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Comment tip calculation (Score 1) 1153

1) move the decimal over one space to the left
2) multiply the first digit by 2
3) a)was the service bad? pick the result of 1)
    b)was the service good? pick the result of 2)
    c)was the service really good? stop being fucking lazy and multiply the whole damned thing by 2 and round up

Personally my step 2) is "divide the original by 5" but I'm weird

Comment Re:Is it really only a matter of scheduling? (Score 1) 472

(Unfortunately, the planned mind reading extension to the kernel is still a few years out.)

So I know some people may read this and think "haha, funny joke" but given that most users are extremely predictable regarding what programs they use and when and how they use them (same with web browsing), shouldnt it be possible to gather user activity over time and analyze it to help improve scheduling. Hell, programs are more predictable about how they call for reads and writes, if the IOS preempts the program by loading stuff into cache that is likely to be needed when it doesnt have anything else to do we could totally speed stuff up. In theory beyond some basic data security needs the IO scheduler could vastly improve its cache performance by simply being fed data on what things the user and/or their programs tended to access repeatedly. Maybe this is too high level for some basic tasks, but it seems like there is plenty of use data that could be gathered to help teach an IOS what types of data are more likely to see repeated reads.

On the other hand, we could simply use OUR brains to write better code so that we didnt have to waist our computer's valuable time. Or for that matter other programmers' valuable time that could be spent making computers better (more efficient) tools rather than writing mindbogglingly complex statistical predictive IO schedulers to cover for our inability to follow proper program design.

Comment fucking stupid (Score 1) 377

Anyone who thinks sunshades are a good idea is a complete idiot. Lets think about this for 2 seconds. What do we currently think causes global warming? CO2. Ok, so how do we think the levels of CO2 are regulated? Well on the production side there is any form of combustion or aerobic respiration. And on the other side? Carbon fixation by plants, the rate of which is determined, yes, you got it, but the amount of SUNLIGHT they get.

Sure this might work if they blocked out some of the infrared that planets etc. dont use, but for some reason I doubt they've thought of that. Furthermore, we have no fucking idea what the impact of these things would be, forget the complete waist of brainpower that might be used to put them up there.

Comment "natural" (Score 1) 646

I think the underlying problem here is how we regulate and define "natural" additives to our food products. I'd have to say that if there is not a metabolic pathway that has regulatory mechanisms to control uptake of said molecule, then it is NOT natural. Sure it came from nature, but that doesnt mean that we'd eat it in nature. 50% or more of the health problems in modern society come from the fact that we don't eat what we've been eating for the past 100,000+ years (the rest probably come from sleep disturbance). Natural has been defined as "not made in a petrochemical factory" for waaaaayyyy too long, for it to have any relevance to human beings it needs to be defined in human terms and take into account many facts about what we (and with respect to food how our body breaks down and converts food into energy). Good luck getting a meaningful definition of natural though, it would cost the agroindustrial complex billions.

Comment mining (Score 1) 444

asteroid mining all the way, it is too expensive to launch the raw materials we need from inside our gravity well, in situ resources are key to any real success

hell, I've had crazed thoughts about starting a company to do asteroid mining in about 10 years once commercial space launches come down and vasimir is working better

Comment Did I miss something? (Score 1) 327

Doesnt this failure tell us that "cloud apps" are completely fucking bullshit? Say what you want, the real problem was that the wave client was a webpage in a browser. No browser has ever had good memory management for online content--disk cache? wtf is that. If they wanted Wave to succeed they should have written it in C and provided a proper way to interface with it through vim/emacs. Also, aside from the aforementioned niches, trying to read a wave was about as fun as puking out your eyeballs except that it didnt produce that post puking relief high.

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