Viewing profile — spiralx

It was actually inspired by Perl as much as Bash if you read one of the asides in the O'Reilly book written by one of PS's developers lol.

Stephen Baxter's books are along the same lines, start with one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelike_Infinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel)

I mean any type of energy is just as intangible as potential energy, so I don't see that the energy stored by doing work (i.e. interacting with one four forces) is that different t…

Because gravity distorts _space-time_ - not just 3-D space - then the event horizon is the boundary at which gravity means that all future paths (technically everything within your…

Which then significantly exacerbates the potential for a negative equity trap, because moving now requires paying all of those deferred taxes. So the longer you've lived somewhere …

Same here. I'd been using GFA Basic for a couple of years when I came across Turbo Pascal which really helped - being a version of BASIC with code blocks, variable types including …

The article is saying that the inherited wealth of the remaining 20% of today's billionaires is greater than the wealth of those new-made billionaires, there's no contradiction the…

But that already happens with property taxes - just look at all the people in California who can only afford to live where they do because their property taxes are fixed at their o…

Nice one, I remember writing a 2D graphics library in Turbo Pascal using embedded hand-optimised assembly for the actual drawing code when I was your age, but that was back before …

The use of a continuous roll of paper with punched perforations to control a loom was invented in 1725 by Basile Bouchon. Then in 1745 Jacques de Vaucanson invented the first fully…

Probably not possible because it wasn't thought of when the system was first implemented and introducing such a change would involve getting new hardware with the jump feature and …

The KKK may be a shadow of its former size and power but that has just lead to lots of smaller groups with similar beliefs forming that aren't so attention-grabbing.

So starting in 1983 that's roughly five conversions a year assuming the figure of 200 people in the article. So a 1,000 years to get through all 5k members according to bruceb's po…

Of course they did that. So you'd have to use a user script to read each account's profile to see if they have a tick, which would be a pain even with caching the results. Just ope…

Having nothing but random comments by $8 subscribers at the top of every post has been pretty terrible for any sort of discussion between posters and followers already, but at leas…

And of course physical currency - i.e. M0 - is only a small portion of the total money supply measured by M2.

Why should they? Other people have already done that, and it's not good for Bitcoin.

As of 2021 Russia supplied 15% of China's oil and 6% of it's natural gas, and those pipelines are a) for gas, not oil, and b) increase from 38 Bcm to 88 Bcm, while total imports vi…

LOL, almost all of China's oil supply runs through the Straits of Malacca which the US Navy could blockade with a carrier fleet and a few submarines. Why do you think they've been …

Although this issue is why the next five or six years is basically China's only window for trying to seize Taiwan, and its leadership is not so crazy as to not know that, but possi…

Only the UK and Taiwan have a nation-wide single-payer healthcare system, although Canada comes sort of close with each state having its own separate single-payer system. Most coun…

You have to remember that originally those exchanges would also have had a public option available to compete with private plans.

Romney got on board with the push for increasing healthcare coverage in MA and helped get the Medicare waiver required for MassHealth, but he didn't propose the system and vetoed s…

Yup. The CBO have in the past even estimated a generic public option as being revenue positive due to replacing ACA subsidies for private insurance plans. https://www.cbo.gov/budge…

The Netherlands has a system very similar to the ACA and the Swiss system mandates insurers offer a not-for-profit plan with minimum requirements, as well as offering generous subs…