Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.
Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.
They want a bike that can go zero to sixty in two seconds. Yet the human eyeball flattens enough under that kind of acceleration that vision is severely limited.
Interesting theory you have there, Butch...
0-60mph in two seconds is 1.37g. Which is comparable to the acceleration you'd experience landing after jumping to the ground from a height of three feet or so....
It doesn't have to be loaded with graft & corruption to be a waste of time.
TFA talks about a 2.5KW system. Which is about 10 panels. So this whole program is going to provide free solar to 150-200 homes in a State with 38.8 million people.
Wow, a program to provide free solar to 0.0025% of CA's population!! Really generous program you've got there, guys....
No way, man. He can only afford a new iPhone every other year! That's bordering the poverty line.
How has the US/Russia/etc negotiated in good faith on effective measures
Note that they're required to negotiate in good faith on "effective measures" - when they figure out some "effective measures", then you can complain about them not negotiating "in good faith".
And just curious, what "effective measures" can you think of? Especially in light of the fact that North Korea is NOT a signatory to the NPT....
It seems that the arsenals are growing, or if shrinking, they are becoming more powerful overall as they are replaced with more modern weapons.
As to that, no, they're not actually building more powerful nukes. The delivery mechanisms are getting more accurate, so smaller nukes are as effective as big nukes were back in the day. Note that there are no multi-megaton nukes left - they've been replaced with fractional-megaton weapons with a CEP small enough that it makes no difference.
Note, by the by, that CEP is a function of the rocket (or bomber), not the nuke. And improved versions of rockets/bombers aren't limited by the NPT in any case.
These career govt employees feed info to the pres, make recommendations, and fight for their interests. Even if a new pres wants to turn on a dime, Washington DC is a large ship that turns slowly.
Bingo. The old UK comedy "Yes Prime Minister" was a rather cutting illustration of this phenomenon at work.
What happens to someone when they become the prez? Enormous numbers of apparently experienced people begin telling you all kinds of secret things. They stress the importance of secrecy. They tell you about this plot or that plot. They say it's vital they get new powers and they not-so-subtly imply that if you don't help them Women And Children will DIE! And although it's left unstated you know perfectly well that if you don't give them what they want, you will see leaks in the press from anonymous officials that paint you as a prevaricator, as weak, as unconcerned for the lives of Patriotic Heroes And Their Women And Children.
The problem any US President has, and I daresay many other countries presidents, is that they are immediately submerged into a fantasy world woven from the agendas of the people around them mixed with their own pre-existing views, and those people are themselves also in a slightly less extreme form of a personal fantasy world and so on all the way down. A toxic brew of patriotism, belief in American exceptionalism, militarism and most of all pervasive classification means that it's impossible for a prez to penetrate the fog of misinformation that surrounds them. They can be manipulated into believing nearly anything because it would take an incredibly strong willed personality to say directly to the senior bureaucrats feeding them classified intelligence, "I think you are bullshitting me and I am going to personally audit your shit and prosecute you if you're lying to me".
Obama is very much NOT a strong willed personality. He sees himself primarily as a reasonable man who finds compromise between different factions. This makes him easily manipulated: all it takes is for people who agree to present him two apparently opposed positions - one extreme and one very extreme - and Obama will reliably pick something that is quite extreme. And the officials around him know that.
In hindsight it should have been obvious. Obama has no real track record of achievement in politics. He supported no particularly controversial positions, or showed any particularly clear thinking. Compared to Bush he seemed like a genius of course but Bush was a fucking man child, so that wasn't hard.
For that reason, Rand Paul fans might be disappointed if he won. I don't expect he would be able to accomplish as much change as people would like.
Almost certainly not. But it looks like Rand Paul is made of stronger stuff than Obama. Paul consistently argues for positions that piss off most of his party. He seems able to come to conclusions about things himself regardless of what other people believe. He seems to have fairly strong principles. He doesn't come across as the sort of wishy-washy people person that Obama is. If there's any US politician that actually might tell the people in his secret briefings "stop bullshitting me or I fire you", it's probably Rand Paul.
That sort of logic holds true when moving between languages that are very similar. The transition between Python and Ruby or Java and C# spring to mind.
However if I need a C++ programmer and need one pronto, I'm not gonna hire a guy who has only JavaScript on his CV no matter what. Learning C++ is not merely learning a different way to create an array or slightly different syntax. To be effective in C++ you need to know how to do manual memory management and do it reliably, which takes not only domain knowledge but more importantly: practice and experience. You need to understand what inlining is. You very likely need to understand multi-threading and do it reliably, which takes practice and experience a pure JS guy is unlikely to have. You need to be comfortable with native toolchains and build systems: when the rtld craps its pants and prints a screenful of mangled symbols you need to be able to understand that you have an ABI mismatch, what that means and how to deal with it. Unfortunately that is mostly a matter of practice and experience. You might need to understand direct manipulation of binary data. There's just a ton of stuff beyond the minor details of the language.
Could the pure JS guy learn all this stuff? Of course! Will they do it quickly? No.
I probably disagree with him on over half of his positions
I don't think there's any way to avoid that. You'll never get someone who agrees with you 100% unless you run yourself.
The things I look for are:
1) Competency
2) Good character
3) Won't mess up the world by starting wars
4) Won't mess up the economy with weird domestic policies (privatize social security, for example, or a $20 national minimum wage).
How is making someone else do the collection and storage (with far less security than their own current collection) really any real change?
It saves the government some money if the data is stored on someone else's hardware?
That being said, Bernie is an interesting cat. He is a true socialist, who believes government has the ability to manage and shape the economy without unintended consequences.
You have to balance that against the fact that there will probably be Republican control of one or both houses of congress. Any time either party gets too much control, they go crazy, including payouts for constituents, etc.
In any case, how would you see him compared to Hillary?
Don't think he was a duck. From the fact that he was about to give us a list of real languages but then failed to do so, I can only assume the last "ducks" was him exclaiming at being overwhelmed by a wave of ducks, that subsequently ate him.
Yes, I am quite sure the real problem is he was a victim of.... fowl play.
The biggest skill in C++ is how to read code that's got templates, generics, overloaded operators, and custom keywords.
"What do you mean they overloaded '+' to merge objects?"
"This doesn't look like C++, it looks like some foreign language."
"Oh, we reversed the meaning of + and - because the senior guy thought that the original semantics were incorrect. But only for some objects."
This. Outside of academia I've never encountered C++ written in a sane manner. Hell, even inside of academia things get a bit iffy. Things you can expect to see if you ever maintain C++ code:
* Objects passed by value which don't have a deep assignment copy constructor.
* File scope objects using other file-scope objects - "Because VS2010 ensures instantiation order."
* Dependencies with no real reason; this is especially bad on Qt projects. Why use std::vector when you can use a QVector?
* const char *use_this_later = MyQstringObject.toStdString().c_str();
* You used copy semantics? You *meant* move semantics (This should never had made it into the standard).
* Overloaded functions - "myfunc (foo);" does something different to "myfunc (bar);", because hilariously foo and bar are different types
* Ditto for operators - "foo + bar" does something quite different to "bar + foo".
* Other than "type var[size];" there is no primitive array type. Arrays are implemented in the library, not in the language like every other sane language.
* No GC. In other languages you can get away with it, but in C++ you stand no chance - someone, somewhere back in the mists of the past, would have created a critically dependent-upon class that *will* return a temporary object that gets deleted automatically while you still have references. QString, for example.
All of the above, in addition to all of the gotcha's in C as well. In this day and age there is very little reason to use C++. If you need objects, UI, etc use Java or C#. If you don't need objects use C; at least you can trivially expose every single piece of C code you've written to other languages via a library. This lets you reuse your code. The only C++ code you'll ever expose to other languages are C-compatible functions.
I'm looking, right now, at a mountain of code, some 20+ classes, many with file-scope instantiations, every single fucking object a Qt object. The original developer noticed that the code for Qt-derived classes won't compile without a copy constructor so he very cleverly made empty copy constructors for all the classes so that even a shallow copy won't be performed. As expected, he also stores instances in containers - which means every now and then the program would give incorrect results with seemingly no predictable occurrences. It doesn't crash, mind, just gives incorrect answers.
Good luck; you'll need it.
Stay away from C++ - stick to languages that implement context-free grammars only.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.
