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Comment Re:They didn't "forget" how to talk to it! (Score 1) 166

We cannot turn it back on again. Even if we wanted to. As all the engineers, physicists, and operators who designed, built and maintained that machine are either dead or retired. ...

It is easier to gut the machine and rebuild it from scratch than turn it on again.

Alright, I am curious. What, exactly, stops you from flipping the switch back to "on"?

Yes, I am ignorant. But it's a serious question.

It was running, right? So you know that it works.

So,
1. What is so hard about starting it up, and
2. If you knew you could not turn it back on after turning it off, why turn it off?

Comment Genetic insulin response (Score 1) 459

Genetics give three different types of insulin response to carbohydrate intake: low, medium, high. They are roughly (warning: 30+ year old data) 25, 50, and 25%. Diabetics (again, 30+ year old data, and incomplete/initial when it was taken) (insulin resistance, not pancreatic failure) correspond only to the high insulin response.

Any attempt to document the response of food/diet to population results that fails to account for which type of insulin response you are testing on is a fail. Basic, simple, first step of peer review fail.

When I see articles like this (and I read the article), I can only think that a non-peer reviewed preliminary study is getting as much press coverage as should go to well-established, peer-reviewed, properly control-tested studies.

Essentially:

1. Different levels of insulin response will have different effects on body behavior, as well as survivability in times of famine.
2. Low insulin response basically makes it impossible for your body to have the same behavior as high insulin response
3. Diets that are healthy for high insulin response is probably good for everyone, but low insulin response can safely eat things that high insulin response cannot.
4. High insulin response means a bigger store of fat, and survival through times of food scarcity.

None of that was addressed by this, or even most of the food studies that get lots of media attention. It's almost as if the people covering the news have no knowledge of what they are covering.

Oh, wait, what did I just say?

Comment Re:Horrible coffee (XKCD) (Score 1) 769

How about we just skip to the end of the chain?

Unless you created a pocket universe, started a creation event, formed stars from the resulting big bang cloud, fused a solar system worth of hydrogen into heavier matter, collected the matter into a planet in the perfect orbit, formed a primordial soup, created life from the soup, evolved the life to create coffee bean producers, harvested the beans, processed and roasted the beans, ground them, and finally pressed them yourself, then it's not proper coffee.

I'll just train the butterflies, and let their wings do the work for me.

Err, is that "obligatory XKCD"?
http://xkcd.com/378/

Comment Re: And in other news... (Score 1) 506

I do not want to force anybody to do anything they do not want to do, but a condition for being a citizen of the USA is that you have to speak the language. It actually is the law, if that means anything.

Nope.

All you have to do is be born or naturalized in the USA, and subject to its jurisdiction.

Unless, you are the courts: Then, you say all you have to do is be born or naturalized, and then you are subject to its jurisdiction.

Or, if you are someone who actually paid attention to older rulings: then, all you need is for a state to consider you a citizen; once one state says you are a citizen of that state, then all states have to accept you as a citizen.

Believe it or not, that was re-affirmed in a case from (memory ... might be off) 1999, against the state of california, for trying to make new arrivals to the state get less welfare support from california.

I think the quote was something like, "Citizens of the united states, whether rich or poor, have the right to choose their own state; states do not have the right to reject citizens".

The issue of being a citizen of a state or not actually dates back to old court rulings that had to deal with someone that was born, and lived entirely in Washington DC, and had never lived in any state. Prior to the 14th amendment, being a citizen or not was entirely up to the states to declare; some gave that to blacks, and others did not.

It is my understanding that the _early_ supreme court rulings after the 14th amendment actually made this clear: states still could issue citizenship, and if they did not, you could claim citizenship from the central government, and then get all the federal rights in state courts.

Don't ask me when the courts started messing up -- I don't know.
But now, it's more "If you are born here, then you are automatically subject to federal jurisdiction, and the restrictions of article 1 no longer apply".

Comment Re:What the hell, is it the 90s again? (Score 1) 627

Yes.

If you ever make a mistake -- and we are human -- then yes you need source control.

A better question: Do you need the ability to do lots of cheap branches and easy merging? I find it really makes things much, much easier, but changes the nature of "spagetti code" to the process of keeping track of all the branches.

Comment Re:Isn't the real proof (Score 1) 627

In what you earn from doing what you do?

That is the business man approach. "Your value, your contribution to society, the quality of what you do is determined entirely by your ability to make money from what you do".

No.

Skill at an art is not the same as skill at marketing that art. And it's different yet from skill at making a profit from marketing something that someone else did.

Skill at business isn't the same as skill at _blank_
Skill at marketing isn't the same as skill at _blank_

When did Einstein's paper on the photoelectic effect, or his paper on random walk of atoms (sorry, the name eludes me this morning) become "skill"? He got his Nobel for some other paper he wrote, where all he did was point out that the three basic assumptions of physics that people used were contradictory, and what happened when you only assumed two and let the third go by the wayside.

Well, in fairness, pointing out that common assumptions are contradictory probably is Nobel worthy. I'm sure Godel got a Nobel for doing that to math and logic, right?

(actually, I don't know if Godel got a Nobel for his incompleteness work.)

---
Side note: How do you get angle brackets in this text? I had to change those to "_blank_" because I could not use angle brackets around the word "blank".

Comment Re:I find it interesting (Score 1) 223

I like the idea how everything is a file etc.

But if you pay attention to modern evolution of OS's, everything is a directory makes more sense / a better map.

Files have extended attributes, various data/resource/etc forks; real directories cannot be read, but have a bunch of index'd names; etc.

People who say that hardware devices need special parallel communication: each such communication is just another entry in the directory.

And then there's the whole "This program contains different versions for different architectures" is just straight multiple single streams.

Comment Re:MechWarrior Online, while waiting for Star Citi (Score 1) 669

I have not played the current MWO, but long, long ago, I had an Amiga game called "Titans of Steel".

Imagine "real-time" (turn based, but you took turns based on your mech's "next active tick time") mech warrior. Realize that the old board game system of "You can generate 1000 degrees of heat, and have it all go to 0 if you have normally functioning heat sinks" fails when you actually have that much heat generated at once and it takes time for your mech to cool off -- and watch mech designs actually change to take realistic heat mechanics come into play.

All those FASA designs, fundamentally only work if you can generate lots of heat and instantly be still cold. Remove that, and everything changes.

Very interesting game.

Only problem? Requires a good Amiga emulator. I haven't had functional kickstart/dos disks in decades, and I'm not even sure I could find this game again.

Comment Minecraft (Score 1) 669

I play Minecraft.

And, Minecraft: Magic Farm 2 modpack (aka "Death and Starvation come to multiplayer")

And, Minecraft: The forums

And, Minecraft: Mod debugging

And, Minecraft: Personal Modpack assembly and performance tuning.

And, Minecraft: Suggestions for improving mods / working with mod authors

And, Minecraft: The video recording editing sessions

And, Minceraft: The sister game of typos.

And, occasionally, minecraft, the video game of mining and crafting, and building.

Comment Re: You Don't (Score 1) 384

...
Vendor A wasn't popular politically, but won on technical merit. Vendor B was a serious player, and had previously held 80% of the market in that segment, but (a) had fallen behind technically, and (b) their presentation had truly been Keystone Kops level bad, unfortunately. They simply didn't take it seriously; they expected to win on name recognition, so they basically just phoned it in.

...
  a competitive analysis for my boss to justify my rankings, and I wrote about 20 pages, detailing the scoring criteria I used, my observations and analysis, etc. Some of the vendors were extremely interested in this (vendor C, in particular, since they just missed the final round by a whisker),

...
Vendor C, in contrast, flew up two guys (one business guy, one tech) to take me out to lunch/dinner and get a Vulcan Mind Meld with me; their approach was "we came in number three, what do we need to improve to be number one".

A year later, Vendor B was sitting at 20% of the market, and unlikely to hang on to that, as both Vendor A and Vendor C had passed them. ...

I think I speak for everyone here when saying...I would really like to read that report.

I am thinking of how I could respond to this. I'm sure that "Wait, was "B" Microsoft?" would get me +5 silly. But this is probably more serious.

Company C -- whoever they are, whatever they do -- sounds like a company I'd like to work for. It's sounds much better than most of the companies I have worked for.

This is, in a nutshell, the market at its finest.

There is a serious view: If you do not improve, you will be overtaken by those that do. Historically, in this industry (Tech), the "improvements" are more likely to come from within -- from elsewhere in the same company. We've seen time and again, companies that sit on an improvement because it will hurt their big department, with IBM being the single biggest such example that I know of; and "biggest example" only because they were the biggest company for the longest. Which company has the highest rate of this, I don't know.

Historically, we see companies that say "We won't improve; no one else is close to us, and improvement helps division C less than stagnation helps division B."
Here, we see "We won't improve; we think no one else is close to us", and improvement helps company C more than stagnation helped company B.

This is what we need to see more of. And I'd love to know who the "new kid to watch out for", C, is.

So, was B microsoft?

Comment Re: Why invest so much money in this... (Score 1) 78

Google is not the answer.

Want proof? Try these two searches:

"Thor"
"atm"

How is Google supposed to know what to do with that? Do you want norse mythology, a comic book, or something else? Do you want packet switching information, bank information, or "Acrylic Tank Manufacturing" -- that's a new one.

About a decade ago, "Cow9" -- that was the name of the alta vista search engine -- had a wonderful solution to this, that required loading a java applet into your browser as part of the search. I loved it, and was disappointed when it was killed off.

Google is far from the answer. Even google itself admits that this is a deep and hard question.

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