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User: Pictish+Prince

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Comments · 377

  1. Re:Brings to mind Jurassic Park on Bits of Tassie Tiger Brought Back from Extinction · · Score: 1

    Funny, but they won't be into the T's for a couple of years.

  2. Re:Brings to mind Jurassic Park on Bits of Tassie Tiger Brought Back from Extinction · · Score: 1

    The first Eutherium (Eutheria includes placental mammals) fossil is from the Barremian age in the lower Cretaceous so the split occurred 125 - 130 million years ago.

  3. Re:Brings to mind Jurassic Park on Bits of Tassie Tiger Brought Back from Extinction · · Score: 1

    You should go outside the city some time. You'll see lots of people who have no idea what a computer does.

  4. Re:First Save the ones on the verge of extinction on Bits of Tassie Tiger Brought Back from Extinction · · Score: 1

    Yes, space is the bottleneck. On the other hand, I was thinking about the baiji - they probably had some sort of oral (blowhole) history. We know primates have cultural memory. You can restore the physical species, but the rest is lost.

  5. Re:biased enforcement on Pirate Bay Launches Free Speech Blog · · Score: 1

    Ever notice how it's only the Ibrahimic faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) that get so touchy when you point out undesirable aspects of their respective religions? Tell a Buddhist he's going to burn in Hell for eternity and he'll offer to say a prayer for you.

  6. Re:Obligatory on What Are Must-Sees For Open Day At the LHC? · · Score: 1

    Hot female scientists! ?? Well, it's in Europe - so yeah!
  7. Re:Who does it apply to? on Administration Claimed Immunity To 4th Amendment · · Score: 1

    But that's the point though, isn't it? When do you know that it is a terrorist sitting in a house, firing on the US military? Not just a lunatic who forgot his meds?

    When the terrorist works for the U.S. government you know he's for real.

  8. Re:terraforming and other things on Lack of Molybdenum May Have Delayed Life on Earth · · Score: 1

    Lightning in a reducing atmosphere (like Titan's) would produce ammonia. Lightning in our atmosphere produces nitrogen oxides, which combines with water to produce nitric acid. So the fixing follows a very different path.

  9. Re:Full sun spectrum?? on A Super-Efficient Light Bulb · · Score: 1

    Does that mean - it gives off Xray and gamma ray? No. Yes it does, just not very much. The blackbody radiation curve for any temperature above absolute zero is non-zero for every wavelength.

  10. Re:Commercial use on A Super-Efficient Light Bulb · · Score: 1

    You may not be able to see UV but plants can use it. Any lighting source that purports to be natural must emit UV. Things don't look right under incandescent lighting because a lot of things fluoresce under UV.

  11. Re:Light pollution on A Super-Efficient Light Bulb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The /. moderation system clearly does not work well. In response to the "troll", however, you don't need to put the telescope somewhere dark on the moon. Having no atmosphere, the moon does not present any difficulties for daytime telescopy since there's no scatter into the objective.

  12. Re:Wrong Question on What Programming Languages Should You Learn Next? · · Score: 1

    I disagree that Smalltalk is all or nothing. Objective-C is a strict superset of C (i.e. it will compile unmodified C programs) that incorporates Smalltalk objects and messaging. You can start out in C and only use as much Smalltalk as you want.

    I read about Smalltalk in the '80s and was enamored. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford a Lisa and I wasn't an accredited learning institution so I couldn't buy a NeXT. With OSX I can now have Smalltalk (via Objective-C) and a BSD OS. Also I have the Cocoa framework, aka NeXTStep, which is all done in Objective-C. Cocoa is a great coding style guide as well. If you know how to spell and conform to the naming rules, you'll much less rarely have to go searching for the name of a class or message in the documentation. Even memory management is straightforward if you emulate the Cocoa code.

    So no FFI needed. I do use Camelbones because the perl's regex and other text processing capabilities are so superior to everything else.

  13. Re:assembly on What Programming Languages Should You Learn Next? · · Score: 1

    Try it like I did: 360/370 assembler. These machines don't have a stack; you have to save your current location in a "jump register" then branch to that location when your subroutine finishes. This will put hairs on your chest.

  14. Re:handy though on Sequoia Threatens Over Voting Machine Evaluation · · Score: 1

    You obviously don't understand the way New Jersey organized crime operates.

  15. You guys think too small on Scientists Create Room Temperature Superconductor · · Score: 1

    Why not pump a few gigawatts into one of Tajmar's rings? Still needing independent confirmation on his results, however.

  16. Re:Meeting expectations on UK Police Want DNA of 'Potential Offenders' · · Score: 1

    As a kid I was treated as a smart criminal. That explains a lot.

  17. Re:Please stay on topic on Israelis Sue Government For Laser Cannons · · Score: 1

    Necessity is the mother of invention. The Israeli's are smart, maybe this will spur them on to create their laser defensive weapon.
    ... and get Americans to foot the bill for that too!
  18. Re:7 years on The Myth of the "Transparent Society" · · Score: 1

    Meanwhile, in Oklahoma you can get 93 years for cultivating marijuana, even if it's for personal use.

  19. Re:How to convice a non-Christian that Christ matt on How to Convince Non-IT Friends that Privacy Matters? · · Score: 1

    English isn't rocket science either: It's "their" not "there".

  20. Re:Turquoise? on Full Lunar Eclipse for the Americas on Wednesday · · Score: 1

    Smurfette? I thought Smurfs were Communist.

  21. Re:vista? - DFS on Making Use of Terabytes of Unused Storage · · Score: 1

    Gary Larson is still alive, although turning in his grave is a distinct possibility.

  22. Re:vista? - DFS on Making Use of Terabytes of Unused Storage · · Score: 1

    The above-average Windows user's
    You mean "above average for Windows user's?"
  23. Like Al Gore on Multitasking Makes You Stupid and Slow · · Score: 1

    I'm totally serial.

  24. Re:Of couse, they could *both* have it wrong... on LIGO Fails To Detect Gravity Waves · · Score: 1

    Actually the main assumption on which GTR is built is that there is an unobserved fourth spatial dimension which accounts for gravitational effects (curvature). The gravity we observe is only the small (because the curvature is so small) component "parallel" to the 3-space we live in.

  25. Re:Of couse, they could *both* have it wrong... on LIGO Fails To Detect Gravity Waves · · Score: 1

    Someone mod parent up. "Offtopic"? In what way, please?