I don't think squaring the circle is a good example here, since the problem isn't so much a find the number problem, but a find the answer while restricting yourself to a few specific operations problem. So the non-algebraic solution doesn't count because it doesn't follow the rules. People knew what the answer was as a number that you can calculate for ages. They weren't sure if you could do it while following the arcane rules of ancient compass and straightedge constructions. It's turns out that the answer is no.

Thinkpad 701C with a Framework brain transplant ( work in progress )

War is Hell

War isn't hell
War is war and Hell is hell, and of the two, war is a lot worse.
How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Sinners, I believe.
Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell.
But war is chock full of them. Little kids, criples, old ladies.
In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.

That's a spicy meatball!

That's just kicking the can down the road. Besides, every function needs memory to store its definition, so you've saved nothing.

Flat butts are the thing!

It wasn't California who decided to base both houses on population. It was SCOTUS. They said that it violated equal protection to have geographical based representation that didn't spread the representatives equally based on population. They also said that you have to actually reapportion every ten years or so. Before then, a few southern states apportioned their representatives at the turn of the twentieth century and then didn't do it again because the old districts kept more black people from being represented than if they updated the boundaries. SCOTUS said that was BS, along with strictly geographical districts.

Another interesting thing about that 74 drinks per week statistic is that it works out to almost exactly a gallon of beer per day. I guess they're well hydrated then.

A drink is a standard amount of alcohol. It's specifically defined as 1.5 fl. oz. of 80 proof liquor or the equivalent in any other form. This works out to 12 oz. for most American Lagers and 5 oz. for most wines. Mixed drinks typically have two shots of liquor and so are usually two drinks, but this can vary. Regardless of form, a drink contains 0.6 fl. oz. of ethanol dissolved in however much whatever.

Hey, totally off-topic but I'm going to respond to your sig. It's even worse than you make it out to be. The Slashdot source actually has Unicode support. It has for more than 20 years. The problem is that it wasn't very good, so when they turned it on, assholes got to work breaking things. Rather than actually fix it, they just turned it off and left it that way. What broke, you ask? Direction markers. If you put a right-to-left direction marker in your comment, then entire rest of the page would be interpreted right-to-left as well. Well, until someone else changed it back in a later comment. It was really, really annoying. Rather than forcing the text flow back to left-to-right after every comment, like literally every site that supports Unicode today does, they just said, "Fuck it. We're too dumb," and turned Unicode back off.

On the other Foot:
Microsoft Opens Source to China

Reader NZheretic points out that less than a year ago, Jim Allchin swore under oath that disclosing the Windows operating system source code could damage national security.

Transcript of Internet Caucus Panel Discussion
Re: Administration's new encryption policy. Date: September 28, 1999.
Weldon statement.

Rep. Curt Weldon : Thank you. Let me see if I can liven things up here in the last couple of minutes of the luncheon. First of all, I apologize for being late. And I thank Bob and the members of the caucus for inviting me here.
...
But the point is that when John Hamre briefed me, and gave me the three key points of this change, there are a lot of unanswered questions. He assured me that in discussions that he had had with people like Bill Gates and Gerstner from IBM that there would be, kind of a, I don't know whether it's a, unstated ability to get access to systems if we needed it., Now, I want to know if that is part of the policy, or is that just something that we are being assured of, that needs to be spoke. Because, if there is some kind of a tacit understanding, I would like to know what it is.
Because that is going to be subjected to future administrations, if it is not written down in a clear policy way. I want to know more about this end use certificate. In fact, sitting on the Cox Committee as I did, I saw the fallacy of our end use certificate that we were supposedly getting for HPCs going into China, which didn't work. So, I would like to know what the policies are. So, I guess what I would say is, I am happy that there seems to be a coming together. In fact, when I first got involved with NSA and DOD and CIS, and why can't you sit down with industry, and work this out. In fact, I called Gerstner, and I said, can't you IBM people, and can't you software people get together and find the middle ground, instead of us having to do legislation.

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Compared with all the AI slop that is being trust upon us, It all looks so dated.

Speaking of Quake, I think that Quake may be more influential on PC FPSs than Doom (or even Wolfenstein 3-D). The reason is that Quake is the game that introduced the world to mouse+WASD for FPS controls. Before then, controls were all over the place. The original Doom controls were really quite terrible. The mouse would move you back and forth as well as rotate the player, and if you held shift then the mouse would strafe instead of rotate. Also, the keyboard used the arrow keys, with the right and left arrows rotating instead of the modern strafing. To strafe with the keyboard, there was a strafe key that put the arrows into strafe mode as with the mouse. It was really weird and compared to mouse+WASD style controls that were introduced with Quake, Doom controls are just awful. All the modern Doom ports sort of fix the controls by getting rid of the mouse moving you forward and back and using WASD instead of arrow keys and making A and D default to strafe instead of rotate, but without mouse-look, it still feels a bit weird.

But in that case, it would have to be Angry Birds, which was the first viral phone game, IIRC. Prior to then, phone games (or mobile games, as they're called today) were more of a curiosity until Angry Birds made them a selling point of iPhones and Androids. Farmville was arguably more popular, but it wasn't on mobile at first, but rather on the web. Farmville was the first social media game and is also super influential.