Well, it might help indirectly. Every hour the developers don't spend trying to debug the OS is an hour they can instead spend on making the user interface work better. I suspect that a lot of mediocre products appear simply because there were so many showstopping bugs to chase down that there was never any time to smooth out the rough edges.

If there's any justice in the world, Keurig will be getting a lot of post-Christmas returns this year, when people realize that the coffee machine they just upgraded to is incompatible with most of the coffee they wanted to make.

When polled on this question, the number one response from consumers was: "What is DRM?"

Agreed, but the hope/expectation is that as the user base grows, the valuation will become less volatile, making it more useful as a currency.

There's nothing that says you have to delete your original file after you've uploaded a copy of it to YouTube.

I don't know why you'd do it, but I think the reason many people put their videos on YouTube is because it's an easy way to share said videos with the people they want to share them with. Sending someone a YouTube URL is a lot easier and quicker than figuring out how to get a multi-gigabyte video file from your computer to their computer.

If you want a global-warming nightmare scenario, Venus is a better candidate.

I don't think there is anything stopping a Texas auto dealer from going to Tesla's web site today and buying as many cars as he wants to buy.

The real issue is that the dealer would then want to service and support these cars, which would require a more in-depth working relationship with Tesla; and Tesla (quite reasonably IMO) does not trust dealers to do as good a job with that as Tesla itself can. Without quality service and support, OTOH, there is no reason why a customer should want to buy through a dealership and pay extra for inferior support.

It's perfect cover: as an anti-government politician, if your policies don't work, that's only more proof that government is incompetent and you were right all along to oppose. If they do work, OTOH, you're a hero! You can't lose :^)

And, Godwin'd. That's a wrap everyone, have a great evening, see you in the next thread.

In a large number of scenarios, the limiting factor is the skill of the (often easily-intimidated newbie) programmer, not the speed of the resulting program's execution.

In those cases, a "slow" language that is easy to learn and use (e.g. Python) typically produces a better result than a really fast/powerful language that isn't as newbie-friendly. Computers are fast enough these days that for a lot of things, a slow/inefficient program is nevertheless more than adequate to the task at hand.

In particular, I think the ability to run the Python interpreter and enter python code into it interactively is an easy and convenient way for people to experiment and learn how Python works. Compiled languages make that harder to do, as you have to enter all your changes at once, then recompile, rather than being able to type in a single line and get an instant result.

It's not retarded at all; it's a simple fact that each language comes with its own set of design decisions that make some tasks easier and some tasks more difficult. Thinking that all languages are equivalent would be a newbie mistake.

For example, Python, while it is a great high-level language and easy to learn and use, will almost never produce software that runs at the speed of an equivalent compiled C or C++ program. Furthermore, its continuing reliance on a Global Interpreter Lock means that multithreaded Python programs will not utilize multiple cores efficiently for the forseeable future.

Java, OTOH, avoids those problems but using Java means you'll need to include a Java runtime environment and JIT on any platform you deploy on; that makes it inappropriate for many embedded devices or otherwise constrained environments. Also the non-deterministic timing of the built-in garbage collector makes Java a poor fit for real-time programming.

C/C++, finally, can run mostly anywhere, but their low-level nature makes them a bit harder to learn, and a great deal more conducive to shooting yourself in the foot with (if you don't use them correctly).

I'm reminded of this quote:

"The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language." -- Ed Post

Not very cost-efficient upstream of those output wires, though. You could save a good bit of money by skipping the PV panels and harvesting the heat directly instead.

A possible twist on this outcome: before this happens, the price and performance of energy storage (e.g. electric-car style battery packs) improves to the point where it becomes economical for most solar panel owners (or perhaps even the power company) to store any excess electricity that would otherwise be wasted. Dunno if or when it will happen, but it certainly would simplify things.