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Comment Re:Uh, no. (Score 3, Interesting) 496

s/nuclear bomb/arms/

What you are missing here is that these files this guy is sharing are essentially just descriptions of shapes and therefore typically would be considered speech. The files then let you make nuclear weapons (though really poor quality ones). He is sharing information though, not nuclear weapons, which is why this has been transmuted from a second amendment issue to a first amendment one.

Arms=small arms and nuclear arms. Free speech famously has limits (falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater) so where do we draw the line here?

Comment Historical Context (Score 1) 424

How many people here have discovered dead civil rights activists riddled with bullets? Hands? Yes Dianne?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscone%E2%80%93Milk_assassinations

I think I'd be a bit traumatized too and probably not like anything with guns in it -- including games.

While I disagree with this specific method, I'm glad Feinstein is trying to address the problem of gun violence with a solution other than "more guns, yehaw!". The GOP seems to think there is no problem that cannot be solved through a combination of tax cuts, guns, and Jesus.

Comment WTF is wrong with you? (Score 2) 264

Sorry, dork, your tinfoil hat tea party sites may swallow your bullshit, but there are a few here at slashdot who are a little better educated.

You may want to consider adding "culture" to your education. There's a wonderful little film making fun of these tin-foil hats called "Dr. Strangelove" which is arguably the most famous black comedic film of all-time. Type "communism fluoride" into Google and watch General Ripper give a lecture about it. It's supposed to be funny, but you haven't seen the film, so you don't get the joke.

Comment Headphones (Score 1) 561

I'm guessing by "music" you mean stuff with lyrics -- hence your comment about human voices. I have ADHD too and here's my advice.

My personal favorite for getting work done is Rodrigo y Gabriela's first album, but if you're not into that sort of thing, there's also classical, post-punk (Godspeed/Turtles), ambient (Brian Eno), orchestral video game music (Nobuo Uematsu) etc etc. If music fails, white noise may work but has the issue of your brain wanting to pay more attention to the noise you're trying to block out since what you're listening to is boring. A friend of mine also with ADHD loved to listen to fast-paced Celtic music when reading during college.

There's also noise-cancelling headphones.

Comment And Hollywood is accurate when? (Score 1) 305

Is it any surprise that Hollywood gets UI wrong in favor of "looking good" when we have:
* Bad physics (don't even get me started on the sound explosions make in space)
* Bad understanding of current technology (every hacking movie ever -- with the very notable exception of The Social Network)
* Bad history (based on a true story!)
Etc etc.

Hollywood fundamentally wants to make something that "looks pretty" and to hell with practical applications -- because that pretty picture is ultimately what is being delivered to you. In other news, I'm guessing the food in movies doesn't taste as good as it looks either -- but I sympathize with that are set with the general public and those whose job it is to fulfill them.

Comment Anyone else had better luck? (Score 1) 227

So I work at a Fairly Large Company (TM) and we recently downgraded from SVN to TFS. For years, I used the Git-SVN bridge which worked quite well.

The TFS/Git project, I'm sorry to say, so far DOA for an enterprise user like me. Git-SVN would take a many hours to migrate a large repository...but it worked. MS's Git integration has fallen far short. While checking out shallow copies works, deep copies crash on checkout (it runs out of memory, which really shouldn't happen). Even trying to get the latest version (i.e. git rebase in TFS parlance), it manages to flood my 16 GB system and die down in authentication. ...but I really think this is a good direction. I hat^H^H^H love TFS but being able to use Git is really useful. The lack of locks on all the files are particularly useful when doing large-scale edits with scripts/a good IDE and local branching is killer so I'd really like Git to succeed here.

I'd be curious as to what experience others have had with it in The Real World, rather than the chair-throwing annuls of MS HQ.

Comment PIMPL (Score 1) 535

Or you could use the PIMPL design approach if you really want to "hide" things as seen here.

Basically, create a pointer to another object and then put the actual private data there. And then, you have the added advantage that you don't have to compile every that includes the .h file every time you add something to the data structure.

It's a bit of indirection, sure, but that's why C++ is so great: some of the stupidest things to do are easy (say calling a destructor explicitly), and the proper things to do are hard (oh, like trying to convert a number to a string. Frameworks make this easier, but this hasn't stopped every single large project I've ever seen from creating their own string class sometime in the distant past, which we keep using.)

Comment Re:Israel has nuclear weapons. (Score 1) 569

They sure left Ahmed Jabari (Hamas military chief) alone. If Israel's "defense" minister was killed, would Israel react any differently?

Isn't killing innocent people just wrong? How can you justify killing scores of innocent people to save a few lives on your own side? How is dropping a bomb and killing an innocent family any different than firing a rocket and doing the same?

There's a passage in the Torah that specifies the limit of reciprocity: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. If they are willing to kill ten women and children "accidentally" for every one the Palestinians murder, I cannot see how any Palestinian can take their claims of peace seriously. If the rockets were fired from within their own borders and the terrorism were domestic, I'm sure Israel would find a way to be a bit more careful about stopping them.

As Cohen wrote in his brilliant piece for the NYTimes today, this is sadly a political affair where the objective is not to win peace, but an election.

Comment Great Place (Score 2) 47

There's also an TX/RX Hackerspace in Houston. They've got a bunch of fab equipment, an electron microscope, and a bunch of electrical engineering gear.

Both these places have open houses (go in and say "Howdy;)"), and grats to the folks from there bringing their freaky deaky time machine home.

(Pedantic: You can either say ATX Hackerspace, Hackerspace in Austin TX, or ATX (Austin TX) Hackerspace)

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