Hell, my regular health insurance is ~US $415 per month for me, my wife and daughter
Welcome to the world of different taxation systems - I assume you're from the US since you pay for health insurance. Health insurance is FREE in my country, but of course that just means we pay for it with taxes (I really hate that, BTW). The insurance described is merely an additional insurance to provide for loss of wages due to injuries, not treatment of the injury in the first place - this is covered by the taxmoney used to provide health insurance. So the amounts are not really comparable with the given premises.
I've got one of those insurances - it's called a "Loss of Work Ability" insurance where I come from, and covers up to 6 months in hospital/retraining at full pay, and a price-index regulated income compensation ad infinitum if it turns out I'm no longer able to work at all does to my injuries. This pretty much boils down to me forever getting a pay similar to my current not-so-bad pay. After retirement I'm not sure what happens, but you'd better have that taken care of anyway.
It's looks expensive at ~USD70/month, but it's all tax deductable(sp?), so it boils down to ~USD30/month, which is not all that much actually. And yes, I *AM* actually taxed that heavily:-(
Barring incompetant wiring, it's faster and more reliable
That's the main issue here - incompetence. How many Joe Sixpacks do you know who has the slightest clue about Cat5/Cat6 cables, crossover/straight issues, hubs, switches, routers, BNC vs. RJ-45 (which looks a lot like an RJ-11 phone plug) and so on. I'd trust most/.'ers to know that (almost) by heart, but just about no-one else. I know that you don't need most of that for simple filesharing, but that's knowledge I've acquired simply because I'm a - well - geek. To the average guy the amount of cabling required for a standard PC (Macs are slightly better, but not much) is horrifying, and adding another cable won't help. It's not so much that ~5m of cross-linked Cat6 with RJ-45 plugs is hard to plug in, but if you THINK you have ZERO knowledge of it, you're not even going to try. At least if you belong to the ignorant masses outside places like this forum, and those are the EXACT same people whom we (while chuckling) tell to buy a Mac 'cause they're so damn easy to use...
I agree with the rest of your post though - good one.
I sometimes wish they would follow me, and when I stop, and they get out of the car to yell at me for 'cutting them off', I could point at those funny looking glass things above my break lights.
"You see those? You know, when those things are flashing, that means I'm going to change lanes. You will usually get a warning. 20-30 seconds should be enough. Trust me, those just aren't there to make pretty flashing lights for your amusment, they mean something!"
I'm pretty sure if you ever tried that you'd get punched in the face (or worse) for being a smartass...
that they didn't factor in Open Source. It would have lessened their argument, and it's bad enough as is. Besides, piracy figures from the BSA and similar bodies have always been - at most - one notch above reading tea-leaves.
To ensure that things get really complicated, some of us crazy europeans use a comma to seperate real and fractional parts and a DOT to seperate groups of digits (thousands, millions etc.). So where I come from (Denmark), 4500 could be written as 4.500, which I'm sure would confuse the American audience far more than 4 500. It's going out of style though - most young people don't seperate groups of digits in ordinary numbers, probably because of the confusion it often causes. We're a small country with limited resources for localization, so a lot of stuff used in higher education is foreign (typically anglo-american), where the 4,500.0 style is rampant. So to deal with that, we take away the grouping seperators and use a comma or dot interchangably as a real/frational seperator.
Confused? You should be - we are:-)
Development tools?
on
Qt vs MFC
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As others have mentioned, the article is really badly written. I cannot comment on the merits of Qt, since I've done practically nothing with it. But I've done my fair share of MFC, and it's quite ugly - I find it hard to believe that *anything* solving a comparable problem can be much worse.
But my main point is this: When dealing with stuff like MFC you need to factor in the quite helpful development tools that the Visual Studio suite consists of. I have yet to see something of that quality from anyone else (except possibly Borland), and so far I've found only KDevelop to be reasonably useful. The MFC library (I flatly refuse to call it an object model) is ugly, but to some extent this is ameliorated by the IDE. I *know* this is not the way it should be done, but it's there and it DOES help...
... which all assumes your proposed game architecture sends the frames of video out to the clients.. which would be nice if you're running 386's for client machines.. its much easier to get the client to render the images..:)
You're right, of course - no disagreement what so ever. I just answered the question (as I understood it, anyway).
[snip] but full-res PAL video is 720x576 is in size, so adjust the math accordingly
I don't know about you, but I'd like better resolution on my monitor than 720x576. Even 720x576 requires a LOT of bandwidth (too lazy to do the math right now - the sun is shining:-) though, so I guess streaming/compression will remain necessary for a LONG time yet...
Let's do the math:
1280x1024 uses 1.25MPixels (that's real Mega as in 2^20) at 32 bpp gives 48MBit/frame. Multiply that with 60 frames/second yields 2880 MBit/second, or just a tad short of 3 GBit/second. That sounds well within the limits, but consider this: Assuming that in a real network this 10 Gbps network will be relatively as efficient as 10 or 100 Mbps networks (some assumption, I know) are right now, you'll get between 30% and 50% of theoretical throughput as the sustained data rate, leaving you with a very narrow margin of bandwidth. And this assumes that you're the ONLY user on the network, which pretty much zeroes out the use for 1280x1024x32bpp, since this is bound to be needed for networked games, which tend to be less than funny when you're the only player.
But ignoring my assumptions and assuming 100% throughput sustained, you'll get 3 players max - still far less than you're likely to really want.
As you mention the article is in Danish, which suits me (a Dane) just fine:-). The article is kind of thin on specifics, but my guess is that the main issue has to do with them linking to (print) newspaper web-site articles. In Denmark we have a (somewhat dumb) law that forbids re-prints of newspaper articles without express permission of the newspaper involved. It's my GUESS that this is the real issue here, since no newspaper is going to give anyone the permission to reprint whatever they write, and no link-site is going to ask permission every time - they probably wouldn't get it anyway.
To me, this is yet another case of old-media vs. new-media, and this time around, the old-media won the first round, but the article states that it is highly likely to get appealed, and the Danish courts are no more computer-literate than any other courts, so the actual outcome is anyones guess.
Bill Gates reports that no-one will ever need more than 640KB of memory. Wait a minute - that was like two decades ago? Wow.
Re:I don't know if it's fair...
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 2
I think I know why (as I said in MY original post) - it's about exposure. No sport, however fun to watch, will amount to much without TV coverage, and the massive flux of money that accompanies TV coverage. And any sport that requires longer continuous timespans would be of lower interest to the TV networks, so the sport would receive less money for TV rights, and would therefore develop more slowly, further lowering it's interest to the general public, and so on and on and on...
I must admit to not knowing the least bit about baseball (and not caring about that), but the other types of big US television sports I enjoy occasionally - even US style football. I live in Europe, so that definately colors my outlook of things. I do know about American style commercial-driven television, though.
The ever-occuring wish from the US concerning soccer is about having more goals scored and more interruptions. To that effect they've suggested the following (no particular order implied):
bigger goals
no offside rule
four quarters
an overseeing referee with access to video information (much like US football, I guess)
Some more stuff that I've forgotten about:-)
With the exception of bigger goals, none of these would imply more goals scored. Removing the offside rule would seem to imply more goals, but in reality it would not. Here's why:
Imagine the recent World Cup finals had no offside rule. Consequently Brazil would camp Ronaldo out near the German penalty spot. To counter this the Germans would need to camp TWO defenders near him. Likewise, the Brazilians would need to park two guys way back down in their own defense. This would remove two general defenders from the ordinary defense, requiring a more defensive stance from midfielders, and so on. The effect would be to move the general layout of players BACKWARDS to take care of defense, which has turned out to be a very important factor in modern soccer. More so than offense, even though the bigger stars are attackers/goalscorers. The alternative would be a longer distance between defense and attackers (goal to goal style play), and that playing style has long been known to be rather inefficient. Fun to watch sometimes, but often looses you the game. You might ask where this rambling is heading: Moving players backwards is detrimental to goal-scoring, so removing the off-side rule is detrimental to goal-scoring, even though it sounds illogical. Suggesting it really tells of a lack of understanding for what makes the game "tick".
To sum it up - removing the offside rule as a "de jure" rule would create a "de facto" offside rule to defend against run-away chances, but needing more defensive players than now, which in my view would imply fewer goals scored.
Re:I don't know if it's fair...
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 2
The rules get tinkered with to please the TV networks. They tried to "tinker" with soccer for the US World Cup, wanting 4 quarters and interrupts to check fouls, all in the name of the almighty commercials. They failed (fortunately), but that could go a long way towards explaining the lousy TV coverage in the US. "What? 45 minutes with no commercials? We're not having that!".
So you see - it's all about COVERAGE, and soccer is admittedly not suited for mainstream american style commercial television. Or rather, it's the other way around, I think...
Weird Turbo Pascal 6.0 and I/O checking bug
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
Back in the days of DOS programming, I was really fond of Turbo Pascal 6.0 from Borland. So I used it a lot. A whole lot, actually.
It had two modes of operating in terms of I/O checking - either it would fire a run-time error (when using the {$I+} mode), or it would silently assign the variable IOResult an error code (when using the {$I-} mode). Weird system, but it worked - sort of. The problem was, that after exiting a piece of code operating in {$I-} mode, and NOT reading the IOResult variable before switching to code operating in {$I+} mode, whatever I/O operation you performed would fail for sure, and the run-time system would report the error as the one I didn't read out of IOResult. So I could get "File Seek Error" or something when simply printing a string on the screen.
That took me a *long* time figuring out, and after I had finally figured it out I contacted Borland, and they admitted that it was a bug on their part, but that they weren't going to fix it, since a simple workaround was to always assign the value of IOResult to a dummy variable upon leaving a {$I-} mode section. That helped me switch to C programming - thanks Borland:-)
Structured Computer Organization and compilers
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 2
Get "Structured Computer Organization" by A. Tanenbaum. It's a really good beginners book on how computers ACTUALLY work. No fancy stuff in it, just plain old basic knowledge of how it actually works, which is really necessary to truly understand what is going on. And some good book on how compilers really work - that way, you can far better grasp the reasons for lots of decisions made in the design of various compilers and programming languages. I find that I apply that knowledge pretty much *all the time*.
Firstly, why use a dual engine design? couldn't the gas engine simply be used to power a generator? it being more effiecent to tune a engine to run at a constant RPM. Just have a large electric motor and a small gas motor.
First of all, large electric motor => large batteries => expensive, heavy and takes a lot of space => not suitable for a normal-looking (or in this case, great looking) car. Because if it didn't have large batteries, the range would be very limited - the small gas engine would not be sufficient to keep the battery charged. This depends on HOW small we're talking here, but if it needs to be large enough to basically deliver all the power for the electric motor, it would be wiser, energy-wise, to forego the generator and have the gas engine run the wheels directly, since even the best generators have noticeable losses of energy.
Second, the idea is to have the two engines do what they each do best. The electric motor keeps it humming along the highways at cruise speed (where little power is needed), and the fuel one delivers the power to accelerate (where more power is needed). So you get the best from both worlds.
Finally, Why use petrol and not natural gas or some other alternative fuel, If you make the tank the standard size then you should be able to get around the "not having enough gas stations problem" which holds these types of fuel back? Since you aren't constantly filling the thing up.
The idea seems to be that using ordinary fuel will speed acceptance. No Joe Sixpack will want a natural gas engine if he THINKS there's not going to be a gas station within range wherever he goes. The hybrid car presented in the article is really just another fuel burner with a really impressive miles/gallon figure, so there is nothing more to worry about than what to do with the gas money saved:-)
Personally, I can't wait for this type of car to reach my country, where fuel is $1/liter. If only they'll put this style of engine in a more usable size car (say, one that can hold my family of soon-to-be 5 persons) and still reap the benefits of a hybrid engine. No wonder my country is the place in the world where 33 km/l VW Lupos are most popular:-)
Well, I *don't* want to inhale any more radioactive dust than I already do, thank you. Its one thing to have my surroundings contain sources of background radiation (I know about that), but I want to limit the amount that goes *inside* me. The reason is rather simple - the stuff inside me is likely to cause much more damage than the stuff outside me, since sensitive organs would get direct exposure to and particles otherwise absorbed by the skin.
[snip]why would you have any problem relying on a power source that wouldn't have to be replaced until your children retire?
This is not the problem - such a power source would be *so* useful. The problem is what the consequences are. Right now, nuclear power is handled reasonably well, since it's the realm of (mostly) highly trained professionals. Once Joe Sixpack starts handling nuclear equipment, *no one* knows what he'll do to it. And please don't tell me that it's his own problem, because *I* will be affected by him not handling it correctly.
They suggest making nuclear "batteries" to fuel - among other things - microscopic planes, and suggest using some radioactive isotope with a half-life (the physics thing, not the game:-) of 102 years. Heck, they apparently already built a power-source of this kind...
Just don't ask me to power my PDA with this stuff...
Seriously, you *may* pay a penalty for the compilers lack of intelligence when dealing with templates, but that is more than made up for by the fact that the STL code itself is *damn* good and efficient. My point is that you could probably hand-code better performing stuff yourself (I like to think that I can, anyway:-), but it would likely either take a long time or miss one crucial feature in most OO languages - strict type rule enforcement. Using the STL you get proven implementations AND type safety thanks to the template system (and the compiler, mind you) doing the tedious bits. Kind of like a tiny part of the huge library in Java, but with type safety C++-style.
Occasionally, I roll my own templates - not too often, but it happens. Great modelling feature for something that is practically the same except for the type involved.
Actually, STL (and to a large extent, templates themselves) represent a fundamentally different programming *paradigm* than OOP. It's called generic programming, and has quite a number of uses. And yes, I do agree that they make a good addition to OOP, but in reality they represent the inclusion of a whole other programming paradigm to C++. Personally, I think it's way cool and useful, albeit a bit complicated to use.
Slashdot Mirror
The Colt guy sounds a lot like Dirty Harry ("the most powerful handgun in the world" and so on). Scary.
Hell, my regular health insurance is ~US $415 per month for me, my wife and daughter
Welcome to the world of different taxation systems - I assume you're from the US since you pay for health insurance. Health insurance is FREE in my country, but of course that just means we pay for it with taxes (I really hate that, BTW). The insurance described is merely an additional insurance to provide for loss of wages due to injuries, not treatment of the injury in the first place - this is covered by the taxmoney used to provide health insurance. So the amounts are not really comparable with the given premises.
He should be really careful about hitting a wormhole up there. It happened to a guy named Crichton, and he got shot into a strange place with aliens.
What? Farscape ISN'T real? Bummer...
I've got one of those insurances - it's called a "Loss of Work Ability" insurance where I come from, and covers up to 6 months in hospital/retraining at full pay, and a price-index regulated income compensation ad infinitum if it turns out I'm no longer able to work at all does to my injuries. This pretty much boils down to me forever getting a pay similar to my current not-so-bad pay. After retirement I'm not sure what happens, but you'd better have that taken care of anyway. :-(
It's looks expensive at ~USD70/month, but it's all tax deductable(sp?), so it boils down to ~USD30/month, which is not all that much actually. And yes, I *AM* actually taxed that heavily
Barring incompetant wiring, it's faster and more reliable
That's the main issue here - incompetence. How many Joe Sixpacks do you know who has the slightest clue about Cat5/Cat6 cables, crossover/straight issues, hubs, switches, routers, BNC vs. RJ-45 (which looks a lot like an RJ-11 phone plug) and so on. I'd trust most /.'ers to know that (almost) by heart, but just about no-one else. I know that you don't need most of that for simple filesharing, but that's knowledge I've acquired simply because I'm a - well - geek. To the average guy the amount of cabling required for a standard PC (Macs are slightly better, but not much) is horrifying, and adding another cable won't help. It's not so much that ~5m of cross-linked Cat6 with RJ-45 plugs is hard to plug in, but if you THINK you have ZERO knowledge of it, you're not even going to try. At least if you belong to the ignorant masses outside places like this forum, and those are the EXACT same people whom we (while chuckling) tell to buy a Mac 'cause they're so damn easy to use...
I agree with the rest of your post though - good one.
I sometimes wish they would follow me, and when I stop, and they get out of the car to yell at me for 'cutting them off', I could point at those funny looking glass things above my break lights.
"You see those? You know, when those things are flashing, that means I'm going to change lanes. You will usually get a warning. 20-30 seconds should be enough. Trust me, those just aren't there to make pretty flashing lights for your amusment, they mean something!"
I'm pretty sure if you ever tried that you'd get punched in the face (or worse) for being a smartass...
that they didn't factor in Open Source. It would have lessened their argument, and it's bad enough as is. Besides, piracy figures from the BSA and similar bodies have always been - at most - one notch above reading tea-leaves.
To ensure that things get really complicated, some of us crazy europeans use a comma to seperate real and fractional parts and a DOT to seperate groups of digits (thousands, millions etc.). So where I come from (Denmark), 4500 could be written as 4.500, which I'm sure would confuse the American audience far more than 4 500. It's going out of style though - most young people don't seperate groups of digits in ordinary numbers, probably because of the confusion it often causes. We're a small country with limited resources for localization, so a lot of stuff used in higher education is foreign (typically anglo-american), where the 4,500.0 style is rampant. So to deal with that, we take away the grouping seperators and use a comma or dot interchangably as a real/frational seperator. :-)
Confused? You should be - we are
As others have mentioned, the article is really badly written. I cannot comment on the merits of Qt, since I've done practically nothing with it. But I've done my fair share of MFC, and it's quite ugly - I find it hard to believe that *anything* solving a comparable problem can be much worse.
But my main point is this: When dealing with stuff like MFC you need to factor in the quite helpful development tools that the Visual Studio suite consists of. I have yet to see something of that quality from anyone else (except possibly Borland), and so far I've found only KDevelop to be reasonably useful. The MFC library (I flatly refuse to call it an object model) is ugly, but to some extent this is ameliorated by the IDE. I *know* this is not the way it should be done, but it's there and it DOES help...
<envy>You went to a college with real *girls*?</envy> So that is possible, after all...
In 10 seconds flat I was thinking about the car "Greased Lightning" from "Grease"
You're right, of course - no disagreement what so ever. I just answered the question (as I understood it, anyway).
[snip] but full-res PAL video is 720x576 is in size, so adjust the math accordingly
I don't know about you, but I'd like better resolution on my monitor than 720x576. Even 720x576 requires a LOT of bandwidth (too lazy to do the math right now - the sun is shining :-) though, so I guess streaming/compression will remain necessary for a LONG time yet...
Let's do the math:
1280x1024 uses 1.25MPixels (that's real Mega as in 2^20) at 32 bpp gives 48MBit/frame. Multiply that with 60 frames/second yields 2880 MBit/second, or just a tad short of 3 GBit/second. That sounds well within the limits, but consider this: Assuming that in a real network this 10 Gbps network will be relatively as efficient as 10 or 100 Mbps networks (some assumption, I know) are right now, you'll get between 30% and 50% of theoretical throughput as the sustained data rate, leaving you with a very narrow margin of bandwidth. And this assumes that you're the ONLY user on the network, which pretty much zeroes out the use for 1280x1024x32bpp, since this is bound to be needed for networked games, which tend to be less than funny when you're the only player.
But ignoring my assumptions and assuming 100% throughput sustained, you'll get 3 players max - still far less than you're likely to really want.
As you mention the article is in Danish, which suits me (a Dane) just fine :-). The article is kind of thin on specifics, but my guess is that the main issue has to do with them linking to (print) newspaper web-site articles. In Denmark we have a (somewhat dumb) law that forbids re-prints of newspaper articles without express permission of the newspaper involved. It's my GUESS that this is the real issue here, since no newspaper is going to give anyone the permission to reprint whatever they write, and no link-site is going to ask permission every time - they probably wouldn't get it anyway.
To me, this is yet another case of old-media vs. new-media, and this time around, the old-media won the first round, but the article states that it is highly likely to get appealed, and the Danish courts are no more computer-literate than any other courts, so the actual outcome is anyones guess.
Bill Gates reports that no-one will ever need more than 640KB of memory. Wait a minute - that was like two decades ago? Wow.
I think I know why (as I said in MY original post) - it's about exposure. No sport, however fun to watch, will amount to much without TV coverage, and the massive flux of money that accompanies TV coverage. And any sport that requires longer continuous timespans would be of lower interest to the TV networks, so the sport would receive less money for TV rights, and would therefore develop more slowly, further lowering it's interest to the general public, and so on and on and on...
I must admit to not knowing the least bit about baseball (and not caring about that), but the other types of big US television sports I enjoy occasionally - even US style football. I live in Europe, so that definately colors my outlook of things. I do know about American style commercial-driven television, though.
The ever-occuring wish from the US concerning soccer is about having more goals scored and more interruptions. To that effect they've suggested the following (no particular order implied):
With the exception of bigger goals, none of these would imply more goals scored. Removing the offside rule would seem to imply more goals, but in reality it would not. Here's why:
Imagine the recent World Cup finals had no offside rule. Consequently Brazil would camp Ronaldo out near the German penalty spot. To counter this the Germans would need to camp TWO defenders near him. Likewise, the Brazilians would need to park two guys way back down in their own defense. This would remove two general defenders from the ordinary defense, requiring a more defensive stance from midfielders, and so on. The effect would be to move the general layout of players BACKWARDS to take care of defense, which has turned out to be a very important factor in modern soccer. More so than offense, even though the bigger stars are attackers/goalscorers. The alternative would be a longer distance between defense and attackers (goal to goal style play), and that playing style has long been known to be rather inefficient. Fun to watch sometimes, but often looses you the game. You might ask where this rambling is heading: Moving players backwards is detrimental to goal-scoring, so removing the off-side rule is detrimental to goal-scoring, even though it sounds illogical. Suggesting it really tells of a lack of understanding for what makes the game "tick".
To sum it up - removing the offside rule as a "de jure" rule would create a "de facto" offside rule to defend against run-away chances, but needing more defensive players than now, which in my view would imply fewer goals scored.
The rules get tinkered with to please the TV networks. They tried to "tinker" with soccer for the US World Cup, wanting 4 quarters and interrupts to check fouls, all in the name of the almighty commercials. They failed (fortunately), but that could go a long way towards explaining the lousy TV coverage in the US. "What? 45 minutes with no commercials? We're not having that!".
So you see - it's all about COVERAGE, and soccer is admittedly not suited for mainstream american style commercial television. Or rather, it's the other way around, I think...
Back in the days of DOS programming, I was really fond of Turbo Pascal 6.0 from Borland. So I used it a lot. A whole lot, actually.
It had two modes of operating in terms of I/O checking - either it would fire a run-time error (when using the {$I+} mode), or it would silently assign the variable IOResult an error code (when using the {$I-} mode). Weird system, but it worked - sort of. The problem was, that after exiting a piece of code operating in {$I-} mode, and NOT reading the IOResult variable before switching to code operating in {$I+} mode, whatever I/O operation you performed would fail for sure, and the run-time system would report the error as the one I didn't read out of IOResult. So I could get "File Seek Error" or something when simply printing a string on the screen.
That took me a *long* time figuring out, and after I had finally figured it out I contacted Borland, and they admitted that it was a bug on their part, but that they weren't going to fix it, since a simple workaround was to always assign the value of IOResult to a dummy variable upon leaving a {$I-} mode section. That helped me switch to C programming - thanks Borland :-)
Get "Structured Computer Organization" by A. Tanenbaum. It's a really good beginners book on how computers ACTUALLY work. No fancy stuff in it, just plain old basic knowledge of how it actually works, which is really necessary to truly understand what is going on. And some good book on how compilers really work - that way, you can far better grasp the reasons for lots of decisions made in the design of various compilers and programming languages. I find that I apply that knowledge pretty much *all the time*.
Anyway, just my DKK 0.17 worth...
Firstly, why use a dual engine design? couldn't the gas engine simply be used to power a generator? it being more effiecent to tune a engine to run at a constant RPM. Just have a large electric motor and a small gas motor.
First of all, large electric motor => large batteries => expensive, heavy and takes a lot of space => not suitable for a normal-looking (or in this case, great looking) car. Because if it didn't have large batteries, the range would be very limited - the small gas engine would not be sufficient to keep the battery charged. This depends on HOW small we're talking here, but if it needs to be large enough to basically deliver all the power for the electric motor, it would be wiser, energy-wise, to forego the generator and have the gas engine run the wheels directly, since even the best generators have noticeable losses of energy.
Second, the idea is to have the two engines do what they each do best. The electric motor keeps it humming along the highways at cruise speed (where little power is needed), and the fuel one delivers the power to accelerate (where more power is needed). So you get the best from both worlds.
Finally, Why use petrol and not natural gas or some other alternative fuel, If you make the tank the standard size then you should be able to get around the "not having enough gas stations problem" which holds these types of fuel back? Since you aren't constantly filling the thing up.
The idea seems to be that using ordinary fuel will speed acceptance. No Joe Sixpack will want a natural gas engine if he THINKS there's not going to be a gas station within range wherever he goes. The hybrid car presented in the article is really just another fuel burner with a really impressive miles/gallon figure, so there is nothing more to worry about than what to do with the gas money saved :-)
Personally, I can't wait for this type of car to reach my country, where fuel is $1/liter. If only they'll put this style of engine in a more usable size car (say, one that can hold my family of soon-to-be 5 persons) and still reap the benefits of a hybrid engine. No wonder my country is the place in the world where 33 km/l VW Lupos are most popular :-)
That's a really good argument for regulating *obesity*, since that is the root cause (by your argument).
Well, I *don't* want to inhale any more radioactive dust than I already do, thank you. Its one thing to have my surroundings contain sources of background radiation (I know about that), but I want to limit the amount that goes *inside* me. The reason is rather simple - the stuff inside me is likely to cause much more damage than the stuff outside me, since sensitive organs would get direct exposure to and particles otherwise absorbed by the skin.
[snip]why would you have any problem relying on a power source that wouldn't have to be replaced until your children retire?
This is not the problem - such a power source would be *so* useful. The problem is what the consequences are. Right now, nuclear power is handled reasonably well, since it's the realm of (mostly) highly trained professionals. Once Joe Sixpack starts handling nuclear equipment, *no one* knows what he'll do to it. And please don't tell me that it's his own problem, because *I* will be affected by him not handling it correctly.
They suggest making nuclear "batteries" to fuel - among other things - microscopic planes, and suggest using some radioactive isotope with a half-life (the physics thing, not the game :-) of 102 years. Heck, they apparently already built a power-source of this kind...
Just don't ask me to power my PDA with this stuff...
Uhm, compiler dependant?
Seriously, you *may* pay a penalty for the compilers lack of intelligence when dealing with templates, but that is more than made up for by the fact that the STL code itself is *damn* good and efficient. My point is that you could probably hand-code better performing stuff yourself (I like to think that I can, anyway :-), but it would likely either take a long time or miss one crucial feature in most OO languages - strict type rule enforcement. Using the STL you get proven implementations AND type safety thanks to the template system (and the compiler, mind you) doing the tedious bits. Kind of like a tiny part of the huge library in Java, but with type safety C++-style.
Occasionally, I roll my own templates - not too often, but it happens. Great modelling feature for something that is practically the same except for the type involved.
Actually, STL (and to a large extent, templates themselves) represent a fundamentally different programming *paradigm* than OOP. It's called generic programming, and has quite a number of uses. And yes, I do agree that they make a good addition to OOP, but in reality they represent the inclusion of a whole other programming paradigm to C++. Personally, I think it's way cool and useful, albeit a bit complicated to use.