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Comment Re:Still.... (Score 1) 1051

by CapOblivious2010 (#42421887) Attached to: Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug
Wait, are you saying Microsoft would admit that they had made a mistake? I don't think so! They'd be all over what a new paradigm for application development it was, and how this represented a clean break with the crufty old past, and how users were going to love the new synergistic platform for cloud deployment of interoperable applications design to leverage the newest hardware and blah blah blah....

...and then it would be silently dropped in Windows n+1.

Comment Re:If I am doing the math right (Score 1) 165

by CapOblivious2010 (#42411701) Attached to: NASA's Ion Thruster Sets Continuous Operation Record
You'd get solar energy by going close to the sun, but no "slingshot" - the slingshot trick relies on the fact that the planets are moving in their orbits. In fact the technique slightly reduces the planet's orbital velocity - the energy has to come from somewhere! But because the sun is stationary (with respect to the solar system, of course) there's no advantage to be gained.

Comment Re:War; War never changes (Score 5, Funny) 206

by CapOblivious2010 (#42136733) Attached to: Carl Sagan Was On US Team To Nuke the Moon

WTF man? Of course he was talking about going some where else with sufficient resources and habitable conditions. You might as well have assumed he meant we should set up a colony on the surface of the sun for all the idiocy you've attributed to him.

As long as you stayed inside during the day, and only went out at night, a solar colony might be workable.

Comment Re:Oh I just love (Score 1) 475

by CapOblivious2010 (#41944297) Attached to: On Daylight Savings Time:
The biggest problem with having a single global time zone is that for a good number of people the DATE would change in the middle of the day. If you tell somebody you'll meet them for lunch on Wednesday, it's potentially ambiguous. Yes, the same is technically true for any time the date changes, but I plan to meet people for lunch far more often than I plan to meet them for midnight snacks.

Comment Re:Oh I just love (Score 1) 475

by CapOblivious2010 (#41944257) Attached to: On Daylight Savings Time:
Every industry I've ever worked in has had MAJOR problems with DST. I don't give a crap about DST as far as my schedule, I just hate all the trouble it causes programs - and by extension programmers. The more our society is computerized, the bigger the problem gets (and no, using GMT does NOT solve the problems) - and I think we, as a society, passed the point of negative returns a good while back.

Comment Re:Fracking is dangerous... (Score 1) 114

by CapOblivious2010 (#41860527) Attached to: Volcano Power Plan Gets US Go-Ahead

For the love of god what do you bloody fucking hippies want? Want us to shut it all down so we can go back to the god damn stone age? How about we all sit around the camp fire, smoke weed, and eat what ever nuts we can find?

Do you have any idea how dangerous and polluting wood fires are? People get burned all the time, and the smoke from them causes asthma in small children. The soot blackens everything in sight, and the carbon released contributes to global warming. Clearly campfires are WAY too dangerous to be used as a power source!

Comment Re:You have the right to pay for your own stuff. (Score 1) 332

by CapOblivious2010 (#41614849) Attached to: Is Mobile Broadband a Luxury Or a Human Right?

Precisely. An "entitlement" is a service someone is required to provide to you. A right is generally defined in the negative: No one is permitted to do X to you. No one is permitted to prevent you from doing Y.

Right to life - not allowed to kill you.
Freedom from torture - not allowed to torture you.
Freedom from slavery - not allowed to require work from you.
Right to a fair trial - not allowed to penalize absent a fair trial.
Freedom of speech - may not prevent you from speaking your mind.

One of these things is not like the others!

The right to a fair trial IS a "positive" right, in that it implies that other people (judges, jurors, witnesses, etc) can be compelled to stop what they'd otherwise be doing and conduct a trial instead.

Comment Re:Infinite velocity (Score 4, Informative) 381

Some parts make sense: At infinite velocity, a particle would necessarily pass through every point in the universe.

Actually that happens at the speed of light: to a photon moving at the speed of light, time has stopped completely and the universe is forsehortened from a 3D volume to a 2D plane - so effectively the photon is at every point along it's path "at once", at least from it's point of view.

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