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User: Julian+Morrison

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  1. Re:It makes a lot of sense on No More Science on the ISS Until Further Notice · · Score: 1

    The ultimate point of manned spaceflight is "get us off this rock". All the human species on one planet overstrains the planet and endangers the species. Elbow-room is a need on an instinctive level. That's the real reason, but talk of it sounds like fiction, so astronauts waffle about "doing science", that being a culturally acceptable excuse.

    I wouldn't mind the ISS if it was serving "get us off this rock" type goals, but really, it isn't. Nor really is the shuttle. That's why I'm excited over their latest "big dumb booster" plan. It may be a technical step back, but they're once again actually going somewhere.

  2. It makes a lot of sense on No More Science on the ISS Until Further Notice · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...if you take building the ISS as a goal.

    But frankly, why would you? ISS isn't a step forward to anywhere. It doesn't do anything much other than "showcase international cooperation". The science it was doing was of the "train ants to sort tiny screws in space" variety. Even the Wikipedia article can't muster much definitive purpose, beyond the usual vague claim of technical spin-offs.

    They should either decide that it's a tool for a task, redesign and build towards that, or de-orbit the whole junkpile into the nearest ocean. To carry on building for the sake of mere inertia would be nuts.

  3. Yeah, but you wouldn't notice it on Initializing all Java classes at Start-Up · · Score: 1

    "javad" would boot from /etc/init.d and be running by the time KDE got finished loading the kitchen sink. At which point, Java processes would have as low startup overhead as regular ones.

  4. Fossil is a bad analogy. Try "modern mammal". on A Look At Bootstrapping · · Score: 3, Interesting

    To you it might look old and convoluted. To me, it looks like a design sharpened by natural selection. The old 16-bit modes stay, because they have vestigial uses and they aren't sufficiently problematic to make the chip "evolutionarily unfit".

  5. Wikipedia on Preview Of The $100 Laptop · · Score: 1

    Supposing it comes with a canned version of Wikipedia, and the software to update it intermittently. Say either online update, or handoffs of canned databases via bluetooth or whatever. Oh, and throw in a copy of Project Gutenberg for good luck.

    Right there, you've got an educational resource that, in anyplace without net connections, is worth its weight in gold.

  6. In order to defeat the calls for "pics plz" on OMG Girlz Don't Exist On Teh Intarweb! · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...she gets her professionally taken pics plastered all over The Escapist.

    Way to prove you're a girl, I suppose. Still, so much for the "I don't show my pic to random people" thing. Couldn't get much more random than that!

  7. dot-qualified column names are unique on How Would You Improve SQL? · · Score: 1

    Why do I not qualify every column name? Because relational attributes *must* always be unique and unambiguous.

    Result, C naming syndrome.

    LeaseNumber and Lease.Number are functionally equivalent, they're both unique, however the latter lends itself to convenient simplification in contexts where it wouldn't create ambiguity. Otherwise you end up repeating yourself a lot. LongTableNamePrefixFoo, LongTableNamePrefixBar, LongTableNamePrefixBaz etc.

  8. Re:enlighten me please on GORM 1.0 Release to Take on GNOME/KDE? · · Score: 1

    OpenStep (the standard GnuStep is cloning) comprises a high/medium/low level library, GUI widgets, standard look and feel, IPC, and basically all the functions of a *DE. As such it's more equivalent to Java (which is also a bundle of everything) than KDE or Gnome (which lean heavily on preexisting libs).

    However, it's also 1990s tech, and it shows. Like one of those hand-wired Crays, it's a beautifully built museum piece.

  9. Given Turing equivalence on GORM 1.0 Release to Take on GNOME/KDE? · · Score: 1

    ...it's still possible to define a useful meaning for "what you can do in language X can't be done in language Y". Namely: the fastest way to implement the features of X in Y is to use Y to write an emulation of X.

    Thus it it's fair to say eg: "you can't do Haskell stuff in C, without rewriting a Haskell interpreter in C".

  10. Usenet is the anti-bittorrent on GUBA makes Usenet search easy as Google · · Score: 1

    BT is efficient. Data starts in one place, then spreads to interested parties, who share the burden of distribution.

    Usenet is wildly inefficient. Data is expanded into an messy ascii encoding, handed to and fro by copying-in-full between thousands of completely uninterested parties, to the order of gigabytes per day. Then the actual interested users download it, taking no part of the burden, quite possibly missing chunks with no way to retrieve them, copy yet again the original from the ascii encoding, log off and throw the encoded data away.

    It made sense when the only comms available to the average computer was intermittent dial-and-forward.

    Nowdays, especially for large binary data, it's beyond obsolete - it's silly.

  11. Eh on A Closer Look at Star Wars on Film and Off · · Score: 1

    Show a postmodernist a Rorschach ink blot, and he sees an existential and reflexive dialectic between order and chaos. Show the same blot to a wino, and he sees a beer can.

  12. I doubt the exact pitch matters on Singing Mice and Brain Chemistry · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Cats etc don't hear "ultrasound" as a distinct thing. They hear what is for them perfectly normal noise that happens to be high-pitched. But they'll as likely recognise an unusually low-pitched mouse call as you would recognise an unusually low pitched meow or bark.

  13. Nope on Microsoft Takes Aim At Google · · Score: 2, Funny

    That's "to tubgirl".

  14. Hah! on Microsoft Takes Aim At Google · · Score: 1

    You can take that comment, fold it until it's all corners, and Microsoft it.

  15. It makes sense, as a wedge and an example on Court Battle Over Internet Calls · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As a wedge: to break and finally remove the existing wiretapping laws. They should not exist, but voting is FAR too blunt an instrument to remove them. The best way to make a bad law go away is to break it.

    As an example, VOIP is a pointer to a wider fact: communication is fungible, because bits are fungible. The only way to wiretap every conversation, is to wiretap every packet and datum on the inernet. Further, there are no longer any "marginal" loopholes. A loophole which can be automated, can be adopted wholesale and worldwide. Therefore, it becomes a binary choice: total Big Brother, or no Big Brother. Wiretapping was always a trade-off, and I would argue that technical progress has made it unacceptable.

  16. At what point are people finally going to stand up on FCC Demands Universities Comply With Wiretap Law · · Score: 1

    ...and say "no, my conversations are none of your business"?

  17. The real renewable energy on UK's Chief Scientist Backs Nuclear Power Revival · · Score: 1

    Wind, geothermal etc are insignificant, inefficient, second-hand energy sources only of interest to luddites. They do not, can not, and never will fulfil the energy demands of the modern world. Nor will humanity permanently cap itself at steam-age energy usage to make nice with said luddites. So basically that idea can go in the dustbin, and good riddance.

    There is basically only one "renewable" energy source that makes sense, namely sunlight. Not the poor, murky, filtered stuff that squeezes through earth's atmosphere, but the raw real deal, billions of megawatts pouring out uselessly into empty space.

  18. That's not necessarily the case on UK's Chief Scientist Backs Nuclear Power Revival · · Score: 1

    Don't forget, the last time these people made any big noise was the 1980s, and the world's moved on a lot since then. In particular, the sort of reactive luddite environmentalism that was popular then has basically overplayed its hand, reached saturation and lost the moral high ground. Sure the nutjobs will sloganize and march in papier-mache-heads as they usually do - but people will recognise it's just the usual rent-a-mob, not any sort of grassroots uprising. They'll mainly get bad press for blocking the roads. Even the BBC might tone down its traditional awed deference. Heh.

  19. Eh, well, it's a matter of scale on ISS Orbit-Raising Attempt Fails · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nine months might sound like a long while. But consider the lead times for rockets. Can an unscheduled mission be planned, built, prepped, tested, rubberstamped and shot into orbit inside nine months?

  20. Re:Ooooh. on Transparent Aluminum a Reality · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeuch. You disgust me! How brainwashed and nihilistic does a human have to be, to strap a gun pointing to their head with a dangling tag saying "for police use"? Or, how utterly sick, to insist others do so?

    I do not view the government as a thing with the legitimate right to kill me. If that stymies their plans, fuck 'em. I'll take all the armor I can get!

  21. Which characters on Why Haven't Special Character Sets Caught On? · · Score: 1

    Suppose you go to the Unicode folks and say "lets use a spare set of codepoints to encode programming language constructs".

    OK, so, which constructs?

    Well, we've got the basic operators of C. Java and C++ can share a lot of those. Then we've got the stuff in Ada, they have a few of their own. And ocaml has a few more. Haskell can use some of the ocaml ones, but we'll distinguish them with a diacritic to mark them as lazy...

    Oh drat, someone sent me a program in Perl, and I haven't got the right font. It just looks like line noise!

  22. I would narrow this down on National Academies on U.S. Science · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's not even your general culture. It's your public education system, which sucks every imaginable mode of ass. It is a union-captured mediocrity-ruled Prussian-designed system absolutely intended to hammer the individual flat to the collective.

    If you have a child in the USA, home-school them. Go hungry, rather than send them to government school.

  23. Grammar check is perhaps a misnomer on AbiWord beats OpenOffice to a Grammar Checker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actual uses of grammar check:

    - As a partner to spell check, find correctly spelled but misplaced words (eg: there and their).

    - Find common brain-farts such as reduplicated words.

    - Remind blame-ducking idiots that the passive verb makes their evasions obvious. Mistakes were made, my foot!

    - Point out incongruities and neologisms, which some people might not know aren't cultured english, such as excessive verbing of nouns.

    These are all tasks that require an ability to parse grammar, and they're actually useful.To call them "grammar checking" would be too strong, but I can't think of a better descriptive name.

  24. Although the noodles had to be saved for science on Four Millennia Old Noodles Found In China · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...some eggs found nearby were considered a delicacy.

  25. Re:Why do you care? on Arrays vs Pointers in C? · · Score: 1

    You're right, it could be running embedded with severe memory and speed constraints. But even there, it's a bad idea to try and second-guess the C compiler's output. If you're worried about the assembler output the compiler might emit, put some manually tuned assembler in there instead.