I don't think he was suggesting using a MAC system under the MS testing program, but making a point about systemic issues being at fault as much as the culprit. Now, if you look directly up, you should see the GP's point stuck to the ceiling directly above your head.
Teachers are employed to perform a function. That function (and I have worked in the education system before) is strictly defined by government oversight bodies, the education department and countless other bureaucrat farms full of people who wouldn't know the first thing about educating a child. Government bureaucrats aren't hired for their family values, they are hired for their single minded obedience to the chain of command. So when teachers receive their orders from these governmental bodies, even if they are well intentioned eager teachers the system undermines their efforts with staid content, fixed syllabuses and a deliberate attempt to suffocate the natural curiosity and energy that children posses. It does this so well that it is hard to believe that it was not designed with this purpose, creating generations of mindless followers who do nothing but consume and obey is in the interests of the high powers of the so called modern democracies.
All this aside, where the hell do you get off blaming unions? You say that the labor union system is to blame for education's failings and then tell me not to blame public servants for the faults of the system? Oh, and you go on about how labor unions destroy productivity? And then you call me alarmist? Mate, seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? What kind of argument is that? It's completely reversible, and it works better in my favor as unions were a response to the flaws of the basic libertarian social model.
It's not that I don't grasp what you're talking about, the problem is that YOU don't seem to grasp what you're talking about.
There is a bloody huge difference between a "citizen" and a "taxpayer". The large overlap between the two groups does not mean they are the same. I don't help my disabled neighbor mow his lawn because of my role as a taxpayer, but because of my role as a citizen. Likewise, I don't think of my contribution towards paying soldiers to fight what I consider unnecessary wars to be my duty as a citizen but rather the necessary role as a taxpayer I have to take on in order to live where I live. In other words, taxpayers pay the government to do what the government decides to do. Citizens do what they think is the right thing to do for the community in which they live.
The distinction is subtle but very important. If you are American, I will excuse you for not seeing this, as your whole country is full of people unable to comprehend subtle but crucial issues.
My role as a "taxpayer" does not influence my concern over the school I send my children to. It is my role as a citizen that does this. Because I am a citizen, I go to the school, talk to the teachers, talk to other parents and make sure that not just my children, but all of the children at the school are being properly and roundly educated to make the next generation of people better than mine. Were I doing it in the capacity of a taxpayer, I'd be going there with a ledger and making sure that the dollars provided a proper amount of books, pens, pencils, gym facilities and that greedy teachers weren't demanding too much in wages.
Get your head out of your ass. The very rotten core of American and indeed any Americanized society today is the fact that the people that make up those societies have forgotten the word "citizen" and replaced it with the words "taxpayer" and "consumer".
It's not like this is an Orwellian scheme of oppression, this is about making effective efficient classrooms that don't waste taxpayer time and money on things students have every capability to do at home in their free time.
Yes, it is, and no, it isn't. Education is not a "sit here, memorize this and then you are educated" type formula. Students who are interacting with the world, learning about things outside the classroom that their teachers have no idea about, is what education is all about. The education system provides them with the basic common knowledge that i required to perform productive tasks in our society, but they are not capable of and should not try to be a substitute for the totality of real world experience that is acquired through exploration and independent interaction with the world. Do you know what you get when you take a bunch of kids and force upon them a formulaic and immutable education system based on the idea that taxpayer dollars need to be spent in a way that can be consistently reported? A bunch of Americans.
Now you may or may not not block Wikipedia, yet, but given that you don't see the idea that information flow control is always a tool of oppression, it is just a matter of time until you fall jut a little bit further down the slippery slope you are already on. People like you always point at people further down the slope and say "we'll never be like them", which is true to an extent, when you are at the point they are at now, they'll just be further down, giving you a nice easy excuse by again being able to point at them and say "we'll never be like them".
Oh, and don't go giving me the "well according to you we should unblock all porn sites" type think-of-the-children BS argument. There is a line between what children should and should not have available to them, but that line definitely does not fall on the wrong side of Wikipedia, The Onion or MySpace. If students at your school are wasting time on MySpace or some other site that your holy principal deems to be inappropriate, then that is a problem with your teachers' ability to guide and teach. You know, the things that the job title "teacher" implies that they are good at.
That idea needs to be re-worked so that you get to participate in all the fun that is to be had by destroying things in acid and thermite. No, I don't know how, but seriously, if there's going to be a thermite party, do you really want to miss out?
All of your ideas indicate a total lack of comprehension of the scale of the things you are talking about.
Wind, solar, tidal, geothermal etc are all sources of energy that are so large that nothing we as humans can do with current, future or imagined technology can make a dent in them. It's like thinking that if we managed to get everyone on Earth to jump up and down at precisely the right time, we could reverse the Earth's rotation around the Sun. Just not possible. Perhaps we could make an immeasurably small change, but the mass of humans vs the mass of Earth is so hugely disparate that any effects from humans jumping will be infinitesimally small.
No, I'm sure the technology has a long way to go. What I am saying is that there is a finite limit as to what the technology can do. If you look at the way most products are engineered, take for instance a computer mouse, it is not possible, with any iteration of this tech (even if we are at 1% of its capability and we get to 100%) to create an object with components that are that vastly different from each other with a single device and material source. How would a printer print a a PCB for instance? I know PCBs have been printed, but then you have to incorporate a whole other type of fab device into your "home fab plant". The same device will not be able to create the teflon mouse feet. Yet another print head will be needed to make the wiring.
It is just wishful thinking if you imagine a world where copying a physical item of non-trivial complexity is as easy as copying the latest DVD, that technology requires not one but several quantum leaps from where we currently are. Imagining this technology and your idea of where it can go is like looking at a Roman Empire Era catapult and imagining a fire-and-forget radar self-guided air to air missile. While they are both weapons that fly through the air, there is a vast, vast difference between them, requiring all sorts of technologies that were not available in the Roman era (electricity, radio waves, suitably strong metals, explosives, timers, sensors, actuated guidance systems etc etc). The difference between these 3D printers and anything resembling a device that could be called a "replicator" is as vast as the difference between said catapult and said modern missile.
I'm not being a tired old cynic, just pointing out that these are not, and never will be without a whole stack of advances in seemingly unrelated areas of science and technology, the replicators that many here seem to think they will lead to. They are not. They are just an ancient Roman catapult by comparison, and if you want a replicator you're going to have to wait far longer than the time it took for impact printers to turn into consumer priced colour laser printers.
The evolution of the 2D printer where colour reproduction and resolution improve is a far cry from the ability to reproduce different materials and structures. Just because the two devices have the world "printer" in their names does not mean they are anything alike.
"It has always closed and will continue to close in every industry in existence."
I want to see you make a single pair of underpants that are a) the same quality as a commercially purchased product and b) doesn't require you to spend a hugely disproportionate time working on them. Don't be trying to convince me that underpants are a new and novel technology and that the gap will close.
The point is that making large number of anything will always be more cost effective, hugely so, by dedicated facilities. Too many IT kiddies drunk on digital goodies think that the idea of lossless reproduction can be applied to anything and everything and that "technology will solve all problems". NEWS FLASH: Digital lossless copying is a special case, not the general nature of the world. It is different from all other forms of product duplication. Complicated stuff is complicated, and you will not be able to put in the latest torrented 3D model, upload it to your printer and then have a perfect duplicate of an axle joint or even a pair of scissors, this technology does not allow for that. It is not even close to a Star Trek replicator, it is conceptually different. It makes a lookalike of an object that is not even a reasonable substitute unless your original object was a simple piece of plastic (or other of the limited materials) with a low use case dimensional tolerance to start with.
The *best* you can hope to do is make components, but then you're really making the final product yourself, and the 3D printer is just saving you the time of using a mill / band saw / other tool for making the parts, and even so, it can only make parts that are more or less solid and have no internally concealed structure. No engine blocks then, even if it *could* use molten iron as a material.
Dude, stop smoking crack. If you think that whatever material can be squirted out of a nozzle on a print head will be able to be used as a substitute for the known tensile strength steel of a camshaft, then I bid you adieu driving your plastic wagon.
It's very different from your wrought iron quip too, the objections that I and other skeptics here have is that the technology will not be able to put the dexterity of a proper fabrication plant into the home. It's just not possible with current technology. Add to that the fact that any non-trivial object needs to be inspected by an engineer before being used. Imagine if old Mrs. Mable down the road decided to make her own axle bolts from the kit given to her by her nephew which he intended to have her make replacement pot handles with. In other words, complicated stuff is complicated.
No, there will always be a huge disparity between the capabilities of dedicated fab plants and home fab gear. I'm not saying they will stay static, just that the disparity will always be large, and that home gear will never be able to fab anything thats non-trivial for a product engineering facility. In short, we're not going to buy expensive items and replicate them, at best we'll avoid being scalped for things like tape dispensers, glass tumblers and dildos. The items that are currently made in fab shops may be made in the garage soon, but anything non-trivial will always be better left to dedicated people and equipment.
Bear in mind that a scanner can only see the surface of the object, complex parts with internal structures are inherently impossible to scan. Can you imagine this thing copying an engine block for instance?
The reason it has happened that way in the past is because creating and replicating audio and video are relatively easy once they are digitized. The sensory data (sound saves and light waves) lend themselves well for digital reproduction at close to perfect quality. Duplication can be done perfectly, with no loss in transmission.
That is not the case with physical reproduction, and I doubt will be for some time. These 3d scanners are good for only what their ads say: prototyping. There will not be a day when you will be able to scan copy and duplicate even a nut or a bolt in your garage anywhere near as cheaply as it can be done en masse at a production plant simply because the mould, tools and materials are too expensive on a small scale to be feasible. Now I know about the "never say never" line in technology, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that while the productive capacity of the home user will scale up, you will never get to the point where manufacturers of physical items will be squeezed out the way manufacturers of virtual goods (music, movies etc) have been. There's a fundamental difference between copying Britney Spears' latest warblings and copying a Ferrari.
"one trick for making models of dark shiny objects is to coat them with a cloud of white powder"
Great, so now when I'm in the tech room doing blow and the boss walks in I'll have a reasonable excuse: I'm prototyping my nose for a prosthetic. Never mind that not even a disfigured maxillofacial surgery patient would want my nose, but hey, the boss doesn't know that.
Just use a finger slingshot to get your message across:
Ammo production: 1. Take an A4 or letter sized sheet of paper. 2. Fold over and tear off a 2-3 inch wide flap, making a strip from a short edge. 3. Roll the strip into a tight (but not too tight) small cigar shaped wad. 4. Lick the end flap of the roll to make it stick and not unravel. 5. Bend it in the middle, to make a V shaped projectile.
The slingshot is just a heavy duty elastic band looped between your thumb and index finger. Assuming you are right handed, the projectile is held by the right hand, and the sling is the thumb and index finger of the left hand.
Can be stowed immediately after a shot. If your poker face is good enough, you can shoot someone point blank and then stare innocently when he/she turns around angrily. Make *damn* sure your poker face is good, as even a tiny smirk is likely to result in you being chased around the terminal.
Pros: 1. Easily concealable, 100% undetectable by airport security. 2. Can inflict serious pain, especially to that exposed part of the back of the neck of a cell phone douche bag. 3. Rapid deployment and concealment.
Cons: 1. Unstable ammo makes accuracy at long range poor 2. Unskilled use can result in the projectile hitting the webbing between thumb and forefinger of your sling hand. Can draw blood! 3. Requires practice in covert deployment and concealment if it is to be used in combat against cell phone douche bags.
Tell her you have a really big penis. She'll know you're lying, but that's OK, because she'll know you speak with a forked tongue, and then her imagination will take over.
Agreed.I've never been a big fan of USB. The concept is fantastic, a unified connector that links just about any device to any other and can charge them is a great idea. However I am still bitter the Firewire lost out. It has more bandwidth, has sturdier connectors, and can deliver far more power. Being able to just plug one cable to power and link a hard drive would be great, I have one of those external IDE enclosures, and having *another* power brick is just silly.
Being able to charge high draw devices through Firewire would rock. Powering my laptop from my PC would be great, especially if it will be syncing files at the same time, allowing me to leave the power brick in my laptop case and not have to get it out after getting home.
In my eagerness to get this post in first, I didn't read the article before I started typing. He says it all the same way I would. So to all of you who haven't RTFA'd, do it to find out the rest of this comment's points. Now lets see if I can still get this in first...
FWIW, in PostgreSQL database return, returning any data set without explicitly stating return order will yield an unstable result. This is not a bad thing IMHO, any request for data where the order was not stated should return the data in the quickest way possible, not the most stable. If the user didn't specify order, chances are they aren't interested in it, and just want the data ASAP. Implying sort orders means there is no way for the user to say "I don't need the data ordered, I just need to make this operation as quick as possible". As a long time PG user, I have gotten used to using unspecified order to mean "as fast as possible". Any time order matters, I tell it what the order should be. Relying on implied ordering rules in your programming language, database or other data source is just *asking* for bugs.
As a layer I am elated by the prospect that 4.0 (billable hours) * "4" (number of 1000 bills we get per hour) can actually yield 4444. Who says Ruby is not a good language for business systems?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think he was suggesting using a MAC system under the MS testing program, but making a point about systemic issues being at fault as much as the culprit. Now, if you look directly up, you should see the GP's point stuck to the ceiling directly above your head.
Teachers are employed to perform a function. That function (and I have worked in the education system before) is strictly defined by government oversight bodies, the education department and countless other bureaucrat farms full of people who wouldn't know the first thing about educating a child. Government bureaucrats aren't hired for their family values, they are hired for their single minded obedience to the chain of command. So when teachers receive their orders from these governmental bodies, even if they are well intentioned eager teachers the system undermines their efforts with staid content, fixed syllabuses and a deliberate attempt to suffocate the natural curiosity and energy that children posses. It does this so well that it is hard to believe that it was not designed with this purpose, creating generations of mindless followers who do nothing but consume and obey is in the interests of the high powers of the so called modern democracies.
All this aside, where the hell do you get off blaming unions? You say that the labor union system is to blame for education's failings and then tell me not to blame public servants for the faults of the system? Oh, and you go on about how labor unions destroy productivity? And then you call me alarmist? Mate, seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? What kind of argument is that? It's completely reversible, and it works better in my favor as unions were a response to the flaws of the basic libertarian social model.
It's not that I don't grasp what you're talking about, the problem is that YOU don't seem to grasp what you're talking about.
No, they are not the same.
There is a bloody huge difference between a "citizen" and a "taxpayer". The large overlap between the two groups does not mean they are the same. I don't help my disabled neighbor mow his lawn because of my role as a taxpayer, but because of my role as a citizen. Likewise, I don't think of my contribution towards paying soldiers to fight what I consider unnecessary wars to be my duty as a citizen but rather the necessary role as a taxpayer I have to take on in order to live where I live. In other words, taxpayers pay the government to do what the government decides to do. Citizens do what they think is the right thing to do for the community in which they live.
The distinction is subtle but very important. If you are American, I will excuse you for not seeing this, as your whole country is full of people unable to comprehend subtle but crucial issues.
My role as a "taxpayer" does not influence my concern over the school I send my children to. It is my role as a citizen that does this. Because I am a citizen, I go to the school, talk to the teachers, talk to other parents and make sure that not just my children, but all of the children at the school are being properly and roundly educated to make the next generation of people better than mine. Were I doing it in the capacity of a taxpayer, I'd be going there with a ledger and making sure that the dollars provided a proper amount of books, pens, pencils, gym facilities and that greedy teachers weren't demanding too much in wages.
Get your head out of your ass. The very rotten core of American and indeed any Americanized society today is the fact that the people that make up those societies have forgotten the word "citizen" and replaced it with the words "taxpayer" and "consumer".
Yes, it is, and no, it isn't. Education is not a "sit here, memorize this and then you are educated" type formula. Students who are interacting with the world, learning about things outside the classroom that their teachers have no idea about, is what education is all about. The education system provides them with the basic common knowledge that i required to perform productive tasks in our society, but they are not capable of and should not try to be a substitute for the totality of real world experience that is acquired through exploration and independent interaction with the world. Do you know what you get when you take a bunch of kids and force upon them a formulaic and immutable education system based on the idea that taxpayer dollars need to be spent in a way that can be consistently reported? A bunch of Americans.
Now you may or may not not block Wikipedia, yet, but given that you don't see the idea that information flow control is always a tool of oppression, it is just a matter of time until you fall jut a little bit further down the slippery slope you are already on. People like you always point at people further down the slope and say "we'll never be like them", which is true to an extent, when you are at the point they are at now, they'll just be further down, giving you a nice easy excuse by again being able to point at them and say "we'll never be like them".
Oh, and don't go giving me the "well according to you we should unblock all porn sites" type think-of-the-children BS argument. There is a line between what children should and should not have available to them, but that line definitely does not fall on the wrong side of Wikipedia, The Onion or MySpace. If students at your school are wasting time on MySpace or some other site that your holy principal deems to be inappropriate, then that is a problem with your teachers' ability to guide and teach. You know, the things that the job title "teacher" implies that they are good at.
Fully fluid page designs are quite easy in CSS. What are you trying to achieve that you can't while maintaining full fluidity of page flow?
That idea needs to be re-worked so that you get to participate in all the fun that is to be had by destroying things in acid and thermite. No, I don't know how, but seriously, if there's going to be a thermite party, do you really want to miss out?
Twice, just to be sure!
All of your ideas indicate a total lack of comprehension of the scale of the things you are talking about.
Wind, solar, tidal, geothermal etc are all sources of energy that are so large that nothing we as humans can do with current, future or imagined technology can make a dent in them. It's like thinking that if we managed to get everyone on Earth to jump up and down at precisely the right time, we could reverse the Earth's rotation around the Sun. Just not possible. Perhaps we could make an immeasurably small change, but the mass of humans vs the mass of Earth is so hugely disparate that any effects from humans jumping will be infinitesimally small.
Your children? Oh wait, this is /.
Just imagine that the lock is on a car.
Lots of empty arguments, lots of ads. Holy siamese twins Batman, do you think there could be a connection?
No, I'm sure the technology has a long way to go. What I am saying is that there is a finite limit as to what the technology can do. If you look at the way most products are engineered, take for instance a computer mouse, it is not possible, with any iteration of this tech (even if we are at 1% of its capability and we get to 100%) to create an object with components that are that vastly different from each other with a single device and material source. How would a printer print a a PCB for instance? I know PCBs have been printed, but then you have to incorporate a whole other type of fab device into your "home fab plant". The same device will not be able to create the teflon mouse feet. Yet another print head will be needed to make the wiring.
It is just wishful thinking if you imagine a world where copying a physical item of non-trivial complexity is as easy as copying the latest DVD, that technology requires not one but several quantum leaps from where we currently are. Imagining this technology and your idea of where it can go is like looking at a Roman Empire Era catapult and imagining a fire-and-forget radar self-guided air to air missile. While they are both weapons that fly through the air, there is a vast, vast difference between them, requiring all sorts of technologies that were not available in the Roman era (electricity, radio waves, suitably strong metals, explosives, timers, sensors, actuated guidance systems etc etc). The difference between these 3D printers and anything resembling a device that could be called a "replicator" is as vast as the difference between said catapult and said modern missile.
I'm not being a tired old cynic, just pointing out that these are not, and never will be without a whole stack of advances in seemingly unrelated areas of science and technology, the replicators that many here seem to think they will lead to. They are not. They are just an ancient Roman catapult by comparison, and if you want a replicator you're going to have to wait far longer than the time it took for impact printers to turn into consumer priced colour laser printers.
The evolution of the 2D printer where colour reproduction and resolution improve is a far cry from the ability to reproduce different materials and structures. Just because the two devices have the world "printer" in their names does not mean they are anything alike.
"It has always closed and will continue to close in every industry in existence."
I want to see you make a single pair of underpants that are a) the same quality as a commercially purchased product and b) doesn't require you to spend a hugely disproportionate time working on them. Don't be trying to convince me that underpants are a new and novel technology and that the gap will close.
The point is that making large number of anything will always be more cost effective, hugely so, by dedicated facilities. Too many IT kiddies drunk on digital goodies think that the idea of lossless reproduction can be applied to anything and everything and that "technology will solve all problems". NEWS FLASH: Digital lossless copying is a special case, not the general nature of the world. It is different from all other forms of product duplication. Complicated stuff is complicated, and you will not be able to put in the latest torrented 3D model, upload it to your printer and then have a perfect duplicate of an axle joint or even a pair of scissors, this technology does not allow for that. It is not even close to a Star Trek replicator, it is conceptually different. It makes a lookalike of an object that is not even a reasonable substitute unless your original object was a simple piece of plastic (or other of the limited materials) with a low use case dimensional tolerance to start with.
The *best* you can hope to do is make components, but then you're really making the final product yourself, and the 3D printer is just saving you the time of using a mill / band saw / other tool for making the parts, and even so, it can only make parts that are more or less solid and have no internally concealed structure. No engine blocks then, even if it *could* use molten iron as a material.
Dude, stop smoking crack. If you think that whatever material can be squirted out of a nozzle on a print head will be able to be used as a substitute for the known tensile strength steel of a camshaft, then I bid you adieu driving your plastic wagon.
It's very different from your wrought iron quip too, the objections that I and other skeptics here have is that the technology will not be able to put the dexterity of a proper fabrication plant into the home. It's just not possible with current technology. Add to that the fact that any non-trivial object needs to be inspected by an engineer before being used. Imagine if old Mrs. Mable down the road decided to make her own axle bolts from the kit given to her by her nephew which he intended to have her make replacement pot handles with. In other words, complicated stuff is complicated.
No, there will always be a huge disparity between the capabilities of dedicated fab plants and home fab gear. I'm not saying they will stay static, just that the disparity will always be large, and that home gear will never be able to fab anything thats non-trivial for a product engineering facility. In short, we're not going to buy expensive items and replicate them, at best we'll avoid being scalped for things like tape dispensers, glass tumblers and dildos. The items that are currently made in fab shops may be made in the garage soon, but anything non-trivial will always be better left to dedicated people and equipment.
I humbly disagree.
Bear in mind that a scanner can only see the surface of the object, complex parts with internal structures are inherently impossible to scan. Can you imagine this thing copying an engine block for instance?
I was tossing (snicker) up making a penis joke, but then I thought, someone else will do it for me.
I humbly disagree.
The reason it has happened that way in the past is because creating and replicating audio and video are relatively easy once they are digitized. The sensory data (sound saves and light waves) lend themselves well for digital reproduction at close to perfect quality. Duplication can be done perfectly, with no loss in transmission.
That is not the case with physical reproduction, and I doubt will be for some time. These 3d scanners are good for only what their ads say: prototyping. There will not be a day when you will be able to scan copy and duplicate even a nut or a bolt in your garage anywhere near as cheaply as it can be done en masse at a production plant simply because the mould, tools and materials are too expensive on a small scale to be feasible. Now I know about the "never say never" line in technology, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that while the productive capacity of the home user will scale up, you will never get to the point where manufacturers of physical items will be squeezed out the way manufacturers of virtual goods (music, movies etc) have been. There's a fundamental difference between copying Britney Spears' latest warblings and copying a Ferrari.
"one trick for making models of dark shiny objects is to coat them with a cloud of white powder"
Great, so now when I'm in the tech room doing blow and the boss walks in I'll have a reasonable excuse: I'm prototyping my nose for a prosthetic. Never mind that not even a disfigured maxillofacial surgery patient would want my nose, but hey, the boss doesn't know that.
Just use a finger slingshot to get your message across:
Ammo production:
1. Take an A4 or letter sized sheet of paper.
2. Fold over and tear off a 2-3 inch wide flap, making a strip from a short edge.
3. Roll the strip into a tight (but not too tight) small cigar shaped wad.
4. Lick the end flap of the roll to make it stick and not unravel.
5. Bend it in the middle, to make a V shaped projectile.
The slingshot is just a heavy duty elastic band looped between your thumb and index finger. Assuming you are right handed, the projectile is held by the right hand, and the sling is the thumb and index finger of the left hand.
Can be stowed immediately after a shot. If your poker face is good enough, you can shoot someone point blank and then stare innocently when he/she turns around angrily. Make *damn* sure your poker face is good, as even a tiny smirk is likely to result in you being chased around the terminal.
Pros:
1. Easily concealable, 100% undetectable by airport security.
2. Can inflict serious pain, especially to that exposed part of the back of the neck of a cell phone douche bag.
3. Rapid deployment and concealment.
Cons:
1. Unstable ammo makes accuracy at long range poor
2. Unskilled use can result in the projectile hitting the webbing between thumb and forefinger of your sling hand. Can draw blood!
3. Requires practice in covert deployment and concealment if it is to be used in combat against cell phone douche bags.
I bought the thing to turn my used HDDs into useful items. That purpose is defeated by buying new drives.
Tell her you have a really big penis. She'll know you're lying, but that's OK, because she'll know you speak with a forked tongue, and then her imagination will take over.
Agreed.I've never been a big fan of USB. The concept is fantastic, a unified connector that links just about any device to any other and can charge them is a great idea. However I am still bitter the Firewire lost out. It has more bandwidth, has sturdier connectors, and can deliver far more power. Being able to just plug one cable to power and link a hard drive would be great, I have one of those external IDE enclosures, and having *another* power brick is just silly.
Being able to charge high draw devices through Firewire would rock. Powering my laptop from my PC would be great, especially if it will be syncing files at the same time, allowing me to leave the power brick in my laptop case and not have to get it out after getting home.
In my eagerness to get this post in first, I didn't read the article before I started typing. He says it all the same way I would. So to all of you who haven't RTFA'd, do it to find out the rest of this comment's points. Now lets see if I can still get this in first...
FWIW, in PostgreSQL database return, returning any data set without explicitly stating return order will yield an unstable result. This is not a bad thing IMHO, any request for data where the order was not stated should return the data in the quickest way possible, not the most stable. If the user didn't specify order, chances are they aren't interested in it, and just want the data ASAP. Implying sort orders means there is no way for the user to say "I don't need the data ordered, I just need to make this operation as quick as possible". As a long time PG user, I have gotten used to using unspecified order to mean "as fast as possible". Any time order matters, I tell it what the order should be. Relying on implied ordering rules in your programming language, database or other data source is just *asking* for bugs.
As a layer I am elated by the prospect that 4.0 (billable hours) * "4" (number of 1000 bills we get per hour) can actually yield 4444. Who says Ruby is not a good language for business systems?