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Comment The early 70's are calling. (Score 1) 313

One of the largest internal migrations in US history was in the early 70's when 20 something hippies started leaving cities in droves and building mud brick utopias. Only a handful of the communes survived more then 2ys. The common cause of downfall was human nature - a bully would arise in the commune and take ownership of the land by pushing people out one by one.

Comment Re:Urban legend? (Score 1) 313

I grew up during the cold war, the term "plan C" sound vaguely familiar. The military is expected to "plan for every scenario", it's unsurprising they came up with silly plans for a nuclear - most primary school kids knew that fallout made "duck and cover" a sick joke. It's an attempt to make people feel like they can "do something" other than dying.

Comment OO is not a property of the language. (Score 1) 200

C++ rewards good design but brutally punishes poor designs.

You hit the nail on the head, somewhere in the early 90's, language vendors stopped claiming "Our language supports OO concepts" and started claiming "Our language is OO".

The first C++ compiler I used professionally was Wacom's (circa 1991). Back then the Watcom C++ extensions were not part of the language, they were implemented with a bunch of C macros pulled in with include files, the macros themselves were riddled with goto (another macro) statements. I still have nightmares....

The fact is any general purpose language can be used to implement an OO design because OO is not about language features, it's a design methodology, or at least that's what I was taught when studying for my CS degree in the late 80's. As my smalltalk lecturer pointed out at the time, most of the examples in K&R's "The C language" are also great examples of OO design that were written long before the term OO was invented.

Disclaimer: These days I spend much more time tying spaghetti balls with different flavoured source together than I do trying to untangle the individual gordian knots.

Comment Re:It was the press coverage that was the disaster (Score 5, Informative) 76

I recall reading about the mirror when it was being made, the precision with which it was polished was mind bogglingly accurate, if it was the size of Australia the largest deviation from perfectly smooth would be less than a millimetre. The problem was the shape (which changes slightly when put in zero-g), an extra shim in the framework that held the glass while it was cut was found to be the cause of the problem.

Cannot fathom why your post id marked redundant, OT maybe, but redundant?

Comment Re:More proof (Score 2) 667

That's exactly what the "public service" are supposed to do "speak truth to power" and I think NASA, NOAA, EPA, and many other government institutions have done an outstanding job over the last 20yrs on this issue. The politician's aren't stupid, they just can't find the courage to "speak truth to their sponsors" who don't give a shit what happens after they die.

Comment Re:More proof (Score 1) 667

How about we get politics out of science and rely on the scientific method to determine if "Global Warming" is real or not.

If we did that then this debate would have ended in 1958 when spectrographs designed for heat seeking missiles became good enough to separate CO2 and H2O absorption lines. It was previously assumed they overlapped but the new spectrographs showed they were interlaced.

Comment Re:Yep it is a scam (Score 2) 667

The best "ringer" I recall was Michael Crichton, author of "Climate of fear", "Jurassic park", and dozens of other popular "science gone mad" stories to testify as an expert witness on "climate science". I've watched some of the worst bits of those climate change hearings, I stopped because they anger and sadden me.

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