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Comment Re:For God's sake, don't read Command and Control (Score 1) 238

That's not quite true.

I just read Command and Control over the weekend, an amazing and eye-opening read. Turns out those detonation systems were far too fragile and susceptible to unusual environments: ie. crashes and burning. Many could have had one or more lens elements detonated by enough induced current. The worse case--a frag hitting the cusp where 3 lens elements met--wasn't even though of until sometime in the late 1950's as far as I can recall. And those could have led to a partial-yield nuclear explosion.

Truly safe nuclear weapons--with safety equivalent or better than say regular conventional munitions--weren't developed or deployed until the late 1980's to 1990's. And there were a lot of accidents, from "simple" ones like dropping bombs short distances to crashes where the very hazardous plutonium and beryllium metal were exposed and burned. In some ways it's only because of shear luck and what safety and dedication there was in all nuclear forces that there wasn't an accidental detonation.

Comment Re:this is a big mistake (Score 1) 141

I get tired of having to repeat this warning every time this idea is rediscovered, but those are NOT wasted codons, and this scheme could hardly fail to cause catastrophic consequences if it gets into the wild. Over the years people have been discovering there is less and less 'junk' DNA, and everything in the code has a meaning. The stop codons are in all probability different. and someone is going to say 'oops' in a few years, when we wipe out all or part of life on earth.

Completely agree, except that the stop codons don't have to be different. They can just be likely to have a mistranscription and having 3 of such similar nature is to guard against this and make sure transcription actually stops.

Comment Re:Movies used to be about the art, the story. (Score 1) 1029

The whole mountain giant sequence was an exercise in excessive CGI combined with some unexplainable contempt for continuity. At some point during production someone had to think "wtf is this?"

That scene is from the book, but like a lot was exaggerated in the film. I think it would have been better following the book more closely by making the rain more opaque and the giants' battle more noise and uncertain glimpses in the lightning flashes rather than the right-on-top of them death-defying action. And the undermountain battle was a bit too much going through a Rube Goldberg machine.

I did like how the film has the dwarves more true to their heroic nature rather than just the bumbling fools they mostly are in the book prior to Erebor, as well as Bilbo finding his inner resolve sooner as well. But I agree Peter Jackson is starting to verge into George Lucas territory. I really hope he has people around him who will honestly criticise his work.

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