Viewing profile — simonblack

We are almost certainly not alone according to laws of probability. However .... The likelihood of ever meeting another set of intelligent creatures is highly unlikely, as the dist…

Sour grapes, Paul. I didn't see the US's huge trade surpluses from 1940 to 1980 being a huge problem. Especially when one out of every two motor vehicles was being built in the US.…

You have to hope your insurance claim is higher than (or at least as high as) your mortgage payout cost.

Samsung 43" 4K (Width:3840 Height:2160 Depth:24bpp) smart TV fed via HDMI "Works for Me".

Can you pay me what I want?

I think that "U.S. Technology Rules" is not correct. Taiwan's microchip technology is better than the US's. Several countries have hypersonic missile technology that's better. Chin…

I got a new, better, improved wife out of mine. And I became a better person overall. Also 47 seems a bit high. Women go through a midlife crisis around 35-38 years old, men tend t…

Latest fad terminology. Up there with "User Friendly"* or "Fuzzy Logic" as meaningless waffle by Sales droids. * Somebody on the Net said of 'User Friendly' that it could be replac…

Operating systems didn't have the large memory space which is necessary to do that. The maximum RAM with 16 bits is only 64K. Bank switching chunks of RAM in and out of that 64K ca…

Stack Overflow has been bad for a decade or more. Of course it's dying. When people don't get answers they go elsewhere. When enough have gone elsewhere there is no one left to kee…

NASA is broke. There is no funding. No way can NASA get to the Moon, much less Mars. The era when NASA could get guys to the Moon and back is gone. It will never come back. Sad but…

It depends on the couple. My first marriage was not a happy one. My second marriage was a happy one.

Yes it would be. At first. Probably as good as it was for German armaments manufacturers pre-1945. That China war might have been winnable if it had been started by 2020. Now, prob…

Very. Compare the height of Everest to the size of the Earth and it's an exceedingly small difference. Probably like the thickness of a film of paint on a baseball.

Which bit? The code without braces, or adding braces to debraced code? For me the debraced code is very ugly. And there is a reason why indented code went out of fashion in the 70s…

Yes. Anything that's useful as a weapon, or as an adjunct to a weapon, can be targeted. That's why radar stations, or AWACS, can be targeted too. They are not offensive weapons in …

Translation: I want paying customers before I have a working product. Definitely a very good business model. I hope it works out.

I answered this, the last time this article was submitted, yesterday. The Australian health care system which is a mix of government-funded care for everybody, including the rich. …

Tariff wars never end well. Go at it!

That just signifies that HiLux trucks are very common, not how ISIS got lots of them. Those US Officials should be asking other US (Intel) Officials.

Non-mainstream OS is Linux. But Linux distro is very mainstream: Linux Mint MATE

It's all very well to shut the China R&D operations, but is the domestic R&D growing by an equivalent amount? Or is IBM's total R&D declining by the amount of that lost China R&D?

The single-payer health system. That covers everybody with a basic but high-quality level of health care. The rich can afford a (slightly) better health care using Private Health I…

Some of us just can't return to the C programming language. We never left it. "If it works, don't fix it."

That's very true. But ... there has to be a change somewhere to get a different outcome. There has been no change, so there is no different outcome.