The murder of a murderer is not something to cry about.
It seems like you're saying that murder is really bad, unless the victim is a murderer, in which case murder is good. So if a murderer gets murdered by a vigilante, presumably you'd be cool with it, because "the murder of a murderer is nothing to cry about". But then what if the vigilante gets murdered? Are you cool with that? Because the vigilante was also a murderer. Presumably you'd be okay with a whole string of murders, as long as all the victims are murderers. Wouldn't it be better to draw the line somewhere on the other side, and just say that murder is always bad?
Still - there is a general failure on a higher level where there are expectations that systems written entirely out of script languages are better than systems written in a compiling language.
It may work from the beginning, but as soon as maintenance starts on the system there will sooner or later be problems. Especially if you have different people doing the maintenance compared to the people developing.
What are you trying to say? Are you saying that maintenance on a system written in a "scripting language" will cause problems, but if the system was written in a "compiled language", then maintenance won't cause any problems? Do you think that it's easier for a person to read code they didn't write if it's written in a compiled language as opposed to a scripting language? Have you ever heard of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest? How is it possible to write obfuscated code in a compiled language?
Why do you think it's a "general failure" if systems written in a scripting language are better than those written in a compiled language? Wouldn't it make sense that the best systems are written in the most powerful languages, regardless of whether the language is compiled or interpreted? Did you know that some languages such as Lisp and Perl can be compiled or interpreted, depending on what the user prefers?
At the silicon level we're talking about wires that are maybe 45nm wide by perhaps 500nm long. We can afford the space they take up
You're talking about having an infinite number of these wires. So the space they would take up is: 45nm * infinity, or rather a lot really. But let's pretend that you only said there would be a million wires. A million wires at 45nm wide would be 45mm wide. That's getting rather wide since a 2.5 inch drive is only 63.5mm wide. Then you need insulation between the wires, since if they touch, the system won't work properly. But hey let's pretend you can get insulation which is only 1nm wide. Let's say you can get your million wires into a plug 50mm wide. How are you going to wire up a plug with a million wires?
Then you've got the bus. Will your bus also be a million wires wide? Or will you have to serialise the output from the SSD to make it fit over the bus? Supposing you had a million wire wide bus, then you've got the CPU. Will the CPU have a million data input wires? And will the registers in the CPU be a million bits wide? One day, maybe they will. But for now, we're stuck with buses and CPUs and registers which are only a few bytes wide. Once they reach the limit of increasing the clock speed on the bus, they'll probably start making buses a lot wider. But there is still a very long way to go before you'd get a million bit wide bus. Until then, we can't make the infinite bandwidth flash drive, because there's nowhere to put the infinite amount of data all arriving at the same time.
In perl I doubt the author could even say what his/her code written a couple of months ago does without studying it for a while.
Authors not remembering what code does is not a perl problem, it can happen in any language. Perl has tools to help stop this from being a problem, such as perlpod and perldoc. The programmer can put documentation and notes into the program near the code that needs documenting. Then if a programmer needs to know a couple of months later what code does, they can simply read the fine documentation, which will be right there in the files.
Here's a simple example of some perlpod. Please see man perldoc and man perlpod for more information. You can use the same pod to document the file, generate man pages, and generate html.
=head2 some_func($x, $y)
Returns the result of the fabulous function. Long description of what the function does. Blah blah blah.
=cut
sub some_func { my ($x, $y) = @_; # do something here return 42; }
Install Linux on your computer, and make sure you learn C, C++, Perl, and shell scripting. Also learn Java if you want to get one of those mind-numbing cubical jobs to earn some cash. You should also learn how to generate HTML, and how to configure webservers and other kinds of servers, especially database servers. So you'll need to learn some SQL too. And you should learn about anything that interests you, such as Ruby, Python, PHP, LIsp, and so on. Then even if you can't get a job with Linux machines, you'll still be able to operate on Solaris, or other Unix systems. And most important, you need to learn to read the manual. Man pages contain huge amounts of information about programming and operating the system. If you know how to find out the information you need (it's in the man pages), you won't have much trouble.
Something else in the environment? I don't think you appreciate just how difficult it is to live off the land and survive out in the wilderness. Particularly when you're not at the top of the food chain.
How hard can it be? All those dumb animals seem to be able to do it. Go out into the wilderness, there are wild animals everywhere! Many of them are living off the land and surviving.
CO2 from humans (or animals, plants, decomposition or any natural phenomenon) is not pollution, since it comes from carbon we took in with our food. Therefore, it is in equilibrium with the carbon cycle.
The polluting part of CO2 is the one coming from fossil fuels, that is from outside the ecosystem, that gets dumped into it because it's easier than to put it back where you took the carbon.
Right, now think carefully. Where did the fossil fuels come from? Did fossil fuels come from animals, plants, decomposition, or any natural phenomenon? If fossil fuels are natural, does that make them "not pollution" by your first definition? So why do you call fossil fuels "pollution" in your second definition?
Are you forgetting that the meat you raise needs to be fed? Guess what it gets fed with? That's right plants. The same plants that could have been fed directly to vegetarians. Of course if you feed it to the cows first they waste the food by standing around farting methane for a few years.
The cattle that live around here eat plants that you can't feed to people. Like grass, for example. People can't live on grass, because they can't digest it. There are cattle living on huge stations where the ground is unsuitable for crops, but can support cattle roaming around eating what grass is available. So you see, not all beef is bad. Beef that eat grass are eating food that humans can't eat, and converting it into food that humans can eat. If some vegetarians suddenly develop some extra stomachs, maybe they can start eating grass.
There's still a lot somebody could do though. Like:
Run in text mode on the console
Use ssh to connect to other computers
Use lynx web browser
Play nethack
A lot of people might not enjoy doing those things, but some people would be quite happy with that.
It'll be better when cheap laptops are available with a lot of RAM, like 4GB would be good. 2GB, maybe.
Once all the applications are cached into RAM, they'll start pretty quickly. But to run 4GB of RAM, you'd
need at least 10GB of flash, since you'll need 4GB of that to hibernate to.
The point is that someone who is high could care less of the laws. Same way with drunk drivers. They know it's illegal, but they do it anyway. Making drugs illegal isn't punishing those who want to get high, it's protecting those who don't from dangers posed by potheads.
If the people using the drugs don't care about the laws, and do it anyway, then what is the point of making it illegal? How is anybody protected by those laws? You say yourself that being illegal isn't stopping anybody from doing it. Therefore, it is not protecting anybody from "dangers posed by potheads".
You say that making drugs illegal does not stop anybody from using them. So what's the new plan now that the old plan has failed? Make drugs super-illegal? And if that doesn't work, make them super-duper-illegal? It's not going to work.
You could make Viagra illegal, but people would still be taking it, because there is a large demand for it. But instead of getting their Viagra by going to see a doctor and getting a prescription, they'd be buying it in an alley somewhere from some strange-looking guy. And it would be more expensive than Viagra is now. And it would be more dangerous than Viagra is now, because a doctor wouldn't be involved to detect any health risks, and the drug itself would have been manufactured illegaly and to low quality and safety standards.
By making drugs illegal you make them more dangerous and you don't stop people from using them. The War Against Drugs hasn't worked, and doesn't look like it's ever going to work. It's time to try something else.
So yes, you could have 100% wind power across the nation, without blackouts.
Sure, if you ignore the effects of transmission loss in the power lines. Imagine what would happen if California was hot and calm, but the east coast was all gale-force winds. Everybody in California turns on their air-conditioners and plugs in their electric cars at the same time, because it's hot and sunny, so they want to drive their electric cars down to the beach.
Will the gales over on the east coast supply enough wind powered electricity to supply all of California without blackouts? I don't think so. That's why sensible people wouldn't make their country 100% wind powered.
So all this carbon that people are taking out of the ground and putting into the air -- where did it come from? You're talking about fossil fuels, right?
Everybody knows that fossil fuels are made of dead animals and plants that got squished up in the ground over millions of years. Where did they get their carbon from? Didn't they get it from the atmosphere? Isn't that where plants get their carbon, and animals get carbon from eating plants and other animals?
So if people are taking carbon in the form of fossil fuels out of the ground, and putting it into the atmosphere by burning it, aren't they just putting back the carbon that was in the atmosphere before? All the plants that make up the coal and oil must have got their carbon from somewhere. They must have got it from the atmosphere. Therefore, all that carbon must have been in the atmosphere at some time, or else plants couldn't have absorbed it.
There's something for people to think about. Yes, the carbon was buried for millions of years. Yes, by burning the fossils we can put the carbon back into the atmosphere. But the carbon must have already been in the atmosphere before, or it couldn't have ended up in the oil or coal.
Right you are. The Brotherhood of Nod were pioneers in this style of warfare.
They weren't "pioneers" in this style of warfare. Combat engineers have existed since ancient times. In fact the word "engineer" comes from their activities, working the siege engines such as catapults, battering rams, etc. As an aside, in the British and related armies, a "pioneer" is an infantry soldier with some combat engineering training. A pioneer in those armies is trained to blow things up in close combat.
Engineering has traditionally been for fighting wars. See the Royal Engineers for example. Over time, people have started to think of engineering as a peaceful profession, but there are still many combat engineers in the world, ready to blow things up.
In America, the Prius IS a two-seater... I defy you to get four, 1.85cm tall, 130 kg guys inside the vehicle without someone's chin literally resting on their knees...
How small is a Prius backseat? You know that 1.85cm is less than 3/4 inch right? And how fat are these guys if they are less than 2cm tall, and weigh 130kg?
Why are they picking on Hans Reiser for strange behavior? Read this quote from the article about what his father is doing:
"His undergraduate thesis is on how if you change the perspective, the reality is different," said Ramon Reiser, the defendant's mathematician father, folding a pair of pants in the courtroom hallway as he waited to testify.
Ramon Reiser was waiting in the courthouse to testify in his son's murder trial, and he was folding a pair of pants. Who takes their laundry to the courthouse? Why was Ramon Reiser standing around folding up pants??? Something very suspicious is going on here! Was Hans's mathematician father sending secret signals with the pants? Some sort of topology-laundry cipher system?
BUT... this doesn't remove the original image, which a photog can take into court proving that it's his... now where's your 2-zillion x 1.5 zillion rez RAW image w/ the steganographic retina scan (and all the other related images showing similar scenery), to match the one he's using in court against you to prove original ownership?
Suppose you produced an image by doing conversions from one format to another, starting with some photographer's original image. Does the photographer hold the copyright for this derivative image? The photographer might have some image which looks pretty much the same, with a watermark of his iris in it. But does he have the original of the image being complained about? The photographer doesn't have the generated image, because you produced that image yourself.
How different does one image have to be from another image before copyright on one image doesn't apply to the other one? Do the images have to look different to the eye, or do they just have to look different to a computer program like "diff"? What if you do a bit of cropping and run a few filters over the photographer's image. Does the photographer have copyright over the image you make? If you remove the watermark from an image, is that enough to make it a different image according to copyright law?
You mean like mysqli_stmt_prepare ?
Looks pretty much like PERL's version
Looking at the examples you linked to, the difference between PHP and Perl in database operations is pretty clear. The PHP function is called mysqli_stmt_prepare, making it obvious that it only works with MySQL. Presumably the code would have to be changed to postgresqli_stmt_prepare,(or whatever the PostgreSQL function is called) if the database was changed from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
Compare that with the Perl version, in which the only difference between code that connects to a MySQL database or a PostgreSQL database is the datasource string. That's the string in your second linked web page that says: "DBI:mysql:database=somedb;host=localhost". For this code to be connected to a PostgreSQL database, that might change to "dbi:Pg:dbname=foo", and the code would then work with PostgreSQL. And the same thing can be done to connect to just about any other database.
That difference alone might be enough to make me want to use Perl in preference to PHP. However, once you start using some Perl modules, the programming job becomes much easier. For example, a lot of PHP code still contains many SQL statements for inserting, finding, updating, and deleting data. Using Perl's DBIx::Class module for example, the programmer will probably not need to write any SQL statements in the program. The module will handle it all. Removing most of the SQL from the program means that a big source of bugs and other problems is gone. And it removes the SQL injection attack problem too as a bonus.
Clearly Perl isn't for everybody. It can be difficult to understand how to use the power of Perl to produce good programs. But once you do understand that, the deficiencies of some other languages become apparent. However, if people want to use PHP for whatever purpose, then good luck to them. I hope it works out well. If somebody likes PHP and doesn't want to change, then they should stick with it. If it does what you want and you're happy using it, then it's clearly a good choice for you.
Same here, on Ubuntu, it starts and you can click to "zone residential" or something, but the big map on the right doesn't update. You can just see things happening on the mini map, like you can bulldoze the forest, but nothing shows up on the big map.
Yep, I haven't used Windows at home since 2003 (ish?). Linux definitely does use the device better, but the umount command can stall for up to 5 minutes while it writes out the cache.
You can use the "sync" command to flush the file system buffers, instead of waiting for umount to do it for you. It's going to take some amount of time to write large files, the real issue is when that writing occurs. So instead of doing "cp file/usb" and then later unmounting the usb and having to wait, you can "cp file/usb; sync" and the writing will be done immediately. When you later decide to unmount the usb stick, it should happen immediately.
This page has a flash animated diagram of how it works, with wiggly lines going in the top on one side, and coming out the bottom on the other side, and black blobs zooming along one way and meandering back on the bottom. I don't know if that really helps people understand the device, but here it is: http://www.johnsonems.com/jhtec.html I think that diagram would be much better if it had labels on it, like "wiggly lines are heat, black blobs are hydrogen ions, and electricity comes out where the plus and minus signs are".
Actually heavier than air because air is O, and N, which are both lighter than Ne.
I thought that neon would be lighter than air, because neon is an inert gas, so it would be atoms of neon. However, air is made of mostly nitrogen molecules and oxygen molecules, each of which contain two atoms of their respective elements. Therefore, you should be comparing the weight of neon in its most common state, Ne1, with the most common state of nitrogen (N2) and oxygen (O2). Sorry about the lack of subscripts there.
The Perl thing is actually news to me -- I thought you needed a Unix underneath to make the shell scripting bits work.
In fact, the opposite is the case. Tom Christiansen and some other Perl hackers wrote Perl Power Tools (PPT), which provided a pure Perl implementation of various Unix commands. That means that it was like having Unix on top of Perl.
Perl Power ToolsBackground on PPT
All Perl needs is a C compiler, and a standard C library. It runs just about everywhere people want it to.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like you're saying that murder is really bad, unless the victim is a murderer, in which case murder is good. So if a murderer gets murdered by a vigilante, presumably you'd be cool with it, because "the murder of a murderer is nothing to cry about". But then what if the vigilante gets murdered? Are you cool with that? Because the vigilante was also a murderer. Presumably you'd be okay with a whole string of murders, as long as all the victims are murderers. Wouldn't it be better to draw the line somewhere on the other side, and just say that murder is always bad?
What are you trying to say? Are you saying that maintenance on a system written in a "scripting language" will cause problems, but if the system was written in a "compiled language", then maintenance won't cause any problems? Do you think that it's easier for a person to read code they didn't write if it's written in a compiled language as opposed to a scripting language? Have you ever heard of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest? How is it possible to write obfuscated code in a compiled language?
Why do you think it's a "general failure" if systems written in a scripting language are better than those written in a compiled language? Wouldn't it make sense that the best systems are written in the most powerful languages, regardless of whether the language is compiled or interpreted? Did you know that some languages such as Lisp and Perl can be compiled or interpreted, depending on what the user prefers?
You're talking about having an infinite number of these wires. So the space they would take up is: 45nm * infinity, or rather a lot really. But let's pretend that you only said there would be a million wires. A million wires at 45nm wide would be 45mm wide. That's getting rather wide since a 2.5 inch drive is only 63.5mm wide. Then you need insulation between the wires, since if they touch, the system won't work properly. But hey let's pretend you can get insulation which is only 1nm wide. Let's say you can get your million wires into a plug 50mm wide. How are you going to wire up a plug with a million wires?
Then you've got the bus. Will your bus also be a million wires wide? Or will you have to serialise the output from the SSD to make it fit over the bus? Supposing you had a million wire wide bus, then you've got the CPU. Will the CPU have a million data input wires? And will the registers in the CPU be a million bits wide? One day, maybe they will. But for now, we're stuck with buses and CPUs and registers which are only a few bytes wide. Once they reach the limit of increasing the clock speed on the bus, they'll probably start making buses a lot wider. But there is still a very long way to go before you'd get a million bit wide bus. Until then, we can't make the infinite bandwidth flash drive, because there's nowhere to put the infinite amount of data all arriving at the same time.
Authors not remembering what code does is not a perl problem, it can happen in any language. Perl has tools to help stop this from being a problem, such as perlpod and perldoc. The programmer can put documentation and notes into the program near the code that needs documenting. Then if a programmer needs to know a couple of months later what code does, they can simply read the fine documentation, which will be right there in the files.
Here's a simple example of some perlpod. Please see man perldoc and man perlpod for more information. You can use the same pod to document the file, generate man pages, and generate html.
Install Linux on your computer, and make sure you learn C, C++, Perl, and shell scripting. Also learn Java if you want to get one of those mind-numbing cubical jobs to earn some cash. You should also learn how to generate HTML, and how to configure webservers and other kinds of servers, especially database servers. So you'll need to learn some SQL too. And you should learn about anything that interests you, such as Ruby, Python, PHP, LIsp, and so on. Then even if you can't get a job with Linux machines, you'll still be able to operate on Solaris, or other Unix systems. And most important, you need to learn to read the manual. Man pages contain huge amounts of information about programming and operating the system. If you know how to find out the information you need (it's in the man pages), you won't have much trouble.
How hard can it be? All those dumb animals seem to be able to do it. Go out into the wilderness, there are wild animals everywhere! Many of them are living off the land and surviving.
Right, now think carefully. Where did the fossil fuels come from? Did fossil fuels come from animals, plants, decomposition, or any natural phenomenon? If fossil fuels are natural, does that make them "not pollution" by your first definition? So why do you call fossil fuels "pollution" in your second definition?
The cattle that live around here eat plants that you can't feed to people. Like grass, for example. People can't live on grass, because they can't digest it. There are cattle living on huge stations where the ground is unsuitable for crops, but can support cattle roaming around eating what grass is available. So you see, not all beef is bad. Beef that eat grass are eating food that humans can't eat, and converting it into food that humans can eat. If some vegetarians suddenly develop some extra stomachs, maybe they can start eating grass.
There's still a lot somebody could do though. Like:
A lot of people might not enjoy doing those things, but some people would be quite happy with that. It'll be better when cheap laptops are available with a lot of RAM, like 4GB would be good. 2GB, maybe. Once all the applications are cached into RAM, they'll start pretty quickly. But to run 4GB of RAM, you'd need at least 10GB of flash, since you'll need 4GB of that to hibernate to.
If the people using the drugs don't care about the laws, and do it anyway, then what is the point of making it illegal? How is anybody protected by those laws? You say yourself that being illegal isn't stopping anybody from doing it. Therefore, it is not protecting anybody from "dangers posed by potheads".
You say that making drugs illegal does not stop anybody from using them. So what's the new plan now that the old plan has failed? Make drugs super-illegal? And if that doesn't work, make them super-duper-illegal? It's not going to work.
You could make Viagra illegal, but people would still be taking it, because there is a large demand for it. But instead of getting their Viagra by going to see a doctor and getting a prescription, they'd be buying it in an alley somewhere from some strange-looking guy. And it would be more expensive than Viagra is now. And it would be more dangerous than Viagra is now, because a doctor wouldn't be involved to detect any health risks, and the drug itself would have been manufactured illegaly and to low quality and safety standards.
By making drugs illegal you make them more dangerous and you don't stop people from using them. The War Against Drugs hasn't worked, and doesn't look like it's ever going to work. It's time to try something else.
Really? How dangerous is it to drive under the influence of caffeine? Or nicotine? Aspirin? Paracetamol?
Is Royal Ascent when the Queen climbs on top of the bill? Or did you mean Royal Assent?
Sure, if you ignore the effects of transmission loss in the power lines. Imagine what would happen if California was hot and calm, but the east coast was all gale-force winds. Everybody in California turns on their air-conditioners and plugs in their electric cars at the same time, because it's hot and sunny, so they want to drive their electric cars down to the beach.
Will the gales over on the east coast supply enough wind powered electricity to supply all of California without blackouts? I don't think so. That's why sensible people wouldn't make their country 100% wind powered.
So all this carbon that people are taking out of the ground and putting into the air -- where did it come from? You're talking about fossil fuels, right?
Everybody knows that fossil fuels are made of dead animals and plants that got squished up in the ground over millions of years. Where did they get their carbon from? Didn't they get it from the atmosphere? Isn't that where plants get their carbon, and animals get carbon from eating plants and other animals?
So if people are taking carbon in the form of fossil fuels out of the ground, and putting it into the atmosphere by burning it, aren't they just putting back the carbon that was in the atmosphere before? All the plants that make up the coal and oil must have got their carbon from somewhere. They must have got it from the atmosphere. Therefore, all that carbon must have been in the atmosphere at some time, or else plants couldn't have absorbed it.
There's something for people to think about. Yes, the carbon was buried for millions of years. Yes, by burning the fossils we can put the carbon back into the atmosphere. But the carbon must have already been in the atmosphere before, or it couldn't have ended up in the oil or coal.
They weren't "pioneers" in this style of warfare. Combat engineers have existed since ancient times. In fact the word "engineer" comes from their activities, working the siege engines such as catapults, battering rams, etc. As an aside, in the British and related armies, a "pioneer" is an infantry soldier with some combat engineering training. A pioneer in those armies is trained to blow things up in close combat.
Engineering has traditionally been for fighting wars. See the Royal Engineers for example. Over time, people have started to think of engineering as a peaceful profession, but there are still many combat engineers in the world, ready to blow things up.
Once they work out how to fake authenticity, they'll crack the youth demographic wide open.
How small is a Prius backseat? You know that 1.85cm is less than 3/4 inch right? And how fat are these guys if they are less than 2cm tall, and weigh 130kg?
Why are they picking on Hans Reiser for strange behavior? Read this quote from the article about what his father is doing:
Ramon Reiser was waiting in the courthouse to testify in his son's murder trial, and he was folding a pair of pants. Who takes their laundry to the courthouse? Why was Ramon Reiser standing around folding up pants??? Something very suspicious is going on here! Was Hans's mathematician father sending secret signals with the pants? Some sort of topology-laundry cipher system?
Suppose you produced an image by doing conversions from one format to another, starting with some photographer's original image. Does the photographer hold the copyright for this derivative image? The photographer might have some image which looks pretty much the same, with a watermark of his iris in it. But does he have the original of the image being complained about? The photographer doesn't have the generated image, because you produced that image yourself.
How different does one image have to be from another image before copyright on one image doesn't apply to the other one? Do the images have to look different to the eye, or do they just have to look different to a computer program like "diff"? What if you do a bit of cropping and run a few filters over the photographer's image. Does the photographer have copyright over the image you make? If you remove the watermark from an image, is that enough to make it a different image according to copyright law?
Looking at the examples you linked to, the difference between PHP and Perl in database operations is pretty clear. The PHP function is called mysqli_stmt_prepare, making it obvious that it only works with MySQL. Presumably the code would have to be changed to postgresqli_stmt_prepare,(or whatever the PostgreSQL function is called) if the database was changed from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
Compare that with the Perl version, in which the only difference between code that connects to a MySQL database or a PostgreSQL database is the datasource string. That's the string in your second linked web page that says: "DBI:mysql:database=somedb;host=localhost". For this code to be connected to a PostgreSQL database, that might change to "dbi:Pg:dbname=foo", and the code would then work with PostgreSQL. And the same thing can be done to connect to just about any other database.
That difference alone might be enough to make me want to use Perl in preference to PHP. However, once you start using some Perl modules, the programming job becomes much easier. For example, a lot of PHP code still contains many SQL statements for inserting, finding, updating, and deleting data. Using Perl's DBIx::Class module for example, the programmer will probably not need to write any SQL statements in the program. The module will handle it all. Removing most of the SQL from the program means that a big source of bugs and other problems is gone. And it removes the SQL injection attack problem too as a bonus.
Clearly Perl isn't for everybody. It can be difficult to understand how to use the power of Perl to produce good programs. But once you do understand that, the deficiencies of some other languages become apparent. However, if people want to use PHP for whatever purpose, then good luck to them. I hope it works out well. If somebody likes PHP and doesn't want to change, then they should stick with it. If it does what you want and you're happy using it, then it's clearly a good choice for you.
Same here, on Ubuntu, it starts and you can click to "zone residential" or something, but the big map on the right doesn't update. You can just see things happening on the mini map, like you can bulldoze the forest, but nothing shows up on the big map.
You can use the "sync" command to flush the file system buffers, instead of waiting for umount to do it for you. It's going to take some amount of time to write large files, the real issue is when that writing occurs. So instead of doing "cp file /usb" and then later unmounting the usb and having to wait, you can "cp file /usb; sync" and the writing will be done immediately. When you later decide to unmount the usb stick, it should happen immediately.
This page has a flash animated diagram of how it works, with wiggly lines going in the top on one side, and coming out the bottom on the other side, and black blobs zooming along one way and meandering back on the bottom. I don't know if that really helps people understand the device, but here it is: http://www.johnsonems.com/jhtec.html I think that diagram would be much better if it had labels on it, like "wiggly lines are heat, black blobs are hydrogen ions, and electricity comes out where the plus and minus signs are".
I thought that neon would be lighter than air, because neon is an inert gas, so it would be atoms of neon. However, air is made of mostly nitrogen molecules and oxygen molecules, each of which contain two atoms of their respective elements. Therefore, you should be comparing the weight of neon in its most common state, Ne1, with the most common state of nitrogen (N2) and oxygen (O2). Sorry about the lack of subscripts there.
In fact, the opposite is the case. Tom Christiansen and some other Perl hackers wrote Perl Power Tools (PPT), which provided a pure Perl implementation of various Unix commands. That means that it was like having Unix on top of Perl. Perl Power Tools Background on PPT
All Perl needs is a C compiler, and a standard C library. It runs just about everywhere people want it to.