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CamperBob

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Holy @#$@, people. Did I wake up in a naïveté vortex?

No, C doesn't define sizeof(int). It is implementation defined. But you don't change it once you implement it in a given development environment... not if you want people to create and maintain production code with your tools. You don't speculate that one day you might want to change sizeof(int). It's just not something you do if you want to be taken seriously.

Is anyone in this thread over the age of 16?

Fantastically dumb comment. FWIW int in C is also 32 bit on all mainstream 64 bit operating systems, and Go has int64.

ROFL. I challenge you to find documentation for the C language or any other language commonly used in production where they speculate that they might wake up one day and change sizeof(int) on an existing platform.

"Fantastically dumb," indeed.

From that page: "At the moment, all implementations use 32-bit ints, an essentially arbitrary decision. However, we expect that int will be increased to 64 bits on 64-bit architectures in a future release of Go."

So, in other words, it's Amateur Hour. All righty, then.

/backs toward door, reaches for doorknob, still smiling and nodding

I'm historically a braces-on-their-own-line guy, so getting used to the strict enforcement of the other style was a pain for me

Wait, what?

As their first business venture together, he and Jobs sold blue boxes.

So, the irony level that was reached when Jobs ordered the creation of a locked-down cell phone platform wrapped clear around 2^32-1 and back to zero.

If there is a famine in an area, and people are dying, is it OK to offer them food and water in exchange for slave labour? No pay, just food and water, and everybody that doesn't like can go and die of hunger. How does this deal sound?

My impression is that like most Westerners living today, you have no earthly idea what the term "slave labor" actually means, so we'll leave it at that. Peace.

If they weren't using all that power to spy on US citizens, it might be a bit more palatable. You can make a case for being nosy when it comes to people who aren't covered by our own Constitutional guarantees, but when it comes to US citizens, due process is something I consider awfully important. (And no, "national security letters" are not what I consider due process.)

Obviously not everything the NSA does is a problem from a Constitutional standpoint, but still... the odds of being ordered to do something I would find grossly unethical are too high for me to want to work there.

Worse still, I could see myself modifying my own ethics over time for the sake of staying in my employer's good graces. How many people can honestly say they would never fall prey to that temptation?

A shame, too, because I'll bet they still have some of the coolest toys around, even in the present age of commoditized supercomputing.

have yet to see any of the loud-mouths spouting off about patents offer to do something like put together a fund to be used in pursuing changes to the laws. An, of course, none of them will write a check for a few million to fund it.

Jeff Bezos was talking a good game there for a while, but nothing ever came of it.

Except someone else is likely to patent the same thing.

Not if the invention is published or otherwise disclosed in any other form. You don't have to claim ownership of an idea to keep someone else from patenting it.

Things worth being made would be prefunded

Prefunding isn't going to get us flying cars, just faster horses.

Translation: "We need to clean up our act in this cave before we try building grass huts. Otherwise we'll just make the same mistakes out there that we're making in here."

True... and yet again, we're reminded that failing to give J. L. Borges the Nobel in literature after a lifetime spent anticipating this very phenomenon was every bit as silly as giving President Obama the Peace Prize during his first year in office.

Kara Is Self-Aware 14 years ago

What would've been even creepier:

"Fight/flight response, check. Reattach components. OK, this one's good to go."

He knows a lot about how busy people feel and where the priorities of most people lie, as expressed by their actions, as measured, rather than their words.

So he's able to "measure" how many people don't buy from his company because they make it too difficult to evaluate their products? That sounds like a highly marketable skill in itself.

To some extent that's true for all drugs (as well as all foods). It's like poking random numbers into memory and restarting your Asteroids game to see if you get 65,536 extra ships, or if the process locks up.