1920p is not an actual resolution. You're thinking of 1080p, which is 1920x1080 in actual pixel dimensions (assuming 16:9 aspect ratio, which is near-universal for the ___p resolutions). While someone could theoretically make a 3412x1920 display, I do not know of any.
"Toggle case" is actually somewhat common, and not at all hard to find when it exists. I don't have any of my code-editing programs installed (home computer), but LibreOffice has Format->Change Case->tOGGLE cASE, right next to Sentence case, lower case, UPPER CASE, and Capitalize Every Word. Capitalized just like that, even, for ease of use.
Oh, and I'm not opposed to variable-width fonts for writing code - that is, after all, logical. But monospace text on the "where you are in the file" and "what mode you're in" and "labels for menu items" UI elements? That's kind of dumb, especially since that wastes *more* of your precious screen space.
PS: 80 characters? Give me ONE good reason why I should format my code to meet some ancient teletype-derived limit. Especially when everyone in my office is using at least one 1920x1080 or higher monitor.
Note to self: measure exactly the dimensions occupied by "IDE fluff" next time I'm at work, so I can have some numbers to shut up the "IDEs waste space!" idiots.
I would, in fact, argue that the current traffic laws *are* broken as currently used.
Speed limits are rigged to bring in ticket money. There's a section of highway I drive daily that's marked as 45MPH (with an advisory limit of 35)... that is completely safe at 65MPH+, and regularly driven at 70. I was once passed by a Mustang I swear was doing at least 120. There are no pedestrians (it's an overpass, no foot traffic), no sharp turns, no visibility problems, no oncoming traffic, nothing that makes such a low limit (for a highway) logical. And since it merges into 65MPH traffic after just a mile, I would argue that 35MPH is in fact completely *unsafe*.
It's also been demonstrated that traffic lights with red-light cameras are almost always set to LESS safe timings to boost revenue. As for "rolling stops", yeah, those shouldn't always be illegal as well. Go on and tell me that it's unsafe to slow down to a crawl long enough to see that there's NO ONE else on the road, then continue on. Blowing through a stop sign's obviously a Bad Thing, but I see no reason to come to a complete stop when I'm the only one on the road.
So if the laws that are being broken are primarily being broken in ways that harm no one, they are obviously in need of at least revision. Should we completely throw them out? Of course not. But should we improve them? Yes.
Your point about South Africa does have merit - obviously something as harmful as rape shouldn't be legalized (although I'll not that "33% of men" is only 16% of the population, so while your general idea has significant merit, your particular was perhaps poorly-chosen). I suppose one could argue that no man-made law can violate natural law, and thus you cannot legislate away the "right not to be raped" or other such natural rights. However, as copyright is clearly an artificial legal construct, I don't think natural law is particularly relevant.
You can hardly blame Emacs that programs which came years later chose different keyboard commands.
But I *can* blame it for not giving up and joining the crowd. The only program I regularly use that doesn't use the "Standard Shortcuts" is bash - and the only commands I need to know are ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k, ctrl/alt-f, ctrl/alt-b and ctrl-d
As for not being keyboard-centric rather than mouse-centric, some of us consider that a feature. Being created before mice has something to do with that of course but having to pull your hands off the keyboard to find the mouse is terribly slow. Yes, there's a bit of effort needed to learn enough to make running Emacs comfortable but when you're there you'll find how painful mice are. By the way, C-/ is only harder than C-z if your right hand is stuck over on the mouse.
Given a choice between "take my hand off the keyboard to click some menus" and "open a new terminal window, open the man page, and look up the keys I need", I'll take the former every time. Hell, given a choice between reading the manual *again* and just doing it *manually*, I'll probably pick the latter. Which makes all of Emacs' programmability and flexibility pointless.
And maybe it's just my years of gaming showing, but I have no problem switching one hand over to a mouse. It takes maybe a quarter of a second, about as long as it takes to write one word. It's far faster for a huge number of tasks - selecting text especially.
This country is, at least in theory, a democracy. If more people break that law than voted for the current president, doesn't that indicate that the majority of people don't believe that piracy is "bad"?
I feel like there should be some eloquent Latin quote for this... Ubi omnes sontes, nemo sontes? Did I get that right?
Actually, I am on a Mac right now. It's normally my backup desktop, but my primary machine's off in the Great/Dev/Null In The Sky and its replacement is taking forever to ship for some reason.
Emacs is a good idea buried under a pretty bad implementation.
My complaints are threefold: * Not mouse friendly. While keyboard shortcuts are awesome, they're very hard to use without practice. Having every option in a menu, somewhere, means that when I want to do some rare thing like "invert the case of these letters", I can just hit Edit->Characters->Toggle Case instead of checking the manual pages to find that it's Control-Meta-i or whatever. If I use that command often enough, I'll learn the shortcut. If not, I'll *never* learn it, and waste half my time in the man pages.
* Incompatible keyboard shortcuts. Most Windows and Mac, and even many Linux programs, all use the same basic keys for basic tasks. Ctrl-A means Select All. Ctrl-V is Paste. Mac just swaps Ctrl for Cmnd. For various historical reasons, Emacs uses completely different key shortcuts for everything. Which causes problems, because I'm never going to be *just* using Emacs. I'll be using Firefox, or SomethingOffice, or something else that almost definitely uses a different set of keys. Which means my mind will always be in "Ctrl-Z = Undo" mode, never "Ctrl-x u = Undo" mode (as an aside, does RMS never mis-type anything, because none of the three "undo" commands are easily entered - Ctrl-X U, Ctrl-/, and Ctrl-_ all suck).
* Ugly interface. Yeah, it's kind of petty, but Emacs looks like crap. If I'm going to be spending 8 hours a day in an editor, can it at least look like a program from *last* decade instead of the one before? (May have been fixed already - I gave up on Emacs years ago, maybe they finally discovered variable-width fonts)
Laptops? They barely had enough funding to get those for the teachers that needed them, never mind the students.
"HD" projectors (ie. 1024x768) and electronic whiteboards I'll concede to, but they're also actually useful - teachers can write notes on the board and just *save* them. Sure beats the old transparencies, in any case, which were usually so faded and yellowed that they were barely legible. And it also simultaneously replaces the crappy TV-on-a-cart used for any videos. Sometimes "wasteful" spending actually does the job better.
I still have my high school history textbook because they were literally used to death - they didn't even bother having students hand them back in, as they were finally being replaced with ones that post-dated Y2K. The pictures may once have been glossy, five years ago, but no longer. Same went for essentially every other textbook - the only "new" textbook I ever had was in Music History, and that was *paperback*.
Oh, and I didn't go to some crappy "ghetto" school. I went to literally one of the top schools in the state, a Governor's School, with strict entrance requirements (seriously, it was harder to get into that school than it was for me to *get* *a* *job*). Extremely bright teachers, bright students, but if *we* couldn't get that kind of funding, I shudder to imagine what the "regular schools" lived on.
Pre-emptively correcting myself before someone bitches at me: My "with the exception of that last one" was supposed to refer to the GOTO - I added Functions to the list while revising.
The only reason I can think that we can't introduce Algebra from the start is that it scares the heck out of the parents.
FTFY
A lot of the problem isn't the teachers - it's the dumbass parents who think "their babies" can't handle Shakespeare, or Al-gee-brah, or the history of any country that isn't 'MURICAH!
Yeah, you can probably blame a bit of it on the teachers, and on the students, and quite a bit on the government's continual lack of funding and constant barrage of tests and requirements, but a lot of the problem comes from the dumbass parents.
No, it won't be "irrelevant", because it's some of the most fundamental elements of programming.
Things I learned in that Logo class: variables and assignment IF-THEN-ELSE statements WHILE loops FOR loops GOTO Functions
With the exception of that last one, what, really, is different in modern programming? I still use every one of those, every day, except the goto.
The syntax is unimportant. The API is unimportant, as long as it's simple, and visual enough for a third-grader to "see" the results of his program. The important thing is teaching the basic programming elements. Hell, the important thing at that age is teaching that a computer is just a machine, that it's not some magic box. I've seen *adults* who can't grasp why a computer is doing what they told it instead of what they want.
Same - I was using Logo in 3rd grade, back in '96 or so. Loved that turtle.
Weirdly, programming disappeared from my curriculum until high school, when I was started on Java. Of course, I taught myself in the mean time - Basic, C++, Java, and so on. Tried teaching myself assembly - did not go so well.
I suspect that much of the reason people are "flocking" to smartphones and tablets isn't just because of the hardware, but because of the software. Desktop environments essentially "peaked" somewhere between 98 and XP. Everything since has either been copying those, copying those but with more shiny, or coming up with really retarded "innovations".
Mobile devices, like it or not, are doing things differently. And people seem to be liking it. I suspect that, instead of Windows and x86 moving down-market, Android/iOS and ARM may move up.
Yes, Android has an x86 port and apps are theoretically cross-platform, but the port is relatively untested and quite a few apps use native code that will not run on x86. It's entirely possible that, after a generation of teenagers grows up primarily using Android/iOS/W8 phones for their computing, that when they finally grow up and get a boring office job, they'd only be really productive using some sort of scaled-up Android/iOS/W8 desktop.
Is it a long shot? Yes. I'm not saying Intel needs to drop everything and start making 32-core i7-competitor ARM chips. That's stupid. I'm saying Intel might want to "insure" themselves against that possibility by spending $50M or so to develop (and potentially NOT release) a desktop-type ARM processor.
I actually read TFA, hoping to see what, exactly, pissed them off, but apparently Pakistan's not telling.
Either Pakistan found a way to get around the Streisand Effect (if you just mass-block an entire large site and never say which particulars caused it, it gets no publicity), or they just wanted to censor it and found blasphemy to be a decent excuse.
They may not release it (they have a ton of unreleased products), and they may not even announce it (to avoid giving ARM any publicity), but honestly, I wouldn't actually be that surprised if they were already doing something like this, and just keeping it secret.
Then again, Windows 8 brings up some interesting opportunities. It seems like, if Windows 8 on ARM takes off, there will be demand for desktop-grade ARM chips. Definitely not a guarantee (personally, my money's on W8A dying horribly), but a possibility. Right now, it seems there essentially is no option for desktop ARM (closest thing is Raspberry Pi). Maybe there's a market there. Maybe not. Only real way to tell is to try releasing a product.
Intel gets my respect for being one of the few companies to invest heavily into research. Seriously, they do a lot of "fundamental research" work, and so far, it's worked well for them. They develop products all the time that never get released because they're too "experimental" - Larrabee is the example that comes to mind first - and justify the expense because the information learned is worth the $100M they spent on an unreleasable product.
Intel, you can hedge your bets. Take one of your teams - rumor has it the Itanium team won't be working on that much longer - and tell them to make a desktop-quality ARM processor. You've already got the ARM license, do something with it. Figure out how to bump up the clockspeed (if *Apple* can do it, so can you), throw cache at it, bring the core count up to eight or so. Target your own Core i3 chips both in speed and in cost.
You do that, Intel, and you basically can't lose (barring sudden inexplicable incompetence). If the ARM desktop project completely fails, well, you just proved that x86 chips are unbeatable on the desktop market (which will never completely disappear). If the project succeeds, you'll win no matter which architecture comes out on top, and you'll have the advantage of having an experienced ARM team to help you take the best features of ARM and put them in your mobile x86 chips.
My old Asus M50 had a "full" keypad - the only difference is that the +-*/. keys are arranged slightly differently than is standard. My new G55 is likewise supposed to have one (although I have to advise against ordering one of those right now - there seems to be some sort of supply issue, as I've been waiting on mine for weeks now).
Those are both "gaming" laptops (and both 15" models, not 17"), probably not something your boss will approve, but still, check out their "business" laptops - they might have full keypads.
It's best if the words are truly* random. Don't come up with them yourself - flip through a dictionary and pick random long-enough words, or better yet, use a computer program. Most estimates place the number of words in the English language at about a million. Even if you conservatively assume only 10% are long enough to be used in a password, four fully random words comes out to be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 potential passwords (10^20), and if you throw in randomly capitalizing first letters, it goes up to 1,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 (20^20).
This probably spikes even faster if you use multiple languages, although that probably only words for people fluent in multiple languages. Still, a bilingual 4-word password would easily be in the 10^22 range, possibly much higher if which languages those are are not known.
Detonation and combustion are different processes - I'm not entirely clear myself on the distinction, but I believe it has to do with detonation "burning" faster than the speed of sound, forming a very, very powerful shockwave.
No engine uses detonation, with the one exception of pulse-detonation aircraft engines. Hell, many *explosives* aren't even detonated - old gunpowder guns combusted, not detonated, to fire a projectile, and I believe even some smokeless powders do the same.
Quite frankly, this is like saying you could run an internal combustion engine off nukes - after all, it's just a matter of making the explosions really, really small, so you don't have as much energy to deal with!
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1920p is not an actual resolution. You're thinking of 1080p, which is 1920x1080 in actual pixel dimensions (assuming 16:9 aspect ratio, which is near-universal for the ___p resolutions). While someone could theoretically make a 3412x1920 display, I do not know of any.
"Toggle case" is actually somewhat common, and not at all hard to find when it exists. I don't have any of my code-editing programs installed (home computer), but LibreOffice has Format->Change Case->tOGGLE cASE, right next to Sentence case, lower case, UPPER CASE, and Capitalize Every Word. Capitalized just like that, even, for ease of use.
Oh, and I'm not opposed to variable-width fonts for writing code - that is, after all, logical. But monospace text on the "where you are in the file" and "what mode you're in" and "labels for menu items" UI elements? That's kind of dumb, especially since that wastes *more* of your precious screen space.
PS: 80 characters? Give me ONE good reason why I should format my code to meet some ancient teletype-derived limit. Especially when everyone in my office is using at least one 1920x1080 or higher monitor.
Note to self: measure exactly the dimensions occupied by "IDE fluff" next time I'm at work, so I can have some numbers to shut up the "IDEs waste space!" idiots.
I would, in fact, argue that the current traffic laws *are* broken as currently used.
Speed limits are rigged to bring in ticket money. There's a section of highway I drive daily that's marked as 45MPH (with an advisory limit of 35)... that is completely safe at 65MPH+, and regularly driven at 70. I was once passed by a Mustang I swear was doing at least 120. There are no pedestrians (it's an overpass, no foot traffic), no sharp turns, no visibility problems, no oncoming traffic, nothing that makes such a low limit (for a highway) logical. And since it merges into 65MPH traffic after just a mile, I would argue that 35MPH is in fact completely *unsafe*.
It's also been demonstrated that traffic lights with red-light cameras are almost always set to LESS safe timings to boost revenue. As for "rolling stops", yeah, those shouldn't always be illegal as well. Go on and tell me that it's unsafe to slow down to a crawl long enough to see that there's NO ONE else on the road, then continue on. Blowing through a stop sign's obviously a Bad Thing, but I see no reason to come to a complete stop when I'm the only one on the road.
So if the laws that are being broken are primarily being broken in ways that harm no one, they are obviously in need of at least revision. Should we completely throw them out? Of course not. But should we improve them? Yes.
Your point about South Africa does have merit - obviously something as harmful as rape shouldn't be legalized (although I'll not that "33% of men" is only 16% of the population, so while your general idea has significant merit, your particular was perhaps poorly-chosen). I suppose one could argue that no man-made law can violate natural law, and thus you cannot legislate away the "right not to be raped" or other such natural rights. However, as copyright is clearly an artificial legal construct, I don't think natural law is particularly relevant.
You can hardly blame Emacs that programs which came years later chose different keyboard commands.
But I *can* blame it for not giving up and joining the crowd. The only program I regularly use that doesn't use the "Standard Shortcuts" is bash - and the only commands I need to know are ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k, ctrl/alt-f, ctrl/alt-b and ctrl-d
As for not being keyboard-centric rather than mouse-centric, some of us consider that a feature. Being created before mice has something to do with that of course but having to pull your hands off the keyboard to find the mouse is terribly slow. Yes, there's a bit of effort needed to learn enough to make running Emacs comfortable but when you're there you'll find how painful mice are. By the way, C-/ is only harder than C-z if your right hand is stuck over on the mouse.
Given a choice between "take my hand off the keyboard to click some menus" and "open a new terminal window, open the man page, and look up the keys I need", I'll take the former every time. Hell, given a choice between reading the manual *again* and just doing it *manually*, I'll probably pick the latter. Which makes all of Emacs' programmability and flexibility pointless.
And maybe it's just my years of gaming showing, but I have no problem switching one hand over to a mouse. It takes maybe a quarter of a second, about as long as it takes to write one word. It's far faster for a huge number of tasks - selecting text especially.
is it really a crime?
This country is, at least in theory, a democracy. If more people break that law than voted for the current president, doesn't that indicate that the majority of people don't believe that piracy is "bad"?
I feel like there should be some eloquent Latin quote for this... Ubi omnes sontes, nemo sontes? Did I get that right?
Actually, I am on a Mac right now. It's normally my backup desktop, but my primary machine's off in the Great /Dev/Null In The Sky and its replacement is taking forever to ship for some reason.
Installing it now, maybe it'll work out well.
Emacs is a good idea buried under a pretty bad implementation.
My complaints are threefold:
* Not mouse friendly. While keyboard shortcuts are awesome, they're very hard to use without practice. Having every option in a menu, somewhere, means that when I want to do some rare thing like "invert the case of these letters", I can just hit Edit->Characters->Toggle Case instead of checking the manual pages to find that it's Control-Meta-i or whatever. If I use that command often enough, I'll learn the shortcut. If not, I'll *never* learn it, and waste half my time in the man pages.
* Incompatible keyboard shortcuts. Most Windows and Mac, and even many Linux programs, all use the same basic keys for basic tasks. Ctrl-A means Select All. Ctrl-V is Paste. Mac just swaps Ctrl for Cmnd. For various historical reasons, Emacs uses completely different key shortcuts for everything. Which causes problems, because I'm never going to be *just* using Emacs. I'll be using Firefox, or SomethingOffice, or something else that almost definitely uses a different set of keys. Which means my mind will always be in "Ctrl-Z = Undo" mode, never "Ctrl-x u = Undo" mode (as an aside, does RMS never mis-type anything, because none of the three "undo" commands are easily entered - Ctrl-X U, Ctrl-/, and Ctrl-_ all suck).
* Ugly interface. Yeah, it's kind of petty, but Emacs looks like crap. If I'm going to be spending 8 hours a day in an editor, can it at least look like a program from *last* decade instead of the one before? (May have been fixed already - I gave up on Emacs years ago, maybe they finally discovered variable-width fonts)
Chrome has now "sold out", and may only be used "ironically".
The current "hip" browser is now Lynx in an xterm window set to use Helvetica (it's "vintage"). Please adjust your usage accordingly.
Laptops? They barely had enough funding to get those for the teachers that needed them, never mind the students.
"HD" projectors (ie. 1024x768) and electronic whiteboards I'll concede to, but they're also actually useful - teachers can write notes on the board and just *save* them. Sure beats the old transparencies, in any case, which were usually so faded and yellowed that they were barely legible. And it also simultaneously replaces the crappy TV-on-a-cart used for any videos. Sometimes "wasteful" spending actually does the job better.
I still have my high school history textbook because they were literally used to death - they didn't even bother having students hand them back in, as they were finally being replaced with ones that post-dated Y2K. The pictures may once have been glossy, five years ago, but no longer. Same went for essentially every other textbook - the only "new" textbook I ever had was in Music History, and that was *paperback*.
Oh, and I didn't go to some crappy "ghetto" school. I went to literally one of the top schools in the state, a Governor's School, with strict entrance requirements (seriously, it was harder to get into that school than it was for me to *get* *a* *job*). Extremely bright teachers, bright students, but if *we* couldn't get that kind of funding, I shudder to imagine what the "regular schools" lived on.
Pre-emptively correcting myself before someone bitches at me: My "with the exception of that last one" was supposed to refer to the GOTO - I added Functions to the list while revising.
The only reason I can think that we can't introduce Algebra from the start is that it scares the heck out of the parents.
FTFY
A lot of the problem isn't the teachers - it's the dumbass parents who think "their babies" can't handle Shakespeare, or Al-gee-brah, or the history of any country that isn't 'MURICAH!
Yeah, you can probably blame a bit of it on the teachers, and on the students, and quite a bit on the government's continual lack of funding and constant barrage of tests and requirements, but a lot of the problem comes from the dumbass parents.
No, it won't be "irrelevant", because it's some of the most fundamental elements of programming.
Things I learned in that Logo class:
variables and assignment
IF-THEN-ELSE statements
WHILE loops
FOR loops
GOTO
Functions
With the exception of that last one, what, really, is different in modern programming? I still use every one of those, every day, except the goto.
The syntax is unimportant. The API is unimportant, as long as it's simple, and visual enough for a third-grader to "see" the results of his program. The important thing is teaching the basic programming elements. Hell, the important thing at that age is teaching that a computer is just a machine, that it's not some magic box. I've seen *adults* who can't grasp why a computer is doing what they told it instead of what they want.
Same - I was using Logo in 3rd grade, back in '96 or so. Loved that turtle.
Weirdly, programming disappeared from my curriculum until high school, when I was started on Java. Of course, I taught myself in the mean time - Basic, C++, Java, and so on. Tried teaching myself assembly - did not go so well.
Software compatibility cuts both ways.
I suspect that much of the reason people are "flocking" to smartphones and tablets isn't just because of the hardware, but because of the software. Desktop environments essentially "peaked" somewhere between 98 and XP. Everything since has either been copying those, copying those but with more shiny, or coming up with really retarded "innovations".
Mobile devices, like it or not, are doing things differently. And people seem to be liking it. I suspect that, instead of Windows and x86 moving down-market, Android/iOS and ARM may move up.
Yes, Android has an x86 port and apps are theoretically cross-platform, but the port is relatively untested and quite a few apps use native code that will not run on x86. It's entirely possible that, after a generation of teenagers grows up primarily using Android/iOS/W8 phones for their computing, that when they finally grow up and get a boring office job, they'd only be really productive using some sort of scaled-up Android/iOS/W8 desktop.
Is it a long shot? Yes. I'm not saying Intel needs to drop everything and start making 32-core i7-competitor ARM chips. That's stupid. I'm saying Intel might want to "insure" themselves against that possibility by spending $50M or so to develop (and potentially NOT release) a desktop-type ARM processor.
I actually read TFA, hoping to see what, exactly, pissed them off, but apparently Pakistan's not telling.
Either Pakistan found a way to get around the Streisand Effect (if you just mass-block an entire large site and never say which particulars caused it, it gets no publicity), or they just wanted to censor it and found blasphemy to be a decent excuse.
They may not release it (they have a ton of unreleased products), and they may not even announce it (to avoid giving ARM any publicity), but honestly, I wouldn't actually be that surprised if they were already doing something like this, and just keeping it secret.
Then again, Windows 8 brings up some interesting opportunities. It seems like, if Windows 8 on ARM takes off, there will be demand for desktop-grade ARM chips. Definitely not a guarantee (personally, my money's on W8A dying horribly), but a possibility. Right now, it seems there essentially is no option for desktop ARM (closest thing is Raspberry Pi). Maybe there's a market there. Maybe not. Only real way to tell is to try releasing a product.
They sold their Xscale ARM chip designs, yes, but they still hold an ARM license from my research*.
* "My research" = "reading Wikipedia"
Intel gets my respect for being one of the few companies to invest heavily into research. Seriously, they do a lot of "fundamental research" work, and so far, it's worked well for them. They develop products all the time that never get released because they're too "experimental" - Larrabee is the example that comes to mind first - and justify the expense because the information learned is worth the $100M they spent on an unreleasable product.
Intel, you can hedge your bets. Take one of your teams - rumor has it the Itanium team won't be working on that much longer - and tell them to make a desktop-quality ARM processor. You've already got the ARM license, do something with it. Figure out how to bump up the clockspeed (if *Apple* can do it, so can you), throw cache at it, bring the core count up to eight or so. Target your own Core i3 chips both in speed and in cost.
You do that, Intel, and you basically can't lose (barring sudden inexplicable incompetence). If the ARM desktop project completely fails, well, you just proved that x86 chips are unbeatable on the desktop market (which will never completely disappear). If the project succeeds, you'll win no matter which architecture comes out on top, and you'll have the advantage of having an experienced ARM team to help you take the best features of ARM and put them in your mobile x86 chips.
It takes approximately 10s to hand someone a CD and say "install this". Given my current salary, that comes out to roughly a nickel.
Yeah, I'm OK with that.
Dunno - are Ubuntu CDs still free?
And I thought it was a rip-off when an OEM offered to not install crapware for $15.
My old Asus M50 had a "full" keypad - the only difference is that the +-*/. keys are arranged slightly differently than is standard. My new G55 is likewise supposed to have one (although I have to advise against ordering one of those right now - there seems to be some sort of supply issue, as I've been waiting on mine for weeks now).
Those are both "gaming" laptops (and both 15" models, not 17"), probably not something your boss will approve, but still, check out their "business" laptops - they might have full keypads.
I'd get right on that, but honestly, there haven't been many movies that have looked interesting enough to even pirate.
It's best if the words are truly* random. Don't come up with them yourself - flip through a dictionary and pick random long-enough words, or better yet, use a computer program. Most estimates place the number of words in the English language at about a million. Even if you conservatively assume only 10% are long enough to be used in a password, four fully random words comes out to be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 potential passwords (10^20), and if you throw in randomly capitalizing first letters, it goes up to 1,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 (20^20).
This probably spikes even faster if you use multiple languages, although that probably only words for people fluent in multiple languages. Still, a bilingual 4-word password would easily be in the 10^22 range, possibly much higher if which languages those are are not known.
Detonation and combustion are different processes - I'm not entirely clear myself on the distinction, but I believe it has to do with detonation "burning" faster than the speed of sound, forming a very, very powerful shockwave.
No engine uses detonation, with the one exception of pulse-detonation aircraft engines. Hell, many *explosives* aren't even detonated - old gunpowder guns combusted, not detonated, to fire a projectile, and I believe even some smokeless powders do the same.
Quite frankly, this is like saying you could run an internal combustion engine off nukes - after all, it's just a matter of making the explosions really, really small, so you don't have as much energy to deal with!