Why does the /. article link to the Venture Beat page? It is completely content free except for the WSJ link, which is what this post should have had.

The majority of water in Santa Barbara is derived from local sources. While there is a lot of local agriculture, it is primarily on coastal planes, not in classic desert areas like Imperial Country. In our current year we've had less than half our typical rainfall, and it has has been going on like this for three years now. Our last drought, when the desal plant was first built, took seven years to set in, we've reached the crisis point in this drought much more quickly. My point is I don't think we're quite as dumb as the rest of the state where they can't ever manage on local sources in normal years, we can. But when things go dry quickly like they have, we get caught out. Of course building a desal plant in an emergency is actually a rain dance. It worked perfectly last time, and given the predictions of an El Nino for next year, it should work this time as well.

By why would you do that typing? Your IDE should be doing that typing for you. Java isn't verbose when you have Eclipse to do your typing for you.

How did this get modded up to "Informative"? This is misinformation. If you believe what an FPGA vendor tells you about their tools then I have some land in Florida you might be interested in. There is NO push button path from C to hardware, unless you consider compiling the C into object code that is burned into ROM as a hardware solution. Yes, there are tools like Cynthesizer from Forte and the cited tool from Xilinx that use C as an input language, but it is gerrymandered C geared toward synthesis, not "dusty deck" C. As stated above, there are too many tradeoffs in time and space to provide a simple answer to your interested party. You should hire someone who can find a couple of points in the solution space and give your interested party an educated answer like "At xx mm^2 it runs this fast with this latency, while at yy mm^2 it runs this fast at this latency with 50% better power".

Perhaps Drs could use a tool like this similar to how weather predictions are done. Run the model(s), and use human analysis to weigh the data.

You haven't found it to be a problem because you haven't tested your code well enough. That is the problem with loosely typed languages, you don't know what is lurking out there until you find it. Strongly typed languages do not guarantee bug free code, but give you a fighting chance.

Like languages (pick one) with strong typing so you know at compile time of trivial bugs that you'll never discover with JavaScript until you have exercised every path of execution that can reach your function.

I'm right there with you. So glad to hear 'hacker' and 'hacking' used in the original positive context.

You must have installed on a bare disk and/or didn't care about the disk layout. That to me is the most atrocious part of the installer. Trying doing a resinstall without out wiping out your /home ... be sure to cross your fingers when you hit go because you'll have no idea whether it is going to preserve that partition or not.