Posts by User McUser

Re: Far Too Long - thanks to Disney

It's the "limited" part that is now being violated.

Well *technically*, it *is* limited, even if they keep extending it. (See also "Eldred v. Ashcroft")

Even assuming that this extension continues unabated (perhaps some sort of copy-right extending robots can take over once the lawyers all die?), the sun will eventually consume the Earth in roughly 4.5 billion years.

Or in the worst-case scenario if we've arranged for some off-planet backup lawyers to be cached somewhere safe, the heat-death of the universe will arrive in about 10^100 years; ironically this is "one googol" years from now.

Re: Process is far too slow

these things need to be done quicker as it took year from buying the vehicle to getting the recall notice

To be fair, Honda probably did not have several million spare airbags sitting in a warehouse somewhere. Nor did they have millions of service technicians qualified to install all of them at once.

So they did it in stages/groups of however many they thought they could reasonably manage at once while not making it take too long for any one group.

I also used to feel that way.

But then I realized that I too will one day grow older...

Or die trying.

Re: A race to the selfdestruction of big car manufacturs ...

I'll agree that cars in America have a 3% utilization implying that 97% of the time the car is idle.

The problem here is the fallacy that this is some sort of artificial limit - cars are used 3% of the time because that's how much we use cars each day. Once the rush-hour traffic gets to work or home then the vast majority of drivers are basically done driving.

Or in other words, most cars are idle most of the time because we don't need a lot of cars most of the time. The limited number of people who can take advantage of an idle car during non-commuting hours is very low compared to the number of idle cars available. At best your car will drop you off at work in the morning and then return home for your spouse/child/whatever to use before it picks you up again after your shift ends. It's highly unlikely that you'll hire it out to randos; with such a potentially high supply and low demand the price will be too low to be worth the bother.

Re: Thiel's been watching too much Simpsons?

A far more relevant quote would be:

Burns: "You know, it's funny, Smithers. I tried every tincture and poultice and tonic and patent medicine there is, and all I really needed was the blood of a young boy."

(Episode 7F22 - "Blood Feud")

Re: Why not

Iodine 131 has a half-life of ~8 days so there's basically none of it left in the exclusion zone.

Re: SOP

Realistically isn't this what we all do?

You pretend that you're an Irish citizen in order to reduce your taxable income in other countries?

Corporations have a much easier time dodging taxes because they can use shell companies and other accounting shenanigans to shift numbers between different columns on the spreadsheet until they sum to zero or whatever numbers suit them at the time.

Why not go further?

How much further can we take this argument? AD INFINITUM ABSURDE!

-Post office? Yikes, someone might send a letter about drugs! Shut it down!

-Internet? Obviously that one's right out.

-Talking? *!gasp!* People might say all sorts of things to each other by transmitting vibrations through a gaseous medium! Guess we'll just have to puncture your eardrums and cut out your tongue and vocal chords, you know 'cause of the possible crime.

-Sign language? Oh my, better start chopping off hands... Actually, let's pop those eyeballs out too - you might see something else we don't like or use a complicated blinking code to exchange secret drug messages!

Re: Friday afternoon, is it?

I just got back from the pub, is it just me, or does that sentence not actually make sense?

It's one of those "I shot an elephant in my pajamas" parsing issues that make English such a great language.

The vulnerability is of the "heap overflow in the kernel" type, rather than there being a "heap overflow" in the "kernel vulnerability."

Re: One credit?

Computer work ain't for everybody. One wonders what would happen if they decided to make all the kids get one credit in metal-working, wood-working, auto repair, logging, fishing, gardening, cooking, swimming, animal care, bread making, institutional laundry, framing, HVAC, and paving

I don't know about you, but that's basically how my Jr High/High School experience worked.

We had to take two semesters of Home Economics (cooking, sewing, nutrition, and other basic domestic skills), 4 semesters of Industrial Tech (woodworking, basic construction and engineerring principles, internal combustion engines, and metal work skills including 3 types of welding), Physical Education every semester (baseball, football, American football, tennis, golf, bowling, swimming, track-and-field, and more) and that was just Jr. High (6th-8th grade.)

In High School we had a choice of additional curriculum including Farming related classes, various trade-related courses in Electronics, Carpentry, Plumbing, automotive tech, Computer programming, Radio/TV, and more.

So a few kids who aren't going to ever write a single line of code outside of that class are forced into taking it. So what? I took all sorts of math classes that I rarely use, chemistry, physics, biology, and history are likewise rarely used in my everyday life, if ever. Shall we eliminate those as well?

I strongly believe in exposing children to as many different and diverse courses as can be squeezed into their education. Principles in different disciplines can be applied to other areas - you may never write a single line of code but the Boolean logic you learned from your CS class can be applied to installing two wall switches to control a single lamp (an XOR circuit) in your future job as an electrician.

Finally, did it not occur to you that there might be kids out there who don't know that they want to be a programmer until they sit down and start programming and find that they're really good at it?

Re: Not that hard actually. @McUser

OS/2 2.0 shipped in April of 1992 and Win3.1 in March of the same year. So technically you're correct.

But given that Win3.1 was a glorified window manager running on top of DOS and OS/2 was a fully object-oriented GUI there's not really even a comparison between the two.