Comment Re:Advocate for?! (Score 1) 140
how does this relate to "advocate against"?
Comment Re:Of course... (Score 1) 637
of course you can, you just have to be a hunter-gatherer. you're perfectly free to move to the alaskan bush any time you like. just remember, some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.
Comment Re:Scary (Score 1) 910
23% still have confidence in banks?
fnord
Comment Re:no agreement... (Score 1) 910
can we get someone who respects the constitution who doesn't sound as wacky as Ron Paul?
Will Gary Johnson do?
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 297
+1
(tho i'd've said github)
Comment Re:zomg (Score 1) 63
/bow
(coincidentally, the fortune at the moment is "'From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.' -- Dr. Seuss"
Comment Re:zomg (Score 4, Funny) 63
yo dawg....
Comment Re:Geoworks (Score 1) 361
my mistake, i have a pro with 8 hyper-threaded cores.
Comment Re:Geoworks (Score 1) 361
reminds me of pre-OS X Macs--on the extremely rare occasions i have to boot OS 9 on bare metal, I'm always amazed by how much more responsive it is, on a single 300MHz core, than Snow Leopard is on 16 3GHz+ cores with more RAM than that box has disk space. (right up to the Type 2 bomb, failed attempt at typing "g finder" into the interrupt box, and four-minute reboot....)
Comment Re:A probabilistic algorithm (Score 1) 206
perhaps a couple examples are in order:
tic-tac-toe: solved (on paper, by bright grade-schoolers everywhere)
checkers: weakly solved (from the standard start, assuming perfect play)
U.S. Gov't To Keep Data On Non-Terrorist Citizens For 5 Years 186
arnott writes with this excerpt from the Washington Post:
"The Obama administration has approved guidelines that allow counterterrorism officials to lengthen the period of time they retain information about U.S. residents, even if they have no known connection to terrorism. The changes allow the National Counterterrorism Center, the intelligence community's clearinghouse for terrorism data, to keep information for up to five years. Previously, the center was required to promptly destroy — generally within 180 days — any information about U.S. citizens or residents unless a connection to terrorism was evident."
The Consoles Are Dying, Says Developer 309
hypnosec writes "While you might have often heard that PC gaming is dying — detractors have been claiming this for over a decade — one developer has a different take: that consoles are the ones on the way out. In a 26-minute presentation at GDC — available now as a slideshow with a voice-over — Ben Cousins, who heads mobile/tablet game maker ngmoco, uses statistics of electronic and gaming purchases, along with market shares of developers and publishers from just a few years ago, to come to some surprising conclusions. The old guard, including the three big console manufacturers — Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft — are losing out when compared with the new generation of gaming platform developers: Facebook, Apple and Google. With the new companies, the size of the audience is vastly increased because of their focus on tablets, mobile and browser-based gaming."
Nomad Planets: Stepping Stones To Interstellar Space? 244
An anonymous reader writes "Ian O'Neill suggests in an opinion piece at Al Jazeera that brown dwarves and nomad planets (planets not orbiting any star) could be a much needed stepping stone on our way to foreign stars. Quoting the article: 'In February, a fascinating paper was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society detailing calculations on how many "nomad planets" the Milky Way must contain after estimating our galaxy's mass from how much gravity it exerts on surrounding space. Scientists from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) had uncovered something surprising — there are likely many more planets in the Milky Way than stars. ... Louis Strigari and his Kavli team calculated that there must be 100,000 planets for every star in the Milky Way (PDF). That's a lot of planets! But how can this be? Every star can't have tens of thousands of planets ranging from Pluto-sized to Jupiter-sized. This planetary "excess" actually suggests the existence of planets that were born without a star — nomad planets. ... we need all the help we can get if we are to venture to another star, so these ultracool brown dwarfs could become much-needed "stepping stones" for future starships to refuel on their light-years of journey time. There may be the possibility that these sub-stellar objects may even become more desirable targets for interstellar travellers. After all, there may be dozens of these invisible objects between here and Proxima just waiting to be uncovered by the sophisticated infrared telescopes of the future; they'd certainly make for more accessible scientific curiosities.'"
Comment Re:Hegemony, schmegemony (Score 1) 395
yes, ideally bonded to medium-length chains of carbon atoms for stability, ease of transport, etc.
Comment Re:No he didn't (Score 1) 311
That said, none of these categories explain the use (I was referring to the title) of quotes around "too intrusive". Context clues still indicate to a reader that this is a direct quote, but he did not say it.
someone (either Unknown Lamer or jfruh, i suppose) probably picked it up from newspapers, where it's mostly a libel shield: "Celebrity X 'abusive'" is a much safer headline to print than "Celebrity X abusive". It's supposed to be a quote from a statement referenced in the article, though, so this was definitely not a correct instance of that use.
