The last two models on your pcadvisor list are customized configurations, and are not standard offerings on the US Microsoft Store. Yes, you can dial the Surface Pro 4 up to $2699 if you want a 1TB ssd, but Wdomburg is right about the price of the i7/16/256. £1449/$1799.
Came here to say this. Get a solid grasp of SQL to go with your C++ and Java, and there will always be somewhere to work. Regardless of whatever shiny new toy is coming out this week, databases aren't going away anytime soon, so database programmers aren't either.
If it's an option for you, I'd suggest getting a job with the enterprise systems group at your university for a year or two after you graduate. I'm really glad I did. The pay will be below average, but getting my student loans paid off and a couple years of Oracle programming under my belt has put me in a great position to move wherever I want and launch into serious work.
It's too bad this whole standing office thing is going mainstream. Too bad for everyone else, that is. Luckily (or maybe unluckily), my spinal injury makes that an accessibility issue so legally I can't be required to participate if our HR office decides they want standing desks installed for everyone. I am physically incapable of standing for more than about twenty minutes per day.
If you're having weight problems, consume fewer calories. That's it. Alternating diet coke and black coffee does wonders to suppress appetite. Working out will only make you hungry. I am the most sedentary person I know, but with about 1800 calories per day, my weight is the same as it was in high school. 6'2, 165lbs.
Am I in shape? Hell no. Doesn't matter anyways, though. Everyone else is fat so I'm still ahead of the curve.
WARNING
Keep Away From All Children!
Do not put in nose or mouth.
Swallowed magnets can stick to
intestines causing serious injury or death.
Seek immediate medical attention if
magnets are swallowed or inhaled.
It says right on the little plastic container that this isn't for children. The cardboard retail box gets torn up and thrown away, so I can understand a label on that *possibly* not being enough. The inner plastic cube is pretty explicit too, though.
There are a handful of stupid people somewhere out there, so bureaucrats close down a business that I like and decide that I can't have something that is of no risk to me or anyone around me. Gotta love this world we live in.
Maybe you're just hiring/working with the wrong programmers?
CSB: I finished my CS bachelor's in 2010, and with the exception of a couple "breadth" courses, I spent nearly my entire college career programming in x86 assembly, C, and C++. Admittedly, extensive use of SQL wasn't part of the degree program, but my starter job for the past couple years has been as an Oracle developer working in Pro*C and PL/SQL. If you're finding recent bachelor's with no assembly or systems architecture background, I'd start checking University accreditations before hiring. ABET is the magic acronym on my diploma.
If anything, I'm seeing the older programmers clinging to built-in function calls and proprietary languages (SQR) because "that's how we've always done it". Problems then take a tremendous number of man hours to debug and fix when the underlying code gets changed or the customer wants a small tweak, when it should have been written from scratch to begin with. It's especially frustrating when the desired functionality is really simple, like writing a SQL query out to a report or generating a dynamic table in HTML.
Something else I've never seen from a younger programmer: goto nests.
I'm about ten hours in and so far I'm enjoying the game for what it is, but its got a few problems I didn't have with the first.
The enemy AI has certainly improved, as often times a bad guy will dive for cover when I start shooting at them, but nearly every time they've done that so far has resulted in them visually clipping through the barrier they are behind. It's really not very immersive combat when arms and legs are sticking out through concrete walls. I thought that technology was nailed down years ago (Gears of War?).
Melee combat is very clunky feeling. There is no visual interaction between my character and the enemy I'm attacking. There's just a generic punch animation, and if it connects, the damage number that follows it. Doom 2 comes to mind.
Framerate performance is... meh. For the hardware I'm running on (eVGA GTX 670FTW, Intel 2600k), I'd expect nothing less than a rock solid 60fps with the graphics on mid-to-high settings. Most of the time there isn't anything graphically intensive going on, but my framerate often dipped into the low 20s anyways.
Getting stuck has been a problem for me. I like to explore, but on foot, there are too many little crannies you can get to but cannot easily get out of, and the vehicle is even worse about that. With the wonky controls it'll easily wedge itself up onto walls and will have to be abandoned. It's bad enough that I just go on foot now instead. That was never an issue with the original Borderlands.
The UI is less intuitive than the original, and even that was just marginal - particularly the inventory screen. Picking a weapon from the list (that has to be scrolled through) usually takes at least two or three tries.
Overall, I'd say wait for this on a Steam special. It would've made a great DLC pack for the original, but I'm glad I didn't drop $60 on it. It simply lacks the polish I'd expect with that price tag.
I started playing World of Warcraft on the day it came out: November 23, 2004. I was a sophomore in college at the time. Before I started playing, my grades were poor; I had no friends, no family, and I had never been in a relationship of any kind. I was underweight and sickly. I was becoming an alcoholic. I was asocial. I was severely depressed and sometimes even suicidal. I had nothing to look forward to and no will to live.
Playing the game didn't change any of that, but the past eight years have gone by a little faster than the eight before it. I log in every night when I'm done with work, get drunk, and find something to grind until I can't keep my eyes open anymore.
I play neither because I enjoy playing or because I have an unconfronted fear of failure. I play because I've accepted failure and am biding my time. Will things ever improve? Probably not. There will always be another game to play, though. I can take some comfort from that.
I'm willing to bet that on average, the people that fit in the workout group also ate healthier food, didn't smoke, and kept their excess weight down. If you completely ignored the workout aspect (or selected a test group where they were all equally inactive) and looked at just eating and smoking habits and body fat percentages, would you find the same three year difference? (Rhetorical; I know the answer.)
Don't get me wrong; as an Alaskan, I'd love to see this go in, but it's not going to happen.
First, the seas of the Bering Strait makes the English Channel look like a backyard swimming pool, especially in the winter months - that is, most of the year. Boats simply don't go there. Good luck operating any kind of floating construction equipment with colder than -100F wind chill, ice bergs, and 1-2 knot constant water currents.
Don't underestimate the difficulty in putting a rail system across the land in those areas either. Between Fairbanks and Nome is literally five hundred miles of permafrost, swamps, silt, fault lines, rivers, lakes, mountains, and simultaneous combinations of the above. There isn't any infrastructure or construction-friendly ground here. Even with ten thousand people living in Nome we can't even build a dirt road out there. I can't imagine the other side of the Strait being any better.
And let's not forget the environmentalists. If we can't drill ANWR, then this rail is out of the question.
To call this a pipe dream would be an understatement, especially for a measly $65 billion.
I'm right in the middle of that age group and I see it all the time. More often than that, though, is taking out a phone to play games or update Facebook right in the middle of a conversation or lunch meeting. Then all of the sudden I'm the obtuse one for getting up and walking away when the rest of my peer group is sitting around tapping away on their phones at one another. Why even go out if you're just going to fiddle with your phone the whole time?
The worst part is, I see it at all levels. This isn't just something the lower class is doing. It might be the way I was raised, but I find the whole thing impossibly rude. If I took out a Gameboy during dinner while I was growing up, it would've been slapped out of my hands into the trash can. I'll be doing the same favor for my kid, if I ever have one. Too bad there's nobody worth my time to procreate with in this day and age.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least check to make sure you're right. The two words (extrovert and extravert) are both correct and interchangeable.
I hope they exclude trucks from this new average requirement, or automakers are going to be in a real pinch. A four wheel drive one-ton work truck capable of towing equipment or fuel wouldn't get 30mpg on gas or diesel even if it ran at 100% efficiency. Those vehicles still need to exist unless you think you can build roads and houses with your Prius. The old trucks won't last forever.
And what about all wheel drive cars? For more than half the year here, I absolutely need one to get to work, and I'm certainly not an exception. That's not an area the US manufacturers are behind on, either. Nobody makes one that gets better than 30MPG in town. Regulations aren't going to magically make it so.
Just how tiny are they going to have to make the front wheel drive commuters to balance against the cars that are actually useful?
Am I reading this right? Is the author of the article really comparing $300 to $500 receivers from 10, 20, and 30 years ago with $300 to $500 receivers from today? Of course you won't see improvement if you ignore inflation. A $20K car from 1980 is certainly higher quality than a $20k car from today, too.
Compare a new $1000 receiver with your dad's thirty year old $300 receiver and you'll be more likely to see the improvement you'd expect with technological advancement. You can get high quality audio equipment without all the iPod docked XM-radio bluetooth garbage, too. The companies that recognize that those will be antique technologies in ten years are able to put the bulk their development costs into developing higher quality components. These are the companies that serious audio enthusiasts are buying from. NAD Electronics was mentioned earlier - yep, that's one of them.
I was thinking battle suits. I wonder if a special forces troop could benefit from having a couple extra lungs grafted in? With this form factor, it might actually be feasible (and removable). Better throw in an extra heart too, just to seal the deal.
The car on the site you linked ran sixteen (plus) second quarter miles. I suppose it is technically faster than some Porsche if you include every model they ever made, but I think saying that might give people the wrong idea. It's not faster than a modern 911 by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, that's not much faster than a Prius.
Your coworker also didn't design a vehicle from the ground up - it looks to me like he just put an electric engine in his car. There's no way you can start from scratch and fully design and prototype a mass production ready electric trike for a half million. That kind of scope is what this company failed at.
No huge surprise, though. Just like nearly every other "green" car these days, that thing is ugly.
I don't get it. 500GB in an hour would be about 140MB per second (yes, I am rounding up). Most of the enterprise level 15K drives are right in that range without any overclocking, with a couple well above that. Do I win ten grand for buying a Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 for $450 and bringing it in to show that it works?
I wonder if any of that money will go towards moving away from uranium 235? If anything, France would be a good candidate to show the western world that thorium 232 is a viable fuel source. All we'd lose is the plutonium and we really don't need more nuclear weapons anyways. Just about everything that sucks about using uranium nuclear fuel (scarcity, goes critical if not cooled, needs to be enriched, unusable waste) would go away.
On the contrary, the "computer illiterate" group you're talking about is growing, not dying off. While it's true that more and more people own computers every day, there is a considerably larger market share of "casual" users than there was ten years ago. With operating systems getting easier to use and more tailored to the general public, the amount of real understanding any given user needs in order to mistakenly install malware/scareware is continuing to go down.
I think it's going to get worse (more profitable) before it gets better.
The EPA estimated city and highway mileage rates aren't referred to as the minimum, though. If there was legislation to require car manufacturers to publish their "guaranteed minimum" mileage, that would have to be zero as well. "Average driving conditions" isn't the same black and white rule set this poorly written bill is referring to.
None of the land line ISPs could guarantee that their connection speeds would always be greater than 0 either, and cable/fiber is a lot more dependable than wireless. Even at five nines any claim other than 0 would be false. Legislation like this is totally inane.
In my own little cynical version of reality I hope this bill passes and all of the providers put 0 bits per second as the minimum data rate on all of their phones, just to poke fun at the bureaucratic world we live in.
Ten years is a long period of time to come up with sums like that and expect the number to be shocking or even newsworthy. Yes, Blackberries have been the standard portable media device for government employees for over ten years. Yes, there is a PS3 supercomputer. Yes, both overseas and domestic troops are provided with entertainment systems and mp3 players for downtime when/where it's reasonable to do so.
I'm still not convinced that any of those figures are too high. The almost eight hundred billion we've spent so far on the Iraq war is a bit more of a concern. As a US tax payer, have you gotten your personal share of $2550 worth of value out of it? I don't think I have.
Thorium is about as abundant in the Earth's crust as lead. It's going to take a bit more than fifty years to use that up. The Thorium Energy Alliance (biased, I'm sure, but still) says there's enough of it in the US alone to sustain our country's current energy use for a thousand years.
C++ is nice, but I wonder how the game would perform in GLSL? Having spent a big part of my undergraduate CS elective budget on physics simulations and advanced rendering methods with GLSL, the first thing I thought when I got the game was how much faster it would be if all the heavy lifting was done on the GPU.
I am sure Notch had his reasons for programming the whole thing in Java, I just hope those reasons weren't speed and cross-platform compatibility.
For the record, since there seems to be a fair amount of finger wagging here - it was a hypothetical situation. I don't go to bars. There aren't DUI checkpoints here. I've never driven drunk and I don't think it's okay to do so.
I know it frequently happens though, and I think a service like this is one way to potentially reduce the number of borderline (possibly over the limit, though probably not) cases of people taking that risk. Those that are too drunk to check or lack the judgement to make the appropriate decision would obviously be unaffected.
Having a breathalyzer handy is even better, though. I like binary yes/no answers.
Slashdot Mirror
The last two models on your pcadvisor list are customized configurations, and are not standard offerings on the US Microsoft Store. Yes, you can dial the Surface Pro 4 up to $2699 if you want a 1TB ssd, but Wdomburg is right about the price of the i7/16/256. £1449/$1799.
Came here to say this. Get a solid grasp of SQL to go with your C++ and Java, and there will always be somewhere to work. Regardless of whatever shiny new toy is coming out this week, databases aren't going away anytime soon, so database programmers aren't either.
If it's an option for you, I'd suggest getting a job with the enterprise systems group at your university for a year or two after you graduate. I'm really glad I did. The pay will be below average, but getting my student loans paid off and a couple years of Oracle programming under my belt has put me in a great position to move wherever I want and launch into serious work.
It's too bad this whole standing office thing is going mainstream. Too bad for everyone else, that is. Luckily (or maybe unluckily), my spinal injury makes that an accessibility issue so legally I can't be required to participate if our HR office decides they want standing desks installed for everyone. I am physically incapable of standing for more than about twenty minutes per day.
If you're having weight problems, consume fewer calories. That's it. Alternating diet coke and black coffee does wonders to suppress appetite. Working out will only make you hungry. I am the most sedentary person I know, but with about 1800 calories per day, my weight is the same as it was in high school. 6'2, 165lbs.
Am I in shape? Hell no. Doesn't matter anyways, though. Everyone else is fat so I'm still ahead of the curve.
WARNING
Keep Away From All Children!
Do not put in nose or mouth.
Swallowed magnets can stick to
intestines causing serious injury or death.
Seek immediate medical attention if
magnets are swallowed or inhaled.
It says right on the little plastic container that this isn't for children. The cardboard retail box gets torn up and thrown away, so I can understand a label on that *possibly* not being enough. The inner plastic cube is pretty explicit too, though.
There are a handful of stupid people somewhere out there, so bureaucrats close down a business that I like and decide that I can't have something that is of no risk to me or anyone around me. Gotta love this world we live in.
The latter, I suppose. Less than 10% of the Title IV four-year institutions in the US have an ABET CS accreditation - mine included.
What that's worth to a prospective employer, that's hard to say.
Maybe you're just hiring/working with the wrong programmers?
CSB: I finished my CS bachelor's in 2010, and with the exception of a couple "breadth" courses, I spent nearly my entire college career programming in x86 assembly, C, and C++. Admittedly, extensive use of SQL wasn't part of the degree program, but my starter job for the past couple years has been as an Oracle developer working in Pro*C and PL/SQL. If you're finding recent bachelor's with no assembly or systems architecture background, I'd start checking University accreditations before hiring. ABET is the magic acronym on my diploma.
If anything, I'm seeing the older programmers clinging to built-in function calls and proprietary languages (SQR) because "that's how we've always done it". Problems then take a tremendous number of man hours to debug and fix when the underlying code gets changed or the customer wants a small tweak, when it should have been written from scratch to begin with. It's especially frustrating when the desired functionality is really simple, like writing a SQL query out to a report or generating a dynamic table in HTML.
Something else I've never seen from a younger programmer: goto nests.
I'm about ten hours in and so far I'm enjoying the game for what it is, but its got a few problems I didn't have with the first.
The enemy AI has certainly improved, as often times a bad guy will dive for cover when I start shooting at them, but nearly every time they've done that so far has resulted in them visually clipping through the barrier they are behind. It's really not very immersive combat when arms and legs are sticking out through concrete walls. I thought that technology was nailed down years ago (Gears of War?).
Melee combat is very clunky feeling. There is no visual interaction between my character and the enemy I'm attacking. There's just a generic punch animation, and if it connects, the damage number that follows it. Doom 2 comes to mind.
Framerate performance is... meh. For the hardware I'm running on (eVGA GTX 670FTW, Intel 2600k), I'd expect nothing less than a rock solid 60fps with the graphics on mid-to-high settings. Most of the time there isn't anything graphically intensive going on, but my framerate often dipped into the low 20s anyways.
Getting stuck has been a problem for me. I like to explore, but on foot, there are too many little crannies you can get to but cannot easily get out of, and the vehicle is even worse about that. With the wonky controls it'll easily wedge itself up onto walls and will have to be abandoned. It's bad enough that I just go on foot now instead. That was never an issue with the original Borderlands.
The UI is less intuitive than the original, and even that was just marginal - particularly the inventory screen. Picking a weapon from the list (that has to be scrolled through) usually takes at least two or three tries.
Overall, I'd say wait for this on a Steam special. It would've made a great DLC pack for the original, but I'm glad I didn't drop $60 on it. It simply lacks the polish I'd expect with that price tag.
I started playing World of Warcraft on the day it came out: November 23, 2004. I was a sophomore in college at the time. Before I started playing, my grades were poor; I had no friends, no family, and I had never been in a relationship of any kind. I was underweight and sickly. I was becoming an alcoholic. I was asocial. I was severely depressed and sometimes even suicidal. I had nothing to look forward to and no will to live.
Playing the game didn't change any of that, but the past eight years have gone by a little faster than the eight before it. I log in every night when I'm done with work, get drunk, and find something to grind until I can't keep my eyes open anymore.
I play neither because I enjoy playing or because I have an unconfronted fear of failure. I play because I've accepted failure and am biding my time. Will things ever improve? Probably not. There will always be another game to play, though. I can take some comfort from that.
I'm willing to bet that on average, the people that fit in the workout group also ate healthier food, didn't smoke, and kept their excess weight down. If you completely ignored the workout aspect (or selected a test group where they were all equally inactive) and looked at just eating and smoking habits and body fat percentages, would you find the same three year difference? (Rhetorical; I know the answer.)
Don't get me wrong; as an Alaskan, I'd love to see this go in, but it's not going to happen.
First, the seas of the Bering Strait makes the English Channel look like a backyard swimming pool, especially in the winter months - that is, most of the year. Boats simply don't go there. Good luck operating any kind of floating construction equipment with colder than -100F wind chill, ice bergs, and 1-2 knot constant water currents.
Don't underestimate the difficulty in putting a rail system across the land in those areas either. Between Fairbanks and Nome is literally five hundred miles of permafrost, swamps, silt, fault lines, rivers, lakes, mountains, and simultaneous combinations of the above. There isn't any infrastructure or construction-friendly ground here. Even with ten thousand people living in Nome we can't even build a dirt road out there. I can't imagine the other side of the Strait being any better.
And let's not forget the environmentalists. If we can't drill ANWR, then this rail is out of the question.
To call this a pipe dream would be an understatement, especially for a measly $65 billion.
Why do people do that? What started this trend?
I'm right in the middle of that age group and I see it all the time. More often than that, though, is taking out a phone to play games or update Facebook right in the middle of a conversation or lunch meeting. Then all of the sudden I'm the obtuse one for getting up and walking away when the rest of my peer group is sitting around tapping away on their phones at one another. Why even go out if you're just going to fiddle with your phone the whole time?
The worst part is, I see it at all levels. This isn't just something the lower class is doing. It might be the way I was raised, but I find the whole thing impossibly rude. If I took out a Gameboy during dinner while I was growing up, it would've been slapped out of my hands into the trash can. I'll be doing the same favor for my kid, if I ever have one. Too bad there's nobody worth my time to procreate with in this day and age.
I'm not even old, but get off my lawn anyways.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least check to make sure you're right. The two words (extrovert and extravert) are both correct and interchangeable.
I hope they exclude trucks from this new average requirement, or automakers are going to be in a real pinch. A four wheel drive one-ton work truck capable of towing equipment or fuel wouldn't get 30mpg on gas or diesel even if it ran at 100% efficiency. Those vehicles still need to exist unless you think you can build roads and houses with your Prius. The old trucks won't last forever.
And what about all wheel drive cars? For more than half the year here, I absolutely need one to get to work, and I'm certainly not an exception. That's not an area the US manufacturers are behind on, either. Nobody makes one that gets better than 30MPG in town. Regulations aren't going to magically make it so.
Just how tiny are they going to have to make the front wheel drive commuters to balance against the cars that are actually useful?
Am I reading this right? Is the author of the article really comparing $300 to $500 receivers from 10, 20, and 30 years ago with $300 to $500 receivers from today? Of course you won't see improvement if you ignore inflation. A $20K car from 1980 is certainly higher quality than a $20k car from today, too.
Compare a new $1000 receiver with your dad's thirty year old $300 receiver and you'll be more likely to see the improvement you'd expect with technological advancement. You can get high quality audio equipment without all the iPod docked XM-radio bluetooth garbage, too. The companies that recognize that those will be antique technologies in ten years are able to put the bulk their development costs into developing higher quality components. These are the companies that serious audio enthusiasts are buying from. NAD Electronics was mentioned earlier - yep, that's one of them.
I was thinking battle suits. I wonder if a special forces troop could benefit from having a couple extra lungs grafted in? With this form factor, it might actually be feasible (and removable). Better throw in an extra heart too, just to seal the deal.
The car on the site you linked ran sixteen (plus) second quarter miles. I suppose it is technically faster than some Porsche if you include every model they ever made, but I think saying that might give people the wrong idea. It's not faster than a modern 911 by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, that's not much faster than a Prius.
Your coworker also didn't design a vehicle from the ground up - it looks to me like he just put an electric engine in his car. There's no way you can start from scratch and fully design and prototype a mass production ready electric trike for a half million. That kind of scope is what this company failed at.
No huge surprise, though. Just like nearly every other "green" car these days, that thing is ugly.
I don't get it. 500GB in an hour would be about 140MB per second (yes, I am rounding up). Most of the enterprise level 15K drives are right in that range without any overclocking, with a couple well above that. Do I win ten grand for buying a Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 for $450 and bringing it in to show that it works?
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/enterprise-hard-drive-charts-2010/Throughput-Read-Average,2156.html
No, I didn't look at the page. It's Slashdotted.
I wonder if any of that money will go towards moving away from uranium 235? If anything, France would be a good candidate to show the western world that thorium 232 is a viable fuel source. All we'd lose is the plutonium and we really don't need more nuclear weapons anyways. Just about everything that sucks about using uranium nuclear fuel (scarcity, goes critical if not cooled, needs to be enriched, unusable waste) would go away.
On the contrary, the "computer illiterate" group you're talking about is growing, not dying off. While it's true that more and more people own computers every day, there is a considerably larger market share of "casual" users than there was ten years ago. With operating systems getting easier to use and more tailored to the general public, the amount of real understanding any given user needs in order to mistakenly install malware/scareware is continuing to go down.
I think it's going to get worse (more profitable) before it gets better.
The EPA estimated city and highway mileage rates aren't referred to as the minimum, though. If there was legislation to require car manufacturers to publish their "guaranteed minimum" mileage, that would have to be zero as well. "Average driving conditions" isn't the same black and white rule set this poorly written bill is referring to.
+1.
None of the land line ISPs could guarantee that their connection speeds would always be greater than 0 either, and cable/fiber is a lot more dependable than wireless. Even at five nines any claim other than 0 would be false. Legislation like this is totally inane.
In my own little cynical version of reality I hope this bill passes and all of the providers put 0 bits per second as the minimum data rate on all of their phones, just to poke fun at the bureaucratic world we live in.
Ten years is a long period of time to come up with sums like that and expect the number to be shocking or even newsworthy. Yes, Blackberries have been the standard portable media device for government employees for over ten years. Yes, there is a PS3 supercomputer. Yes, both overseas and domestic troops are provided with entertainment systems and mp3 players for downtime when/where it's reasonable to do so.
I'm still not convinced that any of those figures are too high. The almost eight hundred billion we've spent so far on the Iraq war is a bit more of a concern. As a US tax payer, have you gotten your personal share of $2550 worth of value out of it? I don't think I have.
Thorium is about as abundant in the Earth's crust as lead. It's going to take a bit more than fifty years to use that up. The Thorium Energy Alliance (biased, I'm sure, but still) says there's enough of it in the US alone to sustain our country's current energy use for a thousand years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium
C++ is nice, but I wonder how the game would perform in GLSL? Having spent a big part of my undergraduate CS elective budget on physics simulations and advanced rendering methods with GLSL, the first thing I thought when I got the game was how much faster it would be if all the heavy lifting was done on the GPU.
I am sure Notch had his reasons for programming the whole thing in Java, I just hope those reasons weren't speed and cross-platform compatibility.
For the record, since there seems to be a fair amount of finger wagging here - it was a hypothetical situation. I don't go to bars. There aren't DUI checkpoints here. I've never driven drunk and I don't think it's okay to do so.
I know it frequently happens though, and I think a service like this is one way to potentially reduce the number of borderline (possibly over the limit, though probably not) cases of people taking that risk. Those that are too drunk to check or lack the judgement to make the appropriate decision would obviously be unaffected.
Having a breathalyzer handy is even better, though. I like binary yes/no answers.