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Comment Re:I must be stupid (Score 1) 255

since my understanding is that gravity is an inherent effect of mass warping space, wouldn't anti-matter possess mass in the same way that matter does, so why would gravity act differently?

It's expected that gravity would work normally. However, we don't know that until we see antimatter fall.

Moreover, if it didn't fall just like matter, that would be important information for constructing a new theory (which, since we still have GR and QM contradicting each other, we know we need).

Comment Re:Twice as big as it needs to be? (Score 4, Informative) 332

it's an easy choice unless you absolutely need 16-bit support.

The annoying thing being that an x86-64 processor in long mode can, in fact, run 16-bit protected mode code (like essentially all actual Windows 3.x programs) with the same compatibility sub-mode that runs 32-bit code. It's merely that Microsoft decided they didn't want to bother supporting it.

That this can be done is easy enough to prove; take a Win16 app and run it in WINE on 64-bit Linux.

Comment Re:I could be wrong but.... (Score 1) 179

I was explicitly talking about escalation of the war in Afghanistan. So I talked about fatalities caused by hostile action in Afghanistan.

If the US quadrupled the number of troops it had in Japan, there would be an increase in the number of US troops killed in Japan, but that wouldn't tell you anything about a war being escalated (since there is no war in Japan to escalate); it would just be evidence that you get more fatal accidents in a country when you have more people in a country. On the other hand, deaths caused by hostile action tells you about how much more intense a war is.

Similarly, whatever happens in Iraq doesn't say anything about what's happening in Afghanistan, and so doesn't say anything about an Afghanistan escalation. It's like saying, "Truman presided over a great reduction in US casualties in Germany, so it's unfair to say he got into a war in Korea". Say what? Again, the point was to show there was a general escalation in Afghanistan, as opposed to a transitory spike during a few specific months.

So, dealing with the real numbers:

US fatalities due to hostile action in Afghanistan under Bush (for simplicity's sake, all from January 2000 through the end of January 2009): 424

US fatalities due to hostile action in Afghanistan in Obama's first term (for simplicity's sake, February 2009 through the end of December 2012): 1,305

(Go ahead, follow the link, use the US filter, the Hostile action filter, and the Afghanistan only filter.)

Hey, guess what? 424Ã--3 is 1,272, and 1,272 is less than 1,305. US fatalities due to hostile action in Afghanistan were more than three times higher in Obama's first term than in all of Bush's presidency. That probably indicates that Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan.

Comment Re:I could be wrong but.... (Score 2) 179

Obama received the Nobel peace price while expanding military operations in Afghanistan and ordering extrajudicial murders of American citizens abroad.

War is peace, right?

Nope, he received the prize before any of that stuff happened.

Ignorance is strength?

In fact, between the February 1 nomination deadline and the October 5th award, Obama did in fact direct an escalation of the war in Afghanistan that increased US personnel deaths from hostile action in Afghanistan by +64% compared to the same months of the previous year.

And it certainly was due to escalation, not a statistical blip. By the end of Obama's first year in office, such deaths were twice those in Bush's last year. And for Obama's first term, they ended at a total triple that of Bush's entire presidency.

Comment Re:Tall screens, essentially square (Score 1) 591

I guess you missed the class where they showed everyone the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V commands which are probably far more common than anything the Insert key does.

The "insert" combinations are from the 1987 Common User Access standard, which wound up implemented in a number of DOS apps, MVS/ESA, VM/CMS, OS/400, OS/2, Microsoft Windows, Java AWT, Swing, CDE, KDE, and GNOME.

"Ctrl+C" and "Ctrl-V" are from the Microsoft bastardizations of the Macintosh HIG "Command" combinations, and do show up in a wide variety of places as a result of Windows' popularity, but are substantially less widely-implemented than the CUA standards.

Comment Re:WP8 compatibility - forward and backward (Score 1) 505

When the host OS is 64-bit, yes, it is. It is just as backwards compatible as a x64 CPU is to x86.

Jesus fucking Christ, did you read the damn thread? Claiming you can't provide backwards compatibility without a VM because of the processor is provably bullshit, because, as was already pointed out, Wine on 64-bit Linux on an x86-64 cpu can run 16-bit Windows programs without a VM. Yes, 16-bit Windows binaries running on an x86-64 CPU in 64 bit mode, no VM layer.

It's not that Microsoft could not provide real backwards compatibility. Hell, the Wine code is all LGPL, so there's nothing stopping them from taking the Wine code as the core of their own effort to provide the backwards compatibility. It's that Microsoft, deliberately, by choice, did not provide real backwards compatibility.

Comment Re:Headline title is sensational (Score 2) 505

Sorry, no, that's an old IBM patent from 1975. Of course, Microsoft was able to use it under the business relationship they had with IBM. It seems to have been the main reason for the IBM-Microsoft alliance, since Microsoft ended the relationship when the patent expired in 1992, allowing them to use it freely.

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