Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Re: Pie in the Sky ......

perversions with regard to personal firearms and assault weapons

Absolutely correct. I like my AK-74 unadorned with random tacticool shit and also not in pink with "my little pony decals".

The only thing it should do is put speeding splinters of metal into a bullseye at moderate distance.

Economies have regular up and down swings.

No they don't unless they are printing money to implement "recovery".

The results could be bad enough that the US needs foreign investment to sustain life.

Foreign "investment" (i.e. stocking of rankly toxic T-bills) IS the only thing that keeps the US alive.

Countries that once viewed the US and oppressive or competitive would now be using it for profit.

Although (or because) he knew the score, Obama gave 38 billion US taxpayer trinkets to a certain very rich country. Thank you for noticing.

Yet another one of those QUALITY rock-steady financial pooducts?

a product called finacle

If the "not fit for purpose" is due to the usual problems, the headline practically writes itself...

finagle: to obtain by trickery

"Who is developing this code?".

"Star Programmers."

"WHO?"

"STAR. PROGRAMMERS."

Re: They should have asked me ...

The building blocks for a smartphone were laid in the *early* 80s (if not 70s). GSM radio handsets, programmable calculators.

Complete bollocks. The software wasn't even around. Nothing was around.

But that kind of reckoning, the building blocks for a smartphone were laid when Leibniz invented the Stepped reckoner.

Re: @Dave 126What's the application?

These are the questions I've always asked and nobody ever seems to be able to answer them.

You need an Ashkenazi brain to grog this. Thumbs up for "Jewish Science". (JOKE! JOKE! HEEELP!)

Just remember that it's not a digital computer. Approach it the same as an analog computer.

In the meantime, if you can do linalg: Quantum Algorithms via Linear Algebra (unfortunately still not read, as I have to deal with management algebra mostly)

But they would be androids, so it wouldn't be slavery?

Re: Reverse discrimination is now political correctness.

Anon because I am genuinely concerned we now live in a society where having a minority opinion will lead to punishment.

Doubt no longer, anon (although I might disagree with the "minority" adjective). Even some NYT writers see that the Prancing Progressivist Pol Pot Pretenders are on a roll:

Yet I have to admit that something bigger is going on. It could be that progressives understood something I didn’t. It could be that you can win more important victories through an aggressive cultural crusade than you can through legislation. Progressives could be on the verge of delegitimizing their foes, on guns but also much else, rendering them untouchable for anybody who wants to stay in polite society. That would produce social changes far vaster than limiting assault rifles.

It's really like I'm reading a German newspaper in the early 20s.

Two things have fundamentally changed the landscape. First, over the past two years conservatives have self-marginalized. In supporting Donald Trump they have tied themselves to a man whose racial prejudices, sexual behavior and personal morality put him beyond the pale of decent society.

What is "decent society" though? It is the society of the duckspeaking/doublethinking self-proclaimed "liberal" ready to reformat actual society to feel Good About Veself (and possibly leech some govt money on the side; well, I also have the suspicion that it has to do with the ingrained outlook of a certain ethnicity, but I won't go there.)

While becoming the movement of Dinesh D’Souza, Sean Hannity and Franklin Graham, they have essentially expelled the leaders and thinkers who have purchase in mainstream culture. Conservatism is now less a political or philosophic movement and more a separatist subculture that participates in its own ostracism.

As Andrew Sullivan noted recently, “workplace codes today read like campus speech codes of a few years ago.” There are a number of formerly popular ideas that can now end your career: the belief that men and women have inherent psychological differences, the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman, opposition to affirmative action.

However..

The only thing I’d say to my progressive friends is, be careful how you win your victories. It is one thing to win by persuasion and another thing to win by elite cultural intimidation. Illiberalism breeds illiberalism. Using elite power, whether economic or cultural, to silence less educated foes usually produces a backlash.

Conservatives have zero cultural power, but they have immense political power [if only]. Even today, voters trust Republicans on the gun issue more than Democrats. If you exile 40 percent of the country from respectable society they will mount a political backlash that will make Donald Trump look like Adlai Stevenson.

"The next war will be civil".

I hope we can clarify things before we arrive at Zimbabwe Forever or Cambodia Control.

Re: Deal

I'm for that. Guns and Government don't mix well.

While the US wallows in hysteria and hypocrisy (Hystocrisy?) about guns and newly activist kids looking bad on camera, meanwhile in Russia: Some kind of AK-74 school competition

Something cool for the garage, you say?

A Volksjäger of course.

A killengine made for kids.

Then I will get someone to paint Asuka Shoryu Langley on it, just for fun.

Re: Form factors

My trusty Nokia Asha cheapophone has met concrete floors more often than I can remember and is still fully functional. Battery is good enough for a whole week. Plus you have a real keyboard. Camera is just good enough to document traffic accidents though and the filesystem has a bug as undeletable files of 0 size have been accumulating over the years.

I could do without the "Facebook Button" retardation (one button to reach max stupidity?) and the interface, though simple, seems to have been designed by someone who used to be a co-designer of Colossal Cave Adventure in his youth. It would be excellent if one could just redesign it, if need be in Microsoft Basic.

The only problem is that women relentlessly make fun of me for having such a crap retro phone. OTOH, my age makes me more than impervious against such criticisms.

Oh well: MC Solaar - Victime de la mode

Re: Don't Drink The water

That is from "Rendezvous with Rama", right?

"we're so happy you're here" and "we're making things great for you"

Nice words as you are being led into the SatNad dungeon.

OTOH, I'm sure Microsoft just wants to cater to the Japanese Market.

Re: "To eliminate a possible future conflict"

Wouldn't that be "to eliminate possible past conflict"?

While this high-falutin discussions are going on, I'm still trying to get my head around basic use of Picat.

Re: There are already some standards out there

And luckily, too:

Therac-25

It was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation. Because of concurrent programming errors, it sometimes gave its patients radiation doses that were hundreds of times greater than normal, resulting in death or serious injury. These accidents highlighted the dangers of software control of safety-critical systems, and they have become a standard case study in health informatics and software engineering [which is weird, I always encounter 'software engineers' that haven't heard about it]. Additionally the overconfidence of the engineers and lack of proper due diligence to resolve reported software bugs, is highlighted as an extreme case where the engineer's overconfidence in their initial work and failure to believe the end users' claims caused drastic repercussions.

I don't think anyone was ever successfully held to account for this clusterfuck on the level of reconverted web programmers. The company seems to have successfully weaseled out b< denying and stalling.

Sat 24 Feb 15:47:26 UTC 2018