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Sudoku
I’ve been playing Sudoku on Google+. i’ve more or less mastered the easy and medium levels, but it takes me about 30 minutes to do a hard level, and I haven’t tried expert yet. Sudoku is a fairly dumb game in some ways; as a colleague of mine pointed out, it’s trivial to write a…
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Pay Voting
New plan: let’s let people pay to vote. Everybody gets one vote free, just like today. You can also pay, say, $1000 for another vote, then $2000 for the next one, $3000 for the one after that, etc. Also, you can sell your vote, so a cheaper way to get more votes is to pay…
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Voluntary Foreclosure
The otherwise completely forgettable movie Larry Crowne had one scene I found quite interesting. The eponymous protagonist, played by Tom Hanks in his blandest mode, is presented as an all-around good guy. He is gentlemanly, helpful, considerate, and in fact has no flaws except for the rather minor one which starts the little action there…
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CVS SSH
Sorry for the long posting hiatus. I have enough readers now that it’s hard to write the usual random nonsense. I was recently reminded of an old problem using CVS over SSH, which was an interesting example of various different instances of reasonable behaviour adding up to a bug. It’s possible that this bug has…
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Executable stack
The gcc compiler implements an extension to C: nested functions. A trivial example: int f() { int i = 2; int g(int j) { return i + j; } return g(3); } The function f will return 5. Note in particular that the nested function g refers to the variable i defined in the enclosing…