NASA is a silly fable all by itself

NASA has been essentially a fictional organisation since about 1973, so sponsoring sci-fi is really some sort of grim epistemic closure.

I was a few weeks away from birth when the first man set foot on the moon. I was three when the last one did. It angers me that now I have grey hairs and wrinkles and no other bugger's been back. It's not like it even costs that much, compared to the fire-hose of cash spent on welfare.

Irritating Morales

Wouldn't it be easier to put Morales in an actual box? I always think that if these sinister capitalists are half as evil as the Lefties paint them then there should be a lot more Hugo Chavez's suddenly exploding than there actually are. It's almost like they act within the law or something. But that's clearly absurd.

Paranoia is the answer

I taped a little square of cardboard cut from a cereal box over the the lens of the camera on my MacBook. If the combined legions of Bill Jobs and the surveillance state can defeat that to see me surfing with no pants on, then good luck to 'em.

This seems a bit James Bond-y

Wouldn't a 340 kT B61 Mod 7 nuke in laydown mode be a safer bet? What am I missing?

Oh God, not the old 'back in the good old days' crap

Arr, when Oi were a lad, you'm didn't need none of yer fancy graphical user interfaces to calculate the powers of two. Aye, yer could do it in nine instructions. Now it's millions! Bloomin' madness, Oi tells yer.

Well that's us whippersnappers told then. Sure the machine might have weighed as much as a bus and cost half a million bucks, but you you could...drum roll...do the sort of wanky thing you learn how to do in first year Microprocessors Lab with a Z80 and a breadboard. Of course code was more efficient. The hardware was shite. To say you need hundreds of thousands of instructions to calculate the powers of two is ignoring the fact that those hundreds of thousands of instructions can also be used to display the results from computations that aren't so ball-achingly pointless.

You're not meant to know how Google ranks sites

Widespread knowledge of exactly how Google ranks things would be a gift to those charlatans who list 'SEO' on their CVs. What we do know is it has roots in spectral graph theory but with a substantial number of knobs on. If you can find me a schoolkid in Britain who knows what a graph eigenspectrum is then you win a lollipop.

Bah, humbug

You can do 90% of that bollocks in emacs if you know what you're doing.

Abstract vs. concrete

Amen DZ-Jay. The Relational Model is just that: a model. But it's still important. If you don't grok why 3NF is, under a not-unreasonable set of circumstances, a good structure for your DB to have then you probably shouldn't be let loose on the world of actual data. Yes, you can deviate from the model, and in the corporeal world, far from Messrs. Boyce and Codd, you probably will. But without an understanding of why the relational model was developed, diversions from it are an appeal to magic. At the very least, no new paradigm that does not incorporate the 'C' in ACID is broken.

No good deed goes unpunished

Way back in the Middle Triassic Era (1985 or so) we discovered that the sysadmin password on the school's Econet fileserver could be obtained by hitting BREAK and peeking at a few bytes in low memory. We told the IT staff this: their response was to get very shirty and move the machine to a cupboard to which they supposedly had the only key (you could have picked the lock with your thumbnail). Needless to say this slowed us down for about five minutes until one enterprising lad wrote a nifty bit of 6502 assembler that switched the Econet card in a machine into promiscuous mode and sniffed the (unencrypted) username/password packets right off the wire. This we did not report.

IPR

The intent of intellectual property rights law is to render a non-rivalrous good (such as an image of an audio CD, or a copy of a digital photograph) excludable. Non-rivalrous goods are those for which possession by one person does not prevent possession by another (rivalrous goods tend to be tangible, e.g. a car or a hamburger). Non-excludable goods are those by which there is no mechanism to prevent those who have not paid for them enjoying them. Non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods (AKA public goods) tend to be things like a beautiful sunset or a free concert in a park (the park itself is non-rivalrous and non-excludable, up to a point). The purpose of IPR is to assign a more-or-less temporary monopoly on a non-rivalrous good in an attempt to make it worthwhile for content providers to continue making new content.

If the artefact in the RPG was non-rivalrous, then (other than the assault and battery) the perpetrators would have been guilty of copyright infringement, which is usually treated as a tort (although in some jurisdictions it is liable to criminal sanction). But since the original owner relinquished his ownership of the artefact and could not subsequently enjoy it, it was rivalrous, and thus the perpetrators' actions constituted theft with violence, i.e. robbery.

It's all Greek to me

Hippopotamus means 'horse of the river', so the plural should probably be something like hippoipotamos, 'horses of the river'.

And the plural of octopus is octopodes; rhinoceros, rhinocerotes.

I am reaching for my anorak.

FMA? In 2012?

It's pretty pathetic that they've waited this long to add FMA to the architecture. The PowerPC 604e in my old PowerMac 8500 had that back in the mid 90's. I wrote some bitching matrix multiplication code in assembler that used it.

Why do you need some fancy IDE for PHP development...

...when you have emacs?

My policy was zero tolerance

As a doctoral student, I used to supplement my meagre income by working as a lab assistant. There was good dosh to be made marking lab books. I took enormous pleasure in marking the idle little toads down for every spelling and grammatical error they made. There were howls of protest, naturally, but I prevailed. The fact that this was in an electronic engineering department rather than law school was neither here nor there: correct orthography and grammar are an aid to clarity and a courtesy to one's readers.

xjy: you're talking bollocks. Insisting on correct spelling and grammar is not a fetish. Allowing 'variant' spelling, punctuation etc. breaks the standard. When Microsoft do that everyone screams like a banshee. It's not that one set of spellings is inherently more logical or superior to another. It's that it's (semi-)fixed, and everyone can read the RFC (AKA OED).

Hoist the black flag and start slitting the throats of the illiterates!

Nukes are problematical

Nuclear power has to be of the breeder type otherwise there's not enough fuel to last. Uranium is a genuinely limited resource in the way that coal, say, is not (we've enough coal for centuries of consumption).

As for Chernobyl, it was pretty bad for the first responders who had to dump bags of sand on the exposed core, but subsequent deaths over a wider area are almost statistically undetectable. And that accident is the only one of its type ever to have occurred.

The Green fascists are among the most repellent people on the planet. If tomorrow a non-polluting, abundant energy source was discovered, they'd be horrified. At heart they just don't like people very much.

Burn it! Burn it all!

If the technology providers are compensated (which they probably should be as they have been acting in good faith, no matter the perniciousness of the ID card scheme in general), then part of the deal must be the surrender of all documentation, electronic and paper, that the providers have gathered and created. This means every memo, every private note, every back of the envelope sketch, every design document, every CD, every backup tape, every hard drive in every computer that has been used to work on the project. Once all this has been obtained, it must be securely destroyed (papers shredded and burnt, hard drives disassembled and the platters smelted down to slag etc.). This way the hurdle to reimposing the scheme when Labour eventually get back in will be as large as it is this time, thereby postponing its implementation until they steer the country into the ditch again and get voted out.

Fire hazard icon for the lovely bonfire we need to make of this Stasi-like proposal.

Call me when they build this round a FEL

Meh. It's a chemical laser. Those things can only go a few shots before the reactants are used up, and they create a load of really, really toxic waste products. I can certainly see the attraction of frying a truckload of Jihadis completely silently from 20 clicks away - if for nothing more than psychological reasons.

What we really need is a free electron laser capable of MW power output and low cycle time. That really would be a deathray worthy of the name.

Fire hazard icon for the pyrotechnic hijinks possible with your laser-armed gunship.