Interesting. I misread "Geode", which is only one character difference. "Genocide" seems like quite a stretch, both more characters difference and requiring you to actually insert stuff that's not there rather than simply miss something. In other words, you have to overlook something to read it as "Geode" (as I did), but have to hallucinate to read it as "Genocide"...
A KDE dev pretending that Gnome 3 or Unity are the only other options makes him seem slightly desperate way.
There are dozens of desktop alternatives for GNU/Linux/*BSD/etc. That a fan of one of the dozens of minor ones is complaining that a KDE dev only mentioned the major alternatives and didn't mention his favorite of the dozens of others makes him seem slightly butthurt...
Well, you might want to skip MS-Windows 8 too, then.
It seems Windows follows a Star Trek like release schedule -- you should skip every other version. 98 was good, ME was bad, XP was good, Vista was bad, 7 was good... waiting for 9/Blue/whatever...
I know nothing of this author, but your review makes me suspect it might be a pretty good read. The kind of jerky ad hominem attacks seen here are usually drawn out of critics when they can't seem to criticize the material itself, so going after the author makes a good alternative, and "pretentious" is usually the way anti-intellectual critics describe anything worth reading...
The line you're misquoting is only correct in the context you ripped it from. In the example program it's referring to, each line happens to contain only one statement, so the statement is true. The implication you're trying to draw from that (that in BASIC terminology, rather than simply in this example, "line" and "statement" are synonymous) is quite false.
Hrm. Maybe they were rubbish interpreters but no BASIC I ever used back in the late 70s / early 80s supported multiple statements.
What BASIC interpreters did you use? Every BASIC I used back in that era allowed semicolon statement separators. Heck Microsoft BASIC allowed it and the vast majority of microcomputer BASICs back then were Microsoft BASIC. Including Commodore and Apple (after the very fist Integer BASIC).
Colons, actually. Semicolons were not used a statement separators, but as separators between items in a PRINT statement, e.g. PRINT CHR$(4);"OPEN FILE"
I doubt it. Most people would look at the result of that program and declare it a maze instantly. They would only object to the features you note if you dropped them in the middle of it...
Having been born only a little bit after you were - I was raised with the assumption that it won't exist by the time I'm of retirement age, so I better find a better way to save.
Why would it not exist? It can't run out of money. If you think otherwise, you're terribly misinformed about exactly what it is and how it works. It currently has a surplus, and at some time down the road it's likely the surplus will be gone. At which point, either it will continue to pay, but not in excess of the amount of money it takes in, or congress will weasel out and start running it in the red. Expecting any other option to occur is ridiculous. No politician is going to eliminate it, and it can't possibly cease to exist without congress eliminating it. The worst that can happen is the benefits will be not so great. But they never were...
How is being the very lowest it's ever been recorded as being since we began reliably recording it "not a record low"? Which word are we disagreeing on here, "low", or "record", since it certainly qualifies as a "record low" for any definition of either of these words I'm aware of. And if it's only a record low for most of our lifetimes, do tell us when it was lower? Which year? And how and where was that record recorded?
Explosions with that technology might not even be visible to earthlings,
nor be very destructive to the moon.
The fact that you used the word "might" there suggests strongly that there would be a wealth of scientific information gained by doing this. If you have to use words like "might", it means you really need to run some experiments, there's stuff you don't know yet...
The reason for doing it on the lunar surface rather than in space would be that you could set up testing equipment and instruments to get measurements you wouldn't be able to reliably position and read from later if you just detonated a nuke in orbit. The kind of stuff they had been doing in deserts or on atolls.
I can't imagine any benefit; scientific, military or political; can you?
Easily. Your failure of imagination is stunning here. I'm left wondering if you think we know a lot more than we do about this stuff (and thus would learn nothing from the experiment), or simply can't comprehend that greater knowledge is always better, even if the only thing you end up learning is "this doesn't really work well" (which is itself useful to know -- saves you from doing something useless in the future when it counts, and lets you know what sorts of things you don't have to worry about defending yourself from if you ever do have moonbases to defend or whatnot).
The amount of potentially practical information this could yield, especially in the minds of people who were seriously worried about the possibility that the Cold War was going to be extended throughout the Solar System someday, is huge. In retrospect, we certainly didn't need it, but how would they know that at the time?
How are you going to throw a big enough rock? Consider Meteor Crater in Arizona. This is a crater with diameter less than a mile -- big enough to obliterate most of the core of a city, but not region-wide destruction kind of size.
Bwa ha ha! More than most of the core of a city. Do you think nothing was affected beyond the rim of the crater? If you have been twenty miles away from that impact when that crater was formed, you'd have been quite very dead within seconds of impact. But the heat generated would have insured you had a nice, all-natural cremation.
(Ironically, decades later, Ronald Reagan used a non-functioning decoy (SDI) to wreck the Soviet economy and win the cold war...)
An outcome that Andrei Gromyko and others predicted in the early-to-mid 70s and were working furiously behind the scenes to try to avert. Wait, how they they know Ronald Reagan was going to do that? They didn't. There were merely aware of the coming problems leading to the (it turned out) inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union THAT HAD NOTHING AT ALL WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH anything Ronald Reagan did. Mickey Mouse could have been president throughout the 80s and the Soviet Union would have collapsed right on schedule, despite right-wing fantasies about their non-existent part in it...
Ah yes, the alleged Washington Monument Symdrome. It's hard to prove beyond the one obvious case in 1969 from which the name is derived, and it led to the firing of the person responsible, so it's questionable to what degree anyone actually does this. Most civil servants like their jobs...
But... but... they're job creators! Shouldn't we just let them do whatever they want?! Making them pay for their mistakes leaves them we less money to trickle out to us as jobs!/eyeroll
Must be new, or young. search wikipedia for OJ Simpson
That's not a good example to generalize from, though. When the prosecution presents a case with holes big enough to drive a white Ford Bronco through, this is the result. It wasn't so much a competent defender as utterly incompetent cops and prosecutors...
Rockets can't be cheap. They are not reusable (you can try to reuse certain parts, but you're going to disassemble and reassemble them in any case) and that is ALWAYS going to put a high lower limit for their price.
That's a weird conjecture, given that for every other manufactured thing in existence, disposable versions have a much lower limit on their price. Making things reusable always puts a high lower limit on their price. It's a lot cheaper to make something that doesn't have to last, often so much cheaper than it's cheaper than the maintenance costs of the reusable thing, even discounting the reusable items much higher initial cost.
Last I read, developing Skylon was going to cost about ten billion pounds (or maybe dollars, though it's a big number either way). So there's a big jump from having an engine to being able to fly into space from your local airport.
You don't even mention human input to search rankings in your troll. Did you have it all typed up before this article was even posted, waiting for the first Google-related post so you could try to slip it in without appearing to be completely off-topic (despite the fact that your troll is, in fact, completely off-topic for this particular article)?
While it's often repeated that porn makes up the majority of traffic, in reality it's an almost insignificant amount. I'd bet that traffic only from Google exceeds porn traffic by several orders of magnitude.
This, of course, depends on your definition of porn. To many of the people who oppose it, half of network TV content is porn...
How are they stopping US residents? I assume they will just block US IP addresses. If that is the case, then the US is acting on InTrade (probably indirectly) in order to stop business from happening directly between the US and InTrade. It does not stop US residents currently outside of the US or those using proxies outside the US.
The fact that law enforcement cannot prevent all violations does not invalidate or make illegitimate a law or attempts to enforce it. Personally, I think it's a stupid law, but using a stupid argument against it does not help...
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Interesting. I misread "Geode", which is only one character difference. "Genocide" seems like quite a stretch, both more characters difference and requiring you to actually insert stuff that's not there rather than simply miss something. In other words, you have to overlook something to read it as "Geode" (as I did), but have to hallucinate to read it as "Genocide"...
A KDE dev pretending that Gnome 3 or Unity are the only other options makes him seem slightly desperate way.
There are dozens of desktop alternatives for GNU/Linux/*BSD/etc. That a fan of one of the dozens of minor ones is complaining that a KDE dev only mentioned the major alternatives and didn't mention his favorite of the dozens of others makes him seem slightly butthurt...
Well, you might want to skip MS-Windows 8 too, then.
It seems Windows follows a Star Trek like release schedule -- you should skip every other version. 98 was good, ME was bad, XP was good, Vista was bad, 7 was good... waiting for 9/Blue/whatever...
I know nothing of this author, but your review makes me suspect it might be a pretty good read. The kind of jerky ad hominem attacks seen here are usually drawn out of critics when they can't seem to criticize the material itself, so going after the author makes a good alternative, and "pretentious" is usually the way anti-intellectual critics describe anything worth reading...
The line you're misquoting is only correct in the context you ripped it from. In the example program it's referring to, each line happens to contain only one statement, so the statement is true. The implication you're trying to draw from that (that in BASIC terminology, rather than simply in this example, "line" and "statement" are synonymous) is quite false.
Hrm. Maybe they were rubbish interpreters but no BASIC I ever used back in the late 70s / early 80s supported multiple statements.
What BASIC interpreters did you use? Every BASIC I used back in that era allowed semicolon statement separators. Heck Microsoft BASIC allowed it and the vast majority of microcomputer BASICs back then were Microsoft BASIC. Including Commodore and Apple (after the very fist Integer BASIC).
Colons, actually. Semicolons were not used a statement separators, but as separators between items in a PRINT statement, e.g. PRINT CHR$(4);"OPEN FILE"
I doubt it. Most people would look at the result of that program and declare it a maze instantly. They would only object to the features you note if you dropped them in the middle of it...
Having been born only a little bit after you were - I was raised with the assumption that it won't exist by the time I'm of retirement age, so I better find a better way to save.
Why would it not exist? It can't run out of money. If you think otherwise, you're terribly misinformed about exactly what it is and how it works. It currently has a surplus, and at some time down the road it's likely the surplus will be gone. At which point, either it will continue to pay, but not in excess of the amount of money it takes in, or congress will weasel out and start running it in the red. Expecting any other option to occur is ridiculous. No politician is going to eliminate it, and it can't possibly cease to exist without congress eliminating it. The worst that can happen is the benefits will be not so great. But they never were...
I'd still be curious when it was recorded as being lower, even if the record isn't reliable...
How is being the very lowest it's ever been recorded as being since we began reliably recording it "not a record low"? Which word are we disagreeing on here, "low", or "record", since it certainly qualifies as a "record low" for any definition of either of these words I'm aware of. And if it's only a record low for most of our lifetimes, do tell us when it was lower? Which year? And how and where was that record recorded?
Explosions with that technology might not even be visible to earthlings, nor be very destructive to the moon.
The fact that you used the word "might" there suggests strongly that there would be a wealth of scientific information gained by doing this. If you have to use words like "might", it means you really need to run some experiments, there's stuff you don't know yet...
The reason for doing it on the lunar surface rather than in space would be that you could set up testing equipment and instruments to get measurements you wouldn't be able to reliably position and read from later if you just detonated a nuke in orbit. The kind of stuff they had been doing in deserts or on atolls.
I can't imagine any benefit; scientific, military or political; can you?
Easily. Your failure of imagination is stunning here. I'm left wondering if you think we know a lot more than we do about this stuff (and thus would learn nothing from the experiment), or simply can't comprehend that greater knowledge is always better, even if the only thing you end up learning is "this doesn't really work well" (which is itself useful to know -- saves you from doing something useless in the future when it counts, and lets you know what sorts of things you don't have to worry about defending yourself from if you ever do have moonbases to defend or whatnot).
The amount of potentially practical information this could yield, especially in the minds of people who were seriously worried about the possibility that the Cold War was going to be extended throughout the Solar System someday, is huge. In retrospect, we certainly didn't need it, but how would they know that at the time?
How are you going to throw a big enough rock? Consider Meteor Crater in Arizona. This is a crater with diameter less than a mile -- big enough to obliterate most of the core of a city, but not region-wide destruction kind of size.
Bwa ha ha! More than most of the core of a city. Do you think nothing was affected beyond the rim of the crater? If you have been twenty miles away from that impact when that crater was formed, you'd have been quite very dead within seconds of impact. But the heat generated would have insured you had a nice, all-natural cremation.
(Ironically, decades later, Ronald Reagan used a non-functioning decoy (SDI) to wreck the Soviet economy and win the cold war...)
An outcome that Andrei Gromyko and others predicted in the early-to-mid 70s and were working furiously behind the scenes to try to avert. Wait, how they they know Ronald Reagan was going to do that? They didn't. There were merely aware of the coming problems leading to the (it turned out) inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union THAT HAD NOTHING AT ALL WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH anything Ronald Reagan did. Mickey Mouse could have been president throughout the 80s and the Soviet Union would have collapsed right on schedule, despite right-wing fantasies about their non-existent part in it...
Ah yes, the alleged Washington Monument Symdrome. It's hard to prove beyond the one obvious case in 1969 from which the name is derived, and it led to the firing of the person responsible, so it's questionable to what degree anyone actually does this. Most civil servants like their jobs...
But... but... they're job creators! Shouldn't we just let them do whatever they want?! Making them pay for their mistakes leaves them we less money to trickle out to us as jobs! /eyeroll
Must be new, or young. search wikipedia for OJ Simpson
That's not a good example to generalize from, though. When the prosecution presents a case with holes big enough to drive a white Ford Bronco through, this is the result. It wasn't so much a competent defender as utterly incompetent cops and prosecutors...
Launch from somewhere accessible to the market via other modes, but with a lack of sane local regulations.
FTFY
Why is something so rare called "common" sense?
The more interesting question is, why do so many people who clearly lack it complain about the lack as if it's not their own problem?
Rockets can't be cheap. They are not reusable (you can try to reuse certain parts, but you're going to disassemble and reassemble them in any case) and that is ALWAYS going to put a high lower limit for their price.
That's a weird conjecture, given that for every other manufactured thing in existence, disposable versions have a much lower limit on their price. Making things reusable always puts a high lower limit on their price. It's a lot cheaper to make something that doesn't have to last, often so much cheaper than it's cheaper than the maintenance costs of the reusable thing, even discounting the reusable items much higher initial cost.
That will only happen, if you're not throwing away a vehicle every time you launch. Else you have to add the cost of the vehicle to the launch.
Right, and since disposable products are always so much more expensive than reusable ones, reusable has the cost advantage.
Oh, wait...
Last I read, developing Skylon was going to cost about ten billion pounds (or maybe dollars, though it's a big number either way). So there's a big jump from having an engine to being able to fly into space from your local airport.
But how much of that has already been spent?
Making new matter does not require breaking any fundamental laws. All it requires is some energy...
You don't even mention human input to search rankings in your troll. Did you have it all typed up before this article was even posted, waiting for the first Google-related post so you could try to slip it in without appearing to be completely off-topic (despite the fact that your troll is, in fact, completely off-topic for this particular article)?
While it's often repeated that porn makes up the majority of traffic, in reality it's an almost insignificant amount. I'd bet that traffic only from Google exceeds porn traffic by several orders of magnitude.
This, of course, depends on your definition of porn. To many of the people who oppose it, half of network TV content is porn...
How are they stopping US residents? I assume they will just block US IP addresses. If that is the case, then the US is acting on InTrade (probably indirectly) in order to stop business from happening directly between the US and InTrade. It does not stop US residents currently outside of the US or those using proxies outside the US.
The fact that law enforcement cannot prevent all violations does not invalidate or make illegitimate a law or attempts to enforce it. Personally, I think it's a stupid law, but using a stupid argument against it does not help...
(I read somewhere that the number of village idiots in Pakistan and Afghanistan has fallen to nearly zero.)
Unfortunately, no. Humanity is exceptionally efficient in this regard. No matter how quickly we use them up, we make more of them even faster.