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Comment Re:SpaceX (Score 1) 94

SpaceX is flying regular crewed flights to the ISS and even higher

It's easy to forget just how much higher the moon is compared to the ISS.

There's a graphic on Wikipedia that shows the radius of the earth (blue ball), the ISS orbit (purple circle), and how far out the moon is.

Saying that you can reach the purple line doesn't really mean much in terms of reaching the moon. It's literally 0.1% of the way there. (About 400km to the ISS, vs. 400,000km to the moon, give or take.)

Comment Re:Local NPM Registry (Score 3, Insightful) 48

For a long time, Debian has been striving for Reproducible Builds, where building a source package produces the same output every time. Even with a local NPM registry, it would be nearly impossible to keep track of what was in the registry at the time of doing the build unless that content is actually in the source package itself.

Comment Re:old tricks don't work on it (Score 2) 433

I voted by mail in New Jersey. There was a ballot that said who I wanted to vote for with no personal identification that went into an envelope with my name, address, and signature. Someone had to compare my illegible scrawl of a signature against an illegible scrawl on file and use that to determine if the ballot was actually mailed by me. With PKI in place, we can replace the hand signature on the envelope with a digital signature, which is much more easily verified consistently. Hand signature verification is a joke. There's no way to catch forgeries without throwing out lots of legitimate ballots. PKI can fix that, at least.

Comment Re:A step forward, but... (Score 1) 399

Even when practical, we're still talking very big, very expensive plants

That's actually not true. When you look at the Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor, it's being designed to be small enough to fit on an airplane. It's a lot bigger than a "Mr. Fusion", but compared to a typical fission reactor, it's tiny.

Comment Re:No thanks (Score 2) 326

Just for the edification of the other readers here, which parts specifically do you feel you don't have to follow?

For the record, I know exactly which ones I would choose, but I'm interested to know what exactly you think makes Stallmann a 'crazy outlier'. Because, in my estimation, it would take a lot for someone to qualify for that kind of labeling.

On a number of occasions RMS has been asked how professional software developers can make enough money to earn a normal middle class income using only Free software licensing, and his response has been that earning money should not be a priority, to the extent that if a developer cannot earn enough money to support a family, that's ok. Software developers shouldn't have children. (example link)

If he had said that most software developers shouldn't expect to have as much money as Gates/Ballmer/Zuckerberg/Jobs/Ellison type people, I'd have been ok with that, but to take it to the extreme that you should deny developers the ability to have children, one of the most basic and fundamental life experiences, that was what tipped the balance into 'crazy outlier' in my opinion.

Comment Re:Autonomous cars can't use V2V (Score 1) 475

V2V isn't just for collision avoidance. You need this kind of communication to safely narrow the following distance to form "road trains" at highway speed. This both allows more cars to fit on the same road and reduces fuel consumption due to reduced air resistance in the following cars.

For example, see the SARTRE project.

Comment Re:Resolution wars (Score 1) 70

The idea is not to scale the whole image down to 300x400, but to crop it down. There isn't space on a phone to include a mechanical zoom lens, so you either need to use "digital zoom", or just take a wide shot and crop it down to the part you want later. A higher than necessary resolution sensor for full image shots is what allows a cropped image to still look sharp.

Comment Re:Oh, not again. (Score 1) 401

As a practical matter, there's a widely used program that tries to solve the halting problem by formal means - the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier. Every signed driver for Windows 7 and later has been through that verifier, which attempts to formally prove that the driver will not infinitely loop, break the system memory model with a bad pointer, or incorrectly call a driver-level API. In other words, it is trying to prove that the driver won't screw up the rest of the OS kernel. This is a real proof of correctness system in widespread use.

The verifier reports Pass, Fail, or Inconclusive. Inconclusive is reported if the verifier runs out of time or memory space. That's usually an indication that the driver's logic is a mess. If you're getting close to undecidability in a device driver, it's not a good thing.

Doesn't the fact that it includes an "Inconclusive" category pretty much mean that it absolutely does not try to solve the halting problem?

The halting problem doesn't state that you can never determine if any specific algorithm halts or not, just that there exists some algorithms which will be inconclusive for any finite bound on the time used to determine if it halts or not.

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