hobin

Fair enough. I can't promise I'll stop reading HN (I probably won't), but do you have any recommendations for other websites that cover more hardware-based solutions? (I do read Hackaday, but that doesn't exactly count, although it sometimes gives me an interesting idea or two.)

I'm not sure whether that would qualify as a startup. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is, after all, a charity. But, your point still stands, because I have to admit that if they tried to make money from it, they could.

You can take my life, but you'll never take my 0xDEADBEEF.

Why? People who don't get jobs because of their gender is a big issue. Why, of all problems, is this a big issue?

In my not so humble opinion, people are simply looking for something to complain about. If there were a supposedly man-degrading word that could easily be expressed in hex, I'd use that for debugging, too. There's absolutely no reason to think that the use of these words is somehow meant as some sort of insult, and taking it as such appears to me to show a very rigid mind.

It doesn't? I thought it was pretty funny.

I'm quite certain this would be one of those things people would be uncomfortable with for a few months - a year, tops.

Then they get used to it.

I'm unfamiliar with many of these certificates, but is there any reason such 'scamware' woudln't be able to get one even though it costs money? Because, if they still can, they the whole certification business definitely seems like a big scam to me.

At first I thought he meant something similar to Tesla's idea of building a ring around the earth and the blowing away the pillars. Yet I can't seem to find anything about his 'hyperloop' of sorts.

"Just because we used to do something does not mean it's the most effective way to do it."

True, but the fact that we used to do it also doesn't mean that it must be broken. I doubt many of would be better programmers if we had a more child-friendly programming language to learn when we were young.

Perhaps this: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/apple/6-best-mac-os-... can be of some use to you.

Touché. I see your point.

But what point is there to an intellectual exercise if you don't know whether you've done it right in the end?

Ah, I see. Thank you. :)

A fair point, and also true where I live. Let me modify my original statement: lying, at least where I live, is in most cases not illegal.

Lying is, at least where I live, not illegal.

Totally serious question: isn't the GPL GPL'ed in some way?

I think it's a shame you were downvoted, because you seem to be asking an honest question: is this possible, or not? I've ranted a bit about why this isn't possible here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4210984

But, if you want to know exactly why going to Mars is so difficult, and why so many projects have failed, start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Probing_dif...

Or simply do a quick search on the internet for 'Mars difficulties' or 'Mars curse'.

This project is completely ridiculous. Those people completely underestimate how extremely difficult it is to even land on Mars. Nearly two-thirds of all Mars missions have failed in some way, and yet these people are convinced they can simply put humans on Mars? Right.

You don't have to take my word for it, though. Take a look at what they say at their own site, and see if it actually makes sense. A few examples:

"In addition to this, the elements needed for a viable living system are already present on Mars, so we can keep the number of launches down. For example, the location Mars One has chosen contains water ice in the ground which can be extracted through heat and used to drink, bathe with, or used to feed crops, but can also be manipulated to create oxygen. Mars even has natural sources of nitrogen, another element of the air we breathe."

And we will extract these resources how? We theoretically know how to build such systems, but that's not the same as actually being able to build them on Mars. Are they just going to experiment during the project, and if it doesn't work then "oops, well, I guess you're all going to die"?

But, most ridiculously: "Of course most of the elements we need are not yet exactly in the form we would like, but crucially: no brand new inventions have to be conceived, designed, tested and built for the mission to become reality."

That's like saying we can also build a colony on Venus right now. Or Mercurius. Or Jupiter. Because we have a theoretical understanding of how to launch rockets there and how to build space colonies, and of course the technology to do both these things already exist. What these people fail to see is not that we don't have a theoretical understanding of how we might do all this, but that without any practical experiments in several areas AND many failed tests the chances of this project going perfectly as planned (which almost never happens to begin with) are VERY slim.

</rant>

No no no no. Absolutely not. Not, especially if its positive. Generally, only if its positive. I'm a slightly cynical person, so if I told people everything I thought, I'd probably be out of friends by now.

I don't know, but there definitely should be. (Given that we vote for these people, who should at least know what they're actually doing. In any case, the parliament is still in session, (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/) I hope to hear a bit more about this in the hours to come.

A teacher tried to teach me that particular hypothesis in high school. It subsequently became much harder for me to be a scientifically inclined person in a religious school. Bad memories.

Hm. True enough. Let's not forget that this is one of those results that will be under great scrutiny, of course. Not because the results are controversial - far from it - but because they're so important. Committing fraud with these results would be academical suicide.

I'm very happy about this. Not only because ACTA was bad, but also because this shows the views of the parliament were fairly congruent with the views of the public - and that's always a good thing in a democracy.

Of course, the battle ain't over yet.

"The only thing that matters is the person using it."

Well, sure, I guess if you're really strange, you can be as efficient with Brainfuck as you can be with Python.

I don't think it's necessarily creepy. There is a whole list of classes depending on what 'type' of developer one is, found here: http://search.cpan.org/~ishigaki/Acme-CPANAuthors-0.19/lib/A...

But I know that I'm not known for my extreme sensitivity, so maybe I should withold judgement on this one.

You raise a valid point. If that were the case, though, then I would argue the article should've been posted under a different title. The current title suggests that I'm going to see mr. Hawking say something profoud about time travel, M-theory and extraterrestials.

"France is too egocentrical, Britain (as much as I love the country) has a government hell-bent on recreating 1984, the Scandinavian countries are dying a slow death of too many paper-pushers and most of Eastern-Europe cannot rightly be called developed."

Ignoring for the moment that much of that sounds overly cynical and is definitely an overgeneralisation, which part of 'fight' did you miss? The very reason we're fighting is to do away with many of these problems and improve the situation! For some reason, you think this applies to the USA and a few other countries, but when it comes to other countries, what you say comes down to "Now, listen, I really want to solve these problems. Really, I do. But listen, you guys have problems, so now I can't help you." How does that make sense?

"But none of that matters as realistically the US is the only country powerful enough to cause sufficient damaged to be worth worring about."

I think you would be surprised. The USA is still only one country. It's a very powerful one, of course, I'm glad we agree on that part. But you can't focus on one country to the exclusion of almost everything else. (Well, you can, but that would not be very smart.)

Also, you forgot the Benelux, but I suspect you would also consider these countries too small to be considered.

I believe this is where I point out that the USA is not the only developed country in the world worth fighting for.

I don't really see how this is news.

Don't get me wrong, I think Stephen Hawking is a very smart man, and he has definitely done his fair share of work to help people understand science - not to mention that his scientific accomplishments aren't bad, either. That being said, there's just nothing new in this Q&A that he hasn't already said or wasn't already widely known to anyone who bothered to do a quick search on Google (except perhaps the part about his quality of life, but let's face it, that's not important).

Ahem.

I am somewhat disappointed that you have not presented one solid argument in favor of this new 'person to blame' field. The whole idea seems to hinge on the following quote: "so why not throw in a small dose of public shaming for good measure?"

And the answer is simple. It doesn't do any good, and can only hurt the performance of you and your team. Let me put this as simple as possible: shaming DECREASES performance. The fact that you apparently think this is 'fun' does not change this.

I will now return you to your regularly scheduled debate.