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Comment Re:Carl Sagan thought Titan was more important (Score 3, Interesting) 98

And what gives him the authority to dictate to NASA how to run their space program?

Mostly the fact that he was one of the most prominent and well-rounded planetary astronomers and astrobiologists in the world, and the fact that he had a pretty good batting average in predicting conditions on Venus, Europa, and other bodies that were later confirmed. Sagan didn't dictate the Voyagers' itineraries, but NASA sure as hell wanted to know what he had to say.

Comment Re:Because titan has ice, pluto isn't even a plane (Score 4, Informative) 98

I believe Voyager 1 still hasn't passed pluto if projected back down onto its orbital plane.

Voyager 1 is almost 20 billion miles away from us now, and is traveling about 35 degrees out of the ecliptic. Some really rough trigonometry shows that if you project that down onto the ecliptic, it's still about 16 billion miles away from the Sun, which is almost three times the length of the long axis of Pluto's entire orbit.

Comment iPhones less bendable than others (Score 2) 152

The iPhone 6+ is in fact less bendable than the Samsung phones, and the Samsung phones have screens that will shatter instead of bending slightly...

But in fact the iPhone 6+ is easily good for more than a day of charge. So if you want an iPhone that you don't have to think about the battery, they already sell one.

Comment Re:It's all about the environment... (Score 1) 126

Hard to concentrate when you can smell your neighbor didn't shower this week.

Fortunately everyone in my office bathes regularly, but we do have an office manager that believes too much perfume is merely a starting point. Seriously, I'm four cubes down from where she works and I can tell when she's arrived to within five minutes.

Comment Re: From TFA: (Score 1) 213

It can, but you have to have at first a clue of what you are doing. To know how to scale back a 100 MByte code base, you have to know the 100 MByte code base first, and you have to have lots of experience from coding within the 100 MByte code base, or from coding in a similar environment and with a similar goal.

To know how to scale back a large government, you have to know first what the government is doing, how it is doing what it does and why it does what it does, at best from your own experience in this government, or from working in another government.

Some outsider with big words but no experience is very likely screwing up big time, because he has no clue about most of the very important details. Yes, sometimes you find that wunderkind who is able to pull the stunt and get a new new code base working. But it surely has coded before, it has a general idea what's the point of the whole thing, and it is able to fastly get a strong team together pulling in the same direction. And sometimes you find that person who is able to redo a government as a relative outsider, but that person needs strong experience in how to govern something, and it has to be able to get a strong team together which pulls in the same direction.

And here the parallel between the government and maintaining a code base ends. Because you can create a new codebase while the old is still running. But you can't start a new government and get it up to speed while the old one is still running.

Comment Re: From TFA: (Score 1) 213

A president who runs on a "massively cut government" platform is like the junior coder who claims to be able to redo the whole 100 MByte source code project in his spare time, and cut it down to 1.5 MByte in size.

If his spare time project will ever be more than some example routines of peripherical functions and a completely overengineered interface full of place holder code and TBDL comments, then it will take 10 years to get some preliminary modules in production, and you will end up with two codebases of 150 MByte each, partly incompatible, but so interwoven that you can't never get rid again of at least one of it.

Comment Re:GMOs have so many different problems (Score 1) 188

We already have a cheap and plentiful food supply.

if you think otherwise then you are highly uniformed MORON.

We have been letting food ROT in this country in order to prop up commodity prices since before you were even born. That's just the stuff that actually gets harvested. Some of it doesn't even make it out of the fields because it doesn't meet stringent packaging guidelines.

Comment Re:genetic manipulation has been done for millenia (Score 1) 188

> There is no scientific difference.

If that were really true then there would be no value perceived in the "newer" alternative. The fact that these differences do exist despite the shrill attempts of "science fanboys" to say otherwise is why megacorps want to use these methods. At best they are a short cut. At worst, they convey unusual monopoly powers.

Comment Re:GMOs have so many different problems (Score 2) 188

Who cares if it can make money or not. That is simply not the correct metric to judge whether or not a certain type of patent (or other thing) should be allowed. We should not suddenly re-align all of our interests merely to pander to the desires of a few large megacorporations.

Our society is simply not driven by the need for Monsanto to make a buck.

Comment Re:More bad science journalism (Score 1) 29

This just in: the difference between a just formed, new planet and a planet that got hot stellar matter from its central sol is much smaller than the difference between a newly formed planet and one that circles around the quiet central star for some billions of years.

And thus it is a rejuvenation, as the planet gets more similar to its primordal state than before.

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