I disagree. The fact is that Trump convinced a lot of people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to vote for him in what Democrats thought was their "firewall". Firewall appears to be political jargon for "we can…
The Federalist Papers (and the Anti-Federalist Papers for that matter) were public attempts to persuade people it's true. At the time they were aimed at the people of New York on the issue of ratifying the Constitution…
The electoral college isn't a bug, it's a design feature. Cf The Federalist Papers. A fundamental problem for democracy is how to keep it from degenerating into mob rule. The EC is one of those "checks and balances"…
It's funny, we expect "undo" features in our applications these days, why shouldn't the OS and indeed the entire machine's state be treated the same way? I used to think that virtualized Windows guests would eliminate…
I too stopped using 'jj' because of the short delay. FWIW I've found ';l' to work well as a replacement. (For a trial period I had them both mapped to <esc> in my vimrc file.) ';l' seems a natural, but distinctive,…
As I mentioned in another reply here, I'd suggest you ignore the siren call of "most recent" and just pretend it's five years ago. Use the Squeak by Example book with it's associated version of Squeak to get a basic…
Some of the cool kids at Smalltalk High forked Squeak to create Pharo back in 2008 and that's where a lot of the recent developer energy has gone. But rapid development has its costs: Pharo 5.0 has just come out while…
Well, it's restricted to educational uses, so I don't anticipate a lot of pressure from Indian textbook authors on this one. The specific case seems to stem from professors suggesting students read various sections of…
One point worth noting on this new release: there's finally an up-to-date official Windows package.
No other text editor has as many developers working on plugins than VIM. Virtually anything that exists in another text editor which isn’t mouse driven has some very popular, very supported, very documented plugin you…
This is one of those historic artifacts, like the Mother of All Demos, that really brings home the sense of possibilities that people had for computers a couple of generations back. Back in 1995 MIT had a symposium with…
In chess below the master level tactics will dominate. How do you get really good at tactics? Not just by playing lots of chess, but by consistently devoting effort to studying tactics via printed collections of…
Harvey is really a force for good when it comes to making programming and computer science topics accessible to more people. In addition to SICP and SNAP work, he was also a force behind UCB Logo and wound up writing a…
Well, by that logic the record studios were proxies for musicians. Sorry, not buying that argument. If I were Stross I'd certainly be peeved at the loss of access to customers and, by extension, income. Especially if I…
I was nodding in agreement right up until the point he showed charts of 17 "first-world" nations and started torturing data: In terms of pretty much any metric you'd care to name — I'm showing you homicide and infant…
The "purpose" of the opening is to get yourself into the sort of middlegame position you like to play. (Some players love having white against a French Defense, for example, while other are quite comfortable with…
1) Android is a Linux, it's just not marketed as such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#... 2) If you're someone like me who drops in to distrowatch.com occasionally, you might think a tweaked…
As has been pointed out, you've got the sequence reversed. Raskin was on the original Macintosh team first. His ideas for the project included keeping the cost down. Things like using an 8-bit CPU (the 6809?) rather…
>> Dave's writing was all about him. > So what? > ... not everybody saw what he wrote as particularly negative towards Marissa, and many (most) of us got that the real point he was making was contained…
The adverse effects of frictionless computing are all around us. Email is the first example that comes to mind. It is simply too easy to send email messages, so we all send too many (I am famously guilty of this) and…
I can't speak to salt, but the classic explanation for sugar and high fructose corn syrup is Robert Lustig's UCSF presentation[0]. Midway through he discusses the differences between HFCS and sugar in how they…
Tiny Core Linuxis still going strong (http://www.tinycorelinux.net/). They're now up to three images, all built on the idea of running out of RAM with a 3.0-era kernel. The Core image is CLI-only and weighs in 8 MB;…
I've always thought it was a nifty chip, but one I couldn't think of an application for. Things like the 18-bit word size can throw some developers off -- the last time I looked at the chip some audio application guys…
First off, beef is indeed awesome and it has given me the incredible intelligence and physical beauty that I so casually display today. Second, more seriously, your response is political rather than scientific. There…
"emotional response is illogical" To compound the problem, emotional responses are faster, with rational arguments developed after the fact. The neocortex likes to think it's hot shit, but the lizard and mammal brains…
I disagree. The fact is that Trump convinced a lot of people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to vote for him in what Democrats thought was their "firewall". Firewall appears to be political jargon for "we can…
The Federalist Papers (and the Anti-Federalist Papers for that matter) were public attempts to persuade people it's true. At the time they were aimed at the people of New York on the issue of ratifying the Constitution…
The electoral college isn't a bug, it's a design feature. Cf The Federalist Papers. A fundamental problem for democracy is how to keep it from degenerating into mob rule. The EC is one of those "checks and balances"…
It's funny, we expect "undo" features in our applications these days, why shouldn't the OS and indeed the entire machine's state be treated the same way? I used to think that virtualized Windows guests would eliminate…
I too stopped using 'jj' because of the short delay. FWIW I've found ';l' to work well as a replacement. (For a trial period I had them both mapped to <esc> in my vimrc file.) ';l' seems a natural, but distinctive,…
As I mentioned in another reply here, I'd suggest you ignore the siren call of "most recent" and just pretend it's five years ago. Use the Squeak by Example book with it's associated version of Squeak to get a basic…
Some of the cool kids at Smalltalk High forked Squeak to create Pharo back in 2008 and that's where a lot of the recent developer energy has gone. But rapid development has its costs: Pharo 5.0 has just come out while…
Well, it's restricted to educational uses, so I don't anticipate a lot of pressure from Indian textbook authors on this one. The specific case seems to stem from professors suggesting students read various sections of…
One point worth noting on this new release: there's finally an up-to-date official Windows package.
No other text editor has as many developers working on plugins than VIM. Virtually anything that exists in another text editor which isn’t mouse driven has some very popular, very supported, very documented plugin you…
This is one of those historic artifacts, like the Mother of All Demos, that really brings home the sense of possibilities that people had for computers a couple of generations back. Back in 1995 MIT had a symposium with…
In chess below the master level tactics will dominate. How do you get really good at tactics? Not just by playing lots of chess, but by consistently devoting effort to studying tactics via printed collections of…
Harvey is really a force for good when it comes to making programming and computer science topics accessible to more people. In addition to SICP and SNAP work, he was also a force behind UCB Logo and wound up writing a…
Well, by that logic the record studios were proxies for musicians. Sorry, not buying that argument. If I were Stross I'd certainly be peeved at the loss of access to customers and, by extension, income. Especially if I…
I was nodding in agreement right up until the point he showed charts of 17 "first-world" nations and started torturing data: In terms of pretty much any metric you'd care to name — I'm showing you homicide and infant…
The "purpose" of the opening is to get yourself into the sort of middlegame position you like to play. (Some players love having white against a French Defense, for example, while other are quite comfortable with…
1) Android is a Linux, it's just not marketed as such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#... 2) If you're someone like me who drops in to distrowatch.com occasionally, you might think a tweaked…
As has been pointed out, you've got the sequence reversed. Raskin was on the original Macintosh team first. His ideas for the project included keeping the cost down. Things like using an 8-bit CPU (the 6809?) rather…
>> Dave's writing was all about him. > So what? > ... not everybody saw what he wrote as particularly negative towards Marissa, and many (most) of us got that the real point he was making was contained…
The adverse effects of frictionless computing are all around us. Email is the first example that comes to mind. It is simply too easy to send email messages, so we all send too many (I am famously guilty of this) and…
I can't speak to salt, but the classic explanation for sugar and high fructose corn syrup is Robert Lustig's UCSF presentation[0]. Midway through he discusses the differences between HFCS and sugar in how they…
Tiny Core Linuxis still going strong (http://www.tinycorelinux.net/). They're now up to three images, all built on the idea of running out of RAM with a 3.0-era kernel. The Core image is CLI-only and weighs in 8 MB;…
I've always thought it was a nifty chip, but one I couldn't think of an application for. Things like the 18-bit word size can throw some developers off -- the last time I looked at the chip some audio application guys…
First off, beef is indeed awesome and it has given me the incredible intelligence and physical beauty that I so casually display today. Second, more seriously, your response is political rather than scientific. There…
"emotional response is illogical" To compound the problem, emotional responses are faster, with rational arguments developed after the fact. The neocortex likes to think it's hot shit, but the lizard and mammal brains…