That's a bullshit argument. It's bullshit because it can be applied to every single human activity, not just space.
Is energy a big problem? No, actually - we have plenty of it, and we know ways to generate far, far more. What we will run out of is fossil fuel, and that is a problem, but 'space' is not a big contributor to that loss (rockets don't run on oil). And even if energy were such a big problem, there is no need to give up on other research and development until we solved it - in fact quite the opposite, as large-scale research programs have always had major beneficial effects elsewhere in society.
I'll take the surface with its sunlight, wide open skies, forests, beaches, cities, mountains, people, and all the other stuff we have here over orbit any time, thank you. But the rich are welcome to live in a stinking, unhealthy tin can that can fail disastrously at any moment with all their money...
Having read the FAQ on the Ocean Cleanup website, what they are proposing is not a seive, more of a barrier - it's intending to collect the larger floating pieces, not the smaller ones.
...and then turn them into a giant floating island that will be filled with windmills, tulips, and people wearing clogs. It will be called "New Netherlands".
How many rock solid kernels, games or video editing suites are you aware of? I'm aware of zero. Do you not install your updates?
How many updates are required because of coding errors that would be caught by a language? And how many are outright logic errors that would occur in any language? Without that information we can only speculate that better languages would produce better software.
Besides, is software actually bad? This is a serious question: is software really in a state of crisis? My machine hasn't crashed in years (it is running Windows 7), I have an occasional crashing application - mostly games, but Visual Studio (the editor, not the compiler) will occasionally hang indefinitely (usually after doing too many renames in the IDE, or when using F12 to jump to a declaration).
Visual Studio, just for the record, is written in one of those safe, managed languages and runs in a safe, managed environment (https://www.quora.com/As-of-2015-how-much-of-Microsoft-Visual-Studio-is-written-in-managed-code) - so it's not a magic bullet after all, then. And 'hanging after too many renames' sure sounds like a creeping resource loss of the kind we were not supposed to have in a managed language.
Now, tell me that _your_ completely incompatible language with just one compiler, one vendor (who changes the language every three months and has a bad track record of supporting its own products), and just about zero library and tool support is so much better...
"But my crappy language can actually call C libraries!" Great for you kid. Might as well write C all the way then...
Passwords suck. Even with SSO, even with a password manager, even with salting and hashing, passwords suck, and will always suck.
You need an authentication token. *One* authentication token. Microsoft can do it, Google can do it, Facebook can do it (but of course they are not compatible).
Millions of little websites still use passwords.
And then Microsoft makes use of Windows 10 (or compatible Windows Phone devices) mandatory for their SSO. Google randomly decides to just drop the whole SSO business. Facebook suspends your account because some asshole from Brazil has complained about one of your holiday snaps. What now? Will you just rebuild your whole online identity? Or forget about the dozens of sites you were participating in?
You should also check _where_ all that air pollution is located. Much of it is apparently in the Sahara, which is an uninhabited desert without people or cars or factories. If the Sahara is suffering from pollution, then I think we can safely say that pollution is a natural feature of our world, and we shouldn't be complaining about it.
Does it come with a real menu bar with file, edit and other proper menus? Or do I have to play "hunt the secret glyph" to unlock a menu?
It has never not done that. Just right-click... in the right spot... and select "menu bar" - and there it is again. The right spot may be tough to find though. The plus-sign next to the tabs works, at least.
I do agree completely that it should never have been hidden to begin with.
put "Hello world at" && the long time & return after field 1
wait 1 second
end repeat
So what does this magical natural language-based language do? It uses the same keywords you find in other languages ("repeat", "end repeat"), it still requires quotes around quoted text, it still uses weird symbols ("&&" and "&"), and no doubt there are still significant restrictions on language structure because otherwise it would not be parseable without ambiguity. In other words, it is like every other computer language out there, except perhaps slightly more verbose in places because most other computer languages have done away with sticking "the" in front of nouns.
If "most of the best" programmers you know only know how to create websites and mobile apps, maybe you just don't know any good programmers... Which would also explain why they have no clue about CS.
Those people are being taken care of. What makes you believe anyone will be taking care of you? The unwanted and undesired live like rats. Visit any place in the third world to see the truth of that. You're future isn't WALL-E, it's this: https://d.fastcompany.net/mult...
If you want to avoid that, maybe it's time to start manufacturing stuff at home again, instead of farming all of that work out to China.
It will allow ISPs to provide financial incentive to users, and that would be the end of internet as we know it. Instead of access to the entire internet you might see specialty packages that are cheaper and only offer access to specific services (facebook, youtube, and some messenger service maybe) while everything else is deprioritized to the point where it might as well not exist. Instead of everyone being his own voice on the net, all of a sudden the internet has become like television, with the providers determining what we can see and what we cannot see. Do you, as a content provider, want to be on the preferred channel list? No problemo, it's very cheap! So internet providers will have to provide less service, and get paid by both their customers and the service providers.
Instead of being an open medium where everyone can speak and have his voice heard, internet will become a walled garden owned by a few large companies. And while that's certainly the wet dream of a lot of companies (endless income!) and governments (no more free speech! or at least, not where anyone can hear it), it would be major bad news for us, the citizens of planet Earth.
This line of stories where any kind of physical access to a device can be abused in an unexpected and incredibly convoluted way is completely out of control. Hey guys! If you discharge a big capacitor into sensitive electronics IT BREAKS! WOW! HEADLINE!
So let's say manufacturers, shaken awake by this completely unexpected use of their devices, now protect their electronics from this attack. Next year: "Hey guys! If you stick a 240V line directly into your USB port IT BREAKS! WOW! HEADLINE!"
So they fix that too, although I couldn't imagine why they'd want to. The year after: "Hey guys! If you fly a metal object on a metal wire during a thunderstorm and link the metal wire directly into your USB port IT BREAKS! WOW! HEADLINE!"
Like I said, it is getting ridiculous. Just like all those completely pointless side-channel attacks. Why, yes, if you stand next to a 3D printer, you _can_ in fact listen to it and presumably get some vague idea of what's being printed. Or you can just, you know, look at the damn device you are standing right next to. So this attack is great news for all spies who have physical access to sensitive 3D printers that are covered by blankets - and of not much use, or concern, to everyone else.
Stop it already with the silly fear mongering. Side channel attacks that require access that would allow a far more direct attack to take place are completely pointless, and need not be reported on (or maybe we can have a summary topic every year, a "best of the stupidest" kind of thing). And discharging big capacitors tends to destroy electronics. It's not "news for nerds" and it is not "stuff that matters". But maybe this site is now "slashdot: clickbait for nerds and stuff that sounds good but has no substance whatsoever"...
As I wrote below, I remember seeing documentation with specific functions for each type of control, suggesting very much they were all completely unrelated.
And you could at least get rid of namespace qualifiers with a few 'using' declarations...
I distinctly remember seeing a long list of member functions: add_button, add_checkbox, add_string_widget - one for each type of control in QT. You'd think those would all qualify as "controls", and therefore work with a single add_control function that leverages the power of inheritance. I can't find it now; maybe it was in an older version.
And don't give me crap about "...in good software design". A button is-a control (it doesn't have-a control), and that is an inheritance relation, not a composition relation.
I'm sorry, but I really don't like QT. It's not C++ - they have their own little language that compiles to C++ using an external compiler. It has crappy alternatives for everything in STL that work just slightly different but not any better. It has copy-on-write. It doesn't use inheritance, but gives you endless lists of almost-identical function calls (all those functions to add controls, for example). And that stupid Q everywhere you look is just painful.
This is the 21st century, and I demand the right to use fractional tabs! I want my tabs to align to 3.78 spaces for the optimum combination of readability and screen space use!
The funny thing being, of course, that I actually do thermal testing on spacecraft and therefore have a good idea of what's involved in their construction, whereas you are presumably a pale basement dweller who has zero real-world experience of any kind but believes he knows everything because he has read about it on the internet once.
Dude, my job is doing thermal testing on spacecraft. I can tell you thermal design involves just slightly more than "wrapping a mylar blanket around it".
Also, the fact that rocket stages and habitats are both in some sense metal boxes does not in any way imply they are therefore interchangeable. Both are highly specialized parts that have very different goals. Rocket stages simply cannot afford all the extra weight necessary for them to function as a habitat (life support equipment, solar cells, meteorite shielding, access hatches, equipment for the astronauts to do useful work with, etc.). Besides, the biggest (lower) stages never make it into orbit anyway (only the top stage does, and why do you think that is?). The top stage is typically quite small. It's also not just a hollow shell; inside are multiple tanks (for fuel and oxidiser), the engine itself, pumps, electronics, etc. You'd have to remove all that.
So let's say you want to add all the necessary equipment later. How is it going to get into orbit? For that you need _another_ launch! And then you need to do a hell of a lot of precision engineering in one of the most hostile environments known to mankind, just to remove the old contents of the stage, and replace it by new contents which you might as well have launched ready to use from Earth (the weight is going to be the same, whether you pack it up tightly or not, after all).
You also have to come up with a plan to get rid of any remaining fuel. If it's hydrazine (not uncommon on upper stages), that's pretty toxic, and no, you cannot just open the hatch and hope it disappears into space.
So an empty metal container made for storing fuel is also a great place to live? It has precisely the right properties in terms of structural integrity, heat and radiation shielding, etc.? Putting all the required machinery to sustain life inside is cost-free?
Or, if it is none of those things, changing all that stuff in orbit is actually cheaper and easier than launching a complete habitat from earth?
There's just such a mountain of crap on stackoverflow. Newbies are apparently all of them trying to reimplement std::vector or std::list, and they all want to do C-style strings. Worse, they get all offended when you point them towards the standard library solutions. Apparently there's some truly lousy teachers around... The weird thing about C++ is that it is actually bloody easy if you stay away from the crappy C parts, but since everyone seems hell-bent on doing things in as complicated a fashion as possible it makes it look like a difficult language.
Anyway, you should possibly have given that evidence to the manager in a private setting, so he could avoid losing face (and perhaps avoid some of the damage as well). Someone must have given that coworker access to production, after all...
Oh, I can show you that portfolio already. It's called "stackoverflow". If you have ever browsed through that you'll see how much "a few weeks of bootcamp" is worth...
Slashdot Mirror
That's a bullshit argument. It's bullshit because it can be applied to every single human activity, not just space.
Is energy a big problem? No, actually - we have plenty of it, and we know ways to generate far, far more. What we will run out of is fossil fuel, and that is a problem, but 'space' is not a big contributor to that loss (rockets don't run on oil). And even if energy were such a big problem, there is no need to give up on other research and development until we solved it - in fact quite the opposite, as large-scale research programs have always had major beneficial effects elsewhere in society.
I'll take the surface with its sunlight, wide open skies, forests, beaches, cities, mountains, people, and all the other stuff we have here over orbit any time, thank you. But the rich are welcome to live in a stinking, unhealthy tin can that can fail disastrously at any moment with all their money...
Having read the FAQ on the Ocean Cleanup website, what they are proposing is not a seive, more of a barrier - it's intending to collect the larger floating pieces, not the smaller ones.
...and then turn them into a giant floating island that will be filled with windmills, tulips, and people wearing clogs. It will be called "New Netherlands".
How many rock solid kernels, games or video editing suites are you aware of? I'm aware of zero. Do you not install your updates?
How many updates are required because of coding errors that would be caught by a language? And how many are outright logic errors that would occur in any language? Without that information we can only speculate that better languages would produce better software.
Besides, is software actually bad? This is a serious question: is software really in a state of crisis? My machine hasn't crashed in years (it is running Windows 7), I have an occasional crashing application - mostly games, but Visual Studio (the editor, not the compiler) will occasionally hang indefinitely (usually after doing too many renames in the IDE, or when using F12 to jump to a declaration).
Visual Studio, just for the record, is written in one of those safe, managed languages and runs in a safe, managed environment (https://www.quora.com/As-of-2015-how-much-of-Microsoft-Visual-Studio-is-written-in-managed-code) - so it's not a magic bullet after all, then. And 'hanging after too many renames' sure sounds like a creeping resource loss of the kind we were not supposed to have in a managed language.
Now, tell me that _your_ completely incompatible language with just one compiler, one vendor (who changes the language every three months and has a bad track record of supporting its own products), and just about zero library and tool support is so much better...
"But my crappy language can actually call C libraries!" Great for you kid. Might as well write C all the way then...
Passwords suck. Even with SSO, even with a password manager, even with salting and hashing, passwords suck, and will always suck.
You need an authentication token. *One* authentication token. Microsoft can do it, Google can do it, Facebook can do it (but of course they are not compatible).
Millions of little websites still use passwords.
And then Microsoft makes use of Windows 10 (or compatible Windows Phone devices) mandatory for their SSO. Google randomly decides to just drop the whole SSO business. Facebook suspends your account because some asshole from Brazil has complained about one of your holiday snaps. What now? Will you just rebuild your whole online identity? Or forget about the dozens of sites you were participating in?
You should also check _where_ all that air pollution is located. Much of it is apparently in the Sahara, which is an uninhabited desert without people or cars or factories. If the Sahara is suffering from pollution, then I think we can safely say that pollution is a natural feature of our world, and we shouldn't be complaining about it.
In similar news, parents who are complete pricks do run the risk that their children grow up to be policemen.
Does it come with a real menu bar with file, edit and other proper menus? Or do I have to play "hunt the secret glyph" to unlock a menu?
It has never not done that. Just right-click... in the right spot... and select "menu bar" - and there it is again. The right spot may be tough to find though. The plus-sign next to the tabs works, at least.
I do agree completely that it should never have been hidden to begin with.
I found the following example on wikipedia:
repeat ten times
put "Hello world at" && the long time & return after field 1
wait 1 second
end repeat
So what does this magical natural language-based language do? It uses the same keywords you find in other languages ("repeat", "end repeat"), it still requires quotes around quoted text, it still uses weird symbols ("&&" and "&"), and no doubt there are still significant restrictions on language structure because otherwise it would not be parseable without ambiguity. In other words, it is like every other computer language out there, except perhaps slightly more verbose in places because most other computer languages have done away with sticking "the" in front of nouns.
If "most of the best" programmers you know only know how to create websites and mobile apps, maybe you just don't know any good programmers... Which would also explain why they have no clue about CS.
It is a lousy astronomer who does not know how to use a telescope, or who has never seen the stars.
Those people are being taken care of. What makes you believe anyone will be taking care of you? The unwanted and undesired live like rats. Visit any place in the third world to see the truth of that. You're future isn't WALL-E, it's this: https://d.fastcompany.net/mult...
If you want to avoid that, maybe it's time to start manufacturing stuff at home again, instead of farming all of that work out to China.
It will allow ISPs to provide financial incentive to users, and that would be the end of internet as we know it. Instead of access to the entire internet you might see specialty packages that are cheaper and only offer access to specific services (facebook, youtube, and some messenger service maybe) while everything else is deprioritized to the point where it might as well not exist. Instead of everyone being his own voice on the net, all of a sudden the internet has become like television, with the providers determining what we can see and what we cannot see. Do you, as a content provider, want to be on the preferred channel list? No problemo, it's very cheap! So internet providers will have to provide less service, and get paid by both their customers and the service providers.
Instead of being an open medium where everyone can speak and have his voice heard, internet will become a walled garden owned by a few large companies. And while that's certainly the wet dream of a lot of companies (endless income!) and governments (no more free speech! or at least, not where anyone can hear it), it would be major bad news for us, the citizens of planet Earth.
Not installing the Geforce Experience in the first place.
I've been doing without it for years. Nothing seems to have broken as a result, and I suspect I saved myself a lot of nagging popups.
This line of stories where any kind of physical access to a device can be abused in an unexpected and incredibly convoluted way is completely out of control. Hey guys! If you discharge a big capacitor into sensitive electronics IT BREAKS! WOW! HEADLINE!
So let's say manufacturers, shaken awake by this completely unexpected use of their devices, now protect their electronics from this attack. Next year: "Hey guys! If you stick a 240V line directly into your USB port IT BREAKS! WOW! HEADLINE!"
So they fix that too, although I couldn't imagine why they'd want to. The year after: "Hey guys! If you fly a metal object on a metal wire during a thunderstorm and link the metal wire directly into your USB port IT BREAKS! WOW! HEADLINE!"
Like I said, it is getting ridiculous. Just like all those completely pointless side-channel attacks. Why, yes, if you stand next to a 3D printer, you _can_ in fact listen to it and presumably get some vague idea of what's being printed. Or you can just, you know, look at the damn device you are standing right next to. So this attack is great news for all spies who have physical access to sensitive 3D printers that are covered by blankets - and of not much use, or concern, to everyone else.
Stop it already with the silly fear mongering. Side channel attacks that require access that would allow a far more direct attack to take place are completely pointless, and need not be reported on (or maybe we can have a summary topic every year, a "best of the stupidest" kind of thing). And discharging big capacitors tends to destroy electronics. It's not "news for nerds" and it is not "stuff that matters". But maybe this site is now "slashdot: clickbait for nerds and stuff that sounds good but has no substance whatsoever"...
As I wrote below, I remember seeing documentation with specific functions for each type of control, suggesting very much they were all completely unrelated.
And you could at least get rid of namespace qualifiers with a few 'using' declarations...
I distinctly remember seeing a long list of member functions: add_button, add_checkbox, add_string_widget - one for each type of control in QT. You'd think those would all qualify as "controls", and therefore work with a single add_control function that leverages the power of inheritance. I can't find it now; maybe it was in an older version.
And don't give me crap about "...in good software design". A button is-a control (it doesn't have-a control), and that is an inheritance relation, not a composition relation.
I'm sorry, but I really don't like QT. It's not C++ - they have their own little language that compiles to C++ using an external compiler. It has crappy alternatives for everything in STL that work just slightly different but not any better. It has copy-on-write. It doesn't use inheritance, but gives you endless lists of almost-identical function calls (all those functions to add controls, for example). And that stupid Q everywhere you look is just painful.
This is the 21st century, and I demand the right to use fractional tabs! I want my tabs to align to 3.78 spaces for the optimum combination of readability and screen space use!
The funny thing being, of course, that I actually do thermal testing on spacecraft and therefore have a good idea of what's involved in their construction, whereas you are presumably a pale basement dweller who has zero real-world experience of any kind but believes he knows everything because he has read about it on the internet once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dude, my job is doing thermal testing on spacecraft. I can tell you thermal design involves just slightly more than "wrapping a mylar blanket around it".
Also, the fact that rocket stages and habitats are both in some sense metal boxes does not in any way imply they are therefore interchangeable. Both are highly specialized parts that have very different goals. Rocket stages simply cannot afford all the extra weight necessary for them to function as a habitat (life support equipment, solar cells, meteorite shielding, access hatches, equipment for the astronauts to do useful work with, etc.). Besides, the biggest (lower) stages never make it into orbit anyway (only the top stage does, and why do you think that is?). The top stage is typically quite small. It's also not just a hollow shell; inside are multiple tanks (for fuel and oxidiser), the engine itself, pumps, electronics, etc. You'd have to remove all that.
So let's say you want to add all the necessary equipment later. How is it going to get into orbit? For that you need _another_ launch! And then you need to do a hell of a lot of precision engineering in one of the most hostile environments known to mankind, just to remove the old contents of the stage, and replace it by new contents which you might as well have launched ready to use from Earth (the weight is going to be the same, whether you pack it up tightly or not, after all).
You also have to come up with a plan to get rid of any remaining fuel. If it's hydrazine (not uncommon on upper stages), that's pretty toxic, and no, you cannot just open the hatch and hope it disappears into space.
So an empty metal container made for storing fuel is also a great place to live? It has precisely the right properties in terms of structural integrity, heat and radiation shielding, etc.? Putting all the required machinery to sustain life inside is cost-free?
Or, if it is none of those things, changing all that stuff in orbit is actually cheaper and easier than launching a complete habitat from earth?
(hint: the answer to all these questions is "no")
There's just such a mountain of crap on stackoverflow. Newbies are apparently all of them trying to reimplement std::vector or std::list, and they all want to do C-style strings. Worse, they get all offended when you point them towards the standard library solutions. Apparently there's some truly lousy teachers around... The weird thing about C++ is that it is actually bloody easy if you stay away from the crappy C parts, but since everyone seems hell-bent on doing things in as complicated a fashion as possible it makes it look like a difficult language.
Anyway, you should possibly have given that evidence to the manager in a private setting, so he could avoid losing face (and perhaps avoid some of the damage as well). Someone must have given that coworker access to production, after all...
Oh, I can show you that portfolio already. It's called "stackoverflow". If you have ever browsed through that you'll see how much "a few weeks of bootcamp" is worth...
What's stopping you from visiting a cheap university? Either at home or abroad?