Look at how many orbital launch failures SpaceX experienced. The failures are not due to incorrect science but rather inadequate application of engineering.
As I understand it, SpaceX have built a new rocket engine and two new launchers and a capsule and flown them into space for about the same as NASA spent to put a dummy upper stage on a shuttle SRB and fire it into the ocean.
Java programers prefer to work on actual problem, and not spending hours writing memory management boiler-place.
No, instead they spend weeks tweaking the garbage collector so their program doesn't need 16GB of RAM and doesn't freeze for two minutes to garbage-collect all that junk.
I actually did write 'new' in a C++ program yesterday. That's the first time in months that I've had to do actual memory allocation, and since it's a smart pointer I don't need to worry about freeing it either.
Does Java really work that way? I don't program in Java, so I really don't know, but that would be one of the most bizarre memory allocation systems I've heard of.
The JVM has to decide when to collect garbage allocations. To do that it uses various methods, including when the accumulated crud has reached some maximum size defined when you start up. If you give it too much RAM then the crud will keep piling up until it eventually gets cleared out, and then your JVM will still have 2GB of RAM even though little of it is useful. If you give it too little, then the program will crash.
Most memory allocations in C++ programs are usually on the stack, so they're automatically freed when you exit that code. The remainder are freed when you're done with them, and so the memory can immediately be reused. If a C++ program temporarily needs all the RAM on the machine it can use it, and if the memory allocator is smart enough it can give that RAM back to the OS when it's done.
Because, the harder something is (ie memory management done by hand as opposed to garbage collection), the more frustration - and more importantly - more errors occur.
Garbage collection is a disaster, at least as implemented by Java. In most respects I prefer it to C++, but huge memory bloat and massive amounts of tuning to try to get it not to freeze or suck up massive amounts of CPU time when garbage collecting are not improvements.
And 99% of memory management in sensible C++ code is handled automatically by things like STL containers (or plain old local variables on the stack), so there are few reasons to need to call free and delete in modern code.
Publishers can pay a some money up front, and then a certain crappy percentage per book later... if it sells bad, that's a good idea for the author, and if it sells well the publishers win. If you're an author, do you want to take the risk?
Uh, dude... if your book sells bad, guess what? No publisher will want to buy your next book unless you have a long history of producing books that sell well; Stephen King can release a clunker once in a while, but Joe Nobody can't.
So the idea that an advance is good because you'll get more money if your book doesn't sell is just silly; if your book doesn't sell, you'll have to write the next one under a pseudonym and start at the bottom again.
So you just need to come up with several month's mortgage in advance so you can spend some time focusing on your book rather than working to pay those pesky bills...
Most trade-published writers in America have day jobs because they can't live off 8% royalties on their paper books. Few writers in America can get money from a publisher before they've written a book; who's going to give $20k to an unknown who's thinking of maybe writing a book?
The problem here is that someone has to interpret those words, and the SCOTUS seems to have inherited that duty.
Why? The US Constitution is one of the simplest substantial legal documents in the world. There are very few words which might require interpretation, and those are the very words which have been used to drastically increase the power of government. In this case, the copyright clause not specifying a duration but only saying 'a limited time'.
In other cases, the words are very clear, e.g. "shall make no law", and it's taken centuries of lawyering to turn that into "shall make no law except when we feel like it."
Otherwise, who's going to interpret them?
Juries don't need a gang of lawyers to tell them what the Constitution means, they can simply acquit if they feel the law is unconstitutional or immoral.
So does that mean the US government can seize your US-registered car because someone says they saw it speeding? Or your US-registered house because someone says that you weren't recycling your garbage?
and would be less shitty than ICE vehicles given a decade or two of development.
Electric cars have had more than a century of development and they're still hopelessly inadequate compared to ICE cars. That's why our great-grandparents dumped electric cars as soon as the ICE came along.
It's true. My gasoline-powered cars catch fire all the time.
You are half-right, though. From what I've read the Volt's battery is supposed to be drained after a crash to ensure it can't catch fire... which must be great fun for people who are responding to the accident.
Perhaps where you live, but that's not how it works in America. Most people won't even get their cover letter read at a major US publisher unless it comes from an agent, and an agent who receives a letter saying 'look, I'm writing this book, I've got a couple of chapters, can you get a publisher to give me money to finish it' would just laugh.
If the book sucks because it wasn't done right the first time, I'm definitely not going to reread it after it's "fixed."
Note that I've seen a lot of people complain about trade-published ebooks because they just OCR-ed the print book and then did a few fixups before shipping it. And probably haven't released a new version that's 'fixed'.
For a few books, yes. The average book gets none of that; even an 'attention-grabbing' book cover is of little value when the cover is only visible after you pull the book off the shelf because the publisher paid for the next Stephen King novel to be the one that's positioned on the shelf with the cover showing (and who the heck thinks Stephen King needs a ton of marketing?)
But you will not be forced to pick any job at all, and you will be able to work hours you choose, rather then ones your manager will choose for you. Which is the whole point of advance for the first authors, who are the ones pushing median size of allowance down.
Again, how does Joe Nobody get a publisher to give them even $5k for a book they haven't written yet? And how does he manage to live on that amount of money without a day job while writing the book?
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Remember, back when air travel wasn't a total clusterfuck pain in the ass.
Remember, not long before that taking guns on a plane was merely an inconvenience for other passengers who had less space in the overhead bins.
It's not the guns you need to worry about, it's the people who want to use them to kill other people.
Look at how many orbital launch failures SpaceX experienced. The failures are not due to incorrect science but rather inadequate application of engineering.
As I understand it, SpaceX have built a new rocket engine and two new launchers and a capsule and flown them into space for about the same as NASA spent to put a dummy upper stage on a shuttle SRB and fire it into the ocean.
Java programers prefer to work on actual problem, and not spending hours writing memory management boiler-place.
No, instead they spend weeks tweaking the garbage collector so their program doesn't need 16GB of RAM and doesn't freeze for two minutes to garbage-collect all that junk.
I actually did write 'new' in a C++ program yesterday. That's the first time in months that I've had to do actual memory allocation, and since it's a smart pointer I don't need to worry about freeing it either.
Does Java really work that way? I don't program in Java, so I really don't know, but that would be one of the most bizarre memory allocation systems I've heard of.
The JVM has to decide when to collect garbage allocations. To do that it uses various methods, including when the accumulated crud has reached some maximum size defined when you start up. If you give it too much RAM then the crud will keep piling up until it eventually gets cleared out, and then your JVM will still have 2GB of RAM even though little of it is useful. If you give it too little, then the program will crash.
Most memory allocations in C++ programs are usually on the stack, so they're automatically freed when you exit that code. The remainder are freed when you're done with them, and so the memory can immediately be reused. If a C++ program temporarily needs all the RAM on the machine it can use it, and if the memory allocator is smart enough it can give that RAM back to the OS when it's done.
Does this mean that after he's built it, everyone else gets to vote for who flies in it?
Have you seen the price of memory these days? It's virtually given away in cereal packets.
16GB of RAM doesn't last very long if every Java app configures the JVM to give it 2GB even though it only actually needs 20MB.
Because, the harder something is (ie memory management done by hand as opposed to garbage collection), the more frustration - and more importantly - more errors occur.
Garbage collection is a disaster, at least as implemented by Java. In most respects I prefer it to C++, but huge memory bloat and massive amounts of tuning to try to get it not to freeze or suck up massive amounts of CPU time when garbage collecting are not improvements.
And 99% of memory management in sensible C++ code is handled automatically by things like STL containers (or plain old local variables on the stack), so there are few reasons to need to call free and delete in modern code.
Publishers can pay a some money up front, and then a certain crappy percentage per book later... if it sells bad, that's a good idea for the author, and if it sells well the publishers win. If you're an author, do you want to take the risk?
Uh, dude... if your book sells bad, guess what? No publisher will want to buy your next book unless you have a long history of producing books that sell well; Stephen King can release a clunker once in a while, but Joe Nobody can't.
So the idea that an advance is good because you'll get more money if your book doesn't sell is just silly; if your book doesn't sell, you'll have to write the next one under a pseudonym and start at the bottom again.
So you just need to come up with several month's mortgage in advance so you can spend some time focusing on your book rather than working to pay those pesky bills...
Most trade-published writers in America have day jobs because they can't live off 8% royalties on their paper books. Few writers in America can get money from a publisher before they've written a book; who's going to give $20k to an unknown who's thinking of maybe writing a book?
The problem here is that someone has to interpret those words, and the SCOTUS seems to have inherited that duty.
Why? The US Constitution is one of the simplest substantial legal documents in the world. There are very few words which might require interpretation, and those are the very words which have been used to drastically increase the power of government. In this case, the copyright clause not specifying a duration but only saying 'a limited time'.
In other cases, the words are very clear, e.g. "shall make no law", and it's taken centuries of lawyering to turn that into "shall make no law except when we feel like it."
Otherwise, who's going to interpret them?
Juries don't need a gang of lawyers to tell them what the Constitution means, they can simply acquit if they feel the law is unconstitutional or immoral.
It was a commuter car for the masses.
It was a Reliant Robin for the 21st century, except it cost more than a Honda Civic.
More than a century of development? They were basically forgotten between the late 1800s/early 1900s and the '90s.
Yes, because they were crap in the 1800s and nothing has changed to make them less crap today.
Same issues occured when the auto industry 1st got it's feet wet. This is new-tech AND for certain is the next place to go in terms of automobiles.
Electric cars are not new tech. They are tech we abandoned a century ago because the ICE was vastly superior.
Doesn't seizing domains seem counterproductive? Wouldn't be it more productive to seize the server instead?
Good luck seizing a virtual server in Butfukistan.
I have a civil right to an Internet domain? Don't remember that from the Constitution...
If you actually knew anything about the Constitution, you'd know that it defines the limited powers of the government, not the rights of the citizens.
It's a .com, so it's registered in the US.
So does that mean the US government can seize your US-registered car because someone says they saw it speeding? Or your US-registered house because someone says that you weren't recycling your garbage?
Electric cars are NOT shit now
Yes they are.
and would be less shitty than ICE vehicles given a decade or two of development.
Electric cars have had more than a century of development and they're still hopelessly inadequate compared to ICE cars. That's why our great-grandparents dumped electric cars as soon as the ICE came along.
Compare this to the infernal fireball that you get seconds after you puncture a gas tank.
Dude, you should watch less action movies.
Hint: in the real world, gasoline cars rarely explode when you fire a pistol at them.
It's true. My gasoline-powered cars catch fire all the time.
You are half-right, though. From what I've read the Volt's battery is supposed to be drained after a crash to ensure it can't catch fire... which must be great fun for people who are responding to the accident.
No, but he will give him a few hundred to a couple of thousands for good idea and a first chapter, after a face to face meeting.
No they won't.
Not in America, anyway.
Which is how the system indeed does work.
Perhaps where you live, but that's not how it works in America. Most people won't even get their cover letter read at a major US publisher unless it comes from an agent, and an agent who receives a letter saying 'look, I'm writing this book, I've got a couple of chapters, can you get a publisher to give me money to finish it' would just laugh.
If the book sucks because it wasn't done right the first time, I'm definitely not going to reread it after it's "fixed."
Note that I've seen a lot of people complain about trade-published ebooks because they just OCR-ed the print book and then did a few fixups before shipping it. And probably haven't released a new version that's 'fixed'.
And they also say their profits are up despite lower sales because profit margins are much higher on ebooks.
For a few books, yes. The average book gets none of that; even an 'attention-grabbing' book cover is of little value when the cover is only visible after you pull the book off the shelf because the publisher paid for the next Stephen King novel to be the one that's positioned on the shelf with the cover showing (and who the heck thinks Stephen King needs a ton of marketing?)
But you will not be forced to pick any job at all, and you will be able to work hours you choose, rather then ones your manager will choose for you. Which is the whole point of advance for the first authors, who are the ones pushing median size of allowance down.
Again, how does Joe Nobody get a publisher to give them even $5k for a book they haven't written yet? And how does he manage to live on that amount of money without a day job while writing the book?