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Comment Treaties supercede state laws (Score 1) 817

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

-- US Constitution, Article VI

Why does the Texas AG not know this?

Comment Re:I'll die happy (Score 1) 251

Congratulations on having spotted a statistical trend armed with whopping total of 2 data points.

I learned in college that a mathematician requires 2 points to determine a straight line, an engineer prefers at least 3, a statistician 4 or more, but a sociologist only needs 1.

Comment R. A. Lafferty and Thomas M. Disch (Score 1) 1130

Lafferty specialized in science fiction that was more folk-tale like, or as I see Wikipedia puts it "shaggy characters and tall tales". His short stories, in such collections as Lafferty In Orbit or Nine Hundred Grandmothers, are more approachable than his novels, especially for someone new to his style.

Disch wrote both horror and science fiction. If you're literate you owe it to yourself to read Camp Concentration. His first novel, The Genocides is an easier read, if a bit heavy-handed in its message.

If you're deeply religious you might want to avoid Disch, especially The Genocides.

Comment ECPA = wiretaping law (Score 2) 85

Since the summary didn't say, ECPA is The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, an updated version of the 1968 Federal Wiretap Act.

FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the FISA court (technically the FISC, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) generally rubber stamps wiretapping warrants, even after the fact.

Comment FUCK (Score 2, Insightful) 320

Fuck Mozilla's fucking releases every fucking other fucking week. Want me to pay attention to a new release? then don't bombard me with requests to update, or call versions barely worth an increment to the patch level a fucking release. Buy a clue and stop ruining what was a pretty decent browser. As ColdWetDog already joked, only for real, you're actually making IE look good again. The level of fuckitude necessary to reach that level of fuckedupness is almost unfuckingbeliveable.

Comment Re:Time for the Judges ruling? (Score 1) 475

Name another company that size that is as friendly to open source software.

Sun Microsystems, in its day. In addition to Java: NFS, ZFS, D-Trace, virtual box, StrongTalk, GlassFish, OpenSolaris, NetBeans; after buying them but keeping them open: MySQL, OpenOffice, BlueQuartz (former Cobalt stack); and in the realm of open hardware, OpenSparc T1. (No question, Sun botched some of the companies it bought.)

At its largest Sun was never as big as Google today, but proportionally Google has done far less.

Oracle is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Sun Microsystems. (For one, they make money.)

Comment Title is wrong, /. SOP (Score 2) 97

TFA says the delay is for hardware in the loop testing, not code tweaking.

One hopes normal end-to-end testing was done long before this, but given the costs and logistics of assembling the actual hardware this final phase of testing pretty much has to wait until shortly before launch.

I'm a developer and am pretty much in the camp of "if it complies and boots, ship it", but I appreciate the need for QA. When you're shooting a missile at a fragile target keeping a crew alive 200 miles above earth just maybe before you sign off on the launch you want to finish testing. It's the low delta-v docking code they're testing apparently, but docking coupling damage has happened in the past, and that or just a failure to dock would be kind of a big deal.

Comment Re:Comparable? (Score 2) 582

Did you read even the summary or just Wikipedia? 12kWh/kg, the projected max energy density of these batteries, and what they were calling "comparable", is about 43 MJ/kg (1 kWh = 3.6 MJ). That's only10% less than gasoline and "comparable" seems apt. Open question how close actual batteries ever get to that max, but that's not what you were complaining about.

And then there is effective density, when you consider the amount of energy that can be used for productive work. A gas engine typically wastes 70% to 80% of it's energy while electric motors over 100hp waste less than 8%. So lets see, using the best efficiency for gas, .3 * 47 = 14MJ/kg and for electric the NEMA minimum, .92 * 43 = 40MJ/kg, and we have electric motors with li-air batteries at 3 times the effective density of ICE with gasoline. There are other real-world considerations for true effective density, but it seems you were right after all, "comparable" isn't fair -- to a li-air car, which you seemingly would be willing to pay $60,000 for.

Comment Re:If it's unencrypted... (Score 2) 103

Pah, kids these days. Try TECO

"It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse - introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine."
    -- Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL

The first versions of emacs were written in TECO, inspired in part by tmacs -- TECO macros.

Or try APL. Uses a special character set, permits composed characters, assumes you know linear algebra, and reads right to left -- the epitome of a write-only language.

Now get off my lawn.

Comment Thanks for the heads-up on OnLive, Gamestop (Score 1) 343

I don't really game much anymore and so don't follow gaming news., but Deus Ex was an old favorite and I've thought about getting the new iteration. Good job Gamestop, your tactics made it made it to slashdot and my radar, introducing me to OnLive, something I hadn't heard of (or had and mistook it for a branding of Microsoft Live). Although I wonder how well it will actually work for me it seemed worthwhile enough to at least download the free client and watch some games in progress -- on a Mac where Deus Ex sn't otherwise available at that.

Not quite the Streisand Effect, but mostly because few here are as clueless about OnLive as I was. Gamestop, you don't yet seem to understand that every company memo is a public document these days.

Medicine

Scientists Aim To 'Print' Human Skin 77

suraj.sun sends this excerpt from CNN: "Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, inspired by standard inkjet printers found in many home offices, are developing a specialized skin 'printing' system that could be used in the future to treat soldiers wounded on the battlefield. 'We started out by taking a typical desktop inkjet cartridge. Instead of ink we use cells, which are placed in the cartridge,' said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the institute. The device could be used to rebuild damaged or burned skin. ... Burn injuries account for 5% to 20% of combat-related injuries, according to the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine. The skin printing project is one of several projects at Wake Forest largely funded by that institute, which is a branch of the US Department of Defense. Wake Forest will receive approximately $50 million from the Defense Department over the next five years to fund projects, including the skin-creating system. Researchers developed the skin 'bio-printer' by modifying a standard store-bought printer. One modification is the addition of a three-dimensional 'elevator' that builds on damaged tissue with fresh layers of healthy skin."

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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