You often cannot develop software with the language you want, but must develop it with the language you have. C has no such features and, therefore, goto is used more often than in languages that have them. Fit the strategy to the tool.
Yes, but tools are chosen for the variety of strategies they offer. Usage of C has been in constant decline for over 10 years now, and it is rapidly becoming a minority language, at least in fields outside of systems and embedded software.
In the 50's when they were cranking out cheap housing, slab houses with copper piped radiant heat in the floor was the spec. They all started leaking from electrolytic corrosion and had to be retrofitted with baseboard.
[citation needed].
Copper has been in use here in the UK embedded in concrete for a similar length of time, and we haven't had widespread similar problems to the one you describe.[1] Yes, alkaline conditions (such as those found in concrete) corrode copper. But they cause a layer of either cuprous or cupric oxide to form, which resists further corrosion. Only acidic conditions (which are not found in concrete) are seriously problematic for copper pipes; a much more likely cause of the failure you cite is in long-term use with acidic water in turbulent flow, which is well known to cause serious corrosion to copper. The concrete is likely to be almost totally irrelevant.
[1] I can tell you plenty of other problems we experienced with cheap mass-produced 50s housing --- e.g. the aluminium-framed houses that were held together with steel bolts --- but we didn't have that one.
Yes. But if you're on a concrete raft foundation, it should shift and settle in a single piece without significantly changing shape. Even if you aren't (e.g. you have trench foundations and concrete floors that are independent of them), the problem isn't significant:
Won't a standard 1 + 1/2 inch copper pipe break during that time?
No. Copper piping is extremely flexible, and the amount your house moves by is (hopefully) only a few millimetres at worst. If not, unless you're built on a raft, you'll have much worse problems than your pipe cracking (i.e., your house cracking and starting to fall apart will probably happen first, as concrete and brick aren't exactly the most flexible materials available). If you are built on a raft, you don't have much to worry about as everything's moving by the same amount.
not only that, but i would have thought that driving the copper pipes into the water table would do much more for cooling than surrounding it in concrete.
If you're Doing It Right(tm) you don't want to be building anywhere even remotely close to the water table. Unless you're on a very poor site, the water table should be at least half a metre below your foundations, preferably much more. You want to dig down that far just for a bit of CPU cooling?
Um, copper pipes in the slab aren't code anywhere as far as I know.
Practically standard practice here in the UK. They're slowly being replaced by PVC pipes, but most houses over about 10 years old (and less than about 100; older than that and the pipes'll be lead instead) have copper pipes embedded in their concrete flooring.
They corrode. They fail. If they're not in there deep enough, then they crack your foundation.
Can't say I've ever heard of such problems, despite having family in the building trade (and laying such pipes) for the last 25 years.
Have you ever needed to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?
Wouldn't "have you ever shipped a product without needing to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?" be a more sensible question?
According to the British government, there has been a 48% decrease in recorded crime since the peak in 1995, which seems to argue that the proliferation of cameras and draconian gun control have been effective in protecting the safety of Britons.
No, it doesn't. The simple fact is that areas that _haven't_ installed CCTV have seen as much reduction as areas that _have_. Controlled studies find no substantial difference between areas that have installed CCTV and others. The simple fact of the matter is that overall crime levels have reduced, probably for a large variety of reasons (things to consider: reduced poverty levels since 95, more effective policing, improved education, changes in patterns of drug use).
Unfortunately, recorded violent crimes have approximately doubled since the current record-keeping system was implemented in 1998
Are you sure about this? The stats I can find only go back to 2002, and there has been only a moderate increase since then, starting at 844k, peaking at 1,050k in 2005, and dropping back to 960k in 2007 (most recent year available). Press releases since then suggest the rate has continued to drop since 2007.
there are compelling reasons to believe that most other categories of crime are now being massively underreported
Yes. And they always have been, too. You can look at the statistics similarly to how that article does it as far back as they go, and you'll find that this has always been a problem; it is, after all, why the two sets of statistics are collected. Note that both sets of figures have fallen by similar amounts (6.1 million - 4.95 million, or 16 million to 10 million, depending on which method is used). The fact that two ways of determining the statistic with such widely divergent methods indicates to me that the underlying trend that has been reported is clearly real.
suggesting that crime problems in Britain are getting much worse
I see nothing that suggests the problems are getting worse, other than a slight increase in violent crime, which appears to have passed its peak now and is sliding back to normal levels. Can you show any real evidence of an increase?
Why else would them set a bail higher than for killers and rapists?
AIUI, the process of setting bail includes making a judgment of how much money the accused could afford to lose. See Stack v Boyle:
"Bail is excessive when set at an amount higher than necessary to achieve a legitimate government purpose. If the purpose is to ensure a defendant's appearance at trial, and if found guilty serve the sentence, then bail may not be set higher than needed to meet those ends."
The judge setting bail must take this into account. If the judge believed that a bail of $1000 would have a serious enough financial impact on an accused that the accused would not risk losing it, then he can't set it higher. OTOH, for somebody who has the potential to earn say $80000 per annum as a consultant, obviously the figure must be higher. The only reason the type of crime is factored into the calculation is that people are more likely to run if they're facing a long-term imprisonment rather than just, say, 3 months.
Adams was a genius and having someone else pick up where he left off with anything makes no sense. If they are that good - they should be writing their own stuff.
As I understand it, Adams requested that this book be written. He was unhappy with how the last one he wrote ended, and didn't want the series to end like that. That's the kind of request that a writer doesn't turn down.
So what exactly is supposed to be new about that? There have been companies providing exactly such services as that for decades.
Indeed. Most people miss the point of these services, which is that you can turn capacity on and off, and only pay for what you use. Imagine, for a moment, that you run a vaguely popular web site. Most of the time it copes well enough with a single server, but every so often it grinds to a halt as more users hit it for some reason or another (e.g. you get slashdotted). With a so-called "cloud" service you can fire up another server instance, configure it to load balance, wait until the traffic tails off and then kill the extra instance. You only pay a few hours worth of hosting charge. Traditional hosting providers would have taken several hours (at least) to get the new instance configured, and wouldn't be interested in selling the service to you for any period shorter than a month, leaving you with substantially more expense.
Well, Microsoft's Azure is in.NET, and Google's AppEngine is Python, but Amazon's EC2 is basically a virtual machine (you load your image in from S3, can be Linux or Windows). I would assume you could just write a common object in Python, have a IronPython hook to Azure, a plain Python hook to AppEngine, and a hook to whatever method you use to host your service in EC2 (like mod_python or whatever, if you're using Apache).
You could do that, but if your intent is to get as much processing power out of each platform as you can (e.g. you want to benchmark them to see how they compare with each other), you'd want to use a compiled language for your EC2 version, and probably C# for your Azure version. But you're stuck with Python for AppEngine, so you're going to be doing at least 2 and probably 3 versions. Otherwise any conclusions you make are going to be unreasonably favourable to AppEngine, as you're intentionally crippling your other systems to bring them down to the same level.
If they keep calling you and asking you to pay them, it automatically becomes your problem, even if it isn't supposed to be.
This is why you guys need some legislation equivalent to the UK's Data Protection Act. Over here the approach would be to inform them that the phone number they hold (which constitutes personally identifiable information within the meaning of the Act) is incorrectly assigned to the account (incorrect information within the meaning of the Act) and it is therefore their legal responsibility to correct it. It's always worked first time for me.
They were quite stunned when I told them to shut up and start suing.
Yeah, I love this strategy. I was hassled by an agency once that put at the bottom of their initial contact letter "if you do not respond within 14 days we will instruct our lawyers to recover this debt in court." I wrote a response, "Go ahead. Make my day."
Funnily enough, I never heard anything else from them. 6 months later, another agency starts trying to collect...
From Lightning Source, the printer almost all of the POD services you talk about use, the same book would cost $6.10. You'd then have the POD service's cut on top of that, so you'd be lucky to get the book in your hands for less than $7.
Having just priced one up in Lulu, it seems they want $8.50 for it.
There are many, many POD publishers out there. and most are pretty good/indistinguishable from "regular" printing [...] To me this seems like a "no fail" system that provides both free (ebook) and physical (POD) versions of your book while side-stepping an outdated publishing industry.
No, they aren't, although it isn't in the quality of the printed copy you'll notice the difference: it's the price tag that'll do it. POD printing costs many, many times more than regular printing does. To pick a random example, a 400 page softcover "perfect-bound" trade-paperback size book from a traditional printer in standard publisher-sized print runs would probably cost about $3 US per book to print and bind. From Lightning Source, the printer almost all of the POD services you talk about use, the same book would cost $6.10. You'd then have the POD service's cut on top of that, so you'd be lucky to get the book in your hands for less than $7.
But this ignores the primary problem with your suggestion, which is that POD publishers don't provide the same service that traditional publishers do. Publishers provide editing services that ensure the content of the book is as good as possible. They provide marketing services to make sure potential customers know about the book. And most importantly, they provide a limited range of books that the buyer knows they can have confidence in because they know that the publisher has chosen to publish the book because it's a high quality book, written by a reliable author, and they are confident in the correctness of its content. If you buy a textbook from an author you've never heard of published by Lulu, well good luck. You have a 50% chance of it being absolute rubbish. Probably higher.
Why would you say the publishing industry is outdated? They know the market they're in, and unlike many other industries you'll find they're actually pretty proactive about changing to follow the times. Try talking to a publishing professional some time and you'll realise that POD (at least in its present form) cannot replace the existing infrastructure of publishers, because publishers provide an entirely different service to POD.
The next step is clearly a robot that learns not to flash lights when it is about to wipe out humanity and take control of the world!
It's something that hollywood robots have never learned.
Next thing you'll be saying that terrorists have learned that having a digital readout of the time left before their bombs detonate can work against them...
The probability of it getting all the way there without one single part of the 1 KM sail getting hit by any single piece of space rock or other debris: 0% Dream on, space sailors. It's an idiotic idea and always will be.
That, plus the fact that they're talking about in 30 years being able to have the technology to make the trip take only 30 years.
Great.
Here's an alternative mission profile for you: we use a VASIMR drive, with an estimated specific impulse of around 30,000s. We have one large enough to produce an acceleration of around 0.0001m/s^2, and enough propellant for a delta-v of 200km/s. This is a lot of propellant, but it would be possible. The required thrust is around 100N if we assume the engine will mass around 1000kg (this will require the current designs, which produce around 5N, to be scaled up somewhat, and the resulting design to be more efficient than the current design, but such efficiency improvements seem likely with a larger model).
We're travelling 2500AU, or ~375,000,000,000,000 metres.
The probe will accelerate for 2,000,000,000 seconds (~63 years). In this time it will cover 200,000,000,000 metres, or just over half the distance. It will cover the remaining half of the distance in around 1,000,000,000 seconds or about 30 years.
This mission has taken approximately 50% longer than the estimated time to complete the above-mentioned mission. It can almost be achieved with today's technology. It would cost, I suspect, about a tenth as much. The technologies developed for it (a large, high thrust, high specific-impulse thruster) would be very useful for orbital work (whereas space sails aren't really useful in an orbital situation as they only work when they're on the daylight side of the planet). And above all else, it's much more likely to work, because its failure modes are much better understood.
Of course, neither mission will ever happen because no government is going to invest in something that won't pay off for such a long time, whether it's 30, 60 or 90 years.
It's legal for me to make a backup copy of my media, in case of theft or destruction, except that owning or building the tools to allow me to create the copy is not legal -- although arguably this makes any turing machine attached to a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive illegal.
Your "arguably" section there is just nonsense. The law is phrased such that only things that have been designed _specifically_ to enable copying are covered. If copying is just one of many possible uses, then they are perfectly legal.
Does this mean we're finally getting proper sockets, instead of having to do everything through HTTP requests? I've been advocating this for years...
Yes. And no. The HTML5 spec includes a sockets-like API. However, it's intentionally crippled so that you can't use it to communicate with an application that hasn't been specifically enabled to communicate with it (i.e. it uses its own handshake protocol to ensure it's talking to a system that's designed to talk to it).
Doesn't anyone remember FTP? And why Passive-mode FTP was developed? All of the same reasons why this isn't a good idea. Your web browser ends up behind a NAT firewall and poof, this no longer works.
Did you actually read the article? Or are you just responding to the one-line throwaway description in the summary, without even bothering to think for one second what the title ("ReverseHTTP") might actually mean?
Did anyone else notice amazon.co.uk doesn't have an upgrade version of Windows 7 available?
Yes. Haven't you bbeen reading the stories about this: there is no upgrade version of Win7 in the EU, because MS couldn't be bothered to implement the browser selection system that the EU has required them to include in an upgrade situation (which would have been more difficult, because they'd have to detect how the system's already set up and uninstall IE if it was already there and the user didn't choose it).
For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question (the scale based on 0-100% is better),
Not really, actually. Fahrenheit has two issues for this question, the first being that the freezing point (which is something we can easily identify, or at least approximate) is stuck at an arbitrary value, the second being that the large numbers it produces gives a sense of false accuracy. Celsius works because the difference between, say, 24 and 25 celsius is approximately on the same level as the smallest difference in temperatures an average person will be able to detect. Very few people, I warrant, could tell the difference between 78 and 79 fahrenheit. Neither is a killer problem for fahrenheit, but then neither is the fact that celsius doesn't go to 100 in ordinary weather. The freezing = 0 thing is extremely convenient though.
Meters suck for "how big is this object I hold?" question
This is closer to true, but it still isn't a big issue. Inches and feet are convenient as small and large units, but it really isn't much harder to work in units of (say) 1cm - 25cm. And once you get beyond issues of human scale items, the simpler arithmetic you get from performing calculations in the metric system is a huge benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
You often cannot develop software with the language you want, but must develop it with the language you have. C has no such features and, therefore, goto is used more often than in languages that have them. Fit the strategy to the tool.
Yes, but tools are chosen for the variety of strategies they offer. Usage of C has been in constant decline for over 10 years now, and it is rapidly becoming a minority language, at least in fields outside of systems and embedded software.
Admittedly, C++ also has this shortcoming.
And, no, exceptions are not part of C
Fortunately, it doesn't have this one.
Copper pipe in cement + time = leaks
In the 50's when they were cranking out cheap housing, slab houses with copper piped radiant heat in the floor
was the spec. They all started leaking from electrolytic corrosion and had to be retrofitted with baseboard.
[citation needed].
Copper has been in use here in the UK embedded in concrete for a similar length of time, and we haven't had widespread similar problems to the one you describe.[1] Yes, alkaline conditions (such as those found in concrete) corrode copper. But they cause a layer of either cuprous or cupric oxide to form, which resists further corrosion. Only acidic conditions (which are not found in concrete) are seriously problematic for copper pipes; a much more likely cause of the failure you cite is in long-term use with acidic water in turbulent flow, which is well known to cause serious corrosion to copper. The concrete is likely to be almost totally irrelevant.
[1] I can tell you plenty of other problems we experienced with cheap mass-produced 50s housing --- e.g. the aluminium-framed houses that were held together with steel bolts --- but we didn't have that one.
Doesn't the house shift and settle?
Yes. But if you're on a concrete raft foundation, it should shift and settle in a single piece without significantly changing shape. Even if you aren't (e.g. you have trench foundations and concrete floors that are independent of them), the problem isn't significant:
Won't a standard 1 + 1/2 inch copper pipe break during that time?
No. Copper piping is extremely flexible, and the amount your house moves by is (hopefully) only a few millimetres at worst. If not, unless you're built on a raft, you'll have much worse problems than your pipe cracking (i.e., your house cracking and starting to fall apart will probably happen first, as concrete and brick aren't exactly the most flexible materials available). If you are built on a raft, you don't have much to worry about as everything's moving by the same amount.
not only that, but i would have thought that driving the copper pipes into the water table would do much more for cooling than surrounding it in concrete.
If you're Doing It Right(tm) you don't want to be building anywhere even remotely close to the water table. Unless you're on a very poor site, the water table should be at least half a metre below your foundations, preferably much more. You want to dig down that far just for a bit of CPU cooling?
(Now, if you were running a ground source heat pump, that might be different...)
Um, copper pipes in the slab aren't code anywhere as far as I know.
Practically standard practice here in the UK. They're slowly being replaced by PVC pipes, but most houses over about 10 years old (and less than about 100; older than that and the pipes'll be lead instead) have copper pipes embedded in their concrete flooring.
They corrode. They fail. If they're not in there deep enough, then they crack your foundation.
Can't say I've ever heard of such problems, despite having family in the building trade (and laying such pipes) for the last 25 years.
Have you ever needed to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?
Wouldn't "have you ever shipped a product without needing to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?" be a more sensible question?
According to the British government, there has been a 48% decrease in recorded crime since the peak in 1995, which seems to argue that the proliferation of cameras and draconian gun control have been effective in protecting the safety of Britons.
No, it doesn't. The simple fact is that areas that _haven't_ installed CCTV have seen as much reduction as areas that _have_. Controlled studies find no substantial difference between areas that have installed CCTV and others. The simple fact of the matter is that overall crime levels have reduced, probably for a large variety of reasons (things to consider: reduced poverty levels since 95, more effective policing, improved education, changes in patterns of drug use).
Unfortunately, recorded violent crimes have approximately doubled since the current record-keeping system was implemented in 1998
Are you sure about this? The stats I can find only go back to 2002, and there has been only a moderate increase since then, starting at 844k, peaking at 1,050k in 2005, and dropping back to 960k in 2007 (most recent year available). Press releases since then suggest the rate has continued to drop since 2007.
there are compelling reasons to believe that most other categories of crime are now being massively underreported
Yes. And they always have been, too. You can look at the statistics similarly to how that article does it as far back as they go, and you'll find that this has always been a problem; it is, after all, why the two sets of statistics are collected. Note that both sets of figures have fallen by similar amounts (6.1 million - 4.95 million, or 16 million to 10 million, depending on which method is used). The fact that two ways of determining the statistic with such widely divergent methods indicates to me that the underlying trend that has been reported is clearly real.
suggesting that crime problems in Britain are getting much worse
I see nothing that suggests the problems are getting worse, other than a slight increase in violent crime, which appears to have passed its peak now and is sliding back to normal levels. Can you show any real evidence of an increase?
Why else would them set a bail higher than for killers and rapists?
AIUI, the process of setting bail includes making a judgment of how much money the accused could afford to lose. See Stack v Boyle:
"Bail is excessive when set at an amount higher than necessary to achieve a legitimate government purpose. If the purpose is to ensure a defendant's appearance at trial, and if found guilty serve the sentence, then bail may not be set higher than needed to meet those ends."
The judge setting bail must take this into account. If the judge believed that a bail of $1000 would have a serious enough financial impact on an accused that the accused would not risk losing it, then he can't set it higher. OTOH, for somebody who has the potential to earn say $80000 per annum as a consultant, obviously the figure must be higher. The only reason the type of crime is factored into the calculation is that people are more likely to run if they're facing a long-term imprisonment rather than just, say, 3 months.
Adams was a genius and having someone else pick up where he left off with anything makes no sense. If they are that good - they should be writing their own stuff.
As I understand it, Adams requested that this book be written. He was unhappy with how the last one he wrote ended, and didn't want the series to end like that. That's the kind of request that a writer doesn't turn down.
So what exactly is supposed to be new about that? There have been companies providing exactly such services as that for decades.
Indeed. Most people miss the point of these services, which is that you can turn capacity on and off, and only pay for what you use. Imagine, for a moment, that you run a vaguely popular web site. Most of the time it copes well enough with a single server, but every so often it grinds to a halt as more users hit it for some reason or another (e.g. you get slashdotted). With a so-called "cloud" service you can fire up another server instance, configure it to load balance, wait until the traffic tails off and then kill the extra instance. You only pay a few hours worth of hosting charge. Traditional hosting providers would have taken several hours (at least) to get the new instance configured, and wouldn't be interested in selling the service to you for any period shorter than a month, leaving you with substantially more expense.
Well, Microsoft's Azure is in .NET, and Google's AppEngine is Python, but Amazon's EC2 is basically a virtual machine (you load your image in from S3, can be Linux or Windows). I would assume you could just write a common object in Python, have a IronPython hook to Azure, a plain Python hook to AppEngine, and a hook to whatever method you use to host your service in EC2 (like mod_python or whatever, if you're using Apache).
You could do that, but if your intent is to get as much processing power out of each platform as you can (e.g. you want to benchmark them to see how they compare with each other), you'd want to use a compiled language for your EC2 version, and probably C# for your Azure version. But you're stuck with Python for AppEngine, so you're going to be doing at least 2 and probably 3 versions. Otherwise any conclusions you make are going to be unreasonably favourable to AppEngine, as you're intentionally crippling your other systems to bring them down to the same level.
Together, they form...
Wyld Stallyns? ... a networked cluster with significantly greater power than the individual modules.
I think my version would have been better.
If they keep calling you and asking you to pay them, it automatically becomes your problem, even if it isn't supposed to be.
This is why you guys need some legislation equivalent to the UK's Data Protection Act. Over here the approach would be to inform them that the phone number they hold (which constitutes personally identifiable information within the meaning of the Act) is incorrectly assigned to the account (incorrect information within the meaning of the Act) and it is therefore their legal responsibility to correct it. It's always worked first time for me.
They were quite stunned when I told them to shut up and start suing.
Yeah, I love this strategy. I was hassled by an agency once that put at the bottom of their initial contact letter "if you do not respond within 14 days we will instruct our lawyers to recover this debt in court." I wrote a response, "Go ahead. Make my day."
Funnily enough, I never heard anything else from them. 6 months later, another agency starts trying to collect...
I said:
From Lightning Source, the printer almost all of the POD services you talk about use, the same book would cost $6.10. You'd then have the POD service's cut on top of that, so you'd be lucky to get the book in your hands for less than $7.
Having just priced one up in Lulu, it seems they want $8.50 for it.
There are many, many POD publishers out there. and most are pretty good/indistinguishable from "regular" printing [...] To me this seems like a "no fail" system that provides both free (ebook) and physical (POD) versions of your book while side-stepping an outdated publishing industry.
No, they aren't, although it isn't in the quality of the printed copy you'll notice the difference: it's the price tag that'll do it. POD printing costs many, many times more than regular printing does. To pick a random example, a 400 page softcover "perfect-bound" trade-paperback size book from a traditional printer in standard publisher-sized print runs would probably cost about $3 US per book to print and bind. From Lightning Source, the printer almost all of the POD services you talk about use, the same book would cost $6.10. You'd then have the POD service's cut on top of that, so you'd be lucky to get the book in your hands for less than $7.
But this ignores the primary problem with your suggestion, which is that POD publishers don't provide the same service that traditional publishers do. Publishers provide editing services that ensure the content of the book is as good as possible. They provide marketing services to make sure potential customers know about the book. And most importantly, they provide a limited range of books that the buyer knows they can have confidence in because they know that the publisher has chosen to publish the book because it's a high quality book, written by a reliable author, and they are confident in the correctness of its content. If you buy a textbook from an author you've never heard of published by Lulu, well good luck. You have a 50% chance of it being absolute rubbish. Probably higher.
Why would you say the publishing industry is outdated? They know the market they're in, and unlike many other industries you'll find they're actually pretty proactive about changing to follow the times. Try talking to a publishing professional some time and you'll realise that POD (at least in its present form) cannot replace the existing infrastructure of publishers, because publishers provide an entirely different service to POD.
The next step is clearly a robot that learns not to flash lights when it is about to wipe out humanity and take control of the world!
It's something that hollywood robots have never learned.
Next thing you'll be saying that terrorists have learned that having a digital readout of the time left before their bombs detonate can work against them...
The probability of it getting all the way there without one single part of the 1 KM sail getting hit by any single piece of space rock or other debris: 0%
Dream on, space sailors. It's an idiotic idea and always will be.
That, plus the fact that they're talking about in 30 years being able to have the technology to make the trip take only 30 years.
Great.
Here's an alternative mission profile for you: we use a VASIMR drive, with an estimated specific impulse of around 30,000s. We have one large enough to produce an acceleration of around 0.0001m/s^2, and enough propellant for a delta-v of 200km/s. This is a lot of propellant, but it would be possible. The required thrust is around 100N if we assume the engine will mass around 1000kg (this will require the current designs, which produce around 5N, to be scaled up somewhat, and the resulting design to be more efficient than the current design, but such efficiency improvements seem likely with a larger model).
We're travelling 2500AU, or ~375,000,000,000,000 metres.
The probe will accelerate for 2,000,000,000 seconds (~63 years). In this time it will cover 200,000,000,000 metres, or just over half the distance. It will cover the remaining half of the distance in around 1,000,000,000 seconds or about 30 years.
This mission has taken approximately 50% longer than the estimated time to complete the above-mentioned mission. It can almost be achieved with today's technology. It would cost, I suspect, about a tenth as much. The technologies developed for it (a large, high thrust, high specific-impulse thruster) would be very useful for orbital work (whereas space sails aren't really useful in an orbital situation as they only work when they're on the daylight side of the planet). And above all else, it's much more likely to work, because its failure modes are much better understood.
Of course, neither mission will ever happen because no government is going to invest in something that won't pay off for such a long time, whether it's 30, 60 or 90 years.
It's legal for me to make a backup copy of my media, in case of theft or destruction, except that owning or building the tools to allow me to create the copy is not legal -- although arguably this makes any turing machine attached to a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive illegal.
Your "arguably" section there is just nonsense. The law is phrased such that only things that have been designed _specifically_ to enable copying are covered. If copying is just one of many possible uses, then they are perfectly legal.
Does this mean we're finally getting proper sockets, instead of having to do everything through HTTP requests? I've been advocating this for years ...
Yes. And no. The HTML5 spec includes a sockets-like API. However, it's intentionally crippled so that you can't use it to communicate with an application that hasn't been specifically enabled to communicate with it (i.e. it uses its own handshake protocol to ensure it's talking to a system that's designed to talk to it).
Doesn't anyone remember FTP? And why Passive-mode FTP was developed? All of the same reasons why this isn't a good idea. Your web browser ends up behind a NAT firewall and poof, this no longer works.
Did you actually read the article? Or are you just responding to the one-line throwaway description in the summary, without even bothering to think for one second what the title ("ReverseHTTP") might actually mean?
who cares, it will be hacked and available for download within an hour of going on sale....
Will be?
Did anyone else notice amazon.co.uk doesn't have an upgrade version of Windows 7 available?
Yes. Haven't you bbeen reading the stories about this: there is no upgrade version of Win7 in the EU, because MS couldn't be bothered to implement the browser selection system that the EU has required them to include in an upgrade situation (which would have been more difficult, because they'd have to detect how the system's already set up and uninstall IE if it was already there and the user didn't choose it).
And pints for milk and beer
Last I checked, standard milk bottles and beer serving sizes are 568ml, not a pint (which is actually slightly more than 568ml).
Yes, we're using metric approximations to imperial units. Yay! :)
For the record, Celsius sucks for the "how warm is it today?" question (the scale based on 0-100% is better),
Not really, actually. Fahrenheit has two issues for this question, the first being that the freezing point (which is something we can easily identify, or at least approximate) is stuck at an arbitrary value, the second being that the large numbers it produces gives a sense of false accuracy. Celsius works because the difference between, say, 24 and 25 celsius is approximately on the same level as the smallest difference in temperatures an average person will be able to detect. Very few people, I warrant, could tell the difference between 78 and 79 fahrenheit. Neither is a killer problem for fahrenheit, but then neither is the fact that celsius doesn't go to 100 in ordinary weather. The freezing = 0 thing is extremely convenient though.
Meters suck for "how big is this object I hold?" question
This is closer to true, but it still isn't a big issue. Inches and feet are convenient as small and large units, but it really isn't much harder to work in units of (say) 1cm - 25cm. And once you get beyond issues of human scale items, the simpler arithmetic you get from performing calculations in the metric system is a huge benefit.