If it consumes more than one Watt, it's nowhere near "deep sleep".

The coffee isn't subject to open container laws.

Coffee is scientific payload. You don't want your experiments to fail because the involved researchers were under-caffeinated.

Looking over the analog guys' shoulders at work, I've seen a nifty little piece of software that takes the geometry of your ground plane and its connections, and tells you where exactly you'll need to put your Cs to minimize ground plane effects.

This is neat since it shows you that just placing Cs next to your components connections doesn't work the way you thought it would.

60 cycle creeps in *EVERYWHERE*.

You mean 60 Hz line frequency? Well, wait until you design devices for an international market. You'll have environments completely free of 60 Hz line stuff there, unfortunately, that usually means you'll have to deal with 50 Hz. Have fun testing your device for behavior with 60 Hz line frequency in a 50 Hz line frequency country. Oh .. and be sure to keep those harmonics in mind.

Oh, and debugging these devices is its own kind of hell, since connecting your microcontrollers emulator breaks any kind of isolation and makes the device behave differently. Ugh.

Capacitors leak DC.

More generalized, it should be: There are no resistors, capacitors or coils. Anything that claims to be one of the three is actually an RLC circuit, and you will see them behaving as one at the worst possible moment. Yes, your resistor has capacity and inductance; yes, your capacitor leaks DC, etc.

With all your rage, you missed the point.

And the point is not that self-built instruments are incapable of being validated, but that you'll have to include the effort for validating them (and documenting the validation) yourself. This costs a lot of time, and, unless your time doesn't cost anything, money.

Newton's theory of gravity has been disproven and it's still a theory. Some theories are more equal than others, especially if they're good enough for many cases and much simpler than a more correct alternative.

Ugh.

Can they power a large spacecraft (possibly _huge_, such as an asteroid-turned-spacecraft) for, let's say, one thousand years?

Fusion gets an even higher energy density of the fuel, and the fuel is abundant in the universe (provided that at least D-D-fusion can be achieved) and requires fairly little processing.

First, we need fusion power, though. There's no getting to even Alpha Centauri without it.

We've come up with many working designs for flying machines, some of which use the same principles that allow birds to fly, but none of them works like an actual bird.

They design their engines for the most common fuel in the US - regular gasoline.

Europeans get more than that out of 4.5L V8's.

In Europe, most cars run on premium/super gasoline, which makes it easier to get more power out of the same displacement.

Actually, you have to use words like "liability", "class-action lawsuit", "company stock price drops like a rock", etc.

At least when you're dealing with real managers, and not pretend ones that used to be engineers at some point.

Your crystal ball is quite obviously broken, as half of my work involves embedded system (the other half, the one that comes before the whole embedded thing, involves Matlab).

When you're deciding on a sorting algorithm, you're already optimizing. The unoptimized version just needs to run correctly, i.e. deliver the expected result. You pick a search algorithm that's easy to understand for that (so, bubble sort rather than quick sort). Chosing one that is best suited to the target hardware and implementing it optimally on the target hardware is part of the optimization process.