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mendort

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I don't think living on mars will be that hard. I think building the large industrial base required to extract resources and manufacture the equipment required to live on mars will be very difficult (read expensive and slow).

It may, in fact, require more resources for one person to live on mars than one person can produce with our current (or near future) level of technology.

I think just building the energy infrastructure to do energy expensive things like make steel or silicon ingots will be very difficult. Not to mention that there is no source of petroleum on mars, so plastics are going to have to synthesized using other materials. The difficulties are legion once you get down to the details.

In my region there is a group of charities that get food that would otherwise have been thrown out from local grocery stores. The handling of the food tends to be a bit careless so it's best to stay away from the things that really need to be refrigerated, but it was really helpful for me when I was unemployed. So I for one am glad that grocery stores have too much.

Clojure Distilled 12 years ago

I'm on the latest release of GNU emacs. I'm mostly on Windows, which could be the issue.

Clojure Distilled 12 years ago

I also am a long time emacs user, but whenever a plugin freezes emacs I immediately stop using it. Is is cider now stable? I know nrepl.el would crash emacs frequently if you asked it to evaluate the wrong thing.

It seems like from the definition of viscosity and the estimate of glass viscosity provided we should easily be able to observe some glass flow over the course of 10^12 years or so.

I have found it to be MUCH easier to get regular exercise when I live in a reasonably pedestrian safe neighborhood. I have found that the perceived level of effort to maintain fitness varies wildly with my external conditions (stress, neighborhood, prosperity, relationships, etc.). Saying that everyone can do it if they just give it the old college try may be a result of your circumstances.

That'd be great way to establish a regressive tax. Luxury foods don't have more calories than cheap ones so as a percentage of cost cheap food prices would increase more. Not to mention that percentage of income spent on food for low income people is much higher than % of income spent on food by rich people.

Is 3D printing really enabling this? If they can make the measurements, I have a hard time believing that an experienced machinist couldn't fabricate the parts necessary. This seems more like a victory of measurement technologies that allow the requirements for a replacement skull to be precisely mapped, than a triumph of 3d printing. (Though I do admit that 3d printing would probably be a lot cheaper than machining.)

I don't think anyone would argue that the compiler in question is far from optimal for compiling this particular program.

However, if you are writing a general purpose compiler, you need to accommodate any program. Each of the properties (e.g. no use of getters, only one variable) that you point out about this program would take a compiler pass to establish.

I haven't thought too much about it, but some of the properties are very likely to be undecidable by static analysis for many programs.

It seems likely that using time to determine whether the program being compiled has these properties would not be efficient for most real world programs, even if it did provide enough information to choose a more optimal compilation strategy in some cases.

Standard Markdown 12 years ago

Maybe they can call it "Standardized Markdown" which would be both more descriptive and accurate.

Man, the shuttle's cargo bay was rediculously huge. Lofting that whole volume for a routine iss resupply seems insanely wasteful. (I know that it is expensive to loft mass, not volume. But in this case it is volume that needed to be enclosed in a shell that could survive reentry.)

Exactly. Anyone who objects to easter eggs because they may accidentally introduce vulnerabilities should be objecting much more strongly to features of the application that they don't need. If you want to know every aspect of a program, then you need to own the code and be brutal about stripping out features that you aren't currently using.

You also assume that amazon is free to price ebooks however they want provided that they pay the publisher the right amount. They are not. This is one of the reasons that this conflict has developed. Amazon has traditionally been happy to sell many physical books at a loss. They are not permitted to do this with ebooks.