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User: vikingpower

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  1. Re:510kph is airliner speed? on Japanese Maglev Train Hits 500kph · · Score: 0

    We're talking about AVERAGE speed here.

    Moron.

  2. Re:stupid germans on Japanese Maglev Train Hits 500kph · · Score: 3, Informative

    Germany has a very well-working system of high-speed trains, named ICE ( InterCity Express ). Most of those average > 300 km/h on stretches between major cities. Stupid Germans ? They overtook the French, with their TGV.

  3. Who cares on Microsoft Aims To Offer Windows 10 Upgrades For All Windows Phone 8 Lumias · · Score: 1, Insightful

    about Windows phones, anyway? The huge capital destruction operation that the Nokia takeover amounted to wasn't enough, obviously: MS needs to sink even more cash into a non-existing market: Windows phones. Ain't gonna change anytime soon. Reason : there is no fucking **innovation** going on at MS. Just marketing. Meh.

  4. Take on of the more rugged laptops on Ask Slashdot: Programming Education Resources For a Year Offline? · · Score: 1

    For example, one of the ThinkPads with carbon casing. I speak from experience: I have one, and have been lugging it everywhere. The things simply never break ( hear identical experiences from other users ). With one new internal and one new extra battery ( goes into the CD/DVD player slot ), in low-energy mode and BlueTooth / WiFi off, you'll last for 8 - 10 hours.

  5. Absolutely agree on Ask Slashdot: Programming Education Resources For a Year Offline? · · Score: 1

    Take a compact course book on tensors, and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. You'll need to assimilate the first to grasp the beauty of the second. If you only do the former, you'll come back with an important and valuable mathematical skill: tensors. If you go on to do the second, you'll be an intellectually much richer person when you come back, and it will change your look upon our universe.

  6. Re:It CAN'T land on a comet - see thunderbolts pro on Philae Lands Successfully On Comet · · Score: 1

    Holy crap. The EU fruitcakes here.... wow. Normally, I never react upon ACs, but your stupidity, Sir, blows my mind more than a 1 TeraVolt/meter electric field could ever do.

  7. About fucking time on Microsoft To Open Source .NET and Take It Cross-Platform · · Score: 1

    16 years after it became clear that Linux would break through. Well, at least they posted the stuff on GitHub under the MIT license. Let's see if anyone bites.

  8. TOUCHDOWN !! on Rosetta's Philae Probe To Land On Comet Tomorrow · · Score: 1

    Philae has landed. ESA did it: first landing ever on a comet !! Philae's "tweet"

  9. GO on Rosetta's Philae Probe To Land On Comet Tomorrow · · Score: 4, Informative

    Philae has separated from Rosetta, and is now sailing at 18 cm/s toward the comet. One of its rocket engines, on top of Philae, does not work. This engine is intended to push Philae against the comet; we now face the possiblity that Philae gently "bounces back" into space, because of the comet's very low gravity. Tension rising here.

  10. Re:My 2 cents ( I'm European == are Euro cents ) on Black IT Pros On (Lack Of) Racial Diversity In Tech · · Score: 1

    I omitted to mention that I worked in the Netherlands, in France, in Italy and in the USA. At least a year in each.

  11. My 2 cents ( I'm European == are Euro cents ) on Black IT Pros On (Lack Of) Racial Diversity In Tech · · Score: 1

    I have slightly over 21 years of experience in this business now. Programmer, SW architect. Aerospace industry, logistics, small businesses. You name it. And in all these years, I encountered exactly one black person. He consulted with Red Bull, here in Austria. And - besides being impressively knowledgeable on network infrastructure - he was American. The only black person among the numerous Americans I met and worked with in this field. Yes - there were Asians. I trained a couple of highly gifted Senegalese. South Americans ? Nope - exact for the seemingly gifted girl I, enrolled in an MA with an unknown Brasilian university, I helped this week with her MA thesis by letting her interview me. That was the first time I professionally met a South American in 21 years. We have a long way to go.

  12. Same thing here in Europe on AT&T Won't Do In-Flight Wi-Fi After All · · Score: 3, Interesting

    LTE was touted as the Next Big Thing by telco providers. Not any more now. Telcos have become fairly conservative, technology-wise. Is that a worldwide trend ?

  13. I did a quick scan of primary comments, i.e. of comments that were directly upon TFA, with or without thread attached to them. Around 70%, probably more, of these are overtly in denial of climate change and of CO2 emissions being a problem. Apart from other implications of this figure, I find this quite horrifying, for the reason that /. may be said to represent a good cross-section of ( mostly US-based ) technology-aware people, and hence that the implication is: the USA is going to do nothing to cut emissions. Nothing. Its engineers, its PhDs, its policymakers, its elected politicians, its executives - nothing. Wow.

  14. Re:fascinating... on Drones Over Greenland Give Insight To Pollution's Effects On Melting · · Score: 1

    You are wrong, as to raising dikes regularly. For two reasons:

    1) you can't raise a dike indefinitely, for the simple reason that a dike's foundations sit on very humid soil, basically a sort of muck. Raising it above a certain height makes the dike collapse. Ergo: significantly raising a dike means rebuilding it, on broader / wider foundations. That costs a hell of a lot of money, especially in areas where, historically, houses were built against the dike: you need to buy out the owners, destroy the houses etc. etc. The Dutch built a nationwide infrastructure of dikes and artefacts: the "Delta Works". Work began in the 60s, with the state borrowing massive amounts of money, of which the last euro was paid back only a few years ago. Doing that again requires that considerable financial risk be taken, as this time the effort would be even more humongous.

    2) you can't raise an artefact, like one of the great movable weirs the Netherlands have in the various sea-arms and estuaries, at all, for simple engineering reasons.

    I see where you are going, with your post. Without quoting or citing references, you claim that climate models are all crap. You are simply a denier of climate change who poses as a clever guy. Too bad I wasted my time and keyboard strokes on you.

  15. Re:fascinating... on Drones Over Greenland Give Insight To Pollution's Effects On Melting · · Score: 1

    You make it seem as if I were "running around in circles and screaming", i.e. as if I were hysterical. I am not. I am, however concerned about a point you completely ignore in your comments here, and that is the dynamics of ice sheet melting, of which we know not very much with certainty. It is very well possible that, when an ice sheet begins to melt, it reaches a "tipping point": a point where the whole process can not be reversed any more. You can do a simple experiment in your kitchen, in winter: take a well-pressed snowball, and put it on a warm boiling plate. Wait until half of it is gone, then quickly take it and throw it back into the snow, where it came from. If you are lucky, you'll end up with something close to 10% of the original volume; if you're not lucky, you'll end up with nothing.

    Moreover, I am Dutch, and grew up there, though I live in another place now. I was born at about 5 meters below sea level; as a matter of fact, about 40% of the Netherlands' surface, about 60% of total economy activity and close to 70% of all real estate value are below sea-level. I have personally seen a dike with the water close to its summit, and water seeping in, by the enormous pressure, from under the dike. Anything in Greenland happening that might have increased ice sheet melting as a consequence a reason for concern ? Hell, yes.

  16. Re:fascinating... on Drones Over Greenland Give Insight To Pollution's Effects On Melting · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, we can't. Not for reasons of feasibility of engineering problems, but for political reasons. We'll stand by the sideline, the coming decades, and watch how the Greenland ice sheet begins melting, as the political in-fighting goes on, contributing another 6 meters to sea level rising.

  17. Re:Grammar ? on Tao3D: a New Open-Source Programming Language For Real-Time 3D Animations · · Score: 1

    Don't care if it's recursive descent or not ( having noted the somewhat high-nosed, arrogant tone of your answer ). I want a grammer. BNF, EBNF, whatever. Anyone into compiler construction and wanting to / trying to use your language would want a grammar.

  18. Re:Not the right way, descubes on Tao3D: a New Open-Source Programming Language For Real-Time 3D Animations · · Score: 1

    Agree with your remark on the number of whiners, wholeheartedly even. Yet, any message should be tailored, in form and in content, to its potential public; a thing that, I think, you treated a bit lightheartedly. Moreover, if you want contributors, "steering" is going to bring you nowhere. If what you want is the open source paradigm, then give up steering. If you absolutely want to steer, then give up on the whole open source idea. Speaking from experience here.

  19. Descubes, did you think of putting up a formal grammar for your "language"? E.g. one in BNF ? Or a grammar readable by a widely-used parser generator tool such as ANTLR ? Seriously... !

  20. Not the right way, descubes on Tao3D: a New Open-Source Programming Language For Real-Time 3D Animations · · Score: 1

    This is not going to do your project a lot of good. You author the post, and put it on Slashdot, being lucky that you got on the front page. From that point on, it is *very* counterproductive to interfere with the discussion yourself. As other commenters already pointed out: you appear to have a vested interest in your subject, which - in the minds of many /.ers - influences the discussion in an unwanted, "steering" sort of way. Don't be surprised if your post goes into the history of Slashdot with a low number of comments. Next time, refrain from interfering. Good luck.

  21. - most strangely and remarkably - seems to only happen in the USA. Why ?

  22. Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... on NASA's HI-SEAS Project Results Suggests a Women-Only Mars Crew · · Score: 1

    "Plausibly" ? So a theory that takes interstellar travel and the pre-existence of humans on some other planet, light-years away, is more plausible than on-site i.e. on-earth evolution ? And where then, dear sir, did those humans come from who brought their eggs and sperm to Earth ? If not from evolution, then you face an endless recursion backward into time. And if from evolution, why could evolution not have happened on Earth ?

  23. Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... on NASA's HI-SEAS Project Results Suggests a Women-Only Mars Crew · · Score: 1

    Well, if you like fallacies, then we should send dead women. "dead" being an equal state for both women and men, if a woman eats less than a man, a dead woman eats even less than a dead man, right ?

  24. Re:Please god no. on The One App You Need On Your Resume If You Want a Job At Google · · Score: 1

    Second this, and mod parent up into the heavens. I have been using Julia for number-crunching ( trial factoring large numbers, finding Fibonacci primes, large matrix multiplication, PageRank on large graphs => eigenvalues on very large matrices ), and Julia is simply brilliant. The two guys behind the project seem to be working day and night, bug fixes are very very fast, speak 1 week. Julia runs on LLVM, is lightning-fast, and has a rather coherent design. A colleague ( researcher ) of mine is still on Matlab, as she has simply no time now to learn Julia; hearing her curse Matlab is as frequent as lunch breaks.

  25. Re:Don't trust any app these days on The Guardian Reveals That Whisper App Tracks "Anonymous" Users · · Score: 1

    Holy shit !

    It doesn't take much to realize that some places aren't ready for freedom and democracy.

    Are there actually people still believing that Bushian crap ? Obviously, yes ( at least you ). Up to the next interventionist war which will cost the already-bankrupt US a trillion dollars. Well done, well done.