A good programmer would know to return an unsigned long long int (not an unsigned long int, because that's only 32 bits on 32 bit unix), and use one internally.

Exactly. Java programs aren't multiplatform. They're single platform: the JDK/JVM that you compiled with/for. If you're done everything on Sun Java 1.5, and suddenly Oracle changes it to "Oracle Java" 1.6, you're SOL.

Java is the new COBOL as far as I'm concerned. I work in a large research lab that got bitten by the java bug in the early-mid 2000s. And now we have a large codebase that's locked in to a particular vendor, that only works with other java code, and a whole bunch of "programmers" whose only skill is java. Which means if we need something in C or C++ for low-level hardware interfacing or for running faster than dead slow, we need to reimplement it from scratch, except we need to hire programmers to do it if it's big because all of our "programmers" only know java, except we can't hire anyone new, because we've already got all these "programmers" on staff.

For $10, you can pick up a very very basic refractor with a flimsy tripod mount at any CVS. This will let you look at the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn, which are the most interesting things to look at without going up several orders of magnitude in price. It's dead simple to set up and focus, and the challenge of wrestling it into position so you can see the planets, and see them move away as the Earth rotates, will give you the chance to teach reasonably mature kids about basic astronomy and to gauge their interest without spending a lot of money. If you live in particularly dark country, you can just barely begin to see things like the Orion Nebula with this kind of scope (though it looks like a smudge--we've all been spoiled by nice pictures from 2m+ telescopes mated to CCD cameras).

And if you're doing any unit conversions in realtime software, you're the retard. You can have the fundamental unit of distance be the meter, the foot, the nautical mile, the astronomical unit, or the earth radius, but why would you ever need to do unit conversions in the code? It's just as easy to fuck up a decimal point in metric as it is to mix up a mile and a nautical mile.

That's only for stuff that goes up into the heavily populated geostationary belt. GPS orbits are about half-way down and much more sparse, so there's no need to have a graveyard orbit the way there is in GEO. Besides, a higher orbit analogous to the geostationary graveyard is still a usable orbit for GPS, so there's nothing to be gained by moving there at the end of life, and the orbits are too high for re-entry burns to be practical the way they are for certain LEO orbits.

Sure I can. Was the apparatus temperature controlled during the vacuum test? Was it tested in all orientations (not just backwards) to remove any gyroscopic weirdness from the rotation of the earth (think Michelson-Morley experiment). Was there EM coupling between the cavity, the torsion balance, and the chamber that could manifest as an anomalous torque, not thrust (that is, did they just make a big brushless motor)? Does the instrument register a thrust when the cavity is radiating but is bolted to the chamber floor and not the balance? Is there no thrust when it's oriented orthogonally? Does it still work if the power supply is electrically isolated from the vacuum chamber without a common return (ie did they build an electron gun)?

Because being twenty trillion+ in the hole because you spent too much on welfare and robots deployed to other planets is better than being twenty trillion+ in the hole because you pissed it all away on welfare and don't even have any robots to show for it.

I remember a study making the news in the 90's comparing men and women's brain activity while doing tasks that require 3d reasoning. It was kind of a similar result: men and women would score about the same on the task, but the women's brains lit up like a Christmas tree while the men's brains had fairly localized activity.

In 1990 yes. In 2003...it's complicated.

It's a two cultures problem in IT. The vast majority of Microsoft's, or Apples, or Oracles, or whoever's customers use their OS on laptops, workstations, or servers, where the consequences of bugs are fairly well approximated by "nuisance". The other culture of computer software customers are folks who use computers handle large amounts of money and control moving machinery (power plants, drones, etc), where the consequences of bugs and unintended features start at "oh shit, we've lost millions of dollars" to "oh shit, the crane dropped its load 200ft" up through "oh God, the power plant has exploded!" People in the second camp have a healthy suspicion of getting the latest and greatest upgrade from companies run by and for people in the first camp. And that dichotomy is why most embedded OS's come with source code that you get to debug yourself if it doesn't quite work for your application (VxWorks, QNX, Windows Embedded, RTLinux, etc).

Yeah... didn't the NSA contribute a whole bunch to SELinux and some of the crypto API as well? Might not necessarily be the smartest thing to switch away from an OS developed by a private American company to one developed by several mainly American companies AND the NSA.

Ooh! I know. They should use Oracle Java (TM)! That's multiplatform and not subject to vendor lock-in on any particular OS!

China's a big country with like a dozen languages and accents of the same language. In some of them, L and R are closer together than they are in English. In others, W joins into the mix.

Ah! So Captain Obvious finally has someone to report to! It's all falling into place...but where does Major Pain fit into the picture?