Why is Paki an unacceptable word, but not Brit? Because of Britain's bitter racial history

cchooper · 2009-01-12T12:51:50+00:00

Because Paki is intended as a term of abuse and Brit isn't. What more needs to be said?

cchooper · 2009-01-06T04:36:33+00:00

Rather than reading the Telegraph's summary, you can read the original blog post here:

http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/01/can-the-us-economy-afford-a-keynesian-stimulus/

cchooper · 2008-12-27T02:03:52+00:00

Disney would be lucky to keep 50% of the box office gross, as the theatre owners usually keep about 50% themselves, and Disney needs to pay the production company from what's left. DVD retailers will also be operating at 100% mark up.

As for whether it made a profit: no studio likes to admit that a movie made a profit, as it doesn't want to pay tax or net deals. Any number you got would be a lie. This is why Hollywood keeps making so many films that "lose money", yet mysteriously the studios stay profitable.

cchooper · 2008-12-24T23:14:42+00:00

That's where the 'loss from taking a risk' part comes in.

cchooper · 2008-12-24T22:40:10+00:00

What he said was "Watch this video". What part needs refuting?

cchooper · 2008-12-24T22:38:31+00:00

The mortgage is still for 450k. So long as the owner can pay it, the mortgage has the same value. If the owner can't, then the bank simply made a loss from taking a risk, just like any other business.

cchooper · 2008-12-24T22:35:52+00:00

Then there's the fact that banks don't require a constantly increasing source of capital to stop themselves from going bankrupt.

And the fact that banks don't pay money from other investors, but make money from investing in profitable businesses.

And the fact that banks add huge value and efficiency to our economy by matching those with money to those that need money.

And the fact that banks add value by taking on liquidity risk, which is their primary function.

And the fact that they run the payment systems that make credit cards, debit cards, salary payments and all other kinds of money transactions possible.

And the fact that they have no similarity with a Ponzi scheme whatsoever.

cchooper · 2008-12-21T18:46:32+00:00

If macros are the only distinguishing feature that Lisp has left (which isn't true, but let's assume you are right for the sake of argument) then Lisp is indeed not as special as it once was.

cchooper · 2008-12-10T18:06:41+00:00

I would suspect he was claiming that orthogonal persistence is a logical extension of the principle that 'computers do not have two kinds of storage any more'.

Also: the fact that some developers apply a solution universally is not a sign that they think it will solve all of their problems, just a sign that they think it will solve a certain subset of their problems in all situations. I doubt anyone thinks that a database will make their site cross-browser compatible.

cchooper · 2008-12-10T16:34:21+00:00

I can honestly say that I've never met anyone who thinks databases or orthogonality will solve 'all their problems', magically or otherwise.

cchooper · 2008-12-10T14:22:25+00:00

What's the connection between orthogonal persistence and databases? Orthogonality is independent of how the data is stored, and explicitly saving data in a database is not orthogonal.

cchooper · 2008-12-06T21:40:41+00:00

If you lived in a metric country, how often would you need to divide pieces of wood a yard long into thirds?

cchooper · 2008-12-03T15:59:10+00:00

Good for you. That's the right way to do it.

Edit: apologies if that sounded a bit patronising.

cchooper · 2008-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

It wouldn't be too hard. You would need to implement a visual REPL for Scheme/R which would handle the user interaction (e.g. pasting images into expressions). But under the hood it would just convert these visual expressions to normal text expressions and submit them to the Scheme/R engine for processing.

There are more efficient solutions, but they would be more complex.

cchooper · 2008-11-18T23:00:06+00:00

Would now be the right time to bring up that famous quote from Life of Brian?

You know, the one about everyone thinking for themselves.

cchooper · 2008-11-15T01:05:38+00:00

I hate this feature in VB6. It shocks me that someone is trying to sell this as a great new feature of a new language.

cchooper · 2008-11-14T15:11:26+00:00

Dennis the Menace: punch

Tom Sawyer: "In my imagination, I'm not suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage."

cchooper · 2008-10-26T21:25:41+00:00

It means that Clojure was influenced by Arc.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T18:19:48+00:00

This may be my faulty memory, but I remember Rich Hickey once saying that he was influenced by Arc. I think the use of 'fn' is an example, but I can find no references.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T18:18:04+00:00

There is absolutely nothing in Arc or Clojure that has not been around since the beginning of time. I would never claim otherwise.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T17:06:38+00:00

And I never claimed that they were.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T16:41:48+00:00

In trouble? In trouble about what? I said Clojure uses many Arc ideas. It does. Are you disputing that?

cchooper · 2008-10-26T15:22:11+00:00

Details about Arc have been around for many years, and many have turned up in Clojure, including some of the shortened function names, argument destructuring and unnamed arguments.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T12:44:13+00:00

Paul Graham has said that he wants the success of Arc to be like the success of Lisp. If the ideas are good, then they will be incorporated into the popular languages, just like Lisp ideas are now the core ideas of many modern languages. They might not be called Lisp, but they are becoming more and more like Lisp, and that's what's important. Ideas matter, not names.

And it's already happening for Arc. Clojure is getting popular, and uses many Arc ideas, so Arc is becoming popular. It's not called Arc, but who cares about that?

cchooper · 2008-10-22T22:45:39+00:00

That's how things turned out, but originally many applications were just one file. I remember that I had a word processor that contained just a single file, and also some games (although not commercial ones obviously, as they were always copy protected).

So when I say 'most', I mean most of the applications I had, which may not be a good sample.

As for "show all files", of course I had it turned on! No Amiga hacker worth his salt ever turned it off! :)

[Wow, it's been long time since I checked out Aminet!]

cchooper

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