yosh

Those makefiles wouldn't have to be as complex if automake only targeted GNU make. A lot of the messiness is there to support conditionals.

"make it work with the autotools" ? The auto* family of tools have a ton of complexity to make things work with non-GNU tools. Automake would be vastly simpler if there wasn't the specific design goal of working with non-GNU make.

There's also debate on whether Neanderthals are a subspecies of human or a separate species altogether, so there's obviously enough genetic differences to fuel that debate.

All those are power user features though. Most users don't even know they exist, and why would they, since they aren't very discoverable.

IIRC, koala isn't considered endangered, but I think various agencies want to do a current population assessment.

For Eurostar (Paris<->London) there's a security checkpoint with x-ray and metal detector too. No shoes-off, but you don't have to do that for air travel in Europe either. I guess they're paranoid about the Chunnel...

The legroom on a standard Eurostar seat isn't any better than a plane either.

The Shinkansen, however, really is the gold standard for train travel in the world still: fast, convenient (no security), and frequent.

If txt was _really important_ to Twitter they'd have actually got the length limits right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660986

Summary: for languages like Arabic, Hindi, etc., you only get 70 characters total.

You favorite example isn't actually true: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

"Normally that's not a security problem" ? PulseAudio allowing arbitrary code loaded into a suid root app via command line parameters is a gaping security hole by itself.

This exploit used a trivial root exploit to setup a deeper kernel level exploit, that can bypass SELinux, hide itself completely, etc.

LZW encoding was patented, decoding was never patent encumbered. So web browsers never had to worry, since all they were doing was decompressing. For the H.264 case, decoding is also encumbered, so it's not the same situation.

Careful now, GIF uses Lempel-Ziv-Welch or LZW, which was patent encumbered in the US until 2003, and a few other countries until 2004. Not all Lempel-Ziv compression algorithms were patent encumbered though: LZ77 with Huffman coding is the DEFLATE algorithm which is very widely used, since that's the algorithm used in PKZIP/gzip/zlib.

Yeah, I always thought faking meat with vegetables has a certain amount of hack value, but people who are serious about a vegetarian diet are better off mostly eating cusines that are designed to be vegetarian, to get the proper nutrient balance. True veganism is really hard, because you can't really trust processed foods.

From the food hacking perspective, it'd be cool if someone did the opposite: fake vegetables using meat. Making beef have the taste and texture of a carrot would be pretty impressive.

They may feel that, but they never really got that right in the first place. Twitter has a 140 character limit. SMS has a 140 byte limit. There's a 7-bit GSM character encoding which gives you the 160 characters, but that only covers basic English, select bits of other Western European langauges, and some currency symbols. So beyond those characters, you have to go down to 140 characters, and if you're in non-Latin land (like Chinese or Arabic), you have to use UCS-2, which only gives you 70 characters.

The simple Twitter 140 limit doesn't map to that at all, and coupled with the fact that Twitter SMS is disabled in a good chunk of countries, it seems silly to think of it as an SMS publishing system.

It's questionable how valuable those metrics are, considering that a number of Twitter clients follow the shortened links to get the real URLs for their users, which means a hit doesn't necessarily translate into a view.

That's inaccurate, you can statically link closed source to an LGPL library, as long as you provide the object files so the user can relink it against a modified version of the LGPL library.

Uhm, yes it does. It's realtime data.

And since it's backed by actual scientific instruments, you can tell immediately if it was a magnitude 3 in Berkeley, or a magnitude 6 in Parkfield, which is better than some tweet of "I just felt an earthquake".

Earthquakes are a poor example. http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/latest.htm is going to give you more timely and accurate data than someone's random tweet.