I agree. I felt so sorry for Natalie Portman in Episode III. "Oh Ani! YOU'RE BREAKING MY HEART!" Seriously. I cringe. That is no one but the director.

Watch Natalie Portman in Black Swan. She is utterly brilliant.

Not that I hate Star Wars. Far from it. The broad story arcs echo many ancient myths and stories. George Lucas has said that he read Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" which surveys many ancient myths for commonality. The idea of a young boy escaping his mundane life to find his "hero's journey" is primal, as is the story of a son of facing the sins of his father. In my mind these things elevate Star Wars into the pantheon of cinema, in spite of the horrific dialog.

NO! In a democratic society, we should NEVER tolerate intolerance.

Fair enough, but what scares me is how many extremists are already in power, in Congress and in the Senate. And on the road to the White House. We as a society really do need to take a close look at what is known as the "christian dominionist movement". This movement seeks to establish an American theocracy with the rule of law given by the bible. We should think about what these people are actually proposing: the death penalty for abortion, both for doctor and mother. The death penalty for homosexuality. Here is an article to give you an idea of what I am talking about. A very good read on this subject is American Fascists.

It is easy to dismiss these people as being a crazy fringe. Indeed every society has its own lunatics. What is concerning is how this extreme form of christianity has infiltrated the main stream of christianity and what we commonly know as the christian right. What is extremely concerning is how many mainstream politicians share similar modes of thought to this movement. When I hear about laws such as what Tim Cook is writing about, I hear the clicking of a ratchet, bringing us a small step towards an American version of the taliban government.

Those of us with a sense of what is actually going on must work towards steering our society away from this cliff. Above all, we should promote the idea that although we live in a tolerant nation, we should never tolerate intolerance. The bastards who bring in laws like this should be run out of town.

>That is incredibly unlikely without some other super-mega sci-fi project like a space elevator.

Or mirrors? A multi-km parabolic orbital mirror can be built out of only thin mylar and a minimal stabilizing structure - with only minor construction, launch, and maintenance costs. You can then use that for extremely large-scale, high concentration photovoltaics, of the sort that just aren't feasible on Earth at almost any price.

As for microwave lasers (aka masers - old enough technology that lasers were originally called "optical masers"), the whole point of using such things is that the atmosphere is almost perfectly transparent to microwaves. Unlike sunlight which sees ~30% losses to atmospheric absorption, microwaves mostly make it all the way to the ground. And then, since you're basically dealing with high-frequency radio waves, further concentration and conversion to electricity is relatively straightforward and efficient.

Why would you have sunlight shining directly on your orbital panels? That would be stupid, you would be much better off putting them on Earth. What you want to do is put up massive mylar parabolic reflectors, possibly many km across and stabilized by photon pressure and/or gyroscopic effects, that concentrate sunlight onto extremely high-power photovoltaics. Orbital reflectors can cost practically nothing to deploy and maintain, unlike their Earth-side counterparts which must be built strong enough to survive gravity, weather, and life, and will consume land area that could be put to other use or allowed to lie fallow for ecosystem restoration. (especially important for island nations)

And microwave lasers (aka masers - a technology that predates lasers considerably) actually make incredible sense for beaming the power back to Earth, since the atmosphere is extremely transparent to microwaves. Of course even a tightly focused maser will spread out after 36,000km, so you'll need massive receiving antennas on Earth covering many square kilometers, especially if you want to avoid cooking everything in the airspace alive, but power density could easily be many times the palty 1kW/m^2 of sunlight, and microwave mirrors and antennas are a much more rugged, simple, and efficient technology than optical mirrors and photovoltaics.

Plus, if you're willing to put up with the bureaucracy, you can probably get your military interested in testing its potential as an orbital death ray, dramatically improving the funding available for at least the early facilities.

Chris Christy scares the bejesus out of me. His personality is scary. He is the kind of guy who in my opinion you don't want to give too much power. The way he shouts down people who are weaker than him particularly concerns me. This article is a good summary of him.

Or she can sell off the US government's core technological assets and turn America into a hollow corporate brand name that creates almost nothing. Just like she did with HP when she sold off HP's advanced technology division as Agilent, and changed HP from a technological powerhouse into a brand-name for shitty computers and components.

Considering how quickly SpaceX is leapfrogging the ULA, I'm inclined to suspect that a more open bidding process will end up saving the government a fair amount of money in the long run. It does seem that the ULA has been mostly sitting on their laurels sucking at the government teat for a long while now. Why should they improve efficiency when it will only reduce profits?
My own objection is that saving the government money is a *very* different thing than saving the taxpayer money. What's your bet, will we all get a 0.01% reduction in taxes, or will the government just find some other pork-barrel project to spend it on? Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - I'd much rather get more for my tax dollars than less, but lets not pretend it's going to actually save taxpayers money.

Sure, except that had they used buffered string concatenation, so that the implementation was actually remotely comparable to the buffered disk access, they would have gotten radically different results.

As it is, they've only actually showed that doing things in basically the slowest possible way in memory can be slower than writing to the disk cache (also entirely in memory, they never initiated an actual write to disk at all, only queued it)

Sure, if you expose enough of the implementation details it becomes obvious when you're doing something stupid

  for (int i=0; i numIter; i++) {
                    char * newString = malloc ( strlen(concatString) + strlen(addstring) + 1);
                    memcpy (...);
                    memcpy(...) ;
                    free(concatString);
                  concatString = newString;
}

Suggests strongly a number of different potential optimization routes, though most would require either multiple traversals of the source material, or a growable buffer which would greatly increase the code complexity (or does C offer such a thing these days? I've been on ++ for a long while now)

You've got to admit though, that's a lot uglier to work with for most incidental string-manipulation where performance is largely irrelevant.

Correction: Dumb concatenation is for situations where clarity and convenience are more important than performance. That is to say, most of your code. If you're using a buffered string building system to perform a simple concatenation of file name components before opening the file to begin the real work, then you're creating maintenance headaches for an irrelevant performance boost. In an inner loop dedicated to string manipulation though...

One of the most important aspects of programming is knowing how to choose the right tool for the job - typically 80-90% of your codebase is executed so infrequently that even abysmal performance won't be noticeable to the user, and optimizing that code will actually be counter-productive due to the time and maintenance overhead it imposes. Moreover, most programmers (and especially the inexperienced) are quite poor at recognizing which parts of their code are actually performance critical. Recognizing that, it may often make sense to default to doing things the simple, slow, way and only worry about optimization after performance analysis has highlighted the bottlenecks. Personally I'll often write the expected hotspots with some basic "low-cost" optimizations (like StringBuilder) and an eye towards making future optimization simple (expected optimizations should never require an architecture overhaul, and maybe it's worth passing in certain data that will be necessary for future optimization of a heavily used function, just to avoid having to re-write a million function calls if/when it comes time to optimize it), but primarily focus on correctness. Then, after everything is working correctly, and performance analysis has shown me which bits of code are actually causing issues (including the bits I never would have suspected), then I go back and break out the heavy guns. I've gotten burned too many times over-optimizing the wrong things and generating headaches down the road to make a habit out of it anymore. Unless it's something fun to implement of course...

Ah, one of those statements with a convoluted historical meaning that departs from the literal one. Gotcha.

Can't say I disagree much with your major points, so then why do you object to my voting third party and preferring those candidate who espouse policy I actually agree with? Sounds to me like you think that's exactly what I *should* be doing.

As for your foxes and chickens, I quite agree. However, there are occasionally times when the chickens can squawk loud enough that the foxes will actually pass some laws to limit themselves rather than risk losing control of the situation. Threats of assembling a constitutional congress being one example that has motivated several concessions. Or, at the extreme end, there are moments when well-armed chickens can impose new laws upon the foxes (the Magna Carta springs to mind). To fail to, at our leisure, consider the form such imposed rules might take does a great disservice to mankind when one of those rare opportunities arises, and we have few well-considered options to suggest.

Assuming he's guilty, and that there were warning signs of such destructive behavior (and there usually are) "He would never swat" suggests willful blindness, not unconditional love. Admittedly perhaps she's just trying to cover his ass, but I've seen far more examples of people employing willful blindness to force their perception of a person into a form they can love, than actual unconditional love.