Sure, if you're getting an off-the-shelf board or a board designed by someone else.

However, I will note that the Xilinx Spartan 6 user manual has about half a dozen pages devoted to how to lay out the PCB *for the configuration clock signal alone*.

At least it wasn't irrational.

The world is analogue. Someone's going to have to design the analogue front end to your digital system. Even if you have a ready made analogue front end, you still have to understand the analogue world if you ever hope to design high speed digital systems. When it comes to the actual voltage levels on your PCB and signal integrity, the nice clean world of software where you can just expect the hardware to be predictable and just work with no effort goes away, you have to have a little bit of a clue about the analogue side if you want your high speed digital signals to reach their destinations intact. Another example is your (A)DSL line, it might be called "Digital subscriber line" but it required analogue design to get the signal from your modem (and it is a modem - it modulates and demodulates the signal) to the DSLAM in your phone exchange.

You might not need as many analogue engineers as you may have (say) in the 90s, but they'll never go away because the world is analogue, and the analogue world constantly impinges on your digital signals especially once you pass single digit MHz speeds.

I picked up a used Tektronix 100MHz 1Gsample/sec digital storage scope for around $300. It's an older one with a CRT but it's a *GOOD* scope and has a good analogue front end. I recently upgraded to an LCD version of the same scope (since I wanted enough portability such that it would fit in an airline carry-on) for about the equivalent of $600 (again Tektronix 100MHz 1GSample/sec). The newer LCD based one also has much better firmware. But not withstanding, the old CRT one is still a good instrument and not horrifically expensive. There are always dozens of them on ebay.

If you don't think RC helis are agile, you've not seen what Alan Szabo does with them.

These kinds of stories have been popping up on Slashdot for a while, but I note Slashdot *STILL* doesn't have an IPv6 address even though it's a site supposedly run by and for technologists. Meanwhile, Facebook, a site made for teenagers to post selfies on, has had IPv6 support for three or four years.

It doesn't matter who, anyone trying to get you will exaggerate the numbers.

Years ago I once ran an unauthorized MUD on one of the university's servers, and a friend wrote something in LPC which had a bug in it (which caused the MUD to fill the partition my home dir was on to fill up overnight). When the sysadmin was trying to make me look like the biggest monster to have logged onto the university's Sun box, he was pointing out that the system had to support over 10,000 users and I had singlehandedly denied access to all 10,000 users with my antics.

The problem was (and the sysadmin well knew this) this number was grossly exaggerated. To start with the discs were partitioned so each course was in its own separate filesystem, so I only filled up the filesystem for those on my course. Out of my course perhaps only 5 people used the central Sun system. Secondly, there may have been 10,000 users in /etc/passwd, but 9000 of them had never logged in (and never would log in). After he unlocked my account I was going to rebut his angry email by mentioning this and running a shell script to show how few users had ever logged in, but for some reason 19 year old me had a rare flash of good judgement and decided to let sleeping dogs lie.

.gb would be less accurate than .uk - Northern Ireland is part of the UK but not part of Great Britain.

My landline phone still is rotary dial, you insensitive clod.

Are they increasing prices though? Everything I've seen indicates HFT *decreases* the spread between buy and ask prices, in other words, HFT is reducing the costs to long term investors.

No, technology won't fix the infinite growth problem. Even if we were to have vast amounts of cheap fusion power, the waste heat alone would start to cause a problem. If current growth rates continued indefinitely then the waste heat would raise temperatures enough to boil the ocean within about 300 years.

During the sermon at a Sunday service in Worcester Cathedral. I was forced to go to these services on a Sunday, but fortunately I had one of those Casio pocket computers. While the priest droned on about something irrelevant, fictional and boring, I could make good use of the time writing some bit of code on my pocket computer.

* They speak English in Scotland.
* Buying a phone is not complicated. "Hello Mr Phone seller, I would like to buy a phone".
* You don't have to do it on your first day.

The manufacturing example will also be somewhere where a wage increase has only a small effect on the finished product. The increase per item will be very small for manufacturing, too.

Sure, it'll affect a service industry like a hairdresser's where labour makes up the vast majority of the cost of sale, but manufacturing industry is not like that any more.

Please be a UI person *not* a UX person. If a user interface is giving me an experience it's doing it wrong. I want user interfaces to melt into the background so I hardly notice them.