadays I would dread writing heavy-lifting code in pure JS.

If you want a fully customizable UI, you can always switch to Vivaldi.

https://vivaldi.com/

It is led by Opera's former CEO Jon von Tetzchner, has a UI that can be fully customized via JavaScript and can be extended via regular Chrome Extensions if that is not enough.

And as for site-compatibility, since its rendering Engine is Chrome's Blink engine, you will not find much problems there.

Reading your post makes me think you're exactly the user that they make their product for. :)

As a former developer of Palm/HP WebOS applications, this statement fills me with dread.

The WebOS application framework was also called Mojo and forced developers to use (WebKit) HTML, CSS & JavaScript for their entire application. Writing a UI, fine ... but having to write your entire application in JavaScript -- this glorious idea alone caused otherwise decent hardware to be about as powerful as a 286* as soon as you needed to push some heavier math operations (say, for de-/compression).

Even once WebOS allowed native C/C++, the call overhead between the HTML UI and the C/C++ backend was still ludicrously high (>20ms per callback) and close to useless, unless you abandoned the UI framework entirely and wrote everything from scratch.

So unless Google only uses Mojo for the UI and allows developers to use something nicer and faster for the backend, with good callback support, I feel this platform will obsolete itself, just like WebOS did.

[*] - Of course, that was before the Google V8 engine hit the market and before asm.js and node.js were available, but still...

The same place where Apple will be in 10-20 years?

After all, who knows?
IBM used to be everywhere, now it's just around.
Microsoft used to be ubiquitous in many areas, now it's only so in one ... and that barely.
Before there was Twitter and Facebook, there was MySpace and before that, GeoCities?

Before cars were made, people bought horse carriages. Can you name one horse carriage builder now?

Things change and even the greatest empires eventually fall. No country on this earth is now even remotely like it was 50 years ago.

The greatest fools are not those who predict the future, but those who believe their own predictions will come to pass as is.

333 1/3 mm; exactly.
See? Same thing.

The actual point here was that shifting that value to meter or kilometer or femtometer is all just a matter of moving the decimal dot. No need to involve fractions; unless you already had fractions before or shift the value below 1.0 (why would you?).

Problem is, you can't do that with Imperial measurements because it has different units of measurements for the same thing, and they do not cleanly convert into each other, since their base is different. In metric the base is always the same (10) and there is always just one unit for a measure.

The base could even have been 2, or 12, or 94467. Would not have mattered (much). The beauty of metric is that ALL units have the same base and thus freely convert without artificially forcing you to use fractions.

This is why: m/s, km/s, mm/s, nm/Ts -- they all convert "cleanly" into each other.

You can easily get the same out of the Imperial system, if you keep only one unit for each measurement, and use SI prefixes to alter the magnitude. If you'd only use foot or mile or yard or inch, you'd reap the same benefit as the metric system.

Point is: The actual unit does not matter, as long as the base is always the same.

To clothe it in a car analogy: The difference is about the same as there being two cars, one has a top speed of 170 km/h, the other one of 200km/h. Certainly sounds like a huge difference, does it?

Unless you'll be driving both almost exclusively in a city, where the speed limit is only about 80 km/h at most. All you'd notice is a hardly perceptible difference in acceleration, as both cars don't even reach 50% of their maximum speed.

Stops sounding so terribly significant, does it?

Did I really have to fix that for you? Shame on you.

Strictly speaking, there's no reason for user binary other than that it makes some things a lot easier, while it makes other things a bit more difficult.

For example, during the early time of electronic engineering, the Russians/Soviets experimented with ternary computers, the "SETUN" while the USA had the "Ternac". Both had more complicated hardware than a binary computer, but were a lot more efficient at processing arithmetic instructions.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

And who knows, in a few decades, people might thing binary to be quaint and outdated, given that Qubits are so much, much more efficient.

Interesting fact: It depends on where you look at your posting and whether or not you have "Excellent" Karma.

There are two ways to look at your posting: From the article's comment section and from your own comment history on your profile.

If you're an AC, your comment gets a nifty 0 moderation. People need to upmod you 5 times until it's at +5.
If you're logged in, you get an immediate +1 that is visible to you and everyone. People only need to upmod you 4 times until it's a +5.
If you have "Excellent" Karma, you get another +1 putting your posting at +2.
... ... but that one is only visible on the article's comment section. In your own history, it will appear as a normal, regular +1 posting.

Since people stop moderating when a comment reaches +5, your own history will never show them as more than +4.
If then someone downmods it only once shortly before the thread is archived (and moderation gets closed), your posting will sit at +3 in your history forever ... even if the article lists it at +4.

You see, you don't even need Slashdot Beta for the posting system not to make any sense. :-D

As others have pointed out above and before: Passphrases are neat and easy to remember --- but a nightmare to type.

There is no functional difference between typing X letters of a word, or X letters of random garbage once memorized. Indeed, I would rather argue that the (almost) random garbage is probably faster, since you could choose it for maximum typing comfort/speed, like more strongly alternating hands for typing and avoiding "distant" key combos, without greatly compromising entropy.

Now, add to this that words in almost all languages follow a nice pattern: Consonants-Vocal-Consonants-Vocal. Usually with a 1.5:1 ratio of consonants to vocals. So your actual entropy for pure word-length compresses down by a similar factor.

So, in difficulty of brute forcing (if the attacker knows you chose either garbage or words) 10 letters of random garbage equal about 15 letters of regular words; give or take a few characters.Add to that the speed argument above, once you've memorized them

This means that a passphrase gets more secure only after it has already become far more time consuming to type.

Finally, at some point (currently at about 10-16 chars, depending on the algorith), it becomes easier to break the password hashes by finding collisions that to brute-force the password.

So congrats for your passphrase having 2000 bits of entropy, when it still only takes 15 minutes to find a SHA1 collision against your password.