Re:Conditions Apply
by ShadowRangerRIT (1301549)

To be fair, France benefits from a much more centralized population. The U.S. can't just build enormous nuke plants and send power by wire across the country without serious losses on the line. France is small enough that it can send power to a larger number of people with shorter lines, and moreover, they benefit from economies of scale, because they aren't just powering France, they're selling the power to neighboring countries (presumably at a profit).

Brother Glitch23
by jeko (179919)

Brother Glitch23,

Jesus Christ was the Son of God and He died for my sins. We follow God by taking up our crosses and feeding the hungry, visiting the imprisoned, healing the sick and clothing the naked. We preach the good news and the acceptable year of the Lord.

I am a Liberal, I am your Christian brother, and if you don't believe me, just go ask Pop.

And as much as it pains me to point this out, you have some reading to do.

There is nothing wrong with making known our history just because it has a religious foundation, except for those who hate religion.

I'm assuming you're referencing the Puritans, since Jamestown was a fairly commercial endeavor. Your problem is that those Puritans would not have recognized you as a fellow Christian, any more than you most likely recognize Catholics as fellow Christians. If you're a Southern Baptist, Assembly of God or any other Evangelical, you'd have been shunned as a heretic.

Re:100 Trillion Microbial Cells?
by lawpoop (604919)

...and if you're a woman you produce one certain cell every four weeks...

I had heard that she produced them all when she was forming in the womb, and slowly shed 1 at a time every four weeks.

The implications of this is that when you first began your independent existence as a cell, you were in your mother's ovaries when she was developing in your grandmother's womb.

Very soon, most people not needed.
by Maxo-Texas (864189)

Once we get decent robots (and they can now pick loose nuts out of a bin), 99% of jobs (even low skill ones) go away.
Buy a grocery shelf stocker robot for $50k and let go 6 people. It's never sick and works on holidays.
50 stockers lose their job and are replaced by one repairman-- but with proper design, even he is a minimum wagejob ("check code: A5, replace module 3")
If you can read a piece of paper and enter numbers, your job is threatened in the near future.

We have to find a better way than scarcity to distribute time at the beach, good food, and other resources or it is going to get extremely ugly within the next 20 to 30 years.

Too many people- no value to society- 1% of people having stuff- 99% of people not having stuff. Historically that doesn't go well.

Re:Wow, Great Summary
by Anonymous Coward

Furthermore, I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode. So they are doing their best to attract a younger audience.

I don't think they're gone, and lurk mode depends on your definition of it. If I'm sitting around with a bunch of geeks talking about non-technical stuff, I don't think that makes it lurk mode so much as everyday conversation. When we have technical discussions on here, the level of discussion isn't the same as a professional journal but it's very impressive for a public forum filled with a diverse technical audience. It's still a common occurrence where I see posts on here that give me insight on an issue that I may never have otherwise come across; there are even fairly profound anecdotes.

commercially driven
by roman_mir (125474)

You know, it's great that those people, who commit illegal acts because they are commercially driven, are always brought to justice, no matter what their country of origin is.

Of-course there is a small matter of agreeing what exactly it means for something to be 'illegal'. There also should be an exact description of what 'commercially driven' is, after all, if you download something instead of buying a paid version, you are commercially driven - you want to avoid paying money. There is also this small matter that a corporation based in one country, can force changes upon the law of that country, which seems to propagate itself almost magically to all these other countries, this seems odd.

Re:Isn't that normal?
by jd (1658)

Yes, but it can go down with optimizations and refactoring (finding duplicated code and pushing it into a function or macro, for example) and with eliminating dead code. Ideally, code size should be asymptotic to an optimal size. As you approach the optimal size, more and more of what you need to do is already available to you. As you approach the limit, the amount of special-case logic and hardcoding approaches zero, and the amount of data-driven logic approaches 100%.

Re:How deep?
by hey! (33014)

A league is about the distance a healthy man can walk on a good road in one hour. A fathom is about the height of a tall man; it is about eighteen hand widths (fingers closed). A US gallon is the volume of eight pounds of water. An imperial gallon (i.e. the UK gallon) is the volume of ten pounds of water.

One interesting thing about weights. The system of dram/ounce/pound is base 16, which makes division by two a practical measuring operation. Take a pound of something readily dividable, divide it into two equal portions (using a balance scale). Then repeat the process four times. The result is one ounce.

This shows the offsetting virtues of traditional units. While they are difficult to calculate with, they are convenient for measuring things -- especially when it come to quantifying things for sale.

Re:Pretty cool
by dkleinsc (563838)

Einstein may have demonstrated that the math had to be right, but this sort of result was needed to demonstrate that the math correctly described the universe.

Re:Pretty cool
by u38cg (607297)

Did Hiroshima not convince you?

Re:Curious to see where this one goes...
by Anachragnome (1008495)

$1200?

There is your price of "portability".

As a former mechanic, it always pissed me off when auto manufacturers tried to force customers to dealerships for repairs by making the components so difficult to repair that even independent mechanics could not fix them.

The dirty sekret is that the dealerships couldn't either. They simply resorted to part-swapping to confirm their half-assed diagnosis(manufacturer flow charts(Step 14: Replace with known good part), NOT actual testing).

The end result was that the independents were made to look like bumbling idiots("Your gunna have to take it to the Dealer...") after actually trying to find the problem, while the Dealership makes the money just by throwing parts at the problem (at customer expense).

Try something safer first - fix baggage handling
by trolltalk.com (1108067)

Before trying something as ambitious as routing airplanes, why not see if they can route luggage?

1. If it doesn't work, it can't get much worse than the current situation
2. So terrorists hack the system - and your luggage actually ends up where its supposed to go for a change!
3. Try crashing a Samsonite into a scyscraper ...

Re:Second Patent Office
by afidel (530433)

Actually I like the idea of a constitutional amendment making all Congressional Bills have an automatic sunset clause of say 10 years and require that all bills be read into law in a Congressional session. That way the legislature has to decide that a bill is still worth the effort to renew. Not only that but it conveniently also limits the size of the law by limiting it to what can be read in x hours. If the founding fathers had any idea how large the federal government would become I'm fairly sure they would have included some similar clause to naturally limit its growth.

Re:I'd kill myself, too...
by KodaK (5477)

No, I'm saying that if you take it seriously you're going to drive yourself insane. There's absolutely nothing you, or anyone, can do about what someone else says or does on the Internet, or in person for that matter. Trying to do so is an exercise in futility. The only person you have even a little control over is you.

It shouldn't matter (to you) if I say something that is offensive, what matters is how you deal with it. You have choices in how you react to it. One of those choices is to ignore it and write it off as "oh, that's just some asshole on the Internet." Another is to become upset about what some anonymous asshole on the Internet who didn't know your friend has said. It is your choice.

Who am I to you? Nobody. Why should anything I say at all have any impact on you if you don't want it to?

Predicted long ago
by timon (46050)

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."

-- 1984 by George Orwell

Re:Yeah, so I suppose ...
by Swampash (1131503)

Here is a story.

It's the story of a place called Mouseland. Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do.

They even had a Congress. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats.