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Comment Re:intuitively I would think steam would be better (Score 1) 217

Not with current land-based planes. See, navy planes are reinforced exactly to deal with forces coming from the hooks (both on the landing and on the take-off). In a land-based plane, impulse comes only from the exhaust jet. In a CATOBAR plane, impulse alosn can come from the front, from the take-off hook, so extra planning is needed. Sure enough, land based planes are often towed for parking from the landing gear by service vehicles, but both the acceleration and speed are nothing like this.

For the Rafale, a plane that has both a navalized and land-based versions from the start, the navy version is reinforced and that leads to more weight (about 1 tonne, IIRC). This for a somewhat small fighter jet. Imagine for a bigger, commercial airplane. And, the heavier the plane, the bigger is the proportion of it's weight has to be reinforcement. I bet companies would stick to a higher payload instead of a reinforced, more fuel demanding airplane.

Nevertheless, amazing achievement for the Navy. Maybe it has some hobbyists/scientific uses for civilians, but I believe that's it.

Comment Re:Leave then (Score 2) 886

Oh, that's easy. The real ones are when two people love and care for each other and hope to leave the remaining of their lives together. The fake ones are motivated by economic, politics, or even when two teenagers are bullied to it by their parents.

It always amazed me that (most) religions are fast to discard the former if the couple are from the same gender, but absolutely have no problem whatsoever with the latter if it's between a man and a woman, even when it's obvious there's no love. You know, that "God's gift".

Comment Re:I am so exited. This will be great. (Score 1) 331

What's wrong with Minority Report?

I get that most people don't realize that it doesn't end the way it seems it ends (the kicker: the long and somewhat strange talk with the prision officer of how it's to be in suspended animation). But if you pay attention I'll realize maybe one the finest Spielberg moments of all time. Even the exceptional lame way his wife discovers what happened starts to make perfect sense when you consider that conversation in the beginning.

Comment Re:Delphi is dead, just accept it. (Score 2) 492

I've been hearing this kind of stuff since at least 2002. Still using Delphi and waiting for judgment day. It is funny how VB'ers were for some time the most vocal group preaching Delphi's imminent demise, and then they were struck with the "Visual Fred" fiasco. Many of them had to learn OOP the hard way, many didn't and are still supporting VB6 apps.

Anyway you can use the open-source Free Pascal or other proprietary solutions for Pascal. With both Delphi and Free-Pascal current multiplatform capabilities, I bet many companies that unsuccessfully tried to migrate Delphi internal apps to Java, C# or other offerings are having a second thought about it.

Comment Re:Modula-3 FTW! (Score 5, Informative) 492

In my experience (about 20 years professionally working with Delphi, since the first version), the biggest advantage of Object Pascal over C++ is its strong typing discipline. It makes a program more maintainable on the long run, and errors are easier both to avoid and find. Pointer and String handling are also better in Pascal IMHO, and finally compilation time is also much shorter, which is not something to be disregarded when debugging a big project. Against Java or Python, desktop applications are usually more responsive with Object Pascal as it outputs machine code without JIT or GC involved (and usually Delphi will output a single .exe, without the need for any DLLs). Sure enough, you have to remember to destroy your objects, although newest versions of Delphi can use ARC on mobile platforms. My 2c. Sure I've already used all 3 (Python, C++ and Java) when I needed, but I've never felt as productive in any of these as I am in Object Pascal. So maybe the language has it's values.

Comment Strawman (Score 1) 46

"While stressing over Ebola, the media is oblivious to true public health threats like obesity, heart disease, drunk driving, diabetes, and the like."

No, it's not. Actually, no matter how much the media repeat warnings about these issues, PEOPLE (a part of them) is oblivious to these public health issues. I dare you to watch CNN or read MSN, HuffPo or any news aggregator a day without something being said about at least one of these issues, mostly (in US) obesity. We even had a mayor on NYC that went into a series of highly controversial steps to prevent obesity (limiting size of sodas, really? Coach potatoes would buy 2 of them). it's just that some people doesn't pay attention because they don't want to change their lifestyle.

Ebola is something "new", so gets more flash from news outlets since people will cringe for, well, news. It's the way people work, unfortunately. In a BTVS season, the much bigger issues above would be the Big Bad. Ebola is just the monster of the week. Granted, it gets full attention now, but once current crisis is gone, I doubt you'll hear about it until another outbreak.
Education

Solving the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment 608

theodp writes After an NPR podcast fingered the marketing of computers to boys as the culprit behind the declining percentages of women in undergraduate CS curricula since 1984 (a theory seconded by Smithsonian mag), some are concluding that NPR got the wrong guy. Calling 'When Women Stopped Coding' quite engaging, but long on Political Correctness and short on real evidence, UC Davis CS Prof Norm Matloff concedes a sexist element, but largely ascribes the gender lopsidedness to economics. "That women are more practical than men, and that the well-publicized drastic swings in the CS labor market are offputting to women more than men," writes Matloff, and "was confirmed by a 2008 survey in the Communications of the ACM" (related charts of U.S. unemployment rates and Federal R&D spending in the '80s). Looking at the raw numbers of female CS grads instead of percentages, suggests there wasn't a sudden and unexpected disappearance of a generation of women coders, but rather a dilution in their percentages as women's growth in undergrad CS ranks was far outpaced by men, including a boom around the time of the dot-com boom/bust.

Comment Static initialization order problem. (Score 1) 427

Hi Mr. Stroustrup, Thank you for C++. It is my language of choice.

Why the static initialization order problem was not addressed in recent reforms of the language ?

It does not seem very hard to fix. Although I am aware of the workarounds I do not like them. In my opinion we need to fix what is broken before adding more features. Thank you for your attention, Mauricio Gomes.

The Internet

Whatever Happened To the IPv4 Address Crisis? 574

alphadogg writes "In February 2011, the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last blocks of IPv4 address space to the five regional Internet registries. At the time, experts warned that within months all available IPv4 addresses in the world would be distributed to ISPs. Soon after that, unless everyone upgraded to IPv6, the world would be facing a crisis that would hamper Internet connectivity for everyone. That crisis would be exacerbated by the skyrocketing demand for IP addresses due to a variety of factors: the Internet of Things (refrigerators needing their own IP address); wearables (watches and glasses demanding connectivity); BYOD (the explosion of mobile devices allowed to connect to the corporate network); and the increase in smartphone use in developing countries. So, here we are three years later and the American Registry for Internet Numbers is still doling out IPv4 addresses in the United States and Canada. Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?"

Submission + - NSA infected 50,000 computer networks with malicious software

rtoz writes: The American intelligence service — NSA — infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. Documents provided by former NSA-employee Edward Snowden and seen by this newspaper, prove this.

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