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47091829
comment
byChris Burke
2013 @12:11PM
(#43897661)
Attached to: <em>Green Lantern</em> Writer To Pen Blade Runner Sequel
One has the voice-over narrative, which gives the movie a feeling reminiscent of the old "gum-shoe" detective movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood
It already had that feel in spades. Adding the voiceover just beats you over the head with it. Which I guess is appropriate, because the voiceover itself just beats you over the head with everything else.
46986953
comment
byChris Burke
2013 @06:53PM
(#43867557)
Attached to: UN Debates Rules Surrounding Killer Robots
I think it's the part where they suggested that you jerk off a robot. Or... maybe they're just into that.
45847885
comment
byChris Burke
5, 2013 @05:08PM
(#43550537)
Attached to: Scientists May Have Detected Neutrinos From Another Galaxy
What kind of pedantic choice of interpretation is that?
Internet-pedantry, where either 1) pedantry is misapplied because the word in question does not have a single, precise definition to be pedantic over, and both the the original and the "pedant's" "pedantic" correction are correct or 2) pedantry is possible because the word does have a precise technical definition, but the "pedant" has no idea what that is and is wrong while the original usage was correct.
45782799
comment
byChris Burke
2013 @07:48PM
(#43531825)
Attached to: Will Future Tesla Cars Use Metal-Air Batteries?
15,000 watts per kilo of aluminum made in electricity
For how long are 15,000 watts expended? Power usage isn't meaningful in this context. Need a duration to get energy.
43968101
comment
byChris Burke
9, 2013 @05:24PM
(#43127887)
Attached to: Global Temperatures Are Close To 11,000-Year Peak
The opportunity for "wrong" is that you can be biased to choose one expert or priest over another. You're likely to make this choice based on, to some extent, what the guy next to you thinks.
I choose the concesus. I never choose "one" expert unless I'm sure that expert is representing the concensus opinion of many scientists. If there's large segments with varying opinions, usually indicating a lack of data to explain which is more correct, then I remain agnostic. If there's one expert who disagrees with everyone else, I am leery of that expert's opinion, even if it's exactly what I want to hear.
If that expert turns out to be right, then that will eventually be reflected by the rest of the scientific community as the evidence becomes more and more convincing. As has happened over and over again.
Could this still mean I pick the wrong group of experts? Yeah.
Is that anything like a priesthood? No. That comparison is just stupid.
43923875
comment
byChris Burke
2013 @01:53PM
(#43118681)
Attached to: Global Temperatures Are Close To 11,000-Year Peak
There are probably literally a handfull of people who actually have opinions formed on science. They're sitting in universities looking at models run on supercomputers. Everybody else is using these people as priests, even if they didn't ask to be priests.
And for those of us who want to form our opinions based on science, but aren't climatologists, looking to the people who are and actually do study and understand climate science and asking them is wrong... how exactly?
For any other non-controversial field of science, this wouldn't be controversial either. Nobody says we're treating particle physicists like "priests" when we go with their best working picture of the microscopic universe with the understanding that this picture may change. How is that like a priest?
And for the record, while I do take what the climatologists say as a provisional truth, I would be delighted if they came out one day and said they were wrong all this time and it turns out there's nothing to worry about. So far, so bad.
43882901
comment
byChris Burke
7, 2013 @03:20PM
(#43108485)
Attached to: Dotcom Wins Right To Sue NZ Government
I can't answer that, but I know YouTube never intended itself to be, didn't want to be, and took pro-active steps to deal with that situation.
Well, minus the one Youtube founder who was deliberately posting copyrighted material without permission to drive traffic early on.
Though the others did take pro-active steps by making him stop so on the whole, your statement is true.
43882067
comment
byChris Burke
7, 2013 @02:44PM
(#43108025)
Attached to: North Korea Threatens US With Preemptive Nuclear Strike
Of course you stopped reading. Just like you stopped looking at reality as soon as it stopped conforming to your pre-conceived ideology. And of course you call trumping reality with ideology "intelligence". Even though this viewpoint has been tried and found woefully lacking. But that was only in reality!
I wish I was perceptive enough to see that reality is wrong when it contradicts what's in your head.
43881277
comment
byChris Burke
7, 2013 @02:07PM
(#43107523)
Attached to: North Korea Threatens US With Preemptive Nuclear Strike
the truth is, you can't talk about what is stupid/ rational when you are talking about a regime that starves it's people while it builds nukes. rationality and intelligence are not part of the equation.
Of course they are part of the equation! Their behavior is extremely rational. Just not moral. Their goals are not what you think they should be. It's not to work for the betterment of their people. It's to maintain their hold on power over their people. This doesn't make them irrational. It does mean that as long as you equate rationality and morality and therefore assume that they are irrational that you will never understand them. And because you will never understand them (deliberately!) you will never deal with them effectively.
But failing before you even begin because of a conscious decision to replace reality with ideology is old hat for you, isn't it Mr. Iraq War Cheerleader? Is this you re-polishing your rhetoric in support of another war?
43863453
comment
byChris Burke
7, 2013 @02:26AM
(#43102201)
Attached to: US Attorney General Defends Handling of Aaron Swartz Case
I am offended by your metaphoric comparison of pitbulls, wonderful creatures whose reputation was solely an artifact of those among whom they were popular, to something a beastly and vile as an Attorney General.
43848105
comment
byChris Burke
06, 2013 @02:10PM
(#43095915)
Attached to: Discovery Increases Odds of Life On Europa
Fair enough, a cable was involved. They didn't lower it to the ground on a cable. They didn't lower it while in powered flight hovering above the ground. They did it to separate the rover housing from the descent stage so it would have room to deploy the airbags. Compare to the Curiosity EDL and the operation is quite different.
43846029
comment
byChris Burke
06, 2013 @12:48PM
(#43094899)
Attached to: Why Can't Intel Kill x86?
Alpha designers worked on Alpha at HP -- they produced several variants of the EV7 there. And the servers based on those chips performed better than HP's Itanium offerings, which was rather awkward for them.
Dirk Meyer went to AMD long before that. It was still DEC when he left. Dirk was the lead architect of the K7 (that success being a big part of how he ended up in a position to become CEO) which came out while Compaq was still making new Alphas.
But you're right that a great many jumped ship from Compaq.
43845761
comment
byChris Burke
06, 2013 @12:34PM
(#43094721)
Attached to: Why Can't Intel Kill x86?
You're being completely revisionist.
No, just uninformed about the extent of the embedded use of these chips. By the time I heard of them (e.g. Playstation/N64, and much more recent uses of SPARC) their heydey was over. I had no idea there was a SPARC-based camera in the mid 90s. Obviously I was much more in tune with their traditional business side.
43844787
comment
byChris Burke
06, 2013 @11:51AM
(#43094093)
Attached to: Why Can't Intel Kill x86?
Some of these ISAs found new life, but MIPS and SPARC were for SGI boxes running Ultrix and Sun boxes running SunOS/Solaris respectively for many years. It's only once the original business models collapsed that they became otherwise.
NT on Alpha was contemporary with the ISA's hey-dey, though all it really did was demonstrate that you shouldn't count on Microsoft for the success of your non-x86 server platform. I did know someone who used such a box though. Four processors, baby!
Oh and yeah, the 68k is awesome. It was used in so much stuff besides machines running Unix, though, that "Unix processor" isn't an accurate historical metaphor.
43844157
comment
byChris Burke
06, 2013 @11:28AM
(#43093689)
Attached to: Discovery Increases Odds of Life On Europa
Yeah, even some of the new parts weren't that new, though doing aerodynamic flight in Mars atmosphere counts as fairly new if not unprecedented.
The Viking's last stage of descent was done entirely with retrorockets on the lander itself. The MER rovers used a rocket powered descent stage that then dropped the rovers in their airbag-lined shells only the last 10s of meters. MSL was closer to the MER rovers in this sense, however the Sky Crane part was still completely new.
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