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blorsh

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No, type punning via unions is a gcc extension.

The standard only allows reading a value as the type it was written with or as char, and an access as char is only good for copying. If a char access used different bit order, that would be OK according to the standard because you couldn't tell unless you violated the standard.

It seems every compiler will tolerate a memcpy for type punning, even though this isn't required.

[dead] 8 years ago

Assuming brain changes only, more like:

looks like a chimpanzee, can't really talk due to throat limitations, can't walk very well, but likes to read and write

The only real solution to gerrymandering is to use a minimally-complicated algorithm.

The algorithm need not actually determine the districts. It can instead simply rate proposals, allowing a contest to be held. The highest scoring proposal submitted at least 400 days prior to the election is the winner, with earlier submissions winning any ties.

Another improvement would be to let districts spill over state borders. One could exempt Alaska and Hawaii of course.

I found the comment to be insightful. I'm trying to find his violation, and I can't really. There are a few things that are close, maybe, but not really.

"political or ideological battle" and "shallow dismissals" seem most plausible, but neither really fits. It's not as if the entirety of his comment was "more dumb leftist shit". There was more substance to his comment.

???

Ah, but why were there children and old people being murdered en masse?

It's because humans naturally resist what was being imposed upon them. The smart and able-bodied are going to get more, and they will resist any effort to prevent this. Corruption and workplace theft were rampant in the Soviet Union.

Suppression of this resistance requires violence.

IDA Pro is far more usable, particularly for heavy-duty long-term users. There is a bit of a learning curve, but IDA Pro has a really efficient interface. You get the beauty and readability and nice flowchart-like layout that can be done in a GUI, while the keyboard control has efficiency like a well-made DOS or mainframe program.

The politician pays the union. The union pays the politician.

So both are getting paid, out of money taken by force from the population. Neither has an interest in making this stop.

About the only hope is that 1-sided political donations will sufficiently tick off a political party at the national level. There is a tiny chance that national law could change because of that.

You also have two parties, the "government" and the "opposition". They are created after the election. At that point, the voters no longer get any say. The voters don't even know what they will get.

Consider a situation that starts with 12 parties. One gets 45% support, and the others each get 5% support. When the 12 parties merge into the 2 that will actually govern, that party with 45% may be the loser. The other 11 can merge to become a party with 55% of the power. The party which is most popular by far is thus locked out of power.

Salt should come from mines.

The sea salt craze has always seemed odd to me. Have most people in the USA never been to a beach? Do people really think that the sea is a good source of salt?

What I associate with the sea: seagull droppings, rotten seaweed, spilled oil, dumped WWII chemical weapons, raw sewage...

Then I go to the store and see a box of Triscuit crackers featuring sea salt. Yum??????

How much job capacity do you personally need? Isn't it enough to have just one job? Many cities have that and more, and it only takes one job to support a family.

I hope you don't expect to lose your job every few months, but in case you do, remember that new jobs pop into existence. It's not like a city with 100 jobs is on the verge of running out. (several years later: "oops, the last job got used up in 2018 and we can't ever make any more; this city is all used up")

I've had my tech job for a dozen years now. It pays well enough to get a 3500-square-foot house on half an acre and feed a huge family, even though the pay is perhaps only 2/3 of what I'd make in San Francisco or Mountain View. The 5x to 10x difference in housing cost more than makes up for the salary difference.

This is exactly what you'd do in a Concorde, U-2, SR-71, F-15, or F-22. All of these can get to the required FL600, at 60000 feet.

The F-15 and F-22 have an extra bonus. They can climb straight up through the eye. The U-2 could probably manage a spiral climb within the eye.

Regular cars need this.

Leave a car for months, and you'll get back to a dead battery. Keyless entry won't work. You can't roll down the windows. Settings may be forgotten. There is no way to start the engine.

Leave a car out in the Sun in a place like Arizona, and stuff melts. If you get in the car, the seatbelts cause burns that blister. Having the car run a fan would be nice, and the more you need it the more power there is available to do so.

He comes from a country called South Africa. He's literally an African-American. There would be a birth certificate issue.

I suppose he could be president of South Africa.

LLVM 5.0.0 Release 9 years ago

You say that Zig has no macros, just like FORTRAN, but that isn't a language property at all. Technically, C has no macros, but most people use the C preprocessor. I've seen people preprocess with sed scripts, perl scripts, tr, python scripts, and m4. FORTRAN too was often preprocessed.

So we'll take your Zig and shove it through a preprocessor or several. I've seen code get preprocessed 3 times during builds, but I'm sure that isn't a record.

If a language designer fails to provide a suitable well-matched and effective preprocessor, we'll add something nasty. Oh well. Stuff has to get done.

That is way too dismissive, wrongly comparing total cyclone energy with what we can generate.

A more reasonable objection would be that we don't desire a radioactive cyclone. This is an obvious downside, though there are low-fallout designs (most energy from fusion) that aren't too bad. We did survive the 1960s after all.

We'd have to simulate and test many times. Better prediction capability, for both cyclones and nukes, would increase the chance of knowing if we made a difference.

Nukes might not be the best way. Silver nitrate cloud seeding was tried in the 1950s, but we can't know if it actually made a difference because we didn't have much ability to predict things back then. (wimpy computers) Another approach is to block ocean evaporation. Create an oil slick as large as the cyclone, and there you go.

Maybe we need all three at once: oil slick to weaken it, then nukes and silver nitrate to steer it. Note that this would likely be an operation that puts the Berlin airlift to shame.

They left out the recent DARPA idea of helicopter-style blades that retract into a disk-like wing.

They left out designs that transition rapidly and automatically, without sustained hover. For example, an aircraft with a pair of thrust-vectoring engines could be equipped with a nose gear that tosses the front upward, allowing an automated takeoff. (too fast to be done manually) Landing could be similar, with a long and heavy-duty node gear that can take a bit of shock. Another approach is a solid-fuel rocket, again just enough to support the nose.

No, the situation is "take it or leave it". Give all the permissions, or don't get to use the app. There are now even web sites (facebook, google maps, yahoo email) that seem to refuse service if you are determined to be on a phone. They demand that you install their app instead.

Proper permissions would have 4 possible settings:

1. ask (the default), with checkbox to make the choice stick

2. deny

3. allow

4. deceive the app, pretending to allow.

That last one is important. It keeps apps from forcing users to allow absurd permissions. Deception plug-ins should be possible, allowing various kinds of deception (like "oh, sorry, there is no signal") and even man-in-the-middle against the apps.

It doesn't look Marxist to me, and I don't see how you get long-term sustained competition in an unregulated market.

Maybe it worked before the invention of the corporation. You'd buy from an individual human. Fraud would mostly be obvious, and you could get a mob to beat the person if they were into fraud. Unlike corporations, which can merge into MegaCorp and then dictate prices, humans can't actually merge into MegaMan.

If "learning and developing new skills" isn't the exact same thing as test preparation, then the test needs to be fixed.

Good tests matter. Teaching to the test is the same thing as teaching the material needed, given that the test is decent.

Direct any complaints toward poor-quality tests.

Fox and Breitbart have both lost key leaders due to death. (and other causes) They are both rapidly transitioning to the views of typical reporters (journalism majors), which will soon put them on the left. Breitbart has even started firing people who are strongly toward the right.

One America News Network is still on the right. It probably isn't moving... yet.

It's rather hard to operate a non-left media outlet when nearly all potential employees are far left. It's like standing in a stream, trying to push the water back upward with a rake. Good luck with that.

The USA has rare earth mines in California. They got shut down because China supported mining as a strategic asset, meanwhile the EPA was pretty sadistic. Getting that going again is trivial. If we match the legal situation in China, we're back in business.

Another big source is fly ash, which we get from burning coal. This actually has a decently high concentration of the more urgently needed elements. The more coal we burn, the more fly ash we have. Burn more, and get rare earth elements as a bonus.

The amounts needed are tiny. The only trouble with importing from China is that China considers control of rare earth elements to be part of a strategy to dominate the world. China restricts exports, and threatens to restrict them more. This is of course a national security issue for every other country in the world.

You forget how it got that way. Parts were made in the USA, then shipped to China. Part production moved. Part production can move the other way, back to the USA. It tends to go where the devices are made. The same goes for raw material. The USA has resources to mine.

Moving any part of the supply chain tends to encourage the other parts to move. If part production moved, then both mining and device production would have an increased incentive to move. If mining moved, part production would have an incentive to move, and if that moved then device production would have an incentive to move. It all works both ways, with suppliers and customers tending to move toward each other.

So yes, we can put everything back in the USA, and it can be affordable, but we face an uphill battle. The battle is only lost if you give up trying.

Cryogenic fuel is a reason to use a mountain.

Florida's air is humid and dense. You get lots of heat gain from that. The density itself matters. Condensation is a huge source of heat. Freezing is another huge source of heat. So you boil off cryogenics and maybe worse. We lost a space shuttle due to a chunk of ice hitting the wing. Falcon 9 rockets need unusually cold filler; if it warms then it expands and won't even fit in the rocket. It probably pours out and gets drained away, the alternative being a rupture.

The USA would do better launching from near Tuscon, Arizona. It's decently high up and dry, which helps keep the cryogenic content cold. We used to do this in fact, before the Mexican embassy complained about defective rockets crashing in Mexico. We chose to move to Florida instead of making a liability payment deal with Mexico.