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Comment Re:We are so screwed (Score 1) 197

Remember - the Federation reserved the Death Penalty for making AI Androids.

Noonian Soong had to exile himself to a remote planet outside Federation control to work on Data and Lore (and his sexbot...).

They needed people to be able to have jobs *that* badly.

Which ... stop sending redshirts outside the ship with magnetic boots in a radiation storm, OK? They could have at least had some astromech droids. Sheesh!

Comment Better Targets (Score 1) 24

I recently got a "plastic" target that changes color and the holes mostly self-heal if you don't use a hollow-point.

Good for plinking but they do wear out eventually.

I didn't even know this material existed before a buddy told me they were on Amazon. Amazing times, for sure.

Heck, I picked up some 100-lb test fishing line the other day that is some sort of braided heavy-chain polyethylene that is 11 times stronger than steel wire at the same size. The company made mechanical spinnerets to mimic spiders' to get it to work.

Again, I had no idea until a buddy told me it was $20 on Amazon.

Wild.

Comment Re:And (Score 0) 111

Back in the day we'd install wild boards that would upgrade the Mac CPU's by a generation or two, add FPU's, etc.

All of this depended on the systems being too expensive to replace or buy new except once in a blue moon.

At $600 which is probably $200 in 1986 money, it's a bit harder to be mad.

Those systems were probably $10K in 2025 dollars. Heck, a few were $10K in 1986 dollars.

Comment Re:CHENGDU, China (Score -1, Troll) 197

Do you people really get fifty cents per post? Surely it's more than that by now.

Never seen such a panda hugger since someone pointed out that we should have responded to J6 like China did to 6/4at Tiananmen. It lacks the polish of using the A-10s to turn them into pink mist, but calling out the tanks to turn them into pink mash worked well. Just a remincer: when you want to overthrow the government, bring guns. Lots of guns.

Comment Re:Kilocalories of energy each contestant burned? (Score 1) 70

*nerd alert*

The original script had The Matrix running in parallel on all the human brains.

Studio execs said that was too confusing and that they should be batteries.

Also Neo is seen on the Nebuchadnezzar with hundreds of acupuncture-looking needles with wires to get his muscles working while he's in a coma.

Writers should have been left alone (a story old as time).

Comment Corals are Ancient (Score 1, Informative) 43

The Earth has frequently been much warmer than it is today and coral reefs grew much faster then.

Perhaps they have a fine point to make but the implications fly in the face of established evidence.

And not shaky evidence - you can go vacation on huge islands made of these old reefs, from when the oceans were higher.

You can go visit Chazy Fossil Reef today and see coral fossils 480 million years old, from when Northern Vermont was a tropical marine environment.

These data aren't disputed in the field.

Comment Re:Have to wonder about "religious" "leaders" (Score 1) 151

Religion wouldn't have lasted as long as it did if they didn't come up with some explanation for nearly any hole you tried to poke in their beliefs.

And there's a reason the Inquisition burned books. Oddly, Ireland is about the only place where those that would burn the books were themselves burned in the dark ages. It's something Seneca wrote about before the dark ages and before the inquisition, off hand, can't recall the exact wording, but the conclusion is that some have a need to put others in charge of their lives so that they don't have to take responsibility for themselves and their outcomes. Sort of like the conservative meme that being poor is a choice, rather than a failure of governance to control the economic rapine of others.

Comment Have to wonder about "religious" "leaders" (Score 3, Insightful) 151

Even the most casual study of divinity will show that almost all religions consider simply thinking of some things is a "sin". Almost all religions grant mankind free will, and the supreme being (call them what you may) "allows" for the "choice of sin".

So, by prohibiting "sin", they are, in effect, declaring themselves to be smarter than their Deity, who, in The Wisdom of that Deity, granted the ability to "sin".
I'm pretty sure that's not how that works.

Comment Re:It's pretty clear Google hates custom ROMs (Score 1) 2

I was 100% C=64 before I transitioned to Apple ][ before I went IBM-PC DOS, briefly Windows/OS2 Warp, then MacOS, then 100% linux, and added Android later.

(sprinkle in some brief CP/M, BeOS, and NetBSD sidequests)

I'll deal with the shift to the next phone platform OK, I think.

I should probably dust off my Pine64 and try the latest builds again. It's been a few years since they were unusable as a daily driver.

Folks, this might be a huge opportunity if you correctly pick the successor and are the first developers.

Comment Re:At this point (Score -1) 42

But they're not. The New York Post broke the true story on Hunter Biden's laptop and was censored off social media. NYT won a Pulitzer Prize for failing to question the Russian collusion hoax. Journalists covered for Biden, concealing his dementia from the public. Shall I link to the article in which the BBC radio journalist complains about "too many white co-workers"?

You think you hate journalists enough, but you don't. -- Micheal Malice

Comment Re:We know what perl is capable of (Score 2) 84

> Python isn't perfect with its syntactically meaningful whitespace nonsense

I know a programmer with a visiospatial disability.

Braces are fine. Python is literally impossible.

I looked at a few 'Python with braces' preprocessors for her but they all seemed to be half-done and not really usable.

I'm not quite sure why.

It's a dumb reason to shut someone out of an entire software ecosystem. Almost every other language is accessible to her.

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