That's a liberal canard.

What is? Not mocking Fox news or mocking it?

I do love how people on slashdot^wthe internet love making up random shit about what "liberal" is.

Hint: being a liberal is entirely orthogonal to the indesputable fact that FOX news is terrible. It would be news if Fox actually reported a fact correctly. Most news programs are bad, but fox makes them look good by comparison.

Hell even if it was regulated to some specific frequency like microwaves you'd have to strap your microwave oven down or it move around every time you turned it on. Fighter jets have large microwave based radars in their nose cones, if that generated thrust you'd have a forward facing thrust which at the power levels he's claiming would probably be more powerfull than the jet engine powering the aircraft.

Microwaves can and certainly do produce thrust, because photons have momentum. If you dump enough out the back, you'll get a measurable force forwards. Of course then it isn't a closed system since you have photons flying out the back and off into the big blue yonder.

In fact, the radar will generate thrust, both from the emitted microwaves and also emitted infra red (heat). Just not very much, because compared to ion thrusters you need truly henious amounts of energy, meaning the weight for the power source is far far above any sane amount of fuel you might want to carry.

Kind of like if Robertson screws were better than Phillips screws, they would have been utilized by Henry Ford? That stuff often doesn't work out the way sane people think it ought to.

What? How does that even work? Phillips screws are specifically designed to cam out to protect the drivers since good torque limiting systems didn't exist then, and Robertson screws are deigned specifically not to cam out. Surely the two kinds of screw head are at the complete opposite end of the spectrum.

What?

An organisation has freedom of expression?

That's not good. It's members maybe, but an abstract legal entity?

Goddam idiot AC,

Dude, did you actually read the original post?

It was never meant to do real computational work. For that you need assembly, or straight up binary.

If that's not an obvious (and actually quite amusing) troll, then I don't know what is.

Nobody has ever once said to me "I want to send to journal X because they are open access".

No shit! It turns out that scientists first and foremost need to eat, i.e. need to stay in employment, i.e. submit to journals that potential employers and funding bodies car about. In the brutal publish or perish environment everything else has to be secondary for everyone who is not already so famous that they get money no matter where they publish.

In my old field most people put all papers up on their website anyway whether or not the journal was open access.

And -ND makes citations impossible

That's a total misunderstanding. As is this:

-NC cannot be quoted in research done commercially.

The license can only grant extra rights not afforded by copyright, it cannot take away rights. Fair use built into copyright allows for quoting. No license can take away that right.

Interesting comment.

It's certainly a guy thing. Is it sexist?

Well, I know a guy, a computer scientist. Since he's gay, in an entertaining turnaround from the usual, he comments on other male computer scientists hotness, but completely ignores such things for female ones.

Ubuntu on PCs isn't the holy grail of desktop computing, and between Droid and iPhone, I'm not sure what new-shiney Ubuntu brings to the smartphone table. Does that make me a bad person?

I and many others like to complain about Ubuntu. There's plenty to complain about. Unity. Walyand. Pulseaudio back in the day. Eyewateringly complex and slow system scripts. Bizarre packaging fetishes. Weird patches on programs. Etc.

But basically we love to complain. And the complaints about ubuntu, while legitimate are minor. It is still a decent version of GNU/Linux and despite my whinging it is not even near bad enough for me to consider switching out the OS on working machines. It's still GNU/Linux, it still runs X and is still open.

So while Ubuntu is not the holy grail of desktop computing it's still pretty standard desktop Linux and as a result head and shoulders above everything else except other desktop Linuxices.

What it brings to the phone or tablet is to turn that portable computer with a cell radio into a proper portable computer with a cell radio. Like the Nokia N900. It's basically a fully functional computer in your pocket that can do EVERYTHING your desktop PC can do. I mean sure, you might want things a little optimized for he different input tech, but you still don't have to compromise.

Want the GIMP? It's there. Etc... I used to own a Zaurus 3100, running OpenBSD and I did actually do a bit of image manipulation on it in the GIMP. In fact I actually did a lot of real work on that machine. I can't do the same on my much more capable andriod phone because it tries so hard not to be a proper computer.

This aerostat says its altitude is 10,000 feet, but no caliber rifle right now will be able to shoot vertically more than 1,500 ft.

Really? That seems awfully short.

Fullbore target shooting is done over horizontal ranges of up to 1000 yards (3000 feet), implying that the bullet has a nontrivial velocity after 300 feet of travel through air. Without air resistance, rifle bullets would travel to probably around 50,000 feet, implying a nontrivial velocity after 3000 feet vertivally.

IOW, the bullet would go well over 1,500 feet vertically.

Some googling around indicated calculations show maybe 3000m (10k feet) for a .30-06 fired vertically.

Not saying you'd be able to hit a target at that height, but 10k ft vertically is just about within range of fairly ordinary rifles.

The accuracy would suck.

And yes, civilians can own a Bofors

That would be pretty cool.

It's happened in the past that certain drivers have claimed better performance while at the same time completely ignoring certain things they were supposed to be doing in order to get the framerate up. Do the frames end up looking exactly the same with both drivers? What exactly is making it faster. Did they improve a specific part which only helps for Q3A demo files and doesn't actually make any difference when playing a real game.

All interesting questions. If only there was a long block of text which covered those points. I've never heard such of a thing though. But, I'm going to coin a new term, "TFA" to refer to the hypothetical object.

Anyone with me on this?

Out of interest, do you think any of the advances will be in the area of time cubes once the nuking is over?

or do we have free will.

Define free will.

Well, as far as language features go, it was comparable to BBC Basic.

In many ways i was nicer, seeing as it was freed from line numbers, and the need to prefix functions with FN and procedures with PROC. Oh yeah, and it allowed blocked if-then-else. But it was missing thing that BBC basic did have like pointers and dynamic memory allocation.

The IDE was great.

It was also excellent. Fast, intuitive interface, outstanding builtin help.