Viewing profile — ErsatzVerkehr

Ahhh - now it makes so much more sense. :-)

The Google etymology thing (I didn't even know it existed - just search for "stuff etymology" and you get a nice little graph) tells me that the word "stuff" came to English from G…

I thought this was interesting (both that the space shuttle still used core memory, and that the challenger memory was retrieved and its contents recovered): > Core memory is non-v…

It always pains me to see the space program justified on the basis of its spin-offs. The main (civilian) problems that the space program solved were in getting to space, putting a …

> Is it 500EUR per week or per month? I LOL'd at this - only someone in the SF bubble could mistake EUR 500 for a weekly rent. My one-bedroom apartment in Germany is around EUR 350…

Do you really consider the iPhone 4/4S obsolete? To me this sounds like an unrealistic idea of real-world upgrade schedules. The iPhone 4S was released in October 2011. I would hop…

In German, the word "Land" is used for both states (as in the federal states of Germany, Bundesländer ) and countries. Berlin is a City-State in Germany, entirely surrounded by the…

Important details are really hidden on the webpage. For example, who are the mentors? Second: unlike the Hacker School, it's not free. Both of these items should be addressed under…

> A nautical mile at the pole would be quite short, a nautical mile at the equator would be quite long. No, this is emphatically not the case. You're confusing a minute of curvatur…

"Successful people affirm the consequent" - Not sure what you mean here; you're linking to a description of a logical fallacy.

> Why not have an atomic (nuclear) battery that will be able to send out sonic pings for a year? Are you really proposing to have every commercial airliner fly around with a relati…

This article makes no sense.

LIGO has not failed. The second generation of LIGO detectors, called "advanced LIGO", is currently under construction. It will be around ten times more sensitive than the earlier c…

I completely accept and agree with your criticism of my criticism. My gut sense is that this proposal is simply too amateurish to be worth the effort of thoroughly debunking. Float…

Also, he defines 0*NaN=0, but 0+NaN=NaN.

> In any case, I don't think DEC64 is intended for those users that need to use cos() et al He apparently has other ideas: "DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next…

Just curious, what is your use-case in which you need better support for fractions?

Worse: > DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages.

> I think float will be around for a while, what with the blinding speed in today's processors, and the availability of 80 bit intermediate precision. ...and well-understood numeri…

As a "specification" this document is laughable. For example, rounding modes and overflow behavior are not addressed. The comment that object pointers can be stuffed into the coeff…

Integers are also exactly represented in the standard floating point formats, so this isn't even a particular advantage of DEC64. What is "int truncation" anyway? Overflow?

The answer is, "Yup."

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