Right, maybe we should burn him at the stake for heresy!
    You true believers have absolutely no idea how foolish you come across.

Oh, sure, who doesn't like to hear this?Between this, and "metric system is better lectures" makes me feel small. Almost makes me overlook that fact that none of these wise-asses would exist, except for us.

In fact, many cases of Hitler references trivialize the almost inconceivable magnitude of the evil of the 3rd reich. But some cases - the Khmer Rouge or ISIS, for example - it really is appropriate. Yet Godwin is used to stifle the discussion. I think in that sense it has been a disservice.

If I was hiring programmers, I would be very inclined to hire real engineers (of any stripe) than degreed "computer scientists"

I have used Macs since they existed, and I never once saw the Sad Mac, aside from looking it up, or seeing it in documentation. The spinning beach ball was also exceptionally rare until OS X came along, now you do see that one occasionally.

    On "IBM machines" AKA DOS machines , I have seen xxx failed, Abort, Retry, Fail? almost incessantly. Not artistic, not particular memorable, aside from being drilled into one's head like "Polly Want a Cracker?" is for parrots.

"He got so wasted he SHORTED OUT!!. I want to party with that dude!"

"SPRING BREAK, YEAH!!!!"[/frat boy]

What are you talking about? Pseudo-scientific bullshit it what /. is about!

I thought it was really cool in 1970 when I saw it in Popular Mechanics.

Right, but you have to be a special kind of idiot to think the California Supertrain is a legitimate project to provide effective transportation. It is about sucking out Federal subsidies and the notion that it will ever be viable or economically sound is just foolish.

People have been launching sounding rockets into the aurora borealis for something like 60 years - in the many hundreds, if not thousands. The facilities in AK and Canada are far and away the most active sounding rocket sites in the world because of it.

    How is this news?

Whether he was right or wrong, people have taken his statements, as with most religious zealots, to the ultimate ridiculous end.

      I heard the capper in about 1988 or so, when one of our customers asked, during a code review, if an unconditional branch in assembly code wasn't just like a GOTO, which was prohibited.

You win! I was showing some newbies an example of that yesterday. With a lot of error checking, and indenting that Wirth would have approved of, the inner statements in the deepest loop wouldn't have fit on the screen.

      The alternative chosen was *multiple subroutine exits*, which is arguably much worse than a few GOTOs.

      Brett

Why would you make such a worthless class a requirement? Just to make sure girls take it?

This is a pretty facile assessment. The safest possible approach would be to ban the plants entirely. Once you dismiss that, then it's a trade-off.

That's compared to a few hundred pounds for an equivalent chemical rocket. The point of post you are replying to is absolutely correct, it only makes sense if the rocket using it is large and carries a large amount of propellant.

      There are effectively two factors in rocket design - the engine ISP and the mass ratio. The mass ratio is a measure of how much propellant is carried VS the dead weight (engine, tanks, payload). Those two things can tell you the velocity change of the rocket (see: "rocket equation"). Note that you have to recognize that the ISP and exhaust velocity are one and the same to make sense of it.

  The ISP is twice as good as a chemical rocket, but the dead weight is very high, too, so for this to make sense, you need a large amount of propellant. The difference between 250 lbs (chemical rocket weight) and a few thousand (practical lower end of the NTP and associated shielding, etc) could be critical.

    For example, using hydrogen as a working fluid increases the ISP (the lighter the exhaust products, the better) but reduces the mass ratio because the density is so low, the tanks have to be gigantic and therefore heavy. reducing the mass ratio. If it used Xenon, it might have lower ISP but the dead weight would be smaller due to much smaller fuel tanks. It's a trade-off, and NTP engines don't care very much what fuel they use.

    Someone has already figured all this out, there was a perfectly sound design for a rocket upper stage using a NERVA engine, I would suggest that as a point for further research.