From the article, "the lava tubes offer a dust-free environment and adapting them for human use requires minimal construction. "
I think someone's been drinking too much of the strong coffee if they can conclude anything about dust levels in a lunar cave without having put any telemetry into the hole, or think that adapting any natural structure on the moon requires minimal construction without having actually imaged the fine-scale condition of the rock.
You can fix that problem by using multiple sheets of glass separated by air and different kinds of glass.
The reason multi-glazed windows are more thermally efficient is because you are restricting convective airflow. Glass is a reasonably good thermal conductor (although not an excellent one) compared to many other materials. The reason that even well-sealed windows are a heat conductor is because there is free airflow on both sides of the glass. Adding additional panes reduces the conductivity by restricting airflow.
"Should we" is the better question. They are a sovereign nation and wishes should be respected. How you would you feel about a bunch of outsiders pushing their agenda on your fellow citizens, which is exactly what this entails if you boil it down to the basics?
'Internet' isn't a basic human right.
Trolling?
Qaddaffi is a poster child for war crimes. The international community has an obligation to oppose, subvert, and eventually put to trial leaders who send armies to fire upon unarmed citizens.
This isn't some game. This isn't something that can be rationalized and boiled down to basics unless you have the express goal of sticking your head in the sand. If you believe the few western news reports trickling out of the country, people have been routinely slaughtered and the war crimes covered up.
And maybe you haven't been paying attention to the things Qaddaffi has already done? Seriously, take a few minutes to read up. This man is a terrorist who is hell-bent on repressing his citizens as well as attacking the rest of the non-Arab world. Moreover, unlike many other leaders, he isn't all talk: he has committed substantial violent acts both domestically and internationally. This man needs to be removed from power and tried in The Hague and leave the Libyans to select their own desired form of government. Again, this is not a domestic Libyan issue, this is an international issue.
I have a few friends in high finance. They're well-educated folk. So when they use certain terminology within the realm of finance, it makes them cringe because they know it's wrong, but the rest of the knuckle-draggers dont know the difference between a made-up Greek letter ("vega"... no I'm being serious, look it up; it has to do with the volatility of options pricing) and a real one. When milliseconds are too slow, nanoseconds aren't a big enough improvement, they need to go one step beyond! No one with a brain is going to seriously consider speeding up by six orders of magnitude to the ludicrous level of picoseconds, but abuse of terminology is rife within the financial field.
The backscatter system is designed to penetrate the outer layer of the skin.
Close. The backscatter system is designed to collect photons that are scattered from the outer layer of the body. The ones that keep on going clear through or are absorbed don't matter. But you can see lung and bone shadows in even the officially released photos, so we know the photons are going deeper than the skin before being scattered.
No level of x-ray exposure is safe. Nothing above zero. Each exposure carries a certain risk, and the risk accumulates.
Don't forget that the adaptation of Blade Runner from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? involved tossing huge swaths of the story away, and substantially rewriting the rest. Where is the mood dialing? The Mercerism? The vet service? The artificial pets and envy of owners with real ones? The lead codpieces? The intrigue at the police station? The ludicrously weak plot device that there's a shadow police body entirely of replicants? Deckard's hallucinatory escape outside the city?
Blade Runner was a huge improvement over the original story.
So, while the current Hollywood Studio greed is fixated on repeating the same story in diluted form to appease the masses and will, in all probability just create more unwatchable dren, it's not like the original Blade Runner didn't rape the story it was based on, to use the parent poster's terminology. However, given the story that another posted suggested is the basis for the sequel that uses a weak device to introduce characters that act and look exactly like characters from the original movie (why do anything original and interesting when repeating the same thing will make money?), I'm betting the parent poster is correct: we're going to get more swill.
Again, I'm sure the SSD drive manufacturers have looked at this problem very closely, I'm just concerned that's all.
So, look up the specs, then. Current write cycles are over 1,000,000 per cell. Modern wear-leveling algorithms combined with extra blocks and ECC mean that it's more likely that some other component will fail before your SSD will.
Besides, if you were really concerned, and not just trolling, wouldn't you have the same issues with your hard drive, too? Doubly so in a laptop?
This is the most sage comment thus far. I would add the following to it.
Every single successful academician that I know -- and I mean every single one -- went to lots of conferences when they were young. Most still go to conferences, but typically become more selective as they become more successful. Since I'm fortunate enough to have made it to upper-end institutions, that biases my sample, but the correlation is still 100%.
When I was young, my professor didn't have much of a travel budget. Hell, until I became the head of a lab, none of my supervisors had much of a travel budget. I typically was able to get funding, often just partial, for one domestic US conference per year. I like to travel, so I spent my own money, even going into debt, to attend one or two other conferences per year as well, usually one in Europe and one somewhere in the US. I got to meet many, many people. Giving presentations at these conferences was important in developing my communication skills. As a result, I now get four or five invitations to speak at international conferences per year.
And that's arguably the second most important reason for going to a conference, after networking. As a scientist, assuming you are thinking of the academic track, you have to sell yourself and your research. Only a very small handful of scientists ever do anything so remarkable that they become famous just for that one thing. Most of the rest become well-known because of hard work at becoming well-known. That includes doing good work, but it also, importantly, involves building a reputation for good work. Reputations are built upon interactions that display skill and knowledge. You, as a scientist, are building a brand -- of yourself. Being able to communicate well, and having the skill to do so, is a vital part of that. Attending conferences, with the necessary preparations, works on those skills.
Going to a conference to present work is not just taking a mini-vacation. Unless you want to waste your time and money. It involves writing a carefully-thought-out presentation, creating good slides or a poster, and practicing over and over again until you can do it in your sleep. You will find, at conferences, that most people do not do this, and the difference between a good presentation and a poor one is not just striking, but feeds back into all of the issues above, including reputation. You should reserve about a week to create your presentation, be it a slide or poster, and then several days to practice it. Give it to colleagues and friends, and tell them to be brutal. Take their feedback to heart. Re-write. Give another practice talk. Repeat.
Are conferences worthwhile? Absolutely. Will you see the results right away? Probably not.
BTW, a conference publication isn't considered a "journal" publication, and doesn't confer the same status. Conferences are where the work gets done: people present developing ideas and get feedback on them.
Not in CS. In Computer Science, it is far harder, traditionally, to get a submission accepted for presentation at a conference, along with later publication in the proceedings, than it is to get a submission in a journal.
Microprocessors have become small enough that flexibility isn't necessary for the applications cited in the summary. I can't really think of any situations where a flexible microprocessor would be more appropriate than a suitably small one...
That certainly seems to make sense. The only thing I wonder about is making electrical connections to things that are that small, either to attach power, or to attach sensors. My understanding of the flexible circuitry field is that one of the main goals is not just flexibility, but printability, so that the NRE and manufacturing and NRE costs are very, very low. Building circuitry with sensors made out of low-cost ink printed on paper or an inexpensive plastic means the same hulking printers used to make labels can be used to make smart labels. But since it's not my field, I might just be full of hooey.
I assume this isn't predicting, but setting off alarm bells as soon as possible?
The summary would certainly suggest that (emphasis added): In California's Coachella Valley around Palm Springs, a state-of-the-art, first-in-the-world earthquake early warning system in now installed and operational.
If the alarm sounds and the teacher says "Hmmm, let's see if it's really a big one before taking cover." then it's lost some of it's usefulness.
Heck, it's lost all of its usefulness in that case. But don't forget that schools will have drills, too, with response compliance assessments, so the suggested scenario of wait-and-see is unlikely.
* You duck down in your chair to grab a pencil you drop * You lean over to open a desk drawer
[ etc. ]
A more sensible meme would be to lock the machine when the user steps away instead of logging them out, to be sure. Hopefully the sensors are accurate. Even then, there are many cases (within the designed use case) where this probably isn't appropriate or useful. Biometric logins/unlocking would likely be a bare minimum additional component, IMO.
Nearly every OMGITCANTPOSSIBLYWORK scenario suggested above can be fixed by proper adjustment of various sensitivity and timeout settings. And, if you read the article, it can lock the system, or log out, or potentially anything you want it to do. Why automatically assume that the people who designed such a thing are incompetent boobs?
"The SonarLocID Keyboard connects to a PC via USB and can be configured via an included programming application that allows the user to program custom keystrokes as well as delays and a sequence to lock the computer when the user walks away."
Sounds like they already thought of all the scenarios above. And I bet if you have a fingerprint swipe, it could be made to work with that, too.
A pretty large majority of the article went into arguing that just because Google lacks good social networking tools, it is declining. What kind of logic is that?
Especially since Google owns Orkut, a, um, social networking site.
And, actually, it was one of the first, and I understand it to be big in India and Brazil. According to the Wikipedia article on Orkut, the social networking site that the author of the OP's article is ignoring is flirting with the top 100 most visited sites in the world.
The conclusion? Poor journalism. Again. What is up with Taco these days? He knows better.
Please point out exactly where in the article the issue of uptime is raised. I fail to see it. Many others have also suggested that long uptimes ("e-pene" as one poster put it) is the reason for avoiding reboots. There has been no such suggestion that I could find. I authored a post to the previous thread about the origins of the Unix attitude against reboots that was highly rated and nowhere in that post, or in the follow-on replies, was uptime ever considered an issue.
The issue -- the only issue -- is interrupting service to many users. Modern machines that serve tens to thousands of users cannot be brought down willy-nilly without incurring the wrath of those users, and rightfully so. Bringing down a system because the sysadmin was too lazy to understand what the problem was is inexcusable. The sysadmin's job is to keep the service running. When there's one user, such as in QA, or a single-user desktop, reboots can happen at will. When there are many many users, such as in a production box, file server, or similar, reboots should never be used as a problem-solving tool.
So let go of the old, dead horse about uptime bragging rights. A correct, properly maintained Unix system does not need to be rebooted except under highly unusual circumstances. The reason that Windows boxes are treated differently is because Windows is a comparatively new OS that started out life as a one-seat system whereas, paraphrasing what I wrote in an earlier post, Unix and its intellectual antecedents had been running multi-seat systems for nigh on three decades before Windows started doing that. It's fact, not being better or worse, and the Unix and Windows cultures have grown around those two views.
NatGeo (assuming the video is not a fake) reporting on something gives it serious credence. The Skin Gun looks like it's absolutely amazing, and will nearly eliminate many of the problems faced by many burn victims.
Screw printing skin with an inkjet (which is kind of a silly idea anyway since skin is in no way a nice flat plane, and you really want to be printing directly onto the body which is also essentially never planar, and the operating distance for inkjet printers is really, really small, making hand-holding a problem, and subject movement a bigger problem), the Skin Gun is it.
However, the Skin Gun apparently can currently only treat 2nd degree burns.
Thinking that gcc produces well-optimized code is a nice sunny view to have, but does not align with reality in my experience. I, too, used to think that gcc was the best compiler out there, mostly because I had not done any head-to-head comparisons, and was echoing what everyone else said.
Then, I had to write some high-performance C code. I tried everything I could get my hands on. I used every source code transformation and technique I knew. For this application, the more performance I could wring out of the application, the better. Microsoft's C compiler won hands-down on producing the fastest code and without my needing to use crazy constructs to hand-optimize the source. I spent about a week trying to use tricks to produce better-performing code than straight simple, easy-to-understand C did, and ultimately failed. The folks in their compiler group are very, very good. The speed advantage compared to other compilers was about a factor of 2x, if I recall.
Now my experience is for one very specific application that had a lot of number crunching and a lot of memory accesses, and one application does not prove very much. But gcc is, in my experience, only OK.
In Massachusetts (yes, I know, different state, different laws), if you, as a driver, are unable to view the road and continue to operate your vehicle, you are liable for what happens. If, for example, your windshield is covered in ice and you have a head-on collision, it's your fault. If the sun is in your eyes and you don't slow down to avoid hitting things, your fault if it happens. If you have sunglasses on at night and can't see the pedestrian crossing the road, your fault. If you turn your head to look for merging traffic and rear-end someone at a stop sign, your fault.
But, then there's another pesky idea: if you as a driver are not operating your vehicle such that you cannot stop for stationary objects whether they are in the road or not, then you are operating a vehicle in an unsafe manner, and everything is your fault.
From what we know of this case, and assuming IL has similar laws to MA, the driver is going to have a very hard time avoiding both criminal and civil charges.
You generally don't hire an admin to take care of your home desktop install. And even then there's suspend which only takes up a few watts of power.
Exactly. I am the SA at home. And I put my machines to sleep when I'm not there.
Turns out I am the SA in my lab as well, but those machines stay up 24/7 so that I can remotely access them, because some experiments run for a few days as a time, and so that other automated processes (virus scans, backups, etc.) can happen at off hours. Machines that don't meet those requirements get turned off when not in use for an extended period.
The Windows boxes get rebooted pretty regularly (like before any experiment), but the Linux boxes stay up most of the time.
Considering the number or patches and updates that come out on a regular basis, it really isn't a bad habit to reboot weekly. Besides, you collapse your expectations that everything is working correctly on an actualized understanding that everything is working correctly every time you do a change in your environment that has any unforeseen potential of impacting your machines.
And this is the reason that in the old days, the SAs would perform preventive maintenance (PM) at some ungodly hour like 6am Sunday mornings when absolutely no one else would be using the system. After suffering from repeated complaints about mid-day reboots on servers at my old place of employment, the SAs there (all comparatively young fellows without any mainframe experience) finally got it, and started doing their PM over the weekend. Yes, it meant they had to give up some time on a Saturday or Sunday to come in to work for a while, but the total pain was much less than what they suffered if the same actions happened at, say, 3pm during the week. Once they changed their policy, I, as a user, made it very clear that it was appreciated.
Though if we're going this route, I continue to back the opinion that "shitload" be considered a unit of measure;)
My preferred unit in that scale is the metric butt-load, similar in spirit to the long ton which is the forcing of an imperial unit into a metric approximation by adding an additional layer of arbitrary scaling but still not quite getting it right.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article, "the lava tubes offer a dust-free environment and adapting them for human use requires minimal construction. "
I think someone's been drinking too much of the strong coffee if they can conclude anything about dust levels in a lunar cave without having put any telemetry into the hole, or think that adapting any natural structure on the moon requires minimal construction without having actually imaged the fine-scale condition of the rock.
You can fix that problem by using multiple sheets of glass separated by air and different kinds of glass.
The reason multi-glazed windows are more thermally efficient is because you are restricting convective airflow. Glass is a reasonably good thermal conductor (although not an excellent one) compared to many other materials. The reason that even well-sealed windows are a heat conductor is because there is free airflow on both sides of the glass. Adding additional panes reduces the conductivity by restricting airflow.
"Should we" is the better question. They are a sovereign nation and wishes should be respected. How you would you feel about a bunch of outsiders pushing their agenda on your fellow citizens, which is exactly what this entails if you boil it down to the basics?
'Internet' isn't a basic human right.
Trolling?
Qaddaffi is a poster child for war crimes. The international community has an obligation to oppose, subvert, and eventually put to trial leaders who send armies to fire upon unarmed citizens.
This isn't some game. This isn't something that can be rationalized and boiled down to basics unless you have the express goal of sticking your head in the sand. If you believe the few western news reports trickling out of the country, people have been routinely slaughtered and the war crimes covered up.
And maybe you haven't been paying attention to the things Qaddaffi has already done? Seriously, take a few minutes to read up. This man is a terrorist who is hell-bent on repressing his citizens as well as attacking the rest of the non-Arab world. Moreover, unlike many other leaders, he isn't all talk: he has committed substantial violent acts both domestically and internationally. This man needs to be removed from power and tried in The Hague and leave the Libyans to select their own desired form of government. Again, this is not a domestic Libyan issue, this is an international issue.
Egad, yes, brainfart. Nine orders of magnitude!
I have a few friends in high finance. They're well-educated folk. So when they use certain terminology within the realm of finance, it makes them cringe because they know it's wrong, but the rest of the knuckle-draggers dont know the difference between a made-up Greek letter ("vega" ... no I'm being serious, look it up; it has to do with the volatility of options pricing) and a real one. When milliseconds are too slow, nanoseconds aren't a big enough improvement, they need to go one step beyond! No one with a brain is going to seriously consider speeding up by six orders of magnitude to the ludicrous level of picoseconds, but abuse of terminology is rife within the financial field.
The backscatter system is designed to penetrate the outer layer of the skin.
Close. The backscatter system is designed to collect photons that are scattered from the outer layer of the body. The ones that keep on going clear through or are absorbed don't matter. But you can see lung and bone shadows in even the officially released photos, so we know the photons are going deeper than the skin before being scattered.
No level of x-ray exposure is safe. Nothing above zero. Each exposure carries a certain risk, and the risk accumulates.
Don't forget that the adaptation of Blade Runner from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? involved tossing huge swaths of the story away, and substantially rewriting the rest. Where is the mood dialing? The Mercerism? The vet service? The artificial pets and envy of owners with real ones? The lead codpieces? The intrigue at the police station? The ludicrously weak plot device that there's a shadow police body entirely of replicants? Deckard's hallucinatory escape outside the city?
Blade Runner was a huge improvement over the original story.
So, while the current Hollywood Studio greed is fixated on repeating the same story in diluted form to appease the masses and will, in all probability just create more unwatchable dren, it's not like the original Blade Runner didn't rape the story it was based on, to use the parent poster's terminology. However, given the story that another posted suggested is the basis for the sequel that uses a weak device to introduce characters that act and look exactly like characters from the original movie (why do anything original and interesting when repeating the same thing will make money?), I'm betting the parent poster is correct: we're going to get more swill.
I miss when a 266 MHz CPU and 64 MB of RAM was enough to do serious work under Linux.
I miss RHL 6.2. That was as stable and clean an OS as I've used.
Again, I'm sure the SSD drive manufacturers have looked at this problem very closely, I'm just concerned that's all.
So, look up the specs, then. Current write cycles are over 1,000,000 per cell. Modern wear-leveling algorithms combined with extra blocks and ECC mean that it's more likely that some other component will fail before your SSD will.
Besides, if you were really concerned, and not just trolling, wouldn't you have the same issues with your hard drive, too? Doubly so in a laptop?
This is the most sage comment thus far. I would add the following to it.
Every single successful academician that I know -- and I mean every single one -- went to lots of conferences when they were young. Most still go to conferences, but typically become more selective as they become more successful. Since I'm fortunate enough to have made it to upper-end institutions, that biases my sample, but the correlation is still 100%.
When I was young, my professor didn't have much of a travel budget. Hell, until I became the head of a lab, none of my supervisors had much of a travel budget. I typically was able to get funding, often just partial, for one domestic US conference per year. I like to travel, so I spent my own money, even going into debt, to attend one or two other conferences per year as well, usually one in Europe and one somewhere in the US. I got to meet many, many people. Giving presentations at these conferences was important in developing my communication skills. As a result, I now get four or five invitations to speak at international conferences per year.
And that's arguably the second most important reason for going to a conference, after networking. As a scientist, assuming you are thinking of the academic track, you have to sell yourself and your research. Only a very small handful of scientists ever do anything so remarkable that they become famous just for that one thing. Most of the rest become well-known because of hard work at becoming well-known. That includes doing good work, but it also, importantly, involves building a reputation for good work. Reputations are built upon interactions that display skill and knowledge. You, as a scientist, are building a brand -- of yourself. Being able to communicate well, and having the skill to do so, is a vital part of that. Attending conferences, with the necessary preparations, works on those skills.
Going to a conference to present work is not just taking a mini-vacation. Unless you want to waste your time and money. It involves writing a carefully-thought-out presentation, creating good slides or a poster, and practicing over and over again until you can do it in your sleep. You will find, at conferences, that most people do not do this, and the difference between a good presentation and a poor one is not just striking, but feeds back into all of the issues above, including reputation. You should reserve about a week to create your presentation, be it a slide or poster, and then several days to practice it. Give it to colleagues and friends, and tell them to be brutal. Take their feedback to heart. Re-write. Give another practice talk. Repeat.
Are conferences worthwhile? Absolutely. Will you see the results right away? Probably not.
BTW, a conference publication isn't considered a "journal" publication, and doesn't confer the same status. Conferences are where the work gets done: people present developing ideas and get feedback on them.
Not in CS. In Computer Science, it is far harder, traditionally, to get a submission accepted for presentation at a conference, along with later publication in the proceedings, than it is to get a submission in a journal.
Microprocessors have become small enough that flexibility isn't necessary for the applications cited in the summary. I can't really think of any situations where a flexible microprocessor would be more appropriate than a suitably small one...
That certainly seems to make sense. The only thing I wonder about is making electrical connections to things that are that small, either to attach power, or to attach sensors. My understanding of the flexible circuitry field is that one of the main goals is not just flexibility, but printability, so that the NRE and manufacturing and NRE costs are very, very low. Building circuitry with sensors made out of low-cost ink printed on paper or an inexpensive plastic means the same hulking printers used to make labels can be used to make smart labels. But since it's not my field, I might just be full of hooey.
I assume this isn't predicting, but setting off alarm bells as soon as possible?
The summary would certainly suggest that (emphasis added):
In California's Coachella Valley around Palm Springs, a state-of-the-art, first-in-the-world earthquake early warning system in now installed and operational.
If the alarm sounds and the teacher says "Hmmm, let's see if it's really a big one before taking cover." then it's lost some of it's usefulness.
Heck, it's lost all of its usefulness in that case. But don't forget that schools will have drills, too, with response compliance assessments, so the suggested scenario of wait-and-see is unlikely.
BZZZZT Game over, thanks for playing. ;-)
And that's why I check incompetent each and every time I use the word.
Wow, that is potentially (highly) irritating.
Imagine:
* You duck down in your chair to grab a pencil you drop
* You lean over to open a desk drawer
[ etc. ]
A more sensible meme would be to lock the machine when the user steps away instead of logging them out, to be sure. Hopefully the sensors are accurate. Even then, there are many cases (within the designed use case) where this probably isn't appropriate or useful. Biometric logins/unlocking would likely be a bare minimum additional component, IMO.
Nearly every OMGITCANTPOSSIBLYWORK scenario suggested above can be fixed by proper adjustment of various sensitivity and timeout settings. And, if you read the article, it can lock the system, or log out, or potentially anything you want it to do. Why automatically assume that the people who designed such a thing are incompetent boobs?
"The SonarLocID Keyboard connects to a PC via USB and can be configured via an included programming application that allows the user to program custom keystrokes as well as delays and a sequence to lock the computer when the user walks away."
Sounds like they already thought of all the scenarios above. And I bet if you have a fingerprint swipe, it could be made to work with that, too.
A pretty large majority of the article went into arguing that just because Google lacks good social networking tools, it is declining. What kind of logic is that?
Especially since Google owns Orkut, a, um, social networking site.
http://www.orkut.com/About.aspx
And, actually, it was one of the first, and I understand it to be big in India and Brazil. According to the Wikipedia article on Orkut, the social networking site that the author of the OP's article is ignoring is flirting with the top 100 most visited sites in the world.
The conclusion? Poor journalism. Again. What is up with Taco these days? He knows better.
Please point out exactly where in the article the issue of uptime is raised. I fail to see it. Many others have also suggested that long uptimes ("e-pene" as one poster put it) is the reason for avoiding reboots. There has been no such suggestion that I could find. I authored a post to the previous thread about the origins of the Unix attitude against reboots that was highly rated and nowhere in that post, or in the follow-on replies, was uptime ever considered an issue.
The issue -- the only issue -- is interrupting service to many users. Modern machines that serve tens to thousands of users cannot be brought down willy-nilly without incurring the wrath of those users, and rightfully so. Bringing down a system because the sysadmin was too lazy to understand what the problem was is inexcusable. The sysadmin's job is to keep the service running. When there's one user, such as in QA, or a single-user desktop, reboots can happen at will. When there are many many users, such as in a production box, file server, or similar, reboots should never be used as a problem-solving tool.
So let go of the old, dead horse about uptime bragging rights. A correct, properly maintained Unix system does not need to be rebooted except under highly unusual circumstances. The reason that Windows boxes are treated differently is because Windows is a comparatively new OS that started out life as a one-seat system whereas, paraphrasing what I wrote in an earlier post, Unix and its intellectual antecedents had been running multi-seat systems for nigh on three decades before Windows started doing that. It's fact, not being better or worse, and the Unix and Windows cultures have grown around those two views.
So, if the estimate of habitable is off by two orders of magnitude, that's still millions of planets.
Not one or two planets.
Millions of them.
NatGeo (assuming the video is not a fake) reporting on something gives it serious credence. The Skin Gun looks like it's absolutely amazing, and will nearly eliminate many of the problems faced by many burn victims.
Screw printing skin with an inkjet (which is kind of a silly idea anyway since skin is in no way a nice flat plane, and you really want to be printing directly onto the body which is also essentially never planar, and the operating distance for inkjet printers is really, really small, making hand-holding a problem, and subject movement a bigger problem), the Skin Gun is it.
However, the Skin Gun apparently can currently only treat 2nd degree burns.
well-optimized (gcc -O3) C code
Thinking that gcc produces well-optimized code is a nice sunny view to have, but does not align with reality in my experience. I, too, used to think that gcc was the best compiler out there, mostly because I had not done any head-to-head comparisons, and was echoing what everyone else said.
Then, I had to write some high-performance C code. I tried everything I could get my hands on. I used every source code transformation and technique I knew. For this application, the more performance I could wring out of the application, the better. Microsoft's C compiler won hands-down on producing the fastest code and without my needing to use crazy constructs to hand-optimize the source. I spent about a week trying to use tricks to produce better-performing code than straight simple, easy-to-understand C did, and ultimately failed. The folks in their compiler group are very, very good. The speed advantage compared to other compilers was about a factor of 2x, if I recall.
Now my experience is for one very specific application that had a lot of number crunching and a lot of memory accesses, and one application does not prove very much. But gcc is, in my experience, only OK.
In Massachusetts (yes, I know, different state, different laws), if you, as a driver, are unable to view the road and continue to operate your vehicle, you are liable for what happens. If, for example, your windshield is covered in ice and you have a head-on collision, it's your fault. If the sun is in your eyes and you don't slow down to avoid hitting things, your fault if it happens. If you have sunglasses on at night and can't see the pedestrian crossing the road, your fault. If you turn your head to look for merging traffic and rear-end someone at a stop sign, your fault.
But, then there's another pesky idea: if you as a driver are not operating your vehicle such that you cannot stop for stationary objects whether they are in the road or not, then you are operating a vehicle in an unsafe manner, and everything is your fault.
From what we know of this case, and assuming IL has similar laws to MA, the driver is going to have a very hard time avoiding both criminal and civil charges.
You generally don't hire an admin to take care of your home desktop install. And even then there's suspend which only takes up a few watts of power.
Exactly. I am the SA at home. And I put my machines to sleep when I'm not there.
Turns out I am the SA in my lab as well, but those machines stay up 24/7 so that I can remotely access them, because some experiments run for a few days as a time, and so that other automated processes (virus scans, backups, etc.) can happen at off hours. Machines that don't meet those requirements get turned off when not in use for an extended period.
The Windows boxes get rebooted pretty regularly (like before any experiment), but the Linux boxes stay up most of the time.
Considering the number or patches and updates that come out on a regular basis, it really isn't a bad habit to reboot weekly. Besides, you collapse your expectations that everything is working correctly on an actualized understanding that everything is working correctly every time you do a change in your environment that has any unforeseen potential of impacting your machines.
And this is the reason that in the old days, the SAs would perform preventive maintenance (PM) at some ungodly hour like 6am Sunday mornings when absolutely no one else would be using the system. After suffering from repeated complaints about mid-day reboots on servers at my old place of employment, the SAs there (all comparatively young fellows without any mainframe experience) finally got it, and started doing their PM over the weekend. Yes, it meant they had to give up some time on a Saturday or Sunday to come in to work for a while, but the total pain was much less than what they suffered if the same actions happened at, say, 3pm during the week. Once they changed their policy, I, as a user, made it very clear that it was appreciated.
Though if we're going this route, I continue to back the opinion that "shitload" be considered a unit of measure ;)
My preferred unit in that scale is the metric butt-load, similar in spirit to the long ton which is the forcing of an imperial unit into a metric approximation by adding an additional layer of arbitrary scaling but still not quite getting it right.