I was talking about these hybrid (rubber / NOx) vs liquid (kerosene / O2) engines. I know conventional solid do make more thrust, but are not controllable -- hence they make a good booster but not a main engine. It would seem like for a main engine, conventional liquid would give the most thrust and the most controllability.

Don't conventional liquid engines give significantly more thrust per weight of propellent. From everything I've read, these hybrid designs are also far less controllable and have all sorts of odd dynamics as the solid propellent burns away.

So, you're telling me that the FreeBSD kernel now has to be compiled with support for every piece of hardware out there?

Are you fucking serious? FreeBSD no longer supports drivers that were not statically compiled into the kernel?

This is either a joke or has to be the most idiotic thing I've ever heard of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Is this even true? I did some goggling, and could not find *any* official or otherwise direct statement from PETA.

In any case, I think PETA badly dilutes its message by frequently saying borderline ridiculous statements.

No living being should be subject to the kinds of torture in medical tests, period!.

That begin said, there is no problem with animals and humans cooperating. Camels carry a load, and in return they are fed and cared for. Whats wrong with that. Its called a *symbiotic* relationship in case you forgot sixth grade ecology. If farm animals are well cared for, and killed instantly for meat, well, I guess I'm sort of essentially OK with that.

They already have, why do you think I switched to a local ISP. When I used to have comcrap, the moment I turned on a bit torrent client, they throttled my connection both ways down to less than 100 k.

Has anyone seriously used this for anything other than writing Windows shareware in the 1990s?

I really have no problems with the language, even used it in the 1990s, actually pretty decent. But what an idiotic company behind it. Basically Borland's company strategy was: "Lets go muzzle to muzzle against Microsoft with our closed source language that only runs on Microsoft Windows, and lets charge a lot of money for our language thats completely incompatible with, but sort of resembles Microsoft C# when Microsoft lets you have Visual Studio for free".

If they would have open sourced so it could be cross platform, it or had some way of using your existing C++ code they might have had a chance. But yet again, a half way decent environment ruined by a completely idiotic company.

* yes, evidently the new version is "cross platform", but it a joke. The thing only runs on Windows which generates a binary that looks like it has some sort of emulation environment in it, then copy and hope that it runs on a Mac. And, they don't even remotely resemble Mac apps, looks similar to an Gnome/Qt app running on Linux with an OSX theme.

Seems like a cool idea, just concerned about how much overhead the software will cause.

So, basically, it needs to continuously poll the frame buffer, copy over a fairly huge block of data, rip through the pixel data to determine the mean colors, and then set the device color though the USB port.

I really would have preferred an all hardware solution where its a pass through of your DVI / HDMI, and there would be a DSP that analyzed the HDMI stream and set the color accordingly.

Right, I was expecting something exactly like this, and I'm pretty sure there's the equivalent in .net.

I would say, probably 99% of Windows apps are written in either C++ or .net, they would just call either GetVersionEx, or whatever the .net version is, and they would have the exact major and minor version. So, it basically makes no sense using a Java example of getting the OS version string, as essentially nobody uses Java for any tightly integrated desktop app where you need to know exactly what version of Windows you're on.

I do use a number of libraries in my code (C++), and all the ones I've seen give you standard major and minor versions which I check.

Does anybody seriously write any platform specific desktop code in Java that needs to check the Windows version??

What's the standard Windows API, or .net function to get the Windows version string? Doesn't this return actual version numbers and not a string that you have to parse?

Now that would be cool.

Can't believe I'm the first one to comment about adamantium replacement bones.

Once adamantium is set, it can't be broken, so an additive printing system like 3D printing would be perfect for making adamantium parts.

They probably only need just TWO employees, a CEO to get the money, and a secretary to collect it.

Every single action Microsoft makes is met with incessant criticism. This makes a lot of sense as for two decades the Microsoft marketing machine has firmly established this universal notion that anything different than Windows is scary, different, and OMG, *incompatible*. That worked very so well as no Windows user wants anything different than what they have right now.

So, all Microsoft should do is just keep printing copies of Windows XP, since that what everyone wants, and just keep collecting the money. Users would be a LOT happier as they would never have to worry about any change, and the CEO would be happy as he can just keep collecting the money with no effort.

I think I might have to give VIM yet another try, thing this will be try 7 or 8 now.

Eclipse used to have an Emacs key binding plugin, but it was abandoned a few years ago, and its !uck&ing annoying going back and forth between Eclipse and Emacs key binding.

Funny, I feel the same way about VIM, I tried to learn it, after all a lot of people use it, and finally gave up after trying to remember 5 or 6 mode change seemingly random ctrl + : + ???? key stroke combinations.

Thats a fair answer, and a fair criticism of Emacs. Nearly everyone I've talked to who uses VIM, like I said just uses it because someone told them to in the past and have never tried anything else.