That's an American thing. I managed to lock myself out of various cars on a regular basis while studying over there, until I managed to memorize the conditions under which the doors would auto-lock. Apparently, in the US you're much more likely to get carjacked than be in need of being pulled out of your possibly burning vehicle after an accident.
2) overly extravagent security
Another American thing.
3) satellite communications link for directions in a car with a GPS
Have you ever seen what happens when a technologically challenged person tries operating a navigation system ? It's not pretty. And there's more of them out there than you'd imagine.
4) a window designed to be broken
That is, in fact, a safety thing. The rear window of the car should be made of the same type of glass (it shatters into tiny fragments that aren't as sharp as "real" glass shards). This feature saved an unfortunate moped driver from breaking his skull on the rear window of my car, which he managed to hit in broad daylight while it was parked on the side of the road. It's also good for getting out (or getting someone out) of the car when the thing's too deformed to allow the doors to open.
As far as ASM - I have studied my share of it in my EE undergrad, and I found it to be close to useless except in the simplest of embedded devices or to replace 10 lines of code in a loop - all while sacrificing portability.
I wouldn't call DSPs simple... and there are families of them out there where the compiler knows only about 40% of the chips instructions. Heck - whole features of these chips cannot be used in any other language than assembly: hardware circular buffer support, hardware bit-reversed addressing, saturation, extended accumulators, hardware polynomial evaluation support, etc..
On the other hand, the C compiler for the "simple" embedded devices (like an 8051) are pretty good. For most applications (where you're not counting processor cycles), you don't need to use assembly.
I don't understand this whole "computers are faster; why bother making things run fast?" thing. Why can't we keep writing efficient code, run it on the faster modern machines, and have things actually GO FASTER? It seems that as computers get faster, application programmers get lazier, and everything runs at the same pace.
Get into embedded development if you're an efficiency fan. If you sell hardware+firmware, at several 10 kUnits (or even MUnits) per year, being able to use a $5.50 MCU instead of the $6 version that has twice the RAM is something that's worth investing several man-months in.
Yes. And that's much better than having a really big heap of radioactive soil, because the fungi have a smaller volume and are therefore much easier to dispose of.
When I was working as an intern at a nuclear power plant ten years ago, they were in the process of dismantling a decommissioned reactor block. One of the unexpected issues that popped up was having massive algae growth in the old reactors pressure vessel (highly radioactive due to having been activated over the course of a few decades of use).
That reminds me of something I sometimes wonder about - as a non-citizen Green-card-holder, am I entitled to own firearms??
Probably depends on the state you're in. If it's one that has virtually no checks (maybe residency) on "standard" hunting/home defense/sporting equipment, then it should be no problem.
Then the reporting can be used to "slow down" the competitor.
Hardly, unless you have really overzealous authorities. They won't go and check every other week, and once they've been there three times in a year without finding anything, they'll ignore any further "hints" for that year.
'Disposable income' is income you have extra to go out and buy new stuff with...
Disposable income is what's left after the basic necessities of life are paid for (most of these necessities, being things you consume like food/electricity/etc, would be taxed under the system you advocate). If you use all of your disposable income to go out and buy new stuff which, you shouldn't be lecturing people about different tax system, but take care of your own personal finances yet. There's this thing called investing, and smart people with disposable income will allocate a lot of the latter for it (morons won't, but that can't be helped). And as far as I see, in that "Fair Tax" system there's no tax on money you invest, right ? Therefore, under this system you pay less and less taxes (percentage-wise) the more disposable income you have and invest - i.e. is is a big tax break for people who don't really need one, and it puts the squeeze on people who need to spend most of their income on those basic necessities of life.
Some would go so far as to suggest that checking the citizenship status of prospective employees would leave them open to discrimination lawsuits.
Strawman argument. Check citizenship/work permit after the decision to hire has been made.
People who oppose such data bases should suggest alternatives by which this "race to the bottom" can be avoided and employers of legal status workers are not unfairly undercut by others who employ the illegals.
Report the competitors you suspect of using illegal labor to the appropriate authorities. They should be able to check who's legal and who's not, and they shouldn't need to fear discrimination lawsuits (since they're not the ones doing the hiring).
The barbarian Vandals were invading the Empire from Germany.
Well, at least the Vandals didn't fly a jet plane into the colosseum.
The Christians set fire to Rome... Emperor Nero said so, so it must be true ? At least he was also fairly good at organizing the relief effort after the disaster.
The move to ethanol-blended fuel is based in part on widespread belief that it produces cleaner emissions than regular gasoline. But a recent Environment Canada study found no statistical difference between the greenhouse gas emissions of regular unleaded fuel and 10 per cent ethanol-blended fuel.
Do they need to buy a fscking clue ? Of course there's no difference. The combustion products of ethanol are pretty much the same as those of gasoline. Why do they need to do a fscking study about something that's covered in Organic Chemistry 101 ?
One of the consequences of an environment in which energy is expensive is that we will at last see lighter, more energy efficient vehicles becoming mainstream.
Ha ha... don't tell that to the Americans. If it doesn't weigh at least three tons, it's not safe. Because you might get hit by a semi, a tank, or someone else's three-ton monster.
The point is to do away with the pressurised tank full of inflammable gas.
... and replace it with a heavier tank filled with pellets that will react very exothermically with water (which is kept nearby) and release the same flammable gas at the same time. Great.
PS Everyone stop talking about the 'Hydrogen Economy'.
"Hydrogen economy" is what happens when/if we figure out how to do energy-positive fusion. Once we have that up and running, the only thing we need hydrogen for is to feed our fusion power plants... with the energy thus produced we can easily synthesize fuels that are more easily handled than hydrogen.
Thanks for pointing out that conservation of energy still exists.
That's just the first law of thermodynamics. Too bad the second law of thermodynamics will keep you from actually using most of that energy, since it'll be lost as heat in many, many places of the whole process.
kill the little green men, wipe them out, colonize.
Well, I'm pretty sure the little green men will do one of the following:
a) Disable our colony ships main computer with a computer virus written quickly by one of their hacker geniuses and then hit it with a nuclear warhead while our colonists are waiting for Windows to boot up again.
b) Find out that a very common, harmless (to them) substance on their planet is highly toxic to us humans and douse any unwelcome visitor with it.
c) Realize that their equivalent of the common cold is a deadly plague for humans.
d) Send in the little green men in black to take care of the human invasion, then mind-wipe any innocent bystanders.
e) Travel back in time and keep Earth from forming.
Which European country is it -- one of the Scandinavian ones, I believe -- where every male of military service age is required to keep a rifle in the house?
Switzerland.
And we _do_ own guns here in Europe (certain islands aside), we just don't make a big fuss about it and try make sure the people who get them are appropriately trained, mentally stable and able to keep the things out of the hands of their kids.
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That's an American thing. I managed to lock myself out of various cars on a regular basis while studying over there, until I managed to memorize the conditions under which the doors would auto-lock. Apparently, in the US you're much more likely to get carjacked than be in need of being pulled out of your possibly burning vehicle after an accident.
2) overly extravagent security
Another American thing.
3) satellite communications link for directions in a car with a GPS
Have you ever seen what happens when a technologically challenged person tries operating a navigation system ? It's not pretty. And there's more of them out there than you'd imagine.
4) a window designed to be broken
That is, in fact, a safety thing. The rear window of the car should be made of the same type of glass (it shatters into tiny fragments that aren't as sharp as "real" glass shards). This feature saved an unfortunate moped driver from breaking his skull on the rear window of my car, which he managed to hit in broad daylight while it was parked on the side of the road. It's also good for getting out (or getting someone out) of the car when the thing's too deformed to allow the doors to open.
I wouldn't call DSPs simple ... and there are families of them out there where the compiler knows only about 40% of the chips instructions. Heck - whole features of these chips cannot be used in any other language than assembly: hardware circular buffer support, hardware bit-reversed addressing, saturation, extended accumulators, hardware polynomial evaluation support, etc..
On the other hand, the C compiler for the "simple" embedded devices (like an 8051) are pretty good. For most applications (where you're not counting processor cycles), you don't need to use assembly.
Get into embedded development if you're an efficiency fan. If you sell hardware+firmware, at several 10 kUnits (or even MUnits) per year, being able to use a $5.50 MCU instead of the $6 version that has twice the RAM is something that's worth investing several man-months in.
You get a bunch of radioactive fungi.
Yes. And that's much better than having a really big heap of radioactive soil, because the fungi have a smaller volume and are therefore much easier to dispose of.
When I was working as an intern at a nuclear power plant ten years ago, they were in the process of dismantling a decommissioned reactor block. One of the unexpected issues that popped up was having massive algae growth in the old reactors pressure vessel (highly radioactive due to having been activated over the course of a few decades of use).
Probably depends on the state you're in. If it's one that has virtually no checks (maybe residency) on "standard" hunting/home defense/sporting equipment, then it should be no problem.
Hardly, unless you have really overzealous authorities. They won't go and check every other week, and once they've been there three times in a year without finding anything, they'll ignore any further "hints" for that year.
Disposable income is what's left after the basic necessities of life are paid for (most of these necessities, being things you consume like food/electricity/etc, would be taxed under the system you advocate). If you use all of your disposable income to go out and buy new stuff which, you shouldn't be lecturing people about different tax system, but take care of your own personal finances yet. There's this thing called investing, and smart people with disposable income will allocate a lot of the latter for it (morons won't, but that can't be helped). And as far as I see, in that "Fair Tax" system there's no tax on money you invest, right ? Therefore, under this system you pay less and less taxes (percentage-wise) the more disposable income you have and invest - i.e. is is a big tax break for people who don't really need one, and it puts the squeeze on people who need to spend most of their income on those basic necessities of life.
Strawman argument. Check citizenship/work permit after the decision to hire has been made.
People who oppose such data bases should suggest alternatives by which this "race to the bottom" can be avoided and employers of legal status workers are not unfairly undercut by others who employ the illegals.
Report the competitors you suspect of using illegal labor to the appropriate authorities. They should be able to check who's legal and who's not, and they shouldn't need to fear discrimination lawsuits (since they're not the ones doing the hiring).
The Christians set fire to Rome ... Emperor Nero said so, so it must be true ? At least he was also fairly good at organizing the relief effort after the disaster.
It will, once they've extraordinarily renditioned the first couple of offenders, or shipped them to Gitmo, or just disappeared them.
Huh ? Did you find that in some outdated g******d piece of paper or what ?
Do they need to buy a fscking clue ? Of course there's no difference. The combustion products of ethanol are pretty much the same as those of gasoline. Why do they need to do a fscking study about something that's covered in Organic Chemistry 101 ?
What about intra-molecular bonds (those that influence protein folding) ?
Not for the side that has their own legal department.
I'd say taking government money and spending it on something that's not weapons is a noble enough purpose. The more, the better.
Ha ha
"Hydrogen economy" is what happens when/if we figure out how to do energy-positive fusion. Once we have that up and running, the only thing we need hydrogen for is to feed our fusion power plants
That's just the first law of thermodynamics. Too bad the second law of thermodynamics will keep you from actually using most of that energy, since it'll be lost as heat in many, many places of the whole process.
Making aluminium out of any aluminium ore (including oxides) takes big frickin' huge amounts of energy.
Wake me again when they have found some sort of catalyst that works with the reaction
2 H2O + (some sort of cheap, abundant energy, preferably heat or sunlight, definitely not electricity) -> 2 H2 + O2
Well, I'm pretty sure the little green men will do one of the following:
a) Disable our colony ships main computer with a computer virus written quickly by one of their hacker geniuses and then hit it with a nuclear warhead while our colonists are waiting for Windows to boot up again.
b) Find out that a very common, harmless (to them) substance on their planet is highly toxic to us humans and douse any unwelcome visitor with it.
c) Realize that their equivalent of the common cold is a deadly plague for humans.
d) Send in the little green men in black to take care of the human invasion, then mind-wipe any innocent bystanders.
e) Travel back in time and keep Earth from forming.
Switzerland.
And we _do_ own guns here in Europe (certain islands aside), we just don't make a big fuss about it and try make sure the people who get them are appropriately trained, mentally stable and able to keep the things out of the hands of their kids.
That was fast.