smh

https://www.viking.no/e/england/e-yorkshire_norse.htm

Most have fallen out of use but e.g. 'laik' is still understood by young people.

I see - I guess it's a financial modelling program or similar where the quantities don't represent precise values of money. I was imagining some kind of accounting-like app that would need to be reconciled with real-world balances.

You are using 32 bit floats to represent money?

Does your project correctly calculate $300,000.00 + $0.01, (or even just correctly represent the value $300,000.01) and if so, how?

people familiar with the matter

This peculiar phrase appears four times in the article. Is it journalist-code for something?

Re the "Don't be the first to state a number" strategy, what happens in the real world when two competent negotiators meet?

There was a Flash advert with a man gesturing and waving at me. It was so distracting I literally could not read the article text. I installed adblock and reloaded the page.

An example of "tragedy of the commons", perhaps?

The social-network spamming has already started. On my last trip to the cinema I saw a teenager get a discount on her ice-cream in exchange for posting something on Facebook.

Macduff was born by Caesarean section, not Macbeth.

Actually, I'm impressed. That's a much better (and braver) decision than forcing through a new name just to save face.

Reminds me of this: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html I wonder why this seems to happen in some open-source projects and not in others?

That implicitly assumes these patents are mostly forky-spoony stuff. What if they represent real innovation? In that case the system is working exactly as intended; investors are getting a return on R&D.

PG recommended this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilisation_%28TV_series%29

This sort of thing will likely cause more problems than it solves. Such a struct can't be moved, copied, or put in an array without potential memory corruption.

I'd suggest doing this:

  typedef struct {
    int a;
    int b;
    /* private */
    int c;
    int d;
  } STYPE;

My bank in England is keen for me to "Go Green" and accept PDF bank statements in place of paper copies. I wonder if they allow new customers to open accounts without paper documentation...?

For an example of this sort of thing, see Premium Bonds, available since 1956:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_Bond

The stuff about ERNIE is interesting, too.

Microsoft products are full of annoying features like this. Another example is Outlook and the way it removes arbitrary newlines from plain text emails.

Also: http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/

Choice quote: Rule of thumb--every time Microsoft use the word "smart," be on the lookout for something dumb

A good complement to this would be to work through the exercises in K&R.

This function of the House of Lords has recently been replaced with a newly created Supreme Court. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_Kin...

Investigate the -mno-cygwin option for gcc.

Even worse, they put Southampton in the "Portsmouth" group.