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Comment Re:WTF submitter?! (Score 1) 277

What is gun culture / military about, if not killing people (or at least animals)? I can appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into handmade guns, but that doesn't seem to be what most gun nuts are about. Being able to aim steadily at a target is an interesting skill in the same way as driving or carpentry (though with less to show for it at the end), but guns are disproportionately popular for that to be what it's about.

Comment Re:quantum hype (Score 2) 89

One of the interesting things about quantum computing is that it's fundamentally impossible to copy a qbit (hmm, wait until hollywood hears about that). So the cloud service really couldn't have logged what it sent back to you before it sent it.

More to the point, I suspect this proposal works by sending entangled qbits into the service, keeping the corresponding pairs, and getting back something that can only be turned into your answer by combining it with what you kept. This isn't the same as what you're talking about - the client literally just stores a set of bits and combines them at the end, like an xor. So it's like that story from a few months ago with an encrypted database that could run queries on its data without decrypting it, but better in that a) it works for free, for any computation, you don't have to design your database for it b) it's quantum encryption and thus provably unbreakable

Comment Re:Oracle and Java (Score 1) 372

On the other hand, the fact that there is a an officially GPL'd version of official Java out there may well mean that in the long term, Java will be fine.

Only if you mean the long term after their patents have expired. They've refused to grant a license for apache's Java implementation, and one can only assume they must have some level of control over "Open" JDK (otherwise I take openjdk, modify it by removing all of the code and replacing it with apache harmony, and done).

Comment Re:So... what's the difference? (Score 1) 457

How else would you want it? They're supposed to represent a large political party, of course they're going to take the positions of the mainstream of that party. I do see a fairly clear distinction between the moderates (Romney, Gingrich), the conservatives (Santorum, Perry(?), Bachmann, the rest of them), and Ron Paul, and when you only get to vote for one guy and don't get to give a reason, that's probably about as subtle a question as the electorate can meaningfully answer. I would agree that the "conservative" cluster seems much of a muchness and the field could do with thinning down to one in each of those three groups, but that's what these straw polls are for.

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