Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Re: Isaac Asimov on the subject of rocket fuel

Only the original von Braun "Hydrazin und, und... Salpertersäure! SALPETERSÄURE, Herr Müller. HABEN SIE VERSTANDEN, Herr Müller?" have these properties.

LOX/H2 or LOX/KEROSENE are pretty ok.

Re: Boo, hiss

I find the photo and caption very offensive

Unfortunately there is no right to not be offended.

which means a citizen of a country who has lost more astronauts than any other

"Federation", not country.

Seeing how Stalin-era "do it or gulag" stuff is in the list ....does this mean that American Gear is particularly failure-prone? Maybe "I want something that looks like a Shuttle while pretending to save money while actually blowing money while using very risky technology" is not the way to go.

Re: .NET .. the lame clone of Java

> I think he said that JAVA had all kinds of legacy horrors

Not really, except java.lang.Calendar and various web/ORM monstrosities.

It's just a language, and pretty straightforward, too. Though of course once you have tried languages like Groovy you see its annoying verbosity and inflexibility, which can only be said to be due to its "first order" nature (everything you write means exactly what it says, and that's all you get, and the compiler ain't gonna give you a break by inferring anything to help you write code faster).

The Walking Datacenter

I thought you guys would be prepped to fight zombies?

"A Post-Paris “Clash of Civilizations”? It’s the Islamic State’s Dream and Marco Rubio Agrees"

Alien because he must be saying "Let's blow the whole site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"

Re: Cool!! I can buy 100 business cards for £5

Not really, just finagle the interview, too.

PHB will be impressed by your KeywordDrop strategy that you will undoubtedly deploy.

Always good to link to Millenium Simulation. Which is pretty old now, however. Or I am old. Or the universe is. Something.

Anyway, is there a richer, more glorious simulation out there?

I you want a guarantee, get a toaster

Some of you might know about the DO-178B/C process. Design Assurance Level 'A' and all that analysis and documentation. Often required for safety-critical software.

Non-applicable in any case of real-world-handling machine.

Even in aircraft/spacecraft, only small elements of the whole software have "A" level design assurance - those where things are basically running on rails (reflex arcs, completely specifiable subsystems). Once it gets interesting, guess what? Downgrade to level "C" or worse and let the error handler make everything go to "safe mode" as needed.

Re: Testing?

A sensible human driver can almost instantly see and discard.accept many option on the best way to get out of the way of emergency vehicles. I'd really like to see what a computer controlled car might do in those many and varied situations.

Pretty sure that the machine can do better and more "360° awareness" planning and evalution than the meatsack. Maybe not yet, but then pretty soon.

Humans tend to overrate their abilities. Some go so far as to credit consciousness with "special sauce" qualities instead of the intermittent stuttering introspective debugging review that it is.

Re: Klingt reichlich erfunden

You're supposed to start reacting when you see two or three cars in your rear-view

I will post a reaction meme over my facebook account accessible via the built-in entertainment facilities...

No you!

If two cars (same mass) doing 100 kmh crash head-on, that's basically the same as each hitting a brick wall at the very same, non-summed, 100 kmh.

Not entirely surprisingly, this is not exactly the case in the reference system of the passenger.

These ain't the 80s anymore

Some people actually believe that practical self driving cars are just around the corner. This implies that Strong AI is here

Pfff.... meatsacks that actually manage to drive and otherwise are just good for pushing buttons that do nothing of consequence in real life clearly belie that kind of statement.

This includes quite a chunk of military personnel btw.

Klingt reichlich erfunden

If you have 5 cars backed up behind you, you are required to get out of the way.

Okay. So how do you count those cars? Unless you have a video feed from the coppercopter on your dashboard?