She'd lose my vote, if I were Californian. Not because of her naivete: I'd rather have a naive governor than one that's experienced in, and jaded by, the current political system. People who don't realize that what they're trying to do is impossible are far more likely to succeed than those who know it is.
But she'd lose my vote on one issue: I refuse to support anyone who supports IRV. Our current electoral system is bad enough: why oh why does every electoral-reformist have to support one of the few systems that's actually provably WORSE?
My personal preference for government elections is the Approval system, which eliminates the vast majority of the problems with Plurality without introducing worse ones, like a complicated ballot sheet (remember, a significant percentage of Floridians couldn't handle the ones we have now!) and violations of monotonicity.
I'm aware of the technical superiority of Concordet methods, and support them for elections in which all voters are highly educated, but the complexity of the ballot sheets should rule it out along with IRV for elections to public office, IMO.
One important question isn't answered in the/. article or in the press release: Does this law, like state 'Do Not Call' lists, apply to all email sent to addresses in Michigan, or does it only apply to email sent from Michigan addresses?
Sure, there are limits to the jurisdiction of the former kind of law, too (good luck enforcing it if the spammer is outside the States) but it would be massively more effective than the latter kind. How many spammers can figure out which of their target addresses are in Michigan?
Unspoken but obvious is the motive behind the "improved composition" -- the altered image depicts a coalition soldier motioning threateningly to a father holding his young son.
Interesting - I saw it in exactly the opposite light.
In the first original photo, it's not terribly obvious that the man is carrying a young child; it just looks like the soldier motioning to some guy.
In the second original, it's clear that the man is carrying a young child, but now the soldier looks like he's pointing a gun at him rather than just motioning him.
Thus, the original images are either "motioning some guy" or "pointing a gun at a man with a young child". The altered image is "motioning a man with a young child". Thus the altered image seems much more "sympathetic" to the soldier than either of the originals alone.
(Note that I'm not suggesting that the altered image doesn't reflect the facts of what happened - indeed, it looks like it was altered to better reflect what actually happened, since neither real photo seems to have captured that very well (assuming the soldier wasn't really pointing the gun at the little kid)... All I'm suggesting is that the apparent effect of the modification for me was the exact opposite of what you suggested it was)
The books I'm referring to are Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. I highly recommend them. One word of warning though, set aside a large chunk of time to read them. It's not that they're slow going - the story feels pretty fast-paced as you read it - but there's simply an awful lot of story crammed into the three books. I think they took me about twice as long to read as Lord of the Rings...
Your comment about the atoms/molecules reaching escape velocity raises another question about the (pseudo)science in the trilogy. One of the major terraforming activities in the books is using various strategies (massive-scale generation of gases from chemicals in the surface rocks, burning up asteroids in the atmosphere, etc) to increase the volume of gas in Mars's atmosphere, thereby increasing its pressure to something human-breathable.
Is that actually possible, or does Real Science mean that as soon as you have gas at a human-livable temperature on Mars the molecules are all going to shoot off into space, regardless of how much volume of gas you try to add?
(Not that I can think of any way that you could actually generate the sheer amount of gas necessary to do this even if it did work... but it sounds from your comment as if even with an ACME InfiniteGasGenerator(TM) you still couldn't do it...)
I hoped it was clear from my comment that I was well aware that much of the science in RGB Mars is fictional. On the other hand, in reading the books it's also clear that the author did a vast amount of research on Mars and used a lot of real, verifiable science as the foundation of the fictional science.
What I'm curious about is where the line lies between true current science and fictional speculative science in these books. Especially with regard to information about Mars itself.
One thing I've wondered ever since reading RGB Mars is how much of the science postulated in the trilogy is based on verifiable current knowledge, and how much is speculation?
For example, the books postulate huge underground aquifers - clearly, based on this story, that's something we haven't been able to determine yet. "There might be water" vs "There's enough water to fill several oceans" is a big leap!
How much of the other science that KSR relies on for terraforming to work (eg the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the chemicals that are available from the Martian soil) is based on things we actually know about Mars, rather than just guesses? Anyone have the background to know how likely these guesses are to turn out to be true, based on our current knowledge?
For that matter, does anyone even know the up-to-date status of this story and just how much water is supposedly there?
You're the perfect example of the kind of person who blindly criticises anything they say, without actually reading it. This kind of crap barely deserves a response, but I'll give it one since it seems to be so common.
The FSF has nothing against capitalism; they practice it themselves, by selling CDs of GNU software. Sure, they don't hold it as an ideal above all others, and they treat it as answerable to their ethics: in other words, as a means to an end, but not the end in itself.
They're only opposed to a small subset of the current implementation of capitalism, and that subset is (not entirely coincidentally) the same part of what is commonly regarded as "capitalism" that many people hold as distinctly anti-capitalist: artificial monopolies created through copyright and patents. A "pure" capitalist would argue that these are wrong because they interfere with the free market; the FSF argues that they are wrong because they unethically prevent users from sharing.
"Information wants to be free", while perhaps originating from the Free Software community, has become the mantra of Napster/Kazaa users and I'm sure the FSF sees it as as much of a liability as I do. Perhaps "Information ought to be free"...
I could go on and on about the complete lack of basis in fact of your comment, but I don't have time. It's not like you actually have any interest in hearing an opposing viewpoint anyway, or perhaps you'd actually have read what they write, and know that you're spouting crap.
The FSF's position is important not because everyone is obligated to regard it as gospel and follow it blindly (although some do), or to regard it as heresy and blindly criticise it (although some do), but because in most (not all) cases, the FSF present a well-reasoned argument and raise an important issue.
I don't agree with them on the GNU/Linux thing (although even there, I respect their argument as well-reasoned, if you accept enough of their premises) but reading their position statements is always worthwhile, from my point of view. Even if I don't agree, it's good to challenge my views by exposing myself to well-reasoned opposing ones.
In this case, in particular, the FSF raised a very significant point and one which I, for one, hadn't noticed. I suspect that the chances of the outcome that the FSF hopes for are slim, since the community had to fight tooth and nail for the limited victory we already won, but it's very important to be aware of the limitations of the victory, and to continue to work towards eventually removing that limitation, even if it's not immediate. Without the FSF to point this out, we'd all be celebrating our "victory" and moving onto the next fight - the FSF remind us that there's still a battle here to continue fighting. That's a good thing, IMHO, whatever you think of the FSF.
1) They include(d) dselect because for historical reasons it was part of the dpkg package, and therefore not uninstallable without also losing the core of your package-management system. This has been fixed in recent versions of dpkg and dselect will be optional in the next release. Aptitude will be installed instead.
2) Maybe aptitude isn't the ideal solution, but it's certainly better. If for no other reason than that it has sensical (opposite of nonsensical) keybindings...
3) dselect was only an optional part of the install for woody and aptitude will be an optional step for sarge. Tasksel is offered instead. Tasksel is about as easy as it gets. Of course, experienced users will pick no tasks and install things with apt-get afterwards.
Mozilla 1.1 has been in unstable for ages, since pretty soon after 1.1 was released. Mozilla 1.1 is the latest stable Mozilla version. Ergo, Debian (unstable at least) is up to date with the latest Mozilla. When 1.2 is released, I bet Debian will get it pretty darn quickly.
I suspect that the reason it's not in testing is because someone found a bug in it that's considered release-critical.
Oh, and GNOME2 (the bits that aren't already in unstable, cf gnome-terminal) is apparently going into unstable this weekend (according to the gtk-gnome list archives). The holdup was transition scripts so that it wouldn't completely throw away all your existing configuration settings from GNOME1 (remember that the two can't coexist cleanly!). They're going to hold it out of testing artificially until these transition scripts have been tested a little more.
Personally I'm extremely glad of that, because I use GNOME to get real work done and I went so far as to artificially downgrade my sid machine to sarge specifically to avoid gnome-terminal and other GNOME2 packages. If GNOME2 had gone into Debian any sooner, I'd have been terribly unhappy.
I'd like to see xft/fontconfig make it into Debian, but the X maintainer has made a good case for holding off on that until X 4.3ish. When you're Red Hat and do one release a year, ongoing changes aren't a problem because you can ignore them until your next release. When you're Debian and do one release a day, ongoing changes hurt!
If you click on the big "8.0" ad on the right of www.aol.com right now, you'll get the option to download the 8.0 client.
I haven't tried this (it wouldn't make much sense, since I'm on linux and it's unlikely to work) but the system requirements still indicate that IE5.0+ is required (and the Windows 98/2000 requirements actually talk about the disk space required increasing if IE6 has to be installed). That suggests to me that even 8.0 still doesn't run Gecko as the embedded browser.
Can any AOL subscribers here confirm this? Like, for example, seeing what it does with sites where Mozilla and IE are known to give different behavior?
I'm not going to reply to most of this for lack of time (so please don't infer any position, either way, on the rest of your post from this lack of response). But the use of cygwin as an example was particularly unfortunate.
You see, Cygwin is a contraction of the words "cygnus" and "windows". And "cygnus" is a recursive acronym from "cygnus your GNU software".
Oh, and one other point I have to argue. The FSF has never claimed that the GNU tools are vital to Linux-the-kernel. It's true that it's almost certainly possible to build a system with a Linux kernel that's otherwise entirely a BSD system. But from the content of the FAQ and every argument I've ever heard from RMS, he'd want to see that system called BSD/Linux, not GNU/Linux. His point isn't that such a system isn't possible, but that no distribution in any kind of wide use actually does so.
Interestingly, if systems like that actually were in wide use, it would validate his argument further. Think about it: instructions on how to do any given operation are far more likely to depend on the toolset than on the kernel. So instructions for "Linux" (meaning Linux+GNU-tools) are less likely to apply to BSD/Linux than instructions for BSD are. It would make much more sense to have to choose between instructions for BSD versus GNU (which would cover the case of GNU tools on a BSD kernel also, as in the fledgling Debian GNU/BSD project, not to mention Hurd) than for BSD versus "Linux" as you're more likely to see now.
I've always been surprised to see so little activity in the area of switchable kernels based on the same overall operating system / distro. I suspect that the naming issue is actually partly to blame for this - if you think of the whole system as "Linux", what are you actually running if you keep the whole rest of the system the same but switch in a BSD or Hurd kernel?
Yup, that's my call also. He's a descendent of Gryffindor on his father's side, and whatserface's "only other accurate prophecy" was that the Heir of Gryffindor would be the undoing of the Heir of Slytherin.
That's why Voldemort says that he wanted to kill Harry's father, but only killed Harry's mother because she was trying to save Harry.
Only problem with that theory is, doesn't that mean that Harry should have inherited the Gryffindor green eyes from his father, rather than his mother? (I'm guessing as to the significance of the eyes, but why else make such a big deal about them?) Maybe that's another mistake like the incorrect order of deaths in GoF, but one that made it into several published books. And maybe the reason for the delay in book 5 is that JKR can't figure out how to reconcile the mistake with the story! Nah, now we're getting into conspiracy theory. But I'd bet money that the first two paragraphs of this post are accurate.
I don't see why you have to worry about that. The article was about minimizing the size of the executable file itself on disk, not in memory (otherwise some of the last few optimizations would be counterproductive: one of them increases the amount of memory requested in order to reuse a particular byte).
If the size of bash is going to be counted towards my seven-byte program, you'll have to count the size of the kernel towards his 45-byter. Sure, I still lose because bash+kernel+7 is greater than kernel+45, but at least the ratio isn't so bad as bash+7 vs 45;) (besides, I claim I could probably find a combination of kernel and shell which total smaller than the linux kernel, and on which "exit 42" would still work, but his 45-byter is x86-linux specific)
Slashdot Mirror
She'd lose my vote, if I were Californian. Not because of her naivete: I'd rather have a naive governor than one that's experienced in, and jaded by, the current political system. People who don't realize that what they're trying to do is impossible are far more likely to succeed than those who know it is.
But she'd lose my vote on one issue: I refuse to support anyone who supports IRV. Our current electoral system is bad enough: why oh why does every electoral-reformist have to support one of the few systems that's actually provably WORSE?
My personal preference for government elections is the Approval system, which eliminates the vast majority of the problems with Plurality without introducing worse ones, like a complicated ballot sheet (remember, a significant percentage of Floridians couldn't handle the ones we have now!) and violations of monotonicity.
I'm aware of the technical superiority of Concordet methods, and support them for elections in which all voters are highly educated, but the complexity of the ballot sheets should rule it out along with IRV for elections to public office, IMO.
One important question isn't answered in the /. article or in the press release: Does this law, like state 'Do Not Call' lists, apply to all email sent to addresses in Michigan, or does it only apply to email sent from Michigan addresses?
Sure, there are limits to the jurisdiction of the former kind of law, too (good luck enforcing it if the spammer is outside the States) but it would be massively more effective than the latter kind. How many spammers can figure out which of their target addresses are in Michigan?
In other words, it would be possible to cut tax to ZERO for 54% of americans and only have a 4% effect on the federal budget.
I say let's do it!
Interesting - are there any plans to open this up eventually?
Are there any other assemblies that are planned to be released in this way?
If someone in the community contributed an alternative implementation of DirectoryServices under the standard Mono license, would it be accepted?
Thanks,
Stuart (occasional mono user who had to #if out references to this namespace in some code to make it compile under Mono)
Unspoken but obvious is the motive behind the "improved composition" -- the altered image depicts a coalition soldier motioning threateningly to a father holding his young son.
Interesting - I saw it in exactly the opposite light.
In the first original photo, it's not terribly obvious that the man is carrying a young child; it just looks like the soldier motioning to some guy.
In the second original, it's clear that the man is carrying a young child, but now the soldier looks like he's pointing a gun at him rather than just motioning him.
Thus, the original images are either "motioning some guy" or "pointing a gun at a man with a young child". The altered image is "motioning a man with a young child". Thus the altered image seems much more "sympathetic" to the soldier than either of the originals alone.
(Note that I'm not suggesting that the altered image doesn't reflect the facts of what happened - indeed, it looks like it was altered to better reflect what actually happened, since neither real photo seems to have captured that very well (assuming the soldier wasn't really pointing the gun at the little kid)... All I'm suggesting is that the apparent effect of the modification for me was the exact opposite of what you suggested it was)
The books I'm referring to are Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. I highly recommend them. One word of warning though, set aside a large chunk of time to read them. It's not that they're slow going - the story feels pretty fast-paced as you read it - but there's simply an awful lot of story crammed into the three books. I think they took me about twice as long to read as Lord of the Rings...
That's great information, thanks!
Your comment about the atoms/molecules reaching escape velocity raises another question about the (pseudo)science in the trilogy. One of the major terraforming activities in the books is using various strategies (massive-scale generation of gases from chemicals in the surface rocks, burning up asteroids in the atmosphere, etc) to increase the volume of gas in Mars's atmosphere, thereby increasing its pressure to something human-breathable.
Is that actually possible, or does Real Science mean that as soon as you have gas at a human-livable temperature on Mars the molecules are all going to shoot off into space, regardless of how much volume of gas you try to add?
(Not that I can think of any way that you could actually generate the sheer amount of gas necessary to do this even if it did work... but it sounds from your comment as if even with an ACME InfiniteGasGenerator(TM) you still couldn't do it...)
Stuart.
Well, duh ;)
I hoped it was clear from my comment that I was well aware that much of the science in RGB Mars is fictional. On the other hand, in reading the books it's also clear that the author did a vast amount of research on Mars and used a lot of real, verifiable science as the foundation of the fictional science.
What I'm curious about is where the line lies between true current science and fictional speculative science in these books. Especially with regard to information about Mars itself.
One thing I've wondered ever since reading RGB Mars is how much of the science postulated in the trilogy is based on verifiable current knowledge, and how much is speculation?
For example, the books postulate huge underground aquifers - clearly, based on this story, that's something we haven't been able to determine yet. "There might be water" vs "There's enough water to fill several oceans" is a big leap!
How much of the other science that KSR relies on for terraforming to work (eg the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the chemicals that are available from the Martian soil) is based on things we actually know about Mars, rather than just guesses? Anyone have the background to know how likely these guesses are to turn out to be true, based on our current knowledge?
For that matter, does anyone even know the up-to-date status of this story and just how much water is supposedly there?
Gee whiz, when GIVEN all the source to Java by Sun, one team was able to port it to linux fairly quickly (when it already ran on Solaris!).
The GCJ team has done something FAR more impressive: without *any* of Sun's sources, they've built a Java implementation from the ground up.
But I shouldn't even bother: you've clearly made up your mind and no amount of facts are likely to change it...
In Soviet Russia, hard times fall on YOU!
(I am sooo sorry)
You're the perfect example of the kind of person who blindly criticises anything they say, without actually reading it. This kind of crap barely deserves a response, but I'll give it one since it seems to be so common.
The FSF has nothing against capitalism; they practice it themselves, by selling CDs of GNU software. Sure, they don't hold it as an ideal above all others, and they treat it as answerable to their ethics: in other words, as a means to an end, but not the end in itself.
They're only opposed to a small subset of the current implementation of capitalism, and that subset is (not entirely coincidentally) the same part of what is commonly regarded as "capitalism" that many people hold as distinctly anti-capitalist: artificial monopolies created through copyright and patents. A "pure" capitalist would argue that these are wrong because they interfere with the free market; the FSF argues that they are wrong because they unethically prevent users from sharing.
"Information wants to be free", while perhaps originating from the Free Software community, has become the mantra of Napster/Kazaa users and I'm sure the FSF sees it as as much of a liability as I do. Perhaps "Information ought to be free"...
I could go on and on about the complete lack of basis in fact of your comment, but I don't have time. It's not like you actually have any interest in hearing an opposing viewpoint anyway, or perhaps you'd actually have read what they write, and know that you're spouting crap.
The FSF's position is important not because everyone is obligated to regard it as gospel and follow it blindly (although some do), or to regard it as heresy and blindly criticise it (although some do), but because in most (not all) cases, the FSF present a well-reasoned argument and raise an important issue.
I don't agree with them on the GNU/Linux thing (although even there, I respect their argument as well-reasoned, if you accept enough of their premises) but reading their position statements is always worthwhile, from my point of view. Even if I don't agree, it's good to challenge my views by exposing myself to well-reasoned opposing ones.
In this case, in particular, the FSF raised a very significant point and one which I, for one, hadn't noticed. I suspect that the chances of the outcome that the FSF hopes for are slim, since the community had to fight tooth and nail for the limited victory we already won, but it's very important to be aware of the limitations of the victory, and to continue to work towards eventually removing that limitation, even if it's not immediate. Without the FSF to point this out, we'd all be celebrating our "victory" and moving onto the next fight - the FSF remind us that there's still a battle here to continue fighting. That's a good thing, IMHO, whatever you think of the FSF.
Stuart.
Why, oh why, advertise priceline, of all companies? That cost you a lot of respect in my eyes, at least.
That and the, er, singing (for want of a better word).
Stuart.
This is (possibly, arguably) +1 funny, or (possibly, arguably) -1 troll, but certainly not in any way worthy of "interesting".
"new languages like Smalltalk"?
"stop using Object Oriented techniques and move to XP"?
"revenue stream increase of the order of Olog(n)"?
Whoever modded this interesting should be ashamed of themselves: it's not like those gibberish-flags are subtle...
What would you prefer? Exportion?
1) They include(d) dselect because for historical reasons it was part of the dpkg package, and therefore not uninstallable without also losing the core of your package-management system. This has been fixed in recent versions of dpkg and dselect will be optional in the next release. Aptitude will be installed instead.
2) Maybe aptitude isn't the ideal solution, but it's certainly better. If for no other reason than that it has sensical (opposite of nonsensical) keybindings...
3) dselect was only an optional part of the install for woody and aptitude will be an optional step for sarge. Tasksel is offered instead. Tasksel is about as easy as it gets. Of course, experienced users will pick no tasks and install things with apt-get afterwards.
Mozilla 1.1 has been in unstable for ages, since pretty soon after 1.1 was released. Mozilla 1.1 is the latest stable Mozilla version. Ergo, Debian (unstable at least) is up to date with the latest Mozilla. When 1.2 is released, I bet Debian will get it pretty darn quickly.
I suspect that the reason it's not in testing is because someone found a bug in it that's considered release-critical.
Oh, and GNOME2 (the bits that aren't already in unstable, cf gnome-terminal) is apparently going into unstable this weekend (according to the gtk-gnome list archives). The holdup was transition scripts so that it wouldn't completely throw away all your existing configuration settings from GNOME1 (remember that the two can't coexist cleanly!). They're going to hold it out of testing artificially until these transition scripts have been tested a little more.
Personally I'm extremely glad of that, because I use GNOME to get real work done and I went so far as to artificially downgrade my sid machine to sarge specifically to avoid gnome-terminal and other GNOME2 packages. If GNOME2 had gone into Debian any sooner, I'd have been terribly unhappy.
I'd like to see xft/fontconfig make it into Debian, but the X maintainer has made a good case for holding off on that until X 4.3ish. When you're Red Hat and do one release a year, ongoing changes aren't a problem because you can ignore them until your next release. When you're Debian and do one release a day, ongoing changes hurt!
Stuart.
If you click on the big "8.0" ad on the right of www.aol.com right now, you'll get the option to download the 8.0 client.
I haven't tried this (it wouldn't make much sense, since I'm on linux and it's unlikely to work) but the system requirements still indicate that IE5.0+ is required (and the Windows 98/2000 requirements actually talk about the disk space required increasing if IE6 has to be installed). That suggests to me that even 8.0 still doesn't run Gecko as the embedded browser.
Can any AOL subscribers here confirm this? Like, for example, seeing what it does with sites where Mozilla and IE are known to give different behavior?
Stuart.
I'm not going to reply to most of this for lack of time (so please don't infer any position, either way, on the rest of your post from this lack of response). But the use of cygwin as an example was particularly unfortunate.
You see, Cygwin is a contraction of the words "cygnus" and "windows". And "cygnus" is a recursive acronym from "cygnus your GNU software".
Oh, and one other point I have to argue. The FSF has never claimed that the GNU tools are vital to Linux-the-kernel. It's true that it's almost certainly possible to build a system with a Linux kernel that's otherwise entirely a BSD system. But from the content of the FAQ and every argument I've ever heard from RMS, he'd want to see that system called BSD/Linux, not GNU/Linux. His point isn't that such a system isn't possible, but that no distribution in any kind of wide use actually does so.
Interestingly, if systems like that actually were in wide use, it would validate his argument further. Think about it: instructions on how to do any given operation are far more likely to depend on the toolset than on the kernel. So instructions for "Linux" (meaning Linux+GNU-tools) are less likely to apply to BSD/Linux than instructions for BSD are. It would make much more sense to have to choose between instructions for BSD versus GNU (which would cover the case of GNU tools on a BSD kernel also, as in the fledgling Debian GNU/BSD project, not to mention Hurd) than for BSD versus "Linux" as you're more likely to see now.
I've always been surprised to see so little activity in the area of switchable kernels based on the same overall operating system / distro. I suspect that the naming issue is actually partly to blame for this - if you think of the whole system as "Linux", what are you actually running if you keep the whole rest of the system the same but switch in a BSD or Hurd kernel?
Edit -> Preferences
The "Navigator" item should be initially selected. If not, select it.
Then look in the pane that says "Select the buttons you want to see in the toolbars". You can uncheck "Search" and check "Go" from there.
(I hate to be mean, but did you actually look for that at all? I mean it's in the first pane that's selected in the Preferences dialog...)
Stuart.
Yup, that's my call also. He's a descendent of Gryffindor on his father's side, and whatserface's "only other accurate prophecy" was that the Heir of Gryffindor would be the undoing of the Heir of Slytherin.
That's why Voldemort says that he wanted to kill Harry's father, but only killed Harry's mother because she was trying to save Harry.
Only problem with that theory is, doesn't that mean that Harry should have inherited the Gryffindor green eyes from his father, rather than his mother? (I'm guessing as to the significance of the eyes, but why else make such a big deal about them?) Maybe that's another mistake like the incorrect order of deaths in GoF, but one that made it into several published books. And maybe the reason for the delay in book 5 is that JKR can't figure out how to reconcile the mistake with the story! Nah, now we're getting into conspiracy theory. But I'd bet money that the first two paragraphs of this post are accurate.
Stuart.
I don't see why you have to worry about that. The article was about minimizing the size of the executable file itself on disk, not in memory (otherwise some of the last few optimizations would be counterproductive: one of them increases the amount of memory requested in order to reuse a particular byte).
;) (besides, I claim I could probably find a combination of kernel and shell which total smaller than the linux kernel, and on which "exit 42" would still work, but his 45-byter is x86-linux specific)
If the size of bash is going to be counted towards my seven-byte program, you'll have to count the size of the kernel towards his 45-byter. Sure, I still lose because bash+kernel+7 is greater than kernel+45, but at least the ratio isn't so bad as bash+7 vs 45
Every time I see that article I have to point out that it's easy to do much better than that.
./a.out; echo $?
...
...
...
$
42
$ wc -c a.out
7 a.out
$
Can you guess the contents of a.out?
$ cat a.out; echo
exit 42
$
(the "; echo" is there because a.out doesn't have a trailing newline - every byte counts!)
Stuart.
So you just need quick reactions and a fast connection... ;)