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rbanffy
194,606karma·63,760submissions·March 12, 2008
about
Seasoned software developer, proficient in Python, Java. Less proficient in Ruby and Lisp. A bit rusty in C and C++. Learning Erlang very slowly. Also a computer collector and restorer, lover of 8-bit computers, mainframes and interesting Unix workstations.
email: username at that google mail thing
http://about.me/rbanffy
https://linkedin.com/in/ricardobanffy
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rbanffy; my proof: https://keybase.io/rbanffy/sigs/HtF1uAf_RNpwIkNP1-YGWP_-3doWV6S5Cc1KywXeLYo ]
recent activity (63,760 total)
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It's slightly depressing to imagine that if our defense contractors could make more money building schools than weapons, we would not be having this discussion.
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"some people don't want peace; their agenda for how the world should be comes first." The point is that those people are relatively few. Most people would rather live in peace unless taught otherwise.…
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Children should be required to watch "Idiocracy" in the classroom...
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"you punch a bully in the face" The fun part is that it goes both ways. In the end, both bullies will need reconstructive surgery.
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"In fact, treating Java as a garbage-collected C is often a very reasonable thing to do." That's exactly what I like about Objective-C. It _IS_ C with garbage collection. And with a little bit of Smal…
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I was thinking more in the lines of killer whales playing with their prey.
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It seems Ballmer likes to play with his food.
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Well... It can still be developed into a movie.
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The attributes of werewolves are substantially different than the ones ascribed to the Jewish-Muslim-Christian God. Werewolves are believed (by some people, sure) to exist within our time-space contin…
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"It's not that I believe in no gods, it's just that I don't believe in gods." It seems this person is agnostic rather than an atheist. As I put previously, an atheist believes "the God question" (that…
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Finding out the results of the 1950 World Series does not require an open mind - History can answer that one. I think we are really playing with words here. You are absolutely sure God does not exist,…
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After all, not all zombies can fly and that one did.
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"No, the lazy choice is to have the visions of the infinite you mention and instead of trying to understand them" There is some ground between being religious and being an atheist. Being an atheist im…
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I don't agree Billg as one of the most brilliant people of our time. He is certainly a clever strategist, but not much more than that. He got incredibly lucky a couple times: The non-exclusivity IBM d…
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To put it simply: "Hey... Your competitor just signed this deal that allows them to include our OS for pennies. I see you will have a tough time competing with them unless you sign it too".
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Oxado and Adbrite. I am not very happy with any of them. Started with Adroll because of your message. Ads seem more on spot than Adbrite and on par with Oxado.
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Google still can build something on the same lines as the iphone app store and deal with the complicated/boring part of advertising, hosting and getting paid for applications. They have all the pieces…
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On the other hand, I was getting about (please, don't laugh) US$10 a month out of AdSense in my blog (which is not really a blog, but I gave up naming it anything else) when Google said there were fra…
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Since bank-robbing is such a big problem, I suggest closing all banks. I also suggest preventing planes from flying with passengers inside, as they can possibly get killed if the plane crashes. The od…
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That's probably because Emacs is such a nice NNTP client... /me ducks for cover.
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LOL. That and the addition of the bazillion servers to cope with the sudden traffic surge the 3G iPhone will cause.
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The question whether it is possible to make Ruby faster is very close to how fast can we make other similar languages. If we can make a system run Smalltalk much faster than the same system can run th…
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Self help books sell well because they tell people whose lives are not all right that it is all right, that it's really not their fault and that, if they really want it, they can still fix them. Peopl…
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Well... Not in the dumpster.
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I love the dumpster-diving part. "In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system" is deeply enlightening.
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Compsci is closer to Math than to Engineering. While you can study nature to find useful algorithms and approaches to solving real world problems, the fact something is not useful or solves no real pr…
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And, BTW, the essay is dated May, 1981.