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Comment: Re:Metro should be able to run in a window on the (Score 4, Insightful) 800

by wiggles (#43861075) Attached to: First Looks At Windows 8.1, Complete With 'Start' Button

THIS.

Metro should have been put inside of Explorer, as an optional component, not the other way around. Alternatively, detect if there's a mouse or touchscreen present - and if there's a touchscreen, launch Metro, and if there's a mouse, launch Explorer.

Comment: Re:Fuck Yeah! (Score 3, Insightful) 143

by wiggles (#43741535) Attached to: Newegg Defeats Alcatel-Lucent in Third Patent Win This Year

Yep. I was a contractor there during the dot-com bust. Watched their stock drop like a stone overnight. For the company that essentially invented cellular service, the company that managed to build a global telecommunications infrastructure, and invent Unix and C on the side - it was truly sad to see what the corporate raiders did to them.

Space

Space Junk 'Cleaning' Missions Urgently Needed 165

Posted by Soulskill
from the need-some-volunteer-space-garbagemen dept.
Following a conference on space debris, the European Space Agency has warned that the amount of space junk floating around in orbit is a problem that needs to be dealt with 'urgently.' They are calling for a number of test missions to examine different methods of controlling or removing the debris. "Our understanding of the growing space debris problem can be compared with our understanding of the need to address Earth’s changing climate some 20 years ago," said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the agency's Space Debris office. A couple years ago we discussed an idea for de-orbiting space junk by hitting it with a laser to change its momentum. An Australian company has now received funding from NASA and the Australian government to try just that. "We've been developing tracking systems using lasers for some years, so we can actually track very small objects with a laser rangefinder to very high accuracy. ... If you allow that velocity to change over a period of perhaps 24 hours, then you can get actually a 100-meter shift in the location of an object to deflect it from colliding with another space debris object." Other plans are in development as well, and there currently exists an international guideline saying that new hardware must de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere after 25 years of operation — but compliance is lagging. Meanwhile, collision events are becoming more common (PDF), and experts worry about the safety of the International Space Station and important satellites. "Their direct costs and the costs of losing them will by far exceed the cost of remedial activities."

Comment: Re:Not gonna happen (Score 3, Insightful) 291

by wiggles (#42916699) Attached to: President Obama Calls For New 'Space Race' Funding

The National Debt goes up for two main reasons: Social Security and the Trade Deficit.

The Social Security "trust fund" is a bunch of T-bills, and represents the second largest chunk of the National Debt - $2.72 Trillion. Whenever they take in more social security payroll taxes than they pay out in benefits, they put the surplus into T-bills. Those T-bills are then counted as part of the National Debt.

In other words,

1. We owe this chunk of the National Debt to ourselves - to old people and sick people

2. The Social Security Payroll Tax is not really used for Social Security - it just goes right back into the general fund, and even worse, the general fund has to pay interest to Social Security, which means we're even more screwed than you thought.

The other reason the national debt keeps going up is due to the trade deficit.

We buy Chinese goods in Dollars. We pay them in Dollars. They can't use dollars in their domestic economy for anything - worthless paper to them. They'd have to plow the dollars into American goods to make use of them, but they don't do that. They don't buy enough of our stuff, so instead of stuffing that cash in a vault somewhere, they buy a bunch of T-bills so they can collect interest. That accounts for the largest chunk of the national debt, over 5 Trillion.

Important to note that, no matter what happens with spending, the national debt will continue to grow because of these two things. Blaming the national debt on spending alone is not accurate.

More reading and sources for my numbers are here.

Comment: Re:Beautiful code but (Score 4, Funny) 399

by wiggles (#42596493) Attached to: <em>Doom 3</em> Source Code: Beautiful

Did we play the same game?

The atmosphere was interesting for the first 5 hours of gameplay, then it just got in the way of trying to play the game.

I got to the point where, every time I'd walk through a door, I'd look to the side and fire into the demon I *knew* was standing there. It was like the line in Last Action Hero where Arnold walks into his apartment, kid in tow, walks into the bedroom and puts a few rounds into the closet door. A ninja falls out of the closet, dead, and the kid says, "How did you know there was a ninja in there?" Arnold says, "There's always a ninja in there."

The only discomfort I felt was when I was squinting and cranking the gamma up just so I could see what I was doing.

The story sucked, too. What do I expect from a FPS? Deus Ex, Bioshock, System Shock, and all their associated sequels, etc. etc.

The only thing worse than X Windows: (X Windows) - X

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