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Comment Re:US policy: first arm them then bomb (Score 1) 215

I doubt that the US gov would have supported IS directly, but I think that it is very likely that they would have supported other groups fighting the Assad regime - and that those groups' resources have been
conquered by the IS.

It is known that many fighters in Syria who belonged to other groups have been forced into squads belonging to the IS, and that many of these would deflect from IS if they had the chance.

Comment Re:Eurasia vs. oceania (Score 1) 215

No, he wouldn't. Saddam was funding and assisting terrorist, not fighting them.

So has the US government, when it has served its interests ...

Saddam Hussein and his regime was actually quite proficient and ruthless in clashing down on terrorists activities within the borders of Iraq.
The notion that his regime would have supported the terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda is well known to be a lie by the GWB administration to gain support for their invasion of Iraq for its oil reserves, as part of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) group's agenda.
The PNAC did first lobby for an invasion during the Clinton administration, but their top men became the government when the non-member they had chosen as front-man/scapegoat "won" the election as US president in 2000.
The PNAC's agenda, list of leaders and lobbying have always been public, even on their web site when they had it, so this is hardly any conspiracy theory that people have made up, yet many Americans are so misdirected by the fnords.

Comment Re:APL: A Programming Language (Score 1) 729

I find it kind of weird that while APL requires you to use proper symbols from mathematics and various branches of logic (binary, predicate, etc..), it doesn't have operator precedence that we are used to from mathematics and logic.

Most languages have some cases where the precedence between operators is equal, but in those cases the evaluation order is almost always left to right. In APL, it is backwards: always from right to left.

Comment Re:competitive features? generally available? not (Score 1) 88

1GHz doesn't compare well-enough with >3GHz dual-core Intel product in terms of GUI responsiveness.

GUI responsiveness is more a matter of software bloat than about hardware.

A Commodore 64 at 1 MHz running GEOS can sometimes be more responsive than a PC with dual eight-core Haswell Xeons.

Comment Re:Ineffective advertising (Score 2) 149

Funny how everyone called it a "trash can" ... until they saw how small it was. Then they started calling it an "ash tray".

I thought the unified thermal core was genius... until I heard that it actually runs pretty hot.
The graphics card have to be custom-made for the Mac Pro, and you can't put a mechanical drive inside, which limits performance for video editing. Yet again Apple's own overpriced accessories are the only ones that fit.
I'm not saying that the Alienware trapezoid/pentagon isn't more ridiculous. I think the older Mac Pro was a better design than both of them.

Comment Re:A basic land line (Score 1) 635

Here here!

My landline phone:
* Has a more ergonomic handset than a cell phone,
* Can be used with phone menu systems without having to move the handset from/to the ear - I don't miss the response of my key press because it was not at my ear at the time
* Has better sound than many cell phones
* I don't have to be worried about microwave radiation (that may or may not be harmful).
* Will work if the power is out
* Does not suffer from a degraded or lost signal because there is a hill or too many walls in-between me and the base station.
* Can be exchanged for a xDSL modem that would provides Internet connection to any device I may have (through a router), where as tethering may not always be supported by the cell phone or allowed by the carrier and the tethered device has to be connected through USB or Wifi, not cable, etc. etc.

Earth

Numerous Methane Leaks Found On Atlantic Sea Floor 273

sciencehabit writes Researchers have discovered 570 plumes of methane percolating up from the sea floor off the eastern coast of the United States, a surprisingly high number of seeps in a relatively quiescent part of the ocean. The seeps suggest that methane's contribution to climate change has been underestimated in some models. And because most of the seeps lie at depths where small changes in temperature could be releasing the methane, it is possible that climate change itself could be playing a role in turning some of them on.

Comment Re:Poland *probably* wouldn't, & why (Score 0) 303

The Polish soil is fertile because Poland has used a lot of fertilizer .. an excess of fertilizer .. which is flushed into the rivers that lead into the Baltic Sea.
Large parts of the Baltic Sea is dead, the cause leading back to this overuse of fertilizer.

Not that the other countries around the Baltic Sea are that much better in controlling their agriculture.

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