"Fo shizzle" is a useful linguistic construct. You could just say "I concur." But "fo shizzle" is laced with metadata. You now have a hint that the speaker is joking, feigning enthusiasm.
No, you don't have any such hint, unless you happen to already be familiar with that particular dialect and subculture. Expecting every English speaker to be familiar with every dialect and subculture around the planet is simply ridiculous. Thanks to modern communications and travel, people are no longer confined to interacting only with people who live within 10 miles; we need to stop dividing ourselves this way as it only hampers communications.
That's fine if you have 50 years of warning. If you only have 2 years, however, you're going to need a much, much, much more powerful probe, probably something with nuclear engines. Good luck getting enough agreement and funding to pull that one off in time.
Stopping an asteroid, unless you have an absolutely huge amount of warning time beforehand (in which case a fairly cheap probe with a small thruster should be enough to move it enough to not be a risk), requires a large amount of resources and money to build something large enough to actually do the job. The deniers don't want to spend money on anything in space, they want to spend it on defense contractors (who don't make spacecraft).
No, that's NIH. Jews circumcised (and still do) because of all that Biblical crap. Christians don't believe it's a religious necessity, since they think they're somehow exempt from all the Leviticus silliness (except for tithing), so they stopped doing it ages ago, until Dr. Kellogg brought it back. That's why Christians in Europe don't circumcise (and haven't, ever), while most Americans do.
Maybe, but you'd need a compatible donor (like a relative), and you still have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life. With current arficially-constructed penises (made using the patient's own tissue), you don't have the rejection problem.
That's easy. Dr. John Kellogg (relative of the guy who invented cereal) really hated masturbation, and pushed the procedure as a way to discourage adolescent boys from masturbating. This of course became popular because Victorian-era America hated sexuality.
I'm going to pass on clicking on your links. This sounds like something I don't want to scar my mind with, as it's something you can't "unsee", much like the goatse.cx picture. The before and after pics are probably OK, but I really, really, really don't want to see the during-surgery pics.
I don't see how Mars is a picnic, when you're talking about terraforming. It's a fraction of the size and gravity of Venus, and has no atmosphere to speak of, and no molten core. Venus has all these. It's a much easier prospect to figure out a way to strip Venus of much of its atmosphere than to figure out how to get Mars to develop one approaching 1atm of pressure (instead of 1/200atm).
Do you honestly think it's more difficult to strip off part of Venus's atmosphere (perhaps using microbes somehow to convert it into a liquid or solid), than to do all three of the following: 1) bombard Mars with large asteroids so it can have more mass so it can have something closer to earth-normal gravity (you're going to need to grab a moon from Jupiter to do this effectively) 2) move Mars' orbit closer to the Sun so it's warmer 3) melt Mars' core so it can have a magnetosphere and keep an atmosphere and protect humans from radiation
As for the day, who cares? Once the atmosphere is converted into an Earth-like one, colonists will just have to get used to it. If people can live in submarines for months on end, or near the poles where days last 6 months, they can certainly handle that.
How is it not realistic? It's three days away! Yeah, if you need to get someone to a hospital within 6 hours they're toast, but 3 days isn't bad (6 days if you need to send a craft there first). It's certainly a lot better than 12-24 months (round-trip).
If we could build a lander module and command module to transport people from the Moon's surface back to Earth back in 1969, we can certainly build an emergency-return lifepod to launch someone from the Moon back to the Earth in 2020 or so, given the far better technology we now have.
"Plenty of people" are also depressed, fickle and unbalanced, the solution to which is often spending more time outdoors experiencing nature.
No, it's not. Doing that would cut into the time we're supposed to be spending at work, slaving away for our corporate masters so we can afford to pay the rent.
The Moon has water and gravity too, and is theorized to have underground lava tubes already there, so you might not need TBMs. And it's only 3 days away in case you need more supplies or someone wants to go home.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, wouldn't it be easier to try terraforming Venus instead? At least it has 0.9g gravity, instead of Mar's lame 0.3, and it's already close to the sun so it's warm. And it actually does hold a substantial atmosphere; the trick is reducing its pressure and temperature and making it earth-like. Venus is Earth's sister planet; Mars is really too small and far away from the Sun.
I'm pretty sure the bit about the gravity well is incorrect: Venus has 3 times the gravity of Mars, so if you're referring to rocky worlds in our solar system, Venus would be the deepest gravity well. Mars I believe is #2.
However, I do agree that Mars seems rather premature, and that the Lagrange points and the Moon would be better candidates for offworld habitats in the near term, due to their proximity. One big problem with the Lagrange points (and also LEO) is that there's no gravity there, so people can't stay there for very long. We'd have to build big, rotating space stations, which probably are not a good idea in LEO, but would be great at a Lagrange point. The problem here, however, is that we don't have the technology to build such things yet: we need to be able to mine materials in space, and refine and manufacture things there too, to do such a thing, because the amount of fuel needed to build a big, liveable station (not a puny little thing like the ISS) at a Lagrange point would be prohibitively expensive with current launch technology since we haven't built a space elevator yet.
It seems to me what we should be working on is asteroid mining, then establishing a Lunar colony for mining, refining, and manufacturing of materials mined on asteroids or the Moon. Once we have a lot of capabilities in Moon's much shallower gravity well, we'll be able to do more stuff at Lagrange points or geosynchronous orbit. After that, human missions to Mars or beyond would be much more feasible and easier.
Note, however, that I am not an astrophysicist, so take this with a grain of salt.
I'm sure they have, their business methods are different. Instead of being like Japanese or Korean conglomerates, they have an American business philosophy, which is basically to concentrate on fewer things and then maximize profit from them, except they're taking it to an extreme even for American companies.
The problem with this philosophy is that it isn't very successful in the long term. Those Asian conglomerates have very long lifetimes and employ lots of people in their societies. If you care about a corporation's duty to society, as Asian corporations do, instead of merely profitability, this is important. American companies don't generally have the great longevity or the immense overall revenues that Asian companies do. Also, having your hand in lots of things generates mindshare: people like one thing from your company, they're more likely to buy other things from it.
It brings (well, brought) mindshare, and that's pretty important. When someone likes one thing your company provides, they'll want to use other things from your company too.
And now, by sacrificing mindshare by axing every product that isn't generating a lot of profit, they're making it so they can't enter any new markets: every time they try to try something new with their "let's throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" approach to business, people are going to say to themselves "well this isn't a well-established business for them like search, Maps, Gmail, or Youtube, and they're always killing off all their smaller products, so I better not bother even looking at this thing because it'll probably be on the chopping block soon. Last time I heard about some cool little thing from Google, it was already being canceled!" Who's going to want to make themselves dependent on any new Google product when they have such a track record of killing of popular but not-popular-enough products? It's a total crapshoot whether a new product will be long-lasting or just something else to get the ax. So why bother?
No, you're right, but that's not the aim of a FOSS DVCS like Git. Unlike some proprietary software solutions, it does not aim to include every conceivable thing you need for any task, it just focuses on one task and does it well. If you want bug-tracking, you use something like Bugzilla, if you want a forum, you use something else, etc.
Yes, if Github vanishes suddenly, the bug tracker and forum etc. will be gone if someone didn't back them up somehow. But the code, and its history, is easily the most important part of any software project. You can recover pretty easily from the loss of your bug tracker and your discussion forum. Recovering from a loss of your source code (and all the development branches) is not so easy. Git makes this easy because with it, everyone who checked out a copy has the entire repository and history (up to the point at which they checked it out). And whoever checked in the newest change will have a repository that mirrors that on Github, so as long as that person is around, no data is lost.
Most SVN users just check out what they need, and that's it. They don't do full client-side clones if they don't have a good reason for it.
With Git, every user has a full client-side clone.
So, when the central server you're using suddenly disappears, with SVN you're hosed if you didn't specifically prepare for this, but with Git it's no big deal at all.
Google is weird in that they'll quickly abandon anything that they aren't #1 or #2 in, or that they don't think they're going to achieve that (rationally or not). So you have to consider that when you look at their offerings. Gmail isn't going anywhere, because it's #1. Same with search, same with Youtube, same with Google Maps. Anything else is more iffy. Google Fiber is probably pretty safe, since there isn't any good competition for it in its local markets. G+ seems to be safe for now because they refuse to give it up, but I wouldn't rely on it. Google Docs seems fairly safe, since its main competition is Office365 but again you never know. But anything smaller, I wouldn't rely on it because it's just too likely they'll pull the carpet out from under your feet.
It's really odd, and honestly a shame. A healthy market requires more than 2 strong competitors, and lots of other companies are perfectly happy to be #3, #4, or #5, or even farther back. Just because you're a big company doesn't mean you need to be #1 in everything you do. Just look at a lot of the Japanese conglomerates: they hang in there for ages, as long as they're profitable. At the end of the day, that's really all that matters in business: are you in the black, able to pay your salaries and expenses, and perhaps generating a profit? If so, you're succeeding. It's when you're in the red and it doesn't look like you're going to pull out that you need to throw in the towel and try something else.
The "D" is for Distributed. Git doesn't require you to use a single server; it's pretty much trivial to move your project history from Github to a competing service, since you're copying the entire project history every time you clone your repo anyway. So even if Github instantly vanished tomorrow, all the project authors would easily be able to re-clone their repos on a different service. That's the advantage of DVCS.
Maybe, maybe not. Another factor you're missing here is performance. If you can do the job with fewer lines but in Perl or some other interpreted language, but the application calls for good performance, that's not a good idea. But C++ gives very good performance (good enough for high-performance games apparently) unlike a lot of other languages; you get C-like performance with a higher level of abstraction.
I found, after decades of experimentation, that simplicity and consistency beats everything else if you want to produce reliable software. Now, I use C exclusively just so I don't have to deal with multiple different ways to do something because the C++ standards committee got a bee in its bonnet about the latest hot new concept that first came out in 1959 and was forgotten until last year.
The problem here is that you're missing out on a lot of really useful features that C++ has, which can make programming simpler and need less boilerplate code (just look at all the fake-OO stuff in the Linux kernel for example).
The key is that while C++ does have a LOT of features, some of them questionable, you aren't forced to use any of them. It's entirely possible (and even common in some software shops, especially ones doing embedded coding) to use a stripped-down subset of the C++ language. I've heard it called "C with classes". Take a look at the DO-178 standard for C++ coding sometime.
The problem with possessing multiple ways to solve a problem is that every developer takes it as a personal challenge to find and use all the different ways.
This isn't a problem. Go to any company doing avionics software in C++ and look at how they do it: they have a published coding style which basically forbids large swaths of C++'s feature set (including exceptions). Developers simply aren't allowed to use any of these! And to make sure they don't, all the code is code-reviewed by other developers to make sure it meets the coding standard. Anyone who insists on breaking the standard won't be working there for long.
found that 90% of what you can do with X lines of fairly complex grammar in C++ can be done with around 1.5X of straightforward C grammer.
Yes, so now you've inflated your SLOC by 50% for nothing just because you're too undisciplined to hold yourself to a C++ coding standard. That's 50% more lines where you can have bugs.
That's an unfortunate and disappointing story, but one of the benefits of OSS is that you can fork it. So it the project has been taken over somehow by some jerk, it is still possible for interested developers to fork it and make a different product using all that hard work of yours.
Of course, the big problem is that the project has to be run by people who have the time to run it; if the jerk has time and is willing, and everyone else is too busy to bother, oh well...
This is idiotic. As some other responders have pointed out, this is a management failure. Just about everything that's gone wrong with software engineering can be rightfully blamed on piss-poor management.
If you get rid of more than half your developers, that now leaves that much more work for the remaining ones to do, including a lot of busywork, testing, etc. Do you really want your top-notch developers doing repetitive testing and QA? How long do you think these developers will stick around now that they need to work 12-16 hours a day to pick up the slack from getting rid of the average performers? Or do you think you're going to somehow, magically hire a bunch more star performers? If that was so easy, why isn't your whole team composed of star performers right now?
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"Fo shizzle" is a useful linguistic construct. You could just say "I concur." But "fo shizzle" is laced with metadata. You now have a hint that the speaker is joking, feigning enthusiasm.
No, you don't have any such hint, unless you happen to already be familiar with that particular dialect and subculture. Expecting every English speaker to be familiar with every dialect and subculture around the planet is simply ridiculous. Thanks to modern communications and travel, people are no longer confined to interacting only with people who live within 10 miles; we need to stop dividing ourselves this way as it only hampers communications.
That's fine if you have 50 years of warning. If you only have 2 years, however, you're going to need a much, much, much more powerful probe, probably something with nuclear engines. Good luck getting enough agreement and funding to pull that one off in time.
Stopping an asteroid, unless you have an absolutely huge amount of warning time beforehand (in which case a fairly cheap probe with a small thruster should be enough to move it enough to not be a risk), requires a large amount of resources and money to build something large enough to actually do the job. The deniers don't want to spend money on anything in space, they want to spend it on defense contractors (who don't make spacecraft).
If I live a few decades more, there will be several women alive my age for every man.
Big deal, they're all going to be elderly, white-haired biddies and certainly not anything you're going to be excited about jumping in bed with.
No, that's NIH. Jews circumcised (and still do) because of all that Biblical crap. Christians don't believe it's a religious necessity, since they think they're somehow exempt from all the Leviticus silliness (except for tithing), so they stopped doing it ages ago, until Dr. Kellogg brought it back. That's why Christians in Europe don't circumcise (and haven't, ever), while most Americans do.
Maybe, but you'd need a compatible donor (like a relative), and you still have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life. With current arficially-constructed penises (made using the patient's own tissue), you don't have the rejection problem.
I have no idea why it became mainstream
That's easy. Dr. John Kellogg (relative of the guy who invented cereal) really hated masturbation, and pushed the procedure as a way to discourage adolescent boys from masturbating. This of course became popular because Victorian-era America hated sexuality.
I'm going to pass on clicking on your links. This sounds like something I don't want to scar my mind with, as it's something you can't "unsee", much like the goatse.cx picture. The before and after pics are probably OK, but I really, really, really don't want to see the during-surgery pics.
I don't see how Mars is a picnic, when you're talking about terraforming. It's a fraction of the size and gravity of Venus, and has no atmosphere to speak of, and no molten core. Venus has all these. It's a much easier prospect to figure out a way to strip Venus of much of its atmosphere than to figure out how to get Mars to develop one approaching 1atm of pressure (instead of 1/200atm).
Do you honestly think it's more difficult to strip off part of Venus's atmosphere (perhaps using microbes somehow to convert it into a liquid or solid), than to do all three of the following:
1) bombard Mars with large asteroids so it can have more mass so it can have something closer to earth-normal gravity (you're going to need to grab a moon from Jupiter to do this effectively)
2) move Mars' orbit closer to the Sun so it's warmer
3) melt Mars' core so it can have a magnetosphere and keep an atmosphere and protect humans from radiation
As for the day, who cares? Once the atmosphere is converted into an Earth-like one, colonists will just have to get used to it. If people can live in submarines for months on end, or near the poles where days last 6 months, they can certainly handle that.
How is it not realistic? It's three days away! Yeah, if you need to get someone to a hospital within 6 hours they're toast, but 3 days isn't bad (6 days if you need to send a craft there first). It's certainly a lot better than 12-24 months (round-trip).
If we could build a lander module and command module to transport people from the Moon's surface back to Earth back in 1969, we can certainly build an emergency-return lifepod to launch someone from the Moon back to the Earth in 2020 or so, given the far better technology we now have.
"Plenty of people" are also depressed, fickle and unbalanced, the solution to which is often spending more time outdoors experiencing nature.
No, it's not. Doing that would cut into the time we're supposed to be spending at work, slaving away for our corporate masters so we can afford to pay the rent.
The Moon has water and gravity too, and is theorized to have underground lava tubes already there, so you might not need TBMs. And it's only 3 days away in case you need more supplies or someone wants to go home.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, wouldn't it be easier to try terraforming Venus instead? At least it has 0.9g gravity, instead of Mar's lame 0.3, and it's already close to the sun so it's warm. And it actually does hold a substantial atmosphere; the trick is reducing its pressure and temperature and making it earth-like. Venus is Earth's sister planet; Mars is really too small and far away from the Sun.
I'm pretty sure the bit about the gravity well is incorrect: Venus has 3 times the gravity of Mars, so if you're referring to rocky worlds in our solar system, Venus would be the deepest gravity well. Mars I believe is #2.
However, I do agree that Mars seems rather premature, and that the Lagrange points and the Moon would be better candidates for offworld habitats in the near term, due to their proximity. One big problem with the Lagrange points (and also LEO) is that there's no gravity there, so people can't stay there for very long. We'd have to build big, rotating space stations, which probably are not a good idea in LEO, but would be great at a Lagrange point. The problem here, however, is that we don't have the technology to build such things yet: we need to be able to mine materials in space, and refine and manufacture things there too, to do such a thing, because the amount of fuel needed to build a big, liveable station (not a puny little thing like the ISS) at a Lagrange point would be prohibitively expensive with current launch technology since we haven't built a space elevator yet.
It seems to me what we should be working on is asteroid mining, then establishing a Lunar colony for mining, refining, and manufacturing of materials mined on asteroids or the Moon. Once we have a lot of capabilities in Moon's much shallower gravity well, we'll be able to do more stuff at Lagrange points or geosynchronous orbit. After that, human missions to Mars or beyond would be much more feasible and easier.
Note, however, that I am not an astrophysicist, so take this with a grain of salt.
I'm sure they have, their business methods are different. Instead of being like Japanese or Korean conglomerates, they have an American business philosophy, which is basically to concentrate on fewer things and then maximize profit from them, except they're taking it to an extreme even for American companies.
The problem with this philosophy is that it isn't very successful in the long term. Those Asian conglomerates have very long lifetimes and employ lots of people in their societies. If you care about a corporation's duty to society, as Asian corporations do, instead of merely profitability, this is important. American companies don't generally have the great longevity or the immense overall revenues that Asian companies do. Also, having your hand in lots of things generates mindshare: people like one thing from your company, they're more likely to buy other things from it.
It brings (well, brought) mindshare, and that's pretty important. When someone likes one thing your company provides, they'll want to use other things from your company too.
And now, by sacrificing mindshare by axing every product that isn't generating a lot of profit, they're making it so they can't enter any new markets: every time they try to try something new with their "let's throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" approach to business, people are going to say to themselves "well this isn't a well-established business for them like search, Maps, Gmail, or Youtube, and they're always killing off all their smaller products, so I better not bother even looking at this thing because it'll probably be on the chopping block soon. Last time I heard about some cool little thing from Google, it was already being canceled!" Who's going to want to make themselves dependent on any new Google product when they have such a track record of killing of popular but not-popular-enough products? It's a total crapshoot whether a new product will be long-lasting or just something else to get the ax. So why bother?
No, you're right, but that's not the aim of a FOSS DVCS like Git. Unlike some proprietary software solutions, it does not aim to include every conceivable thing you need for any task, it just focuses on one task and does it well. If you want bug-tracking, you use something like Bugzilla, if you want a forum, you use something else, etc.
Yes, if Github vanishes suddenly, the bug tracker and forum etc. will be gone if someone didn't back them up somehow. But the code, and its history, is easily the most important part of any software project. You can recover pretty easily from the loss of your bug tracker and your discussion forum. Recovering from a loss of your source code (and all the development branches) is not so easy. Git makes this easy because with it, everyone who checked out a copy has the entire repository and history (up to the point at which they checked it out). And whoever checked in the newest change will have a repository that mirrors that on Github, so as long as that person is around, no data is lost.
You can, but who does?
Most SVN users just check out what they need, and that's it. They don't do full client-side clones if they don't have a good reason for it.
With Git, every user has a full client-side clone.
So, when the central server you're using suddenly disappears, with SVN you're hosed if you didn't specifically prepare for this, but with Git it's no big deal at all.
Unfortunately, that's quite accurate.
Google is weird in that they'll quickly abandon anything that they aren't #1 or #2 in, or that they don't think they're going to achieve that (rationally or not). So you have to consider that when you look at their offerings. Gmail isn't going anywhere, because it's #1. Same with search, same with Youtube, same with Google Maps. Anything else is more iffy. Google Fiber is probably pretty safe, since there isn't any good competition for it in its local markets. G+ seems to be safe for now because they refuse to give it up, but I wouldn't rely on it. Google Docs seems fairly safe, since its main competition is Office365 but again you never know. But anything smaller, I wouldn't rely on it because it's just too likely they'll pull the carpet out from under your feet.
It's really odd, and honestly a shame. A healthy market requires more than 2 strong competitors, and lots of other companies are perfectly happy to be #3, #4, or #5, or even farther back. Just because you're a big company doesn't mean you need to be #1 in everything you do. Just look at a lot of the Japanese conglomerates: they hang in there for ages, as long as they're profitable. At the end of the day, that's really all that matters in business: are you in the black, able to pay your salaries and expenses, and perhaps generating a profit? If so, you're succeeding. It's when you're in the red and it doesn't look like you're going to pull out that you need to throw in the towel and try something else.
The "D" is for Distributed. Git doesn't require you to use a single server; it's pretty much trivial to move your project history from Github to a competing service, since you're copying the entire project history every time you clone your repo anyway. So even if Github instantly vanished tomorrow, all the project authors would easily be able to re-clone their repos on a different service. That's the advantage of DVCS.
Maybe, maybe not. Another factor you're missing here is performance. If you can do the job with fewer lines but in Perl or some other interpreted language, but the application calls for good performance, that's not a good idea. But C++ gives very good performance (good enough for high-performance games apparently) unlike a lot of other languages; you get C-like performance with a higher level of abstraction.
I found, after decades of experimentation, that simplicity and consistency beats everything else if you want to produce reliable software. Now, I use C exclusively just so I don't have to deal with multiple different ways to do something because the C++ standards committee got a bee in its bonnet about the latest hot new concept that first came out in 1959 and was forgotten until last year.
The problem here is that you're missing out on a lot of really useful features that C++ has, which can make programming simpler and need less boilerplate code (just look at all the fake-OO stuff in the Linux kernel for example).
The key is that while C++ does have a LOT of features, some of them questionable, you aren't forced to use any of them. It's entirely possible (and even common in some software shops, especially ones doing embedded coding) to use a stripped-down subset of the C++ language. I've heard it called "C with classes". Take a look at the DO-178 standard for C++ coding sometime.
The problem with possessing multiple ways to solve a problem is that every developer takes it as a personal challenge to find and use all the different ways.
This isn't a problem. Go to any company doing avionics software in C++ and look at how they do it: they have a published coding style which basically forbids large swaths of C++'s feature set (including exceptions). Developers simply aren't allowed to use any of these! And to make sure they don't, all the code is code-reviewed by other developers to make sure it meets the coding standard. Anyone who insists on breaking the standard won't be working there for long.
found that 90% of what you can do with X lines of fairly complex grammar in C++ can be done with around 1.5X of straightforward C grammer.
Yes, so now you've inflated your SLOC by 50% for nothing just because you're too undisciplined to hold yourself to a C++ coding standard. That's 50% more lines where you can have bugs.
That's an unfortunate and disappointing story, but one of the benefits of OSS is that you can fork it. So it the project has been taken over somehow by some jerk, it is still possible for interested developers to fork it and make a different product using all that hard work of yours.
Of course, the big problem is that the project has to be run by people who have the time to run it; if the jerk has time and is willing, and everyone else is too busy to bother, oh well...
This is idiotic. As some other responders have pointed out, this is a management failure. Just about everything that's gone wrong with software engineering can be rightfully blamed on piss-poor management.
If you get rid of more than half your developers, that now leaves that much more work for the remaining ones to do, including a lot of busywork, testing, etc. Do you really want your top-notch developers doing repetitive testing and QA? How long do you think these developers will stick around now that they need to work 12-16 hours a day to pick up the slack from getting rid of the average performers? Or do you think you're going to somehow, magically hire a bunch more star performers? If that was so easy, why isn't your whole team composed of star performers right now?