Marauder is satire like the original, and justifies its otherwise forgettable existence with this:

It's a Good Day to Die

I love how people on YouTube praise it without realizing it is satirical. It's basically making fun of them and they like it.

Oh my God, I can't believe you morons still believe that.

Verhoeven was fucking with you.

This is the man who made RoboCop and Total Recall. The writer of Starship Troopers, Edward Neumeier, also wrote RoboCop.

Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine is a working title. A lot of movies like that have working titles. It helps keep them secret when they're in production.

Do you honestly think they weren't aware of one of the most famous science fiction novels that bore a striking similarity to the movie they had written, which was itself a satire of fascism and war propaganda?

Verhoeven may not have actually finished the novel, you don't need to, it's pretty boring, all hopping around in power armor and nuking skinnies and bugs after you get past the parts they directly lifted. But Neumeier is a writer who is into science fiction, do you honestly think he had never heard of Starship Troopers? That it was all coincidence? If so, you Heinlein fanboys are as dim-witted as the characters.

The actors were chosen specifically because they were too stupid to recognize that the movie is satire. Much like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, they played it straight, and their performances were so much better for it.

That you think the script was bad tells me you're very similar to the actors, though probably not as hot as Denise Richards.

Yeah, it's also like, "In order for the update to full take effect and work correctly, we need to restart a bunch of services and applications. You should save all your work, since various things might close or stop working for a little bit." You can explain that to users, have them not pay attention, and then get pissed off because the update closed their document that they didn't save. Or you can just tell them that you're going to reboot.

Users understand rebooting better.

About 5600 lines. However, because it was a glorified case statement, you were really only debugging a single case at a time, each of which was about the length of a sane function, so splitting it into functions would do little to improve readability. I like to trot out that example to terrify people, but the function itself was really quite sane and easy to maintain.

You did, however, have to fully understand the state machine as a whole, which in total was almost twenty kloc, had almost 200 instance variables in the state object, and leaned heavily on a tree object with about 30 instance variables. That's the point at which most people's heads exploded.

Either way, 4,500 lines is the size of a fairly straightforward iOS app. Most folks can dig into that and figure out enough to maintain it without spending a huge amount of time, even if the organization isn't ideal. When you hit tens of thousands of lines, that's where you have to start thinking about how you organize it and document it, because with such large projects, if you jump into the middle without a complete picture, you're likely to be hopelessly lost.

Please go read the recent BBC interview with an ex-jihadi to see some of the ways that al-Qaeda has been taking Islamic teachings out of context and twisting them to suit their purposes.

It's not just us. Plato raised this as a general problem in ancient Greece. Good people-- the kind of people we should want to be in a position of power-- are quite possibly never the people who are lusting to put themselves into a position of power. That's the one-sentence summary of "The Republic".

I saw a 'gator right at the edge of the VAB parking lot last month. In a drainage ditch, up to the fence, cars parked right on the other side.

With luck, they'll start incorporating our radio transceivers. I hear that SpaceX flies with several USRPs now, so that's not completely unrealistic. That might be as close as I can get. Anyone who can get me a base invitation, though, would be greatly appreciated and I'd be happy to do some entertaining speeches while there. I need a base invite for Vandenberg, too. I got in to the official viewing site for the first try of the last launch (and that scrubbed too), but this next one is on Pad 6.

That we know of.

Oh, you mean the ones that always start out saying, "ATTENTION: This is NOT a dream...!"? You can safely ignore those.

I was in Florida to speak at Orlando Hamcation and went to see the DISCOVR launch at Kennedy Space Center. I paid $50 to be at LC-39 for the launch, an observation tower made from a disused gantry on the Nasa Causeway between the pads and the Vehicle Assembly Building. A crawler was parked next door! A hot sandwich buffet, chips, and sodas were served. It was cold and windy! I watched for a few hours and unfortunately the launch scrubbed due to high stratospheric winds.

The next day, Delaware North Corporation, which operates tourism at KSC, decided not to open LC-39 or the Saturn 5 center for the launch. This was the third launch attempt and I guess they decided most people had left. I was annoyed.

The closest beach was going to be closed in the evening, it's a sensitive ecological area. I ended up seeing the launch from Jetty Park. This turned out not to be such a great location, the tower wasn't visible at all and the first 10 seconds of the rocket in flight were obscured before we saw it over a hill.

What's a better viewing location?

See, I was right. Stubborn, stupid, and there's no point in arguing with you.

If I email you from my Google account, where do those bits go? Who can read it once it leaves Google's servers? I don't know, because aside from SSL in transport, it's not encrypted.

Maybe you should think for 30 seconds before posting.

I, for one, don't really use Google+, but it's not because of any particular problem other than, "No one else is using it," with just a smidge of "I don't know what I'm supposed to be using it for," thrown in.

It does seem to me like "Hangouts" should be its own thing, along with chat and VoIP. If anything, those things should should sooner be integrated into Gmail somehow. I'm not sure I want that, but it would make more sense, at least, since it's all, roughly speaking, private communications.

I also think that there should be a separate web application that is, "Where my phone automatically uploads my photos, where I can organize them and track them myself, but they're private." Personally, it just makes me a little uncomfortable for that to be bolted straight on to the "photo sharing social networking site," but maybe that's just me. I'm old. I feel ok if the social networking site can connect in and pull photos from the private site. Hell, even if I know it's all ultimately stored in the database, that's not what bothers me. It's just to have my private stuff be in the same interface as the publicly shared stuff, without a clear apparent distinction... it worries my poor little monkey brain.

Ultimately, between Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I tend to use Facebook for sharing posts/photos/updates. Not because I like it or think it's good, and only somewhat because my friends seem to use it more. As much as anything, I think it's because it's the site that confuses me the least.