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User: Jurily

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Comments · 2,491

  1. Space elevator? on $2 Million NASA Power Beaming Challenge Heating Up · · Score: 2, Informative

    Last I heard there were bigger problems with space elevators than the energy required to get up there.

    A circular geosynchronous orbit in the plane of the Earth's equator has a radius of approximately 42,164 km (from the center of the Earth). A satellite in such an orbit is at an altitude of approximately 35,786 km above mean sea level.

  2. Re:Technically in the Public Domain But, on U of Michigan and Amazon To Offer 400,000 OOP Books · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sounds silly and convoluted, but this is the kind of argument we can expect to see as information becomes easy to control and manipulate.

    No, this is what you get for treating information as property. Maybe the law needs to get in sync with reality once in a while.

    You can go on and on about how it costs money to create information in whatever form, but as long as it's free to replicate it (since the devices needed are common household items now), you need a different business model other than selling it. I'm generalizing here because it doesn't just apply to literature. Think software, music, movies, etc. That's the beauty of computers: all information can be represented as a sequence of bits, and as such, easily copied and modified. Add in the fact that most people don't have a moral problem with copying, and you have laws that are impossible to uphold without a police state.

    Oh, and let's not go into the finer points, like what happens when I write a program, and the compiler output played as audio happens to be a copyrighted song.

  3. Re:don't believe it on Artificial Brain '10 Years Away' · · Score: 1

    Our brains connect with reality in many ways our conscious self can't perceive.

    What evidence have you? Go on and make shit up, spout it off.

    Quick reality check: speed up your heart rate, then slow it down again. You have 20 seconds.

    Oh, you mean you aren't even in full conscious control of your own body? How are you supposed to know shit about the universe, then? Lack of evidence means "unproven", not "false". Learn the difference.

  4. Re:pointless on 'Power Capping' the Datacenter · · Score: 0

    Power consumption is not just about hardware. Maybe people need to cut down on scripted languages and the like. Return to server-client architecture instead of AJAX and you're halfway there.

  5. Re:don't believe it on Artificial Brain '10 Years Away' · · Score: 1

    I always thought the consciousness is more like a process making syscalls, not the OS itself.

    Which would also explain how people can learn to do things like "slow my heart rate", while others think it's impossible.

  6. Re:Seems ethically dodgy... on Artificial Brain '10 Years Away' · · Score: -1

    Are we just "atoms"? Most religions say otherwise, and if you ignore the crap just there to scare the peasants into behaving, they actually say the same things.

    Are they all wrong, or did we just miss something with our overly materialistic bias? Science might figure out the universe, but by definition it can't figure out things outside it.

  7. Re:Goddammit. on Artificial Brain '10 Years Away' · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sinners go to /dev/null.

  8. Re:This may seem obvious to some, but... on Google Wave Reviewed · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's "on steroids". "On crack" means totally fucked up.

  9. Re:don't believe it on Artificial Brain '10 Years Away' · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Do we know enough to say that with confidence?

    Tell you what: tell me how that thing with the car keys works (you know, the one where you look at the table three times and it isn't there, you search for it for 10 minutes elsewhere, and suddenly you see it right there where you looked before), and I'll believe you.

  10. Re:don't believe it on Artificial Brain '10 Years Away' · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The brain is a self-modifying learning machine. Until you can build a self-modifying learning machine, you can have all the structure you want, it won't be functionally equivalent to a human brain.

  11. Re:ZOMG, on Vacuum Leaks Lead To Another LHC Delay · · Score: 1

    This is like Duke Nukem Forever all over again.

    The story or the development process?

  12. Re:Japan on Japanese Researchers Create Skiing Robot · · Score: 1

    It's not the robotics part that's interesting here. It's that we're starting to realize, that in order to get a clear picture of what's really happening inside a human body, we need to build one from scratch.

    IMO they're doing it wrong. They should aim at creating a robot that can be taught to ski.

  13. Re:What? on Adobe Chided For Insecure Acrobat Reader · · Score: 4, Funny

    There's a version without vulnerabilities?

    Yeah, the experimental branch called Foxit Reader. I heard it's a lot faster, too.

  14. Re:Watch Your Trash Talk! on WoW Gamer Earns Federal Investigation Achievement · · Score: 1

    corps don't have the right to secure their planes the way they'd like to

    Whose idea was that passengers must be conscious during the trip, anyway?

  15. Re:Whole Disk Encryption on Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen? · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    it's trivial to re-install linux

    Oh really?

  16. Re:Even if it was a rave... on UK Police Raid Party After Seeing "All-Night" Tag On Facebook · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The root of this all is the War on Some Drugs.

    Fixed that for you.

  17. Re:No good games on US Videogame Sales Have Biggest Drop In 9 Years · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If the video game industry needs sales of crap in order to be profitable, maybe the lesson should be make better games.

    Actually, the good games don't sell that well. Hence the pile of crap on the market.

  18. Re:Wow on ImageShack Hacked, Security Groups Threatened · · Score: 1

    If their message is clear, concise and not disagreeable, why can't they convince us with a logical argument?

    Because they already tried that and nobody listened?

  19. Re:Final code on Korean DDoS Bots To Self-Destruct · · Score: 1

    First off, I fear this is a hoax, simply because we are hearing about it BEFOREHAND.

    Yes, they deciphered exactly when and how it will strike, but can't figure out how to remove it?

  20. Re:Mouse? on Best Mouse For Programming? · · Score: 1

    :q!

  21. Re:The main reason games don't have obscene conten on Video Games, the First Amendment, and Obscenity · · Score: 1

    Why do you think old married couples don't have sex as often? It's not just because they are busy. It's because they have lost the curiosity.

    Because women aren't as attractive at age 50 after 3 kids, as they were when they got married? Don't know about you, but where I live, sex isn't fueled by curiosity.

  22. Re:A good combination of a storyline and graphics. on What's the Importance of Graphics In Video Games? · · Score: 1

    LOL! By this logic, every modern game is "unplayable" because they can't usually be played on a laptop.

    The point is, graphics did not add anything to the game, as the game logic was fundamentally the same as the tried and tested HOMM3.

    What it did was 1. increased the system requirements for no good reason, 2. obscured the important objects on the map by adding pretty but useless new ones, which of course, being 3D, had a good chance of concealing something important you'd seen from a different angle, 3. every time you clicked a castle, it forced you to view a nice animation that you've already seen 3 million times, thus making the management of multiple castles painfully slow, 4. by having a 3D map with no apparent grid viewed from an arbitrary angle, it also made estimating movement costs a lot harder.

    It also took away from the cutscenes, as the characters talked without lip movement.

  23. How much of the image is real? on Software Converts 2D Images To 3D · · Score: 2, Interesting

    between five and fifteen photos of your object and they must overlap at least 80 to 90 percent.

    So the 3D object in question will only have a front side? That's nowhere near enough for all sides.

  24. Re:How soon we forget on How Microsoft Has Changed Without Bill Gates · · Score: 1

    he has made a important contribution to the computing industry: Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.

    Bullshit. IBM did that, MS was just there to exploit it. The desktop revolution would've happened anyway.

    The one contribution Microsoft gave the computing industry that's actually worth a damn is the taskbar.

  25. Re:Marketing..... on Google Reveals Chrome Hardware Partners · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    From what I have read this is Linux with a custom GUI on the front end.

    If they're happy with that, they'll fail bigtime. If they really want something big, they'll port the Haiku base system to the Linux kernel or something.

    I'm serious. The sheer number of abstraction layers between the bare metal and a typical Linux GUI application is astounding. The kernel itself has drivers, file systems, schedulers, etc., then there's glibc (horribly bloated in itself, and probably destined to remain so for compatibility and portability), then glib and X (don't get me started on that one), then you finally get to make some choices: OO or not? GTK or Qt? GNOME or KDE? If Qt, v3 or v4? Do you want Python with that? Java? How about sound? Alsa, pulseaudio, jack, gstreamer, xine?

    And here's the fun part: a typical desktop has all of these, because there is no standard, and every choice excludes some vital application you absolutely must have to be a decent distro (Amarok, K3b, Firefox, Pidgin, whatever).

    Now, compare this to the Haiku API: Simple, clean, use it and you have everything you need. The result? You get a usable desktop in 5 seconds under VirtualBox. How long does your OS take to boot up?