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Showing posts from March, 2010

A solution to the Halting problem

[ This is not about this Halting problem . ] The Halting problem The problem is how to halt execution of Ali Hussain Sibat. I cite CNN as of 31 March 2010 : "A Lebanese man charged with sorcery and sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia is scheduled to be beheaded on Friday [PF: 2 April] the man's lawyer said Wednesday [PF: 31 March]." Amnesty International has reported about this case on 8 Dec 2009 [ Article from the Amnesty International Website ]. I became aware of the case by CNN's article on 19 Mar 2010 . Update : CNN reported on Thursday, 1 April 2010 that Sibat "won't face beheading Friday [PF: 2 April], his lawyer said Thursday [PF: 1 April]". The solution to the Halting problem I am pretty sure that Sibat's lawyer, his family, Amnesty International, Lebanese government and many other individuals and organizations are working frantically to stop the beheading. Here is an online petition that I ask you to sign if you agree with me that sorcery d

Proprietary hardware jokes

Suppose you own a 2007 model of the then-cutting-edge, high-end laptop of a given brand A with say 4 GB of Ram, an 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Further suppose you want to purchase the current display offering of the same brand (available since Oct 2008), wouldn't you expect to be able connecting both expensive pieces of hardware without yet further investment, say without purchasing a converter that's not even available from brand A? Of course, I should get a 2010 model of an A-branded laptop, and everything works fine until I guess 2011, when they replace the Mini DisplayPort by say a new "Nano DVI port". Suppose you are very happy with the display, the computing power, the browser speed of your lovely smartphone, again from the same brand A. Occasionally, you would like to write some longer emails or edit online documents, or ride on a wave, for which it would make terribly sense to have an external keyboard. Technically, it is trivial to enable this through bluetooth