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User: Waffle+Iron

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  1. Re:Case insensitive file systems were a bug on Critical Git Security Vulnerability Announced · · Score: 1

    All the complexity you need to add is:

    if (ch <= '\x1f') {
            goto FAIL;
    }

    How hard is that?

  2. Re:Oil Reserves. on Spacecraft Spots Probable Waves On Titan's Seas · · Score: 1

    I like how the body of water is measured in "Oil Reserves".

    It's a body of methane, not water, and it is chemically much more closely related to oil than water. So it arguably makes more sense to compare it to the amount of oil on earth than to the amount of water.

  3. Re:Wasn't there a book about this? on How Birds Lost Their Teeth · · Score: 1

    The conditions species live in aren't constant. Advantages of A and/or B fluctuate over time. If an animal has A, and the environment suddenly favors B, those closer to B win. For a while some animals will have both.

    However, every feature comes at an energy cost, so animals quickly let what they don't need atrophy. If in the current environment B beats out A+B minus extra energy to generate both, then they will settle at B only.

    At any rate, every organism is a mixture of thousands of features, from A0 to Z99999, many of which get added and deleted all the time, so your whole argument is bogus to begin with.

  4. Re:Wasn't there a book about this? on How Birds Lost Their Teeth · · Score: 1

    Look at today's flying squirrels. It's not hard to figure out how you get from walking mammals to this species, nor from flying squirrels to fully winged creatures. Why would it be any harder for insects to follow the same path?

  5. Re:Wasn't there a book about this? on How Birds Lost Their Teeth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The example I use is Butterflies, which change from a crawling creature to one that flies, mid life. Incredible "random" feat if you ask me.

    It's not random. The ability for adult insects to fly evolved gradually. That has nothing to do with the fact that insects go through metamorphosis, which most likely evolved independently and prior to the capability of flight

    Your argument makes as much sense as saying: "I don't believe evolution because people can talk using air even though they spend 9 months sealed up in a bag of water."

  6. Re:That day on Utilities Face Billions In Losses From Distributed Renewables · · Score: 3

    You may like living in the stone age, but most of us would rather be comfortable.

    One o the best ways to stay comfortable is to not get your home destroyed by the crazy weather created by your cheap electricity rates.

  7. Re:American wastefulness at its finest on Using Discarded Laptop Batteries To Power Lights · · Score: 2

    And it doesn't matter if someone else wastes something that isn't yours

    Yes, it does matter.

  8. Re:Why program in Python on Which Programming Language Pays the Best? Probably Python · · Score: 1

    Would you care to enlighten us with an example of a popular real-world language that has not had problems with backwards compatiblity?

  9. Re:I don't understand this ... on Stars Traveling Close To Light Speed Could Spread Life Through the Universe · · Score: 1

    I can maybe see the life evolving in one of these solar systems after it leaves the black hole area, presuming the atmospheres of planets aren't scoured away by high-speed interactions with the interstellar medium.

    However, how could this life "spread"? I don't see how you slow down any complex molecules from these speeds without totally incinerating them.

  10. Re:the first built in the US on How the World's First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap Heap · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, Colossus was General Purpose

    True, but only as long as all your purposes are restricted to cracking the codes from a particular model of Nazi mechanical encryption device.

  11. Re:Environmentalists is why we still pump carbon on Two Google Engineers Say Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change · · Score: 1

    It's because Republicans know a WMD proliferation risk when they see it. They just don't want to talk about it because that would make it look like they agree with the smelly hippie environmentalists.

    If fission power were a viable solution to the world's energy needs, we'd already be selling centrifuges to Iran.

  12. Re:Problem? on How the World's Agricultural Boom Has Changed CO2 Cycles · · Score: 1

    And more animals in them, producing more CO2.

    Those animals got all of their carbon from the fields they were standing in. If the animals hadn't been there, that same carbon would have been turned into CO2 by organisms like insects or fungi. The overall amount of CO2 released would have remained almost exactly the same.

  13. Re:Is it wrong to wish for it to crash? on Japanese Maglev Train Hits 500kph · · Score: 1

    there's no way for the train to derail, considering the design (the thing literally runs in a 3 ft deep ditch)

    Yet by my calculations, the train has enough kinetic energy to lift itself over 3100 feet up into the air. So the depth of any ditch isn't really going to help.

    I assume it's "locked" into the track, but at these speeds the entire train could probably disintegrate into confetti if it hit a solid enough obstacle, so it's not impossible for the majority of the mass of train to come off the rails.

  14. Re:Can't trust robots on Comet Probe Philae To Deploy Drill As Battery Life Wanes · · Score: 2

    What state would the man be in after 10 years in space?

    With adequate life support, as good as new,

    Hardly. Cosmonauts returning from Mir after only one year in space could barely function once they returned to earth. I kind of doubt that anybody would physically survive 10 years in zero-G, even assuming they've survived the long-shot odds of no fatal spacecraft malfunctions in 10 years.

    Not to mention that they would gone bat-shit insane by that time, after they realized that they've sat in a tiny tin can eating stale cat food and being blasted by cosmic rays for over a decade just so they get a sample of some crappy small-time comet; a job that could be easily done by a robot.

  15. Re:For those interested... on Five Years of the Go Programming Language · · Score: 3, Informative

    Due to the inherent design of C/C++ header files and their "compile units", building any large project in C++ takes almost forever. The work to build grows significantly more than linearly with the number of source files.

    Many things in C++ feel very "brittle" largely due to the limitations of its type system and generics.

    C++ reference counting is better than fully manual memory management, but still often requires careful attention to "ownership" issues, leaving a risk of leaks or segfaults.

    Most recommedations from the experts advise against using most of the actual features of C++ because they are so poorly conceived, poorly supported, or cause safety or compatibility problems. Best to stick with a bare-bones subset that's not very satisfying.

    Many of these problems were addressed by languages such as Java and C#. However those both require a heavyweght "virtual machine" runtime. The nice thing about Go is that it creates self-contained executables that run without needing to install anything special on the target machines (at the cost of the executables being larger than most people are used to).

  16. Re:I'm surrounded by morons on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 1

    Was it working fine before congress added the extra month to it as well?
    My company runs a lot of hardware that still runs on the old rules we (our department has 5 people) have to go manually adjust the time on them 4 times (When clocks change but the device doesn't and again when the device finally changes and needs to be set to the correct time) a year at 150 sites.

    Congress has been fiddling with DST since it was invented. If you were somehow under the impression that congress would never change DST again while you evaluated equipment for purchase, then you deserve what you get. I'm not going to give up a couple of hundred hours of useful daylight per year to help you compensate for your short-sighted technology buys.

  17. Re:I'm surrounded by morons on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 1

    Your job doesn't have any set hours? You're the one who sounds like a part-time burger flipper.

  18. Re:Where do you live? on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 1

    I've been an adult for decades, and I've never met anybody who is not a mother-in-law that regularly goes to bed at 9pm.

  19. Re:How early do you go to bed? on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 1

    Unless you go to bed before 9PM that is a non-problem.

    The earlier you go to bed, the *less* of a problem it is. But most people go to bed somewhere around midnight or a little before. Having the sun come up before 4:30am in much of the country would just be silly, IMO.

  20. Re:Is there anything to show benefit/harm from it on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 1

    Perhaps you've heard of this great new invention. I think they call them "curtains".

    Window treatments are generally not that effective unless you buy expensive and ugly "total blockout" versions. Why should I have to do that just to appease DST whiners?

  21. Re:Is there anything to show benefit/harm from it on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 1

    As far as I can see now it just screws with people's sleep cycles and schedules to no particular effect.

    You don't think that bright sunlight streaming into bedrooms for an extra hour all summer won't screw with peoples' sleep cycles even more?

    Before clocks, people probably naturally implemented daylight savings time by waking up at sunrise. Now that our whole lives are tied to external schedules, not having DST is more artificial than having it.

  22. Re:I'm surrounded by morons on Ask Slashdot: Where Do You Stand on Daylight Saving Time? · · Score: 0

    Then wake up earlier!

    Nobody in their right mind is going to wake up one minute earlier than necessary before work. And if they did, they'd have a looming deadline to get to work right as they start to get into whatever morning activity they're doing, which would negate much of the value of that time block.

    People worry about a few extra heart attacks once per year with DST. What about entire neighborhoods being woken up on mornings where some jackass early-riser thinks that the extra morning daylight hours would be a great time to mow their lawn and blow leaves? Who is going to count the heart attacks caused by that?

    Other people want to stay on permanent DST. Who is going to tabulate how many kids get run over going to school in pitch black mornings?

    DST as it's currently implemented works just fine. Keep it as it is.

  23. Re:Packages can't be removed? on OwnCloud Dev Requests Removal From Ubuntu Repos Over Security Holes · · Score: 2

    Because ubuntu dosen't allow new major versions to be added to a distro that has already been released.

    Do they allow packages to be ranamed? Then changing only 5 bits woudl rectify the situation.

    If they just leave the code as-is, but change the name from "ownCloud" to "pwnCloud", then the actual functionality of the package would be clear to everyone.

  24. Re:Cashiers on Automation Coming To Restaurants, But Not Because of Minimum Wage Hikes · · Score: 1

    Wonder if the cashiers would even be able to do that today...

    They weren't able to do it back then, either.

    Any large order had an almost 100% chance of having an arithmetic error. It was always unfathomable to me how more than a century after the invention of the cash register, a multi-billion dollar company could predicate all of their income on high school students' scribbling. Not to mention having to wait in line while all these errors were tediously generated by the staff then checked over by irate customers.

    It was a great thing when McDonalds finally dragged themselves into the 19th century.

  25. Re:Glad society is stable for that long on Fusion and Fission/LFTR: Let's Do Both, Smartly · · Score: 1

    Second, people can read signs even after revolutions. If you put "severe radiation, stay out" on a concrete building, it'll be fine.

    An additional advantage to those signs is that in a dystopian future, the terrorists are usually the good guys. The info will help direct those good guys to where they can find materials helpful in the fight against evil governments.