Estou lendo um romance americano. Um dos personagens é faxineiro de escola. As crianças fazem pouco dele. Quando criança, seu pai (que batia na mãe) massacrou toda sua família, menos ele.
Quinhentas páginas depois, sou pego de surpresa pela descrição dos cabelos ruivos de sua irmã. Percebo, de repente, para minha imensa surpresa, que passei esse tempo todo visualizando-o... negro.
Adoro a visão do Alex sobre o racismo, de que não é um problema individual mas do sistema.
Delightfully useless epiphany: Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them. Let's call these devices Vss and Vdd, respectively.
In this model, a UNIX pipe acts like a wire, that is, a conductor with parasitic capacitance. If the pipe is connected to Vss, its pipe buffer in kernel space quickly fills up with null-bytes, and the pipe acts like a negatively charged metal plate. If it is connected to Vdd, the pipe buffer is drained, and the pipe acts like a positively charged metal plate.
Really cool, the article describes using unix shell utilities and a custom MOSFET application written in C in order to simulate circuits. I need to read this later to really understand it.
So some deranged imagination, came up with the idea of the configure script, which sniffed at your system and set up a Makefile that would work.
Writing configure scripts was hard work, for one thing you needed a ton of different systems to test them on, so copy&paste became the order of the day.
Then some even more deranged imagination, came up with the idea of writing a script for writing configure scripts, and in an amazing and daring attempt at the "all time most deranged" crown, used an obscure and insufferable macro-processor called m4 for the implementation.
Now, as it transpires, writing the specification for the configure producing macros was tedious, so somebody wrote a tool to...
That's a hint. Menstruation is a consequence of self-defense. Females build up that thickened uterine lining to protect and insulate themselves from the greedy embryo and its selfish placenta. In species with especially invasive embryos, it's too late to wait for the moment of implantation — instead, they build up the wall pre-emptively, before and in case of fertilization. Then, if fertilization doesn't occur, the universal process of responding to declining progesterone levels by sloughing off the lining occurs.
