There are only so many ways someone is likely to design some functions, particularly if the class demands particular formatting. So if having one function that is very similar or the same triggers it, then it is rather bullshit.

I could see this too. Where I work professors are extremely lazy and grade via script. They don't read the programs students hand in because that would be "too much work", never mind that in the arts and humanities professors have to read papers all the time. Then they usually use some kind of automated cheat checker program. Well, said checkers aren't something that just makes sure files are bit identical. They allow for various fudge factor. That means they can match even on things that aren't actually copies of eachother.

I chose 25 degrees just since it is standard temperature. Either way if you don't believe me, look it up, a significant amount of energy use by humans is temperature related and cold areas use more than hot areas. Saul Griffith has done some great talks on the matter.

I know that it is something of an article of faith that AC is the devil and hugely wasteful but that just is not the case. Heat pumps (that's what an AC is) are very efficient and getting better but they only work if the evaporator coil is warm enough that water doesn't freeze on it, precluding their use as heaters in any place that gets near zero. Because of their thermal efficiency compared to heaters and the fact that sorry, but cold places DO get colder than hot places get hot, even if you set 20 as the benchmark, people use less energy when they live in warmer climates.

Guess what? Cold places use MORE energy than warm ones. While people like to hate on ACs as some excess, they are actually quite efficient. Since they move heat, they can move more energy than they use. A good AC can easily move 3-5 watts of heat for each watt of energy it requires to operate. No such luck with heating systems, they at best get you 1 watt of heat for each watt they take.

Then there's the issue of temperature delta. If we take 25 degrees (C) as a target room temperature, well then you can see why cold places have it even worse. The hottest inhabited places on Earth only tend to reach 40 degrees regularly and peak at 50 rarely. So a 15-25 degree delta from normal. The cold places? Hell, even a "mildly" cold place hits 0, and they generally drop a good bit below that. Denmark sees 15-30 degrees below zero. So a 40-55 degree delta. Of course the bigger the delta, the more leakage you have, the more energy you need, etc.

If you intend that heating energy to be renewable, that means no oil, gas, etc furnaces. You can use electric, so long as the electricity is from a renewable source. I guess depending on your definition wood might be ok too. That's about it, unless you happen to live near some hotsprings and can get some geothermal heat.

So re-run the energy calculation when all the district and local heating has to stop using anything non-renewable.

Remember we don't have battery technology that lasts forever, or really even for a long time. So you have to lifecycle those batteries, they will have to be replaced periodically. Probably once ever 5-10 years max. Well add in the cost of that now to the total cost. Also add in the energy required to create and dispose of said batteries to your calculation.

Ends up not being a great option with current battery technology.

Being an engineering college we see many Indian and Chinese grad students. In both cases we numerous students who have real difficulty with any kind of synthesis and application of knowledge. They want to memorize a bunch of facts and formulas and crunch numbers to get the result. Solving real problems is something they have a lot of difficulty with. In particular there's not a good concept of problem solving. If they don't know the answer to something they believe the solution is to seek the person that does, not apply problem skills.

It, unsurprisingly, comes from the elementary and undergraduate education they received. That is what learning is to them. It is a real issue since of course in real engineering, you don't get to work from a textbook.

Guy is trying to play silly distinction games. Really, everyone in tech understands what people mean when they say "general purpose processor." Yes, said unit may have some specialized circuits and such, but it is made to be good at dealing with all kinds of problems. Integer, FP, branching, linear, etc doesn't matter its design can handle them all reasonably well.

That compares to something specialized like a GPU. For certain kinds of problems, specifically single precision vector math with fairly consistent branches, it does amazing. However for other things, not as much, though it is turning complete and capable of anything. Still a true processor and not an ASIC that can't be programmed, but not general purpose.

Try to play semantic games with it is silly. Are there going to be cases where the line might be blurred? Sure, but who cares? That's how life is. Everything doesn't always fit in to neat little boxes. It is still a generally useful way of looking at things.

Frames are similar to each other (this is a big way that H.264 gets compression) and the more FPS you have, the more similar the frames are since each is a smaller time slice away from the last one. So you may not need a whole lot more bandwidth.

A good example is AVCHD, that's the H.264 camera format that is popular with consumer and pro cameras. The 2.0 spec supports 30fps and 60fps. At 30fps you store data at 24mbps, at 60fps you store it at 28mbps. Same visual quality, only 4mbps more to get the extra 30fps.

Same idea scales down to lower bitrates. You do need more bits to maintain the same quality, but not a ton.

The idea that bitchy DRM is what you need to make money is silly. The bitchier the DRM, the more it costs you in terms of implementation and support and, guess what, it turns out that a great many of those pirates just won't buy your game, they don't want it for anything more than free.

You can see some good examples in the audio industry, which has some really bitchy DRM. Like take Steinberg Cubase and Cakewalk Sonar. These are two of the long time DAWs, both dating back to the DOS days. Both still make money, both are still in active development. Cubase uses super retarded DRM. A dongle that Steinberg bought and customized (syncrosoft, now called Elicenser) that is checked when you do anything. Seriously like opening menus has checks to the dongle. Sonar has no DRM effectively. You need a serial and an activation code, but the activation code is per serial, not per computer. It is just so you register your product with CW. The serial and code don't change and it doesn't phone home. Yet despite that weak DRM, Sonar continues to be developed and sold.

Or in audio samples. The big name in virtual instruments is Native Instruments, their program Kontakt being the king of sampling. They have some fairly weaksauce DRM on their products. A challenge/response kind of thing that is cracked and pirated versions abound. Despite that, they make lots of money and are the unquestioned top of the sampling game. Then you look at EastWest who uses their own custom software with an iLok dongle because of evil pirates. They are too small for anyone to care about cracking. So no piracy, but they are tiny, a fraction of NI's size and profits.

Really all bitchy DRM does is increase the cost on the developer. You end up spending more programmer time implementing it, more QA time making sure it works, and more support time helping people when it doesn't. There's no good evidence showing it increases sales. Remember that decreasing piracy is not the same as increasing sales. You can drop piracy to zero and yet discover you get little to no extra sales because the people who were pirating were only doing so because it was free, and have no interest in paying for it.

You need to register once, that's it. I registered to vote when I was 18, and never again. That makes you valid for all elections.

Also, in most if not all counties, you can have your ballot mailed to you. That's what I do. I would much rather vote at home and mail it back than bother to go to a voting booth. There is no charge for this service, you just fill out and mail in a form, or call, or fill out a form online (which is what I did) and the county recorder mails you a ballot when an election happens. They also mail you all the official election materials listing candidates, propositions (short text, full text, and legislative analysis) and so on.

Really, it is dead easy to get to vote on your schedule. If you don't, that's on you.

They want people who are easily swayed and don't look in to shit to go out and vote for their guys. They know an election could easily be swung if you can get people like that to vote for you.

When by "Strong AI" you mean "a computer with human like intelligence" that may not be something that can be done. We don't even know. It may well be that the kind of intelligence we have is a strictly biological and that you can't replicate it in silicon. It may be no matter how powerful we make computers, no matter how clever their programming, no matter how much they "think" they are never a Strong AI. We just don't know at this point.

So it is really premature at this point to be doing any kind of doomsaying, or other prognostication, about Strong AI. We don't know if such a thing will ever exist, much less what form it will take if it does. Like even if it can exist we have no idea if it would have emotions as we do. Perhaps those turn out to be biochemical in origin, and thus a Strong AI doesn't have the. So it might completely lack ambition, desire, anger, or anything that would lead it to try anything against humans. It might be completely self aware, rational, and perfectly ok with doing whatever it is told to do and serving humans because it simply has no desire for anything else.

All of this is unknown, so maybe let's chill until we start to see if AI is possible, and if so what it is going to look like, before we get all doomsdayer on it.

Radars produce signal when not active. Normal ones aren't "off" when not taking a reading, they are inactive, which means their components are still warmed up. They emit detectable signals, nothing electrical is quiet when it is on.

Now there are what are called "pop" radar guns that go from off to on real fast... but they are, near as I know, not legal for measuring speeds since such a device cannot be made accurate. You can't make a 20GHz transmitter that turns on and stabilizes in a fraction of a second.

The big ones I can think of are Cadence SPB, Ansys HFSS, Ansys Fluent, Dassault Solidworks, Dassault Abaqus, Rocscience RS3D, Agilent ADS, Bently Microstation, PTV Vision, Intel Fortran, and Xilinx ISE.

There are more, but those are the ones I can think of we use the most off the top of my head.

Probably varies Linux distro to distro. In Windows, the MSU files are all signed by MS so the download path isn't of issue, since if it is compromised any alterations to the file would break the signature.

Want to know a big reason people have been getting Macs, that Apple doesn't like to admit? You can run Windows on them now. The Intel switch made it viable to run Windows on them, natively if you wanted, and good virtualization tech means it runs fast in OS-X. That lets people get their shiny status symbol, but still use the programs they need.

We've seen that at work (an Engineering college). Prior to the Intel conversion, there were almost no Mac users. The thing is engineering software just isn't written for the Mac. There is actually some stuff now, but even so the vast majority is Windows or Linux. Back in the PPC days, there was almost nothing. So we had only really two stubborn faculty that used Macs, one because he did no research and just played around, and one because he wrote his own code and was stubborn. However that was it, you just couldn't do your work on them.

Now? All kinds of faculty and students have Macs. PCs are still dominant, but we see a lot more Macs. However every one has Windows on it. Some it is all they have. Seriously, we have two guys who buy Macs, but have us install Windows on it, they don't use MacOS they just want the shiny toy. A number have bootcamp, and many have VMWare. Regardless, I've yet to see one, faculty, staff, or student, that didn't put Windows on it to be able to do the work they need to.

So that is no small part of how Intel helped Apple gain market share.