dx211

> But in retrospect I can see that my touchiness in that moment probably cost me tens of thousands of dollars.

I don't know if it's a side effect of living in a western society, but I see people make this kind of mistake all the time in the corporate world -- i.e. assuming that behind it all there's some neutral arbiter who will square any conflicts that arise in the workplace. In reality, if you make your self look like an ass in front of the wrong person, at the wrong point in the fiscal year, it affects your bonus / promotion / etc., and you never get that back, plus it's used to factor into every reward you get until you leave that company. Definitely better to be diplomatic.

> The fact that nobody benefits much is very much worth pointing out.

Warner Brothers, Disney, etc. benefit from this, as do their employees, in quite concrete terms.

I think the part about "scuppering" is just some nautical-sounding nonsense that the author of the article threw in. If you read the account I linked to above, it's saying they jettisoned the masts, then cut the rudder, then threw the cannons overboard, but despite these the ship eventually broke apart. Like you say, it sounds like they were trying to stabilize it to reduce the damage, but my impression is they were trying to make it lighter and less top-heavy rather than intentionally sink it.

It's interesting to see that even with the proliferation of satellites these days, there are only about a dozen above the continental United States right now, with all the categories selected.

When you factor in the number of people who are going out biking/hiking/vacationing/etc. so they have something to show off to their friends, I think Facebook probably has a positive effect on our collective health. (Present company excepted of course -- we all just love to get outdoors.)

That's a misleading comparison. I think the argument is that if you have a gun you can protect yourself from another person with a gun. A better analogy would be how some jurisdictions make bullet proof vests and gas masks illegal because they can be used (by bad people) to thwart police.

I have this thing where I wake up at 5:00 AM and my internal monologue sounds like someone twisting the tuning knob back and forth on a radio. Anyone know a name for that?

.Net provides a couple of different ways to dynamically emit IL, but that's not quite the same as being able to emit your own native machine instructions, though. I think the challenge would be that you'd need to work out a calling convention between the jitted code and the emitted native code, at which point you might as well stick the native code in its own library function and compile or assemble it with a native tool.

Way back in the day (mid high-school), I wrote a Tetris game in Pascal and Z80 assembly for the TRS-80. At some point I realized that since what was displayed on the screen was just a representation of an area of memory, I could keep track of the "cup" and all of the pieces that had already fallen into it directly in video memory instead of variables. I also optimized the code for drawing the "cup" so all three sides of it would get rendered in one shot in a single loop. The first time I ran it, a bug caused half of the bottom not to get drawn, and the first Tetris piece dropped through the hole and sliced straight into whatever vital memory came after the video area, immediately crashing the computer.

Huh. I always assumed Stalin was being overly paranoid when he exiled all of those folks to Siberia for breaking farm equipment, etc. Still a terrible, awful way to address the problem, but it makes a bit more sense if that's exactly the sort of thing the subversives are being told to do.