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Comment How about "Anything"? (Score 1) 352

The patriotism of WWII, the urgency of the Space Race, the fear in the Cold War, the shock of 911--all these instilled a sense of pride and drive to accomplish specific and strategic goals as a nation. While you can debate the ethics behind and what came out of these endeavors, you really can't deny that the United States came together, pooled its resources, and focused on getting things done. We are so stagnate and complacent as a country these days that we have lost that drive, that pride in being great.

Comment Re:This is how it is done. (Score 1) 28

You are being quite subjective. Take for example the Cassini mission, launched in October 1997, primary mission ended in June 2008 (nearly 11 years). Dawn mission: launched in September 2007, primary mission ends in July 2015 (nearly 8 years). That doesn't take into account the development time. I think you'll find many scientists that are willing to commit a murder for that kind of grants.
True, many missions are fueled explicitly with expectations of extensions. and that is a perfectly logical choice: once you've done a certain amount of science, you should be able to prove the health of your instrument and be able to demonstrate that continued observations will increase the science output. This kind of audit is perfectly defensible, it reduces waste and helps to optimize the overall budget.

Comment Re:It's the difference between science and tech. (Score 1) 322

None of those try to study or gain a better understanding of the natural world. You said it yourself, it's electrical engineering. You could also say that mathematical formulas are used to describe the natural world. While true, that doesn't imply that math is a science.
I think the best field where you could make a case is in modelling, e.g. of galaxy formation, climate change and such. Here computer simulations are really becoming a third pillar alongside theoretical science and experimental science. If you look more closely, in simulating you are just testing that your model of reality is complete with all it complex interactions (or if you are missing something), or try to make some predictions based on the results of your model.
Then again, you could continue to argue about this ad nauseam. Personally, I find this kind of pigeon holing not very interesting. By changing the definitions ever so slightly, you could get very different classifications. Whether it is science, engineering, math, logic, or computer science, I love them all equally and it eventually comes down to "all for one and one for all". Bicker all you want.

Comment Re:Yea, riiiiggghhttt, lol... apk (Score -1, Offtopic) 322

The first mistake he made, is the include statement. The stdio.h was between brackets so slashdot saw it as an unrecognized html-tag and dumped it, it seems.

As far as the defines go:

FUCK YOU -> SUCK MY DICK DUMB BITCH -> void main() { printf("fuck you); }

So he did also forgot a an end quote in the printf statement. And, depending on the compiler, it might also complain about main not returning an int value. So while it might not compile the first time, the bugs are easily fixed as the intent is obvious.

All in all this is bad coding style, I give it a 4/20 (points mainly come from using descriptive macro names).

PS: My professional deformation might be getting a bit out of control.

Comment Re:Just what Apple needs... (Score 1) 116

I was just addressing the issue of power consumption. I assume that an architecture that's basically horrible in terms of design will have some implementation and power issues (as a rule of thumb).
The recompilation issue is entirely different, but an interesting point to bring up. Is it really that hard? From my experience, it isn't. The major difficulty in cross-compiling is with different environments, not the CPU architecture (except for the very lowest levels). But if you're dealing with server farms, e.g. linux servers, the work has already been done, linux runs fine on ARM.
The only possible hurdle I can imagine is with optimized code that optimizes for cache hits on a specific processor. But these kind of optimizations tend to break even between different versions of the same architecture. I don't know how widely they are used in datacenters.

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