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Comment Re:Stars collision rarity (Score 4, Informative) 236

What I find more interesting is why stars rarely collide?

Too much empty space.

This.

Consider that for two stars to hit each other, they essentially have to pass within one stellar diameter of each other (absent gravity, but they're moving at over escape speed relative to each other, so gravity won't enlarge that distance a whole hell of a lot).

So, one stellar diameter is ~1.4 Gm for Sol. Nearest star is 40,000,000 Gm away. If that nearest star were headed toward us (it's not), it's course would have to be within 0.01 seconds of arc of our Sun in order to actually hit it.

And stars farther away have an even smaller course window to be in to smack us....

Comment Re:slashdot - daily news about whiny bitches and S (Score 4, Insightful) 365

They're starting to enclave up in videogames, much like what happened with the atheism movement. It took a few extra years but the "atheism+" crap is now collapsing under it's own corruption and regular atheism is going along just fine still. And of course there's now a similar thing to gamergate starting in comic books and heavy metal. Everything they touch they turn into a political issue, and when they don't get their way they claim sexism, bigotry, racism, or whatever else to try and make people back down. Funny enough, many of them actually sexist, bigots or racists and that can be easily seen in their social commentary on twitter or facebook.

Comment Re:Adopt the German Rules (Score 1) 331

The German rules make far more sense dude.

No it doesn't. Non-competes limit your ability to make a living. People are more important than corporations.

In some instances a non-compete DOES make sense, and it should be an option..

I notice you didn't name any instances.

but it shouldn't be used to handcuff someone to a company.

You are right, but they are used for that..

A company should keep its employees by paying well, and by making it a good place to work. If the only way you can keep employees is by making them sign non-competes, then your company is a lousy company to begin with, and the world would be made better by having someone compete with it.

Comment Wrong - make it easy (Score 1) 385

No airline takeover/sabotage attempt that passengers could reach has succeeded since 911 (the most recent just a week or two ago when some idiot ran down the isles towards the cockpit door screaming - was tackled and pressed).

Stop locking the door altogether. If there's a problem, you'll have a line of people waiting to destroy whoever tries to take over a cockpit now. Threaten to hurt someone with a box cutter? Whatever damage you can do to one person is outweighed by every other person on that plane wanting to live.

Locking the cockpit doors has, to date, only brought disaster. You have to think that had the airplane that vanished had open cockpit access passengers could have got in there over the many hours the thing was off course (there are a lot of people that monitor aircraft position during flight).

Comment Re:Not sure if this is worse (Score 1) 124

No, I think the ISP's will only keep it for two years - but that is gauranteed.

Right now in the U.S. everyone blindly assumes the data is kept for NO years, and we aren't even given an imaginary date when it might be deleted.

The Australians are at least all aware for sure the data is being kept, in the U.S. it's still possible to imagine it is not... That's my point.

Comment Re:"to provide support for the cultural sector" (Score 2) 237

What you describe is pretty much the way the US was originally intended to be. The Feds handle standards (like weights and measures) and foreign policy, pretty much everything else handled at the level of the individual States.

Alas, the Feds have been working hard to move every decision to Washington for a long time now, whether it makes sense to do so or not....

Comment Re:Reminds me of one thing (Score 1) 737

Because then everyone dies when the computer fails. Autopilots regularly fail and expect the pilot to take over

I think this depends on your definition of "fail". As far as I know true computer failures where the machine just goes crazy and tries to crash the plane are non-existent. What happens more regularly is the autopilot sees that something weird is happening and chooses to disengage itself - presumably an autopilot program could be written that never disengages and always does the best it can to fly the plane, unless deliberately disengaged.

This is particularly problematic when sensors fail, as they did in AF447, and the computer doesn't know what's going on any more.

No, this is irrelevant. If the planes sensors completely fail then the pilot doesn't know what's going on either, and the plane is probably doomed no matter what. In normal operation these planes are flying in a very small speed corridor between disintegration and stalling. If you don't know how fast your going a stall or overspeed is pretty much inevitable, and if you don't know how high you are even basic visibility problems can cause a crash into the surface. Neither human nor computer can succeed in such a situation.

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