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Comment Re:How many of you are still using Gnome? (Score 2, Informative) 403

Mod parent up further. I didn't realize how badly the GNOME team screwed the pooch until I tried running Deb 7 and Deb 8 testing to get a new laptop to work.

I am at a complete loss as to why I should have to use a click-and-drag "swipe" gesture to unlock the screen on my workstation in the default configuration of GNOME 3 that comes with Jessie. I'm also not too fond of the default on for all the smart--phone centric gestures that mess up all of my window positioning if I accidentally mouse to the corner of the screen.

I use Debian 6 for an operator console for a piece of heavy moving machinery, and I will not upgrade to Deb 7 or 8 for as long as I can because my whole workflow is based on the quaintly named "classic desktop model" where screens and windows don't magically resize and change position if I sneeze. I am truing to put off as long as I can the task of having to figure out all of these "features" in GNOME 3 or KDE how to disable them so that I can use it for my operator console without fear of an accidental version of the killer poke. I'd switch to LXDE or XFCE, but they're a little too light-weight for my taste, and I don't want to switch to MATE because all the executables have been renamed and I'd lose compatibility with my legacy systems that run GNOME 2. Geez.

Comment Re:Wrong Title (Score 4, Insightful) 499

Again, baloney. The US constitution explicitly enumerates your right to *peaceably* advocate for the overthrown of the US government. The background check forms ask about *violent* overthrow. I hope for your sake you understand the difference and aren't so blinkered by your conspiracy theories to discount the former.

Comment Re:Wrong Title (Score -1, Troll) 499

Baloney. As someone who deals with the military industrial complex on a daily basis, I know for a fact that the forms you submit to the OPM ask you in plain English "have you ever belonged to an organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the US government" and these forms are retained by the OPM for something like 7 or 10 years, after which you are required to resubmit them. If she said "no" to the question in question, but knew that her acquaintances went to jail, something objectively doesn't add up. The best possible excuse is that she's just pathologically oblivious, not that the OPM has trumped up charges out of nowhere.

Comment Re: Nope (Score 1) 511

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.

Comment 10 dollar CVS scope (Score 1) 187

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).

Comment Re:Stupid metric system (Score 1) 140

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.

Comment Re:fuel reserves (Score 3, Interesting) 140

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.

Comment Re:A little behind the times (Score 5, Informative) 315

* they did pretty much all of the things you would like to see (such as reversing the direction and making sure the thrust reverses).

* they seem to have done a thoughtful and careful job, including testing in vacuum.

So, I still think they are likely wrong, but this ups the ante. In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong."

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)?

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