the whole thing flew off as one piece from some supernova explosion

I didn't read TFA but is it's in the elliptic plane, cruising along in the same general direction as everything, it originated in this solar system.

Holy shit! Sun used to be hardcore!

I'm amazed at the noise that doesn't get buried. If you don't browse at 2+ or even 3+, there's an awful lot of juvenile trolling.

Really? Because while there's certainly a lot of views I don't agree with, I see little if any trolling at +2.

But if I go to a nice restaurant, or hell even McDonalds, at the very least I don't want some nutjob banging on the windows flashing his junk at everyone.

Nor do you, nor the restaurant, want PETA to hold a "meat is murder" demonstration outside. And it's all too easy to use anti-flasher policies to squash a protest that, whether you agree or disagree with it, is legitimate. And while a privately run website certainly has the right to disable comments, we should not forget that this results in it turning into an echo chamber where no dissenting voices are heard. People love to spend their time in such echo chambers, getting endless reinforcement for their identities and no challenges. The problem is that they get to vote in the real world, and will likely do so according to the fantasy world.

A website without comment section is basically a propaganda machine, telling people what to see and think. A website that's all comments - like Slashdot and yes, even 4chan - is a community discussing matters. Newssites with comment section are somewhere in the middle, and no, blogs are not sufficient replacement, because people only read blogs they agree with. On the other hand, a comment challenging your most dearly held beliefs can pop up anywhere.

Libertarians are those wackos who are so far to the left that they fall of the map. Or so far to the right. It's hard to tell. They have this nutty notion that if they want to smoke dope in their gay polyamorous collective while shooting guns and drinking unpasturized milk during their worship of the sun-god - well, they should be left alone to their own devices.

No, those are neo-pagans. Libertarians are those wackos who claim that having to label pasteurized and unpasteurized milk as such is government oppression. It's a cult too, but it replaces orgies with whining about taxes. Should the two groups overlap, they're those creeps who launch into a rant about robbery whenever someone suggests they should pay their share of the rent and other expenses.

Kind of a "if you aren't free to make stupid choices, then you have no freedom" sort of ideal.

You are free to make stupid choices. You aren't free to enjoy all the fruits of civilization yet refuse to pull your weight when it comes time to maintain them. Whether libertarians do so because they're simply using their ideology as an excuse to be selfish twats, or because they honestly don't comprehend that roads, public order, property law etc. are not the natural state of things but require constant effort to maintain, I don't know; but whatever the reason is, the one thing that stays consistent from libertarian to libertarian is claiming that paying taxes is equivalent to being robbed.

I find it interesting how some people will completely ignore legitimate complaints and good ideas merely because there's a slight, even imaginary whiff of some ideology they happen to disagree with.

Not "some people", but almost everyone in the US, does so. If it's not Libertarianism (Fascism) it's Socialism (Stalinism). And Obama, as we all know, is an Atheist Muslim Nazi Communist with a fake birth certificate, and the Antichrist besides, working to dismantle the US for the sake of Hydra in their cover as United Nations.

The problem is, this bullshit has been repeated so much that even the people who made up these absurd lies are starting to believe them, so your political process is outright delusional at every level. That the results are less than stellar should be a surprise to no one. But of course that just makes everyone dig deeper into their fantasy world of choice.

Oh well, at least it results in some hilarious political propaganda.

If, on the other hand, every state's Air National Guard had the option of spending their portion of their military budget as they saw fit (to give an example), at least there would be multiple customers potentially for this airplane and be assured that they could sell at least a few of them.

And the end result would be a logistical nightmare. Fighter planes aren't self-contained, they require an infrastructure to maintain, refuel and rearm them. Aircraft carriers - and even military bases - have limited space available for personnel and supplies, so it very quickly devolves into total chaos. And of course this is assuming that individual states even attempt to provide meaningful military contribution, rather than using their portion as a handout to their local corporations and hoping the other states will pick up the slack.

Free market is an economic optimization algorithm, nothing less, nothing more. One has to enforce constraints ("credible defence", "100% employment at living wage", etc) to get results that satisfy them.

That and the fact that the government collects that money by force, while the corporation has to give you enough value to make you voluntarily trade money for their product.

Government needs to give you enough bang for your buck to get re-elected. Also, countries compete with one another, and less effective ones disappear into history. But that doesn't fit Libertarian narrative, so it gets ignored.

Then again, no description of government fits Libertarian narrative, because it requires an organization that's simultaneously an ultra-effective oppressor and utterly incompetent at any task.

Slightly different incentive structure there.

Just as you'd expect from organizations pursuing different goals.

Goal of a company is to make profits.

Goal of a politician is to stay in power.

The goal of a company executive is to stay in power and make money while they're at it. The goal of a goverment is the success of their country.

If you want to criticize government, do so honestly. Comparing the goals of an organization to those of an individual in another organization is transparently deceptive, and won't convince anyone.

As to slavery, thievery, murder all of those concepts are government concepts first and foremost and in a free market economy people don't need governments to deal with any of it, private courts and private security is enough to deal with aberrations.

So you'd be happy to let your grievances be settled by a judge who's being paid by your opponent? And any resulting decisions enforced by private enforcers who are likewise in their payroll?

Or did you simply figure you'll only go to court against people poorer than you?

The geek imagination rarely extends beyond fan fiction.

This is true of all people. Even original characters are simply embodiments of pre-existing archetypes. A truly new character or story would be incomprehensible, since you couldn't relate to it.

That said, while Sturgeon's Law is in effect for fan fiction as well, so is it's reverse: good fan fiction is good literature, and has an added advantage of being able to draw from pre-existing mythos, often with considerable re-interpretation. And of course Cthulhu mythos shows its tentacled head everywhere.

The geek tends to forget

You know, arguments based on pretending a huge group of people are really a single person rarely make sense.

The geek tends to forget that patents and copyrights are meant to be an incentive to create something of your own, something new and something better. It's telling, I think, that the only two video game themed movies that are arguably worth a damn, Tron and Wreak-It-Ralph, both came from Disney.

What should it tell us, exactly speaking? That once you've filmed - or re-filmed - all the stories other people came up with, you can afford to try something else? Especially since Disney can always keep on milking Mickey Mouse, which is the whole reason eternal copyright exists in the first place.

Or do you simply work for them?

Here in the United States, Dastar v. Fox states that trademarks can't be used to extend the effective term of a copyright.

Because it's already infinite.

C++ is still used almost exclusively for large-scale AAA game development.

Many (most?) AAA games use C++ to build a specialized runtime and the actual game logic is implemented with scripts running on it.

I've got 16GB of RAM, there's no point to waste but there's nothing to be gained by hiding in a 1GB corner. If it makes life easier for developers to pull in a 10MB library than write a 100kB function, do it.

Especially since linking to a 10MB library isn't going to pull it all in, it's going to demand-load only the parts you need, and into shared memory at that. So multiple applications using the standard 10MB library is likely to actually end up consuming less memory than each developer making their own routine in hand-optimized assembler. It might even be faster, since it's more likely to be in a cache.

All of which leads to the fact that messing with low-level details is usually not worth it, so most programmers aren't really familiar with them, so they're unlikely to get any benefits even when significant ones might theoretically be had.

Of course that's in geological timescales so it does not matter.

Astronomical, actually. It takes millions of years for continental drift to change the face of the Earth, while Sun requires a hundred times that much to change significantly.

As for oil we have been using it for over a century by now and it seems we haven't ran out of it yet.

The price of oil has risen a lot recently, and there's talk and even practical attempts to tap unconventional sources, which are far more expensive to extract than conventional oil wells. From basic laws of economics we can conclude that this means the conventional sources are running out, or at least unable to increase production to keep up with demand.

He sees a lot of egotism at work, too, but he says if you're setting out to change the world, you're probably going to need a big ego to do it.

I wonder if big ego is a reason or an unfortunate side effect. After all, what you absolutely do need to change the world is the ability to keep going in the face of hardship, which is just another way of saying you need to be able to ignore negative feedback - and that'll make it harder to fix any personality flaws you have, too.

That's how things work here on Slashdot. Facts be damned, it's all about gut feelings.

Have you actually kept statistics to back that assertion, or is it just a gut feeling ?-)

You could imagine a Dyson sphere that is vastly larger than a solar system -- like, a hundred AU across, or so--that would radiate waste heat in millimeter wave, or even something vastly larger than that that would radiate in microwave.

Except that according to Wikipedia the cosmic microwave background peaks at around a millimeter, so the super-sized Dyson sphere would absorb more than it radiates. Also, we need to remember that a diameter 50 AU Dyson sphere won't get any more energy than a 2 AU one, it'll simply get it in a more dispersed - and thus less useful - form.