Re: When any C/C++ code includes "goto" you know it sucks...
> Structured programming if used sensibly and non-dogmatically
Jesus Christ, the 70s called. They want their debates back.
16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
Man: (paraphrased) Something about C/C++
Arthur: (uninterested) Yes...
Man: Something about programmers using C/C++
Arthur: (perturbed) Yes I see!
Man: Finally something about the mothers of C/C++ programmers
Arthur: (mad) Be quiet!
I may remind the dear correspondent that back in the times when X11 was written, C++ was unstandardized, Ada compilers were expensive, D or golang were not to be found. Yes, you could have written it in Pascal.
> I think there might be a bit of social breakdown.
I don't think so. We have been living with nukes on hairtrigger alert since the 50's. Even in 2014 "liburl" presidents are throwing 100 billion dollars that they don't have into a "refresher project". No-one gives a f*ck.
So even if you gathered up all the relatively heavy elements that the nova produced, there wouldn't be enough hydrogen left to trigger star formation again.
Actually, the outer layers of the old ball should yield a a solar mass of perfectly good hydrogen.
"I'm pretty sure that"
Your surety will have to take the proper dent once you realize that depending on your local movement (e.g. shuttling towards and from the khazi), the actual date of the supernovation does suffer serious adjustments due to the effects of Special Relativity and large leverage (i.e. distance to the boomcentre), although I cannot be bothered to compute the actual amounts of delta-t involved.
> Terminator 2 wasn't a documentary.
Well, that "time machine" business was a bit far out but those hunter-killer drones were spot on.
Echelon Security in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, December 31, 2013, confirmed for Monterey County Herald reporter Phillip Molnar that Echelon security guards were hired on Saturday, December 28, 2013, to protect the barley pattern in the field after it first appeared that morning. Chualar residents told field researchers Jeff Krause and David Mendez that dogs barked all night before the pattern appeared and later that people with ropes were measuring in the pattern on Sunday, December 29, 2013.
Yes this is a mysterious pattern and anyone who hasn't had his head buried in esoterics during the last ten years will immediately recognize an IC.
If E. T. non-terrestrial, we might be meant to see this formation as a powerful demonstration of the entity’s ability to investigate our human technology and also to harvest it regardless of our wishes. ... The use of Braille is another aspect of this, but I have no explanation for the repeated use of numerals 192. They may mean something to the module designer as a registration number or perhaps to NASA as an identification to a surveillance satellite camera. We will probably never know the full story here - but it bothers someone!
HUH! Yeah. They are warning us about TESLA 666, using dark tech from serbiaǹ engineers with a bent for showmanism.
How does one perform such nice patterning of wheat fields though?
Oh here we go again.
In truth, liberals and conservatives are the same control freaks.
You may note that you have currently the most liberal multicolored hopistic poster child of the liberal wankshow and he is a serial catastrophe on everything from warmongering to mandatory healthcare fail while bailing out cronies left and right, printing money, keeping the gitmo open and shitting on the constitution.
Yeah, it's all due to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Sure.
Just think how much good we could do in the world with such amounts of money. We could give everyone a decent education and eradicate terrorism.
This is exactly what they are doing.
They are just failing hard on both points.
You think you gonna do any better?
PHYS771 Lecture 19: Time Travel
Let's talk about the more interesting kind of time travel: the backwards kind. Can closed timelike curves (CTCs) exist in Nature? This question has a very long history of being studied by physicists on weekends. It was discovered early on, by Gödel and others, that classical general relativity admits CTC solutions. All of the known solutions, however, have some element that can be objected to as being "unphysical." For example, some solutions involve wormholes, but that requires "exotic matter" having negative mass to keep the wormhole open. They all, so far, involve either non-standard cosmologies or else types of matter or energy that have yet to be experimentally observed. But that's just classical general relativity. Once you put quantum mechanics in the picture, it becomes an even harder question. General relativity is not just a theory of some fields in spacetime, but of spacetime itself, and so once you quantize it, you'd expect there to be fluctuations in the causal structure of spacetime. The question is, why shouldn't that produce CTCs?
Incidentally, there's an interesting metaquestion here: why have physicists found it so hard to create a quantum theory of gravity? The technical answer usually given is that, unlike (say) Maxwell's equations, general relativity is not renormalizable. But I think there's also a simpler answer, one that's much more understandable to a doofus layperson like me. The real heart of the matter is that general relativity is a theory of spacetime itself, and so a quantum theory of gravity is going to have to be talking about superpositions over spacetime and fluctuations of spacetime. One of the things you'd expect such a theory to answer is whether closed timelike curves can exist. So quantum gravity seems "CTC-hard", in the sense that it's at least as hard as determining if CTCs are possible! And even I can see that this can't possibly be a trivial question to settle. Even if CTCs are impossible, presumably they're not going to be proven impossible without some far-reaching new insight. Of course, this is just one instantiation of a general problem: that no one really has a clear idea of what it means to treat spacetime itself quantum-mechanically.
In the field I come from, it's never our place to ask if some physical object exists or not, it's to assume it exists and see what computations we can do with it. Thus, from now on, we'll assume CTCs exist. What would the consequences be for computational complexity? Perhaps surprisingly, I'll be able to give a clear and specific answer to that.
Not bad, but didn't Simon Sharwood talk about that in this ElReg-ism?
My router here, (the name of which sounds either like a Nasty German from a bad WWII movie or an electric interference) has two ports open to the Internet that are not particularly well documented (i.e. not at all), apparently for "maintenance purposes" by the ISP. Am I happy about this? Hell no. Did I close them? I tried. Turns out it is impossible for one of them. Pretty sure the overpaid "maintenance engineer" from the ISP will give me an earful and threaten "fines" when he next shows up. Can I replace the crud with something acceptable? No, the Incumbent Operator (tm) has a special sauce protocol and configurationn that can only be applied by him to exactly that hardware. What do?
Does anyone take consumer security seriously?
No. Here is a two-year contract instead. F*ck you.
In furtherance of which:
The Supreme Court Logic That Could Destroy Privacy in America: It's dangerous for courts to continue adhering to Smith v. Maryland, a decision that was made before the advent of big data.
Yeah Matt, thank you for statist tax-and-spend, war-is-a-force-that-gives-us-tech message.
Sorry, I nearly fell asleep whilst the sheeple desperately tried to inject some paranoia into yet another very obvious story.
Not enough to post random drivel, apparently. Don't you have the latest HP failure to defend?
Ken Thompson proved that you can insert exploits into software without having it appear in the source code. It would be especially easy for open source software.
No. It is time to put that stuff to rest.
It's more likely to have a Bug Of Consequence hidden in plain sight. Plausibly denibale if some takes the time to comb through the code.
"NSA did not violate any US laws."
Next: "SS doctors did not violate any german laws"
Yeah, one can twist and turn, spin and obfuscate, lie and dissemble and plaster the Big Lie on every board so that anything can be justified "to the letter of the law". But so what? It's just another way of raw power abuse if done by those in charge and of whistling past the graveyard by the others.
tl;dr: Retarded