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User: Schmorgluck

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Comments · 541

  1. Re:One small caveat on Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Ever Known," Says Waltz · · Score: 1

    Ahmadinejad is prown to spout random insane shit, which makes the sanity of Iran's government rather questionable.

  2. Re:Maybe if we eliminated on Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Ever Known," Says Waltz · · Score: 1

    You may want to read up about Cincinnatus. He was made a dictator by the Roman senate because there was an issue that required that kind of power to be fixed. And once the the problem was fixed, once he saved the Roman Republic, he handed the power he got back to the Senate, and went back to cultivate his own lands.

    But as a fan of George Washington, you proably know that already.

    And maybe you will find that the Society of the Cincinnati has outlived its usefulness.

    I am French, and a big fan of La Fayette, who ended up a member of said society (and an adopted son to George Washington), was a key personality in the French Revolution, and maybe, maybe, was the one person who could have prevented Napoleon from inventing modern dictatorship. The main reason he didn't was a lack of personal ambition. He finally conspired against Napoleon, but it was too late.

    Napoleon never got to imprison him because he was too popular.

    As a side note, La Fayette is one of the main reasons why I consider the USA and France as Sister republics, born of similar principles. And one day will come when La Fayette's cinders will have to be transfered to the Panthéon. And when this day comes (and it WILL come), the POTUS will be a mandatory guest, since La Fayette is a hero of the Independance War.

  3. Re:Maybe if we eliminated on Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Ever Known," Says Waltz · · Score: 1

    Indeed. Even the most well-meaning person, if put in a position of power, can end up riding a tiger they are unable to tame, and get used to the tiger. In other words, power corrupts. Someone with absolute power could just shoot the tiger, but absolute power corrupts absolutely. So yeah, a rotation of leaders with limited power is probably the optimal solution.

  4. Re:One small caveat on Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Ever Known," Says Waltz · · Score: 1

    Oh, after glancing at the original article, I realize that what I just said is close to the point Kenneth Waltz makes. Well, I'm wary of his theory, just like I'm wary of my own optimism.

  5. Re:One small caveat on Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Ever Known," Says Waltz · · Score: 1

    Sanity doesn't seem to be the main property of the current Iranian government. The optimist in me hopes that, if Iran gets nuclear weapons, its people will be bolder than ever to overthrow the regime before it does something stupid.

  6. Re:Texas eh? on Texas Scientists Regret Loss of Higgs Boson Quest · · Score: 1

    (Inevitable large hardon collider joke)

  7. Re:Not only did they reject it... on ACTA Rejected By European Parliament · · Score: 1

    Specifically, these are the MEPs from The Greens-European Free Alliance group (you can see its logo on the lower right of the signs).

    It's worth noting that the two MEPs of the Swedish Pirate Party belong to this group, which is unsurprizing given the Greens have been sharing their concerns for a long time.

  8. Re:Pound is a weight=force on CERN Announcing New LHC Results July 4th · · Score: 1

    What you have just highlighted though is one of the (many) reasons why imperial units are stupid and inconsistent. The pound is a measure of weight which is a force otherwise you cannot explain the use of pounds per square inch as units for pressure.

    If you are going to use that kind of reasoning - a pound can be converted directly into kilograms, therefore it must in fact be a mass.

    And as a result, pound per square inch can't be a pressure unit, which was entirely his point

  9. Re:Lots of coffee or caffeine = always indoors? on Caffeine Linked To Lower Skin Cancer Risk · · Score: 1

    Interesting observations, but note that Italians drink a lot of coffee too.

  10. Re:Dunno, might help but not solve problem on Google Proposes Fighting Piracy By Blocking Ad Money · · Score: 1

    We are getting close to carrying around enough storage so that every kid could just expect to have 'everything' ever released on a major label sitting in their mobile device. Just a few more turns of Moore's Law.

    Moore's Law doesn't really apply to storage devices, they actually progress much faster than microprocessors. It's sometimes called Kryder's Law.

    Just my two bits.

  11. Re:Yea right a 'glitch' on Facebook API Bug Deletes Contact Info On Phones · · Score: 3, Funny

    No, I really think it's a glitch, because it's totally incoherent with their business model: Facebook deleting personal data? That would be new!

  12. Re:anything but "rock solid" on Exxon CEO: Warming Happening, But Fears Overblown · · Score: 1

    Indeed, that's the kind of post I'd mod "+1 Interesting" as a form of "+1 disagree".

  13. Re:It's always been obvious on The PHP Singularity · · Score: 1

    $_ = shift;
    tr/+/ /;
    s/%(..)/pack('c', hex($1))/eg;
    return($_);

    I'm self-taught in Perl, and it took me only a few seconds to understand what this code does. Granted, it would have taken me longer when I was beginning, but still, I don't see anything wrong with this code. It's quite straightforward, actually. Seriously, there are sloppy programmers in any language, but you seem to suck at showing an exemple of sloppy code. If that was your intention, that is.

    Note that I have nothing against Python, I'm starting to learn it out of curiosity.

    But I agree about your point about PHP being an easiest path up to a certain point. If I may risk a Perl comparison, it's a lot like coding in Perl without "use strict": it works for very simple things, but past a (rather low) level of complexity, it quickly becomes a mess.

    Every time I tried to learn PHP, I ended up with a headache as soon as I tried to do anything more complex than taking some shit out of a DB and inserting it in the HTML page.

    There's one thing PHP has got for it, still, that may also have given it a boost at first, it's the fact that you could put the code in treatment instructions markers in an (X)HTML page, which made the document well-formed XML. No such stupid shit as the <%..%> marker in JSP, for example.

    But the main selling point was that it was (at least apparently) easy to deploy for unskilled server admins. It wasn't designed to write files in a file system, therefore it wasn't a risk to said file system.

    It allowed for PLENTY of amateur free or very cheap servers, handled by operators of various skill levels, which was GREAT for the pennyless who just wanted to set up their personal website. As a result, plenty of people ended up having half-assed skills in Web building, and PHP skills were a cheap commodity.

  14. Re:C'mon on Exxon CEO: Warming Happening, But Fears Overblown · · Score: 1

    On second thought, I'm not sure the boiling water was a very good example of a chaotic system. Not much sensitivity to initial conditions. Oh well... It depends on the scale of observation, I guess.

  15. Re:Standard PR on Exxon CEO: Warming Happening, But Fears Overblown · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So you are pretending that deforestation has been reversed? I didn't get the memo.

  16. Re:C'mon on Exxon CEO: Warming Happening, But Fears Overblown · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The atmosphere is a chaotic system, but the climate configuration, is a general property of it. And it's perfectly possible to study the general properties of a chaotic system with good precision. You can predict the general properties of a quantity of water boiling in a pan, even if reliably predicting the trajectory of bubbles is out of reach.

  17. Re:C'mon on Exxon CEO: Warming Happening, But Fears Overblown · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Actually, Tillerson cleverly attacks the weakest part of research about climate change: the prospective part, about its consequences. Remember it was in that part of the IPCC report that there was reviewing issues.

    Since the hard sciences part turned out to be rock solid, staying in denial of it would have been disingenuous.

  18. Because someone has to say it... on Strong AI and the Imminent Revolution In Robotics · · Score: 4, Funny

    I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

  19. Re:why in the hell on Google Launches Endangered Languages Project · · Score: 1

    Wouldn't work, because "doch" (or "si" in French) isn't inherently snarky, not even necessarily adversarial. It can be merely informative.

    I'm French, and I learned German before English (which was admittedly unusual even by then), and when I started the latter I've been kinda confused by the absence of an equivalent to French "si" or German "doch".

  20. Re:why in the hell on Google Launches Endangered Languages Project · · Score: 1

    I don't think there was much to de-Germanize in France during the Roman Empire. Wasn't France basically a Celtic language territory, with the Gaulish family and some Brythonic being spoken and basically wiped out and replaced by Latin under the Romans?

    You're basically right, except the Brythonic arrived later from Great Britain in the fifth century or so, and settled in Brittany, giving modern Breton (which is also on the list of threatened languages).

    French is basically derived from Latin, with traces of Gaulish in the lexicon, and a strong later Germanic influence.

  21. Re:Slashdot might not the right place for this, bu on Why Do Programming Languages Succeed Or Fail? · · Score: 1

    The reason C syntax is popular is because C is a very good language for learning serious programming skills, as it will obediently perform any awful shit you ask it, then fling it back into your face harshly. It's the fucking drill of programming skills. It has got other qualities, but this one is very important for academical circles.

    As a result, most if not all serious programmers had to go through it at some point in their education, and end up reusing its syntactic elements in the event that they design a new language.

  22. Re:Because programmers use them or they don't on Why Do Programming Languages Succeed Or Fail? · · Score: 1

    I agree that integration with HTML is good, the code being enclosed in a processing instruction marker, it easily made a PHP script a well-formed XML document, which made debugging easier, at least on a structural level. On this respect, it was way better than JSP and its absurd <%...%> marker.

    But you stated the real selling point of PHP: "any damn fool web designer could throw a little bit of PHP into their pages." No need to engage in extensive learning, someone who only knew HTML could manage to obtain a result pretty quickly. So it's not so much that it was easy to learn (hence my earlier reservation) than it needed very few learning before obtaining a result. That's why it's called "Personal HomePage", no matter what they pretend PHP means, nowadays.

    This early boon ended up being a curse, because it resulted in a huge crowd of PHP "programmers" with no proper training in programmation. And when the fad hit its peak, properly trained programmers ended up being forced to use a sketchy (to be polite) language to actually get a job.

    Another selling point of PHP was it being Free Software. It endeared it to many key people in the industry. It wasn't Microsoft's ASP, you see. I'm a huge supporter of Free Software, but I must painfully admit that concerning PHP, the derogative term "freetard" has never been more deserved. It even undermined another Free Software asset, Perl, that (IMHO) could have given the same result for base users with proper libraries.

  23. Re:Because programmers use them or they don't on Why Do Programming Languages Succeed Or Fail? · · Score: 2

    PHP complies to none of these except A, and even that is arguable.

  24. Re:Ha! Broken even before that. on EU "Clean IT" Project Considers Terrorist Content Database · · Score: 1

    Disclosing it to a third-party would be illegal, anyway.

  25. Re:This is one area we've regressed. on FBI Wants To "Advance the Science of Interrogation" · · Score: 1

    I looked up about Hanns Scharff. It came to no surprise for me that he worked for the Luftwaffe instead of, say, the SS.