At 5000mph, a projectile 100 miles out will have 66 seconds to respond. Closer in, far less. Still, for an enemy craft width of, say, 300 feet would need to move 150' to avoid collision. At 0.1g lateral acceleration, fairly trivial, you could move an H-4 Hercules out of the line of fire in just over 3 seconds. That's a 5 mile range for the largest (wingspan) plane in the world. And from 6 miles out, the EM signature from a rail gun would be pretty obvious. That's very practical if the target is equipped with an automatic avoidance system.

Now if the projectile is active it does make things more interesting.

I'm kind of sorry I commented elsewhere as I would mod you up if I could.

There are exclusions and exemptions for existing structures where accessibility is not feasible.

Paying a single lawyer for a single case is not going to do any good if you look like a money machine to other lawyers. Now, if the structure was built after the law was enacted and you did the work yourself (or you designer and contractor are outside of the statue of repose for their services), then it could be fantastically expensive to fix. It's still probably cheaper than multiple lawsuits, though, and the building would be worthless to a new buyer unless upgraded.

I disagree with the premise of the article, as there are quite a few things about automobiles which are independent of the OS the in-vehicle entertainment and nav console - much more than a beige box pc.

However, it's worth noting that people over 25 are dying. Old people (over 25) as a market segment will change dramatically over then next 30 years as nearly everyone over 50 will no longer be in the market for an automobile. The "money" demographic will shift to those who are just now getting their driver's licenses.

I do find it depressing that, in an age where interactivity with personal devices can be done in an agnostic way, more and more interfaces are becoming OS specific.

Oh, I though he was talking about something where you put a cat in an lowered a handle to create two large punctures so you could drink the liquid that came out the bottom.

Probably for the best, as I didn't expect that would turn out to be a terribly popular product.

Amateur. Everyone knows you can only get the real flavor your after by collecting the fresh scat from wild animals in their native forest. I've bought half a small country and employ most of two villages to gather the beans prior to roasting them in the heat well adjacent to turbine in my private jet in the near vacuum of my 45k transpacific flights.

And I'm not even half as particular as most of the regulars at CoffeeGeek.

An espresso maker doesn't just make espresso, though. It's an entire hot-drink station. At least, that's the way I use mine.

So, if we just add wifi we can have the Internet of Keurigs?

When I worked at SourceForge, this was a major thing I worked on. I called it the "Yeah, but what does it *DO*" campaign, and I'd try to get projects to explain what their project was actually for, rather than saying that it was "an effort to build a fast, efficient, best of breed tool XYPDQ object-hierarchical framework" or whatever.

Turns out that a lot of people find this kind of thinking revolutionary. It's honestly eye-opening when you say some people might not know what their whizbang is used for.

Good documentation is typically not written by "most coders". It's written by writers. Some of us do indeed get a thrill from writing good documentation. I've been doing this for 20 years because it's fun, not because I'm paid for it, in much the same way that you have been coding, because it's fun. Different people find different things fun. The trick is to make it easier for these kinds of people to get access to the communities which are typically coder-dominated. (As you might guess, there's more about this in the article.)

Yes, there are plenty of counterexamples. And those communities - I presume you are referring to Linux? Or did you mean something else? - are remarkably hard for beginners to break into, unless they display a similarly belligerent attitude. Thus, this kind of attitude is self-perpetuating, and it makes it remarkably hard to improve the tone of the community over time. Monkey see, monkey do.

Look, I'm not declaring this to be a theory or a law of community organization. I'm saying that when you're nice to people, you tend to make it easier for them to solve problems.

From the article: ... there are some amazing books out there that you should read if you care about this stuff. First, I'd recommend Conversation and Community, by Anne Gentle. And if you're looking for a conference about this stuff, there are two that I'd suggest: Write The Docs and OpenHelp.

As I mention in the article (you did read it, right?) is that there are different voices required for different types of documentation. There's a place for both the "straight to the point" (reference docs) and "conversational" (howtos, more learning-oriented exposition) voices, depending on who you're talking to, and how much they already know.

"RTFM" is defined in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the article.

"parents feel they can't help their kids with homework."

That's true, but also a bit by design from what I've seen. The cc methods tend to take multiple approaches, realizing that not every child learns the same way and, in a way, shotgunning the approach in hopes of finding a method for everyone. Some of the math - the stuff which has be severely ridiculed by (mostly) politically conservative groups - happens to be exactly the way I do math very quickly in my head. It's not any method that's typically taught to students, but is more physical rather than theoretical in nature. If you learned (and still only know how) to do the theoretical versions, the practical ones will throw you. And that *should* be okay, but only if the teachers understand it. And many of the teachers are old and set in their ways, too, which results in teachers who can't teach it and parents who aren't in the loop. And that will always lead to friction.